Seas of Venus(142)

The local subsistence farmers plant corn, squash and beans in the same hole as the Mayans did. The squash grows along the ground and the beans use the cornstalk for support. Ninety percent of the grain in Belize, however, is grown by a small number of Mennonite immigrants (who left Germany for the U.S., then moved to Mexico, and in the 1950s settled in Belize) who by dint of hard work and Western agricultural methods are hugely more productive than the locals.

Because the Mennonites (some of whom eschew internal combustion machinery; others use tractors and outboard motors for their fishing boats) keep to themselves, there's been relatively little ethnic tension, but their per capita income is much higher than that of any other group in the country. One can hope—I hope—that envy won't drive these productive people out of Belize as has happened to them so often in the past.

We stopped en route at an anomaly, a Belizeian winery. The owner, a Creole about 60 years old, developed gardens and a winery on the 20 acres the government granted his father for being a veteran of World War II. So far as I could tell there was no difference between him and his neighbors, save that he was much harder working and imaginative. (There was a wall around the property to keep the garden furniture from going missing; before that he'd chained it down.)

The wines were local recipes for local fruits, among them orange, grapefruit, "blackberry" (a tree; not what we know as blackberry in the U.S.), cashew (from the fruit, not the nut), tamarind, and sorrell. Tourists had sent him books on winemaking after they got home—he'd been working without any help whatever before then. His bottles were liquor bottles from El Salvador, his corks from Canada (a visitor had found him a source), the plastic caps from Mexico, and his bottling machinery was British. He was selling the product for $3.50 U.S./bottle or three for $10. Heaven knows what it tastes like (I'm teetotal), but we brought some back for friends.

Thence to the zoo, a recovery operation stocked solely with injured animals and those released from poachers. The cages are very large and incorporate the vegetation that was on the site before it was fenced, so it can be quite difficult to find even good-sized animals. There was a lot of, "Is that it up there?" and the like. The facilities have largely been built by the Royal Engineers. The British army keeps a jungle training site in Belize and pays for the use of it by carrying out infrastructure projects within the country. The zoo was a beneficiary of this policy.

The woman who founded and runs it (she'd come to Belize 20 years ago to shoot a documentary and stayed) came by with some chicken scraps while we were there, so we got to watch the jaguars gambolling. Even I got good pictures of the friendly tapir, and the tamandua (lesser anteater) was an absolute ham.

Tapirs follow regular trails through the jungle and are therefore easy to shoot, but they—like jaguars and most other native animals in Belize—are making a comeback during the past decade or more. Belizeans have taken readily to the notion of the natural world as a tourist resource and a subject of national pride

In the macaw cage was a clay-colored robin which had managed to squirm in through the mesh and was frantically trying to find a way out. The macaws watched it with mild interest.

It was an extremely hot day, and we were all wilting after the combination of the winery, a patio diner en route (it was called Cheers), and the zoo. The air-conditioned bus was a pleasure on the long trip to Pook's Hill, and I say that as one who normally dislikes and avoids air conditioning.

When we left the main road, the going became extremely bad. Here above all I was impressed by the Toyota and by Peter's skill. We were on a narrow rutted track, steep both up and down. The diesel and 5-speed manual transmission were more than adequate; Peter only rarely dropped into compound low. (My year driving a city bus allows me to appreciate excellence in this aspect of the trip.)

At one point Peter stopped and pointed out a pair of collared aracaris eating the fruit from a rubber tree. Aracaris are a form of toucan—smaller than the keel-billed, but big by almost any other standards—and brilliantly colored. They were just another of the striking species of birds we saw at every stage of the trip.

Pook's Hill is a nature reserve with a bush-hogged "lawn" on the slope beneath the lodge, an open-sided building with a thatch roof. The lower story (ground level at the back as the upper floor is at the front) is a common dining area, enclosed against the bugs. The individual bungalows have whitewashed walls of cast concrete and thatch roofs with a ceiling fan. The baths were large tiled rooms with a shower at one end and the toilet and washstand at the other; the water was drinkable (I did) though there was bottled water as elsewhere in Belize for those who didn't want to trust the taps.