Seas of Venus(138)
The Callahan stood up. "All right," he said quietly. "Then I suppose we'd better support the process, hadn't we? May I see Director Wilding now?"
The two men walked down the hallway together, toward the office of the Director of the Surface Settlement Association.
THE REAL JUNGLE: Belize, 2001
My wife Jo and I got up at 4:30 am on July 13 and drove to our son and daughter-in-law's (Jonathan and April) house in Burlington, where we loaded all the luggage into April's Rodeo and went to RDU airport. The flight to Miami was on a full 727 (no problems, though I hadn't realized American still operated 727s) and the flight to Belize a 757 with lots of empty seats. International flights (which I take rarely) are strikingly upscale, providing cooked food on china with steel flatware instead of plastic containers and utensils.
International Expeditions, the tour organizer, provided a guide in Miami to make sure we got from one flight to the other. That gave me a correct notion of how careful they are with their clients.
Our first guide in Belize, Martin, had come to there as a mahogany company executive in 1975. He took us through Belize City (the capital and largest city with 70–80 thousand people in a country of 250–260 thousand total) while we waited for the other six of our party (who were flying in through Dallas). The houses reminded me of older Brunswick County (NC) beach houses: colorful, run-down, and frequently on stilts because of hurricanes. Some of the oldest places in the city are built of bricks carried over in the 19th century as ballast for mahogany ships. There are also "drowned cayes" in the bay where ships dumped ballast on which mangroves then took root, though they're underwater at high tide. (The lift is only 18 inches in Belize.)
The educational system works very well. The churches build the schools and choose the teachers, but the government pays those teachers. People whose faith doesn't have schools of its own (the big ones are Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Baptist) send their kids to some other church's school, but the kids aren't required to take the religious instruction. Literacy was 96% until the recent influx of refugees from El Salvador and Guatemala (some 80 thousand illiterate Spanish speakers) dropped it to 64%.
Twenty-five percent of the country's Gross Domestic Product comes from tourism, and they really do care about visitors. There are "Have you hugged a tourist today?" posters and tourist police to make sure only licensed guides are operating (we ran into a checkpoint of tourist police later in the afternoon).
Most cars are used sub-compacts from the U.S., generally from Texas and California. Used tires are imported from the U.S. also. Gas is about twice the U.S. price.
Then back to the airport, where there's a Harrier GR.3 on static display. The British sent a squadron of Harriers to Belize in 1976 when Guatemala was threatening to invade. They flew non-stop from Britain, refueling repeatedly. Castro allowed them to overfly Cuba: nobody but CIA likes Guatemala. (I will have more bad things to say about Guatemala in the course of this account, I suspect.)
We were switched to a different guide—Edd, a Creole who'd been an officer in the defense forces—and separate driver, Peter, also a Creole who'd been in the defense forces. Peter drove us from the airport in a Toyota Coaster, a 28-seat diesel bus with a five-speed manual transmission. It was a very rugged and satisfactory vehicle with two seats to the left and one to the right of a center aisle which could be filled by jump seats. It was comfortable, holding ten tourists, the guide and driver, and all our luggage without crowding. Peter took us places on it that I'd have wondered if a jeep could get through.
After his stint in the defense forces, Peter had worked for many years with ornithological projects. He was a really exceptional birder and communicated his enthusiasm to me.
At the New River we boarded a boat while Peter took the bus on to Lamanai by road. The boatman, Ruben, was also a birder. As with every part of this trip, getting there was part of the experience—not just travel. IE packed us full of information.
A word on my equipment. For the trip I'd gotten the recommended packet of background books, which included one on the wildlife of Belize. In addition I'd gotten a specialist birdbook (A Field Guide to the Birds of Mexico and Adjacent Areas, by Edwards) which proved very handy: full, but small enough to carry in a cargo pocket. Peter praised it, though he had a massive volume of his own in his backpack.
I'd also gotten a pair of military specification Steiner 8x30 binoculars. They have great depth of field, so by setting them for 30 feet they're effective from 20 feet to infinity. That permitted me to follow flying birds, but birds are so close in Belize that often I could only use my glasses by increasing the eye relief. A standard pair might have been more useful in the circumstances that obtained.