Don't Stop Belize-ing: Part 1

It has not escaped me that I have so far failed to update you, faithful reader, on my winter break Central American extravaganza. Since returning, the real world has rather rudely made its presence known, and I've not really had much time to think about the rather daunting number of photos I took, or the somewhat impossible task of relating accurately what happened while I was away. Here goes anyway.

I woke up really early. Painfully early, after not having actually achieved any modicum of deep sleep. I finished packing, drank a cup of coffee (little did I know it was going to be my last cup of real coffee for nearly two weeks) and Dad drove me to the airport in the cold, pitch-black predawn.

I waited in the longest security line ever witnessed at Tulsa International (by me, anyway). Three people, on seeing my passport, asked me if I was going to a mission trip. Because clearly anyone who would deign to go to another country must also be proselytizing. Is there anything more condescending than proselytization?

I contemplated breakfast in that kind of queasy way that I contemplate food when I think it might be useful preventative maintenance outside the normal operational hours of my digestive system. I decided against it. I called my brother. I read the United States Marine Corps' recruit packing list over the shoulder of a kid who looked like he was probably still finishing high school. We boarded the plane.

For the first time in recorded history my plane arrived at and took off from the same terminal at DFW, so I had to move all of two gates and sat there, bored, at a phone charging station before deciding to eat the most mediocre tacos in the known Universe at a place called Blue Mesa. So much for Texan pickiness about Mexican food.

I met Ken, Wayne, Andrea and Ryan at the gate and we embarked. The flight was uneventful. I watched How to Train Your Dragon with a soundtrack of the Mountain Goats. On arrival, the first thing I saw out the plane window was a brewery. The second and third things were a palm tree and a sign that read "JESUS IS LORD" in 20-foot high letters. It wasn't so different from being home, I guess. The first breath of air off the plane hits you all in a rush -- oppressively humid. It smells like any beach town in Alabama or Florida.

We deplaned and customs took forever. A guy named Ivar picked us up with a driver and a rickety bus which, apart from making horrible groaning and squeaking noises when it started to move, had sever issues climbing a speed bump on the way out of the parking lot. I was a little concerned for a moment, and then we were hurtling down the Western Highway toward the Tropical Education Center and the Belize Zoo.

The roadside communities are small and ramshackle, and still suffering from the effects of Hurricane Richard a few months back (that overturned tree is Richard's handiwork). The locals are often congregating on porches, out of the sun. We pull into a grocery store and pick up some local beer. Belikin is the only Belizean beer company. Their products are, apparently, sold in single bottles only and come in "regular" (lager) and stout.

We arrived at the Tropical Education Center a little after dark. We were staying in a few rooms of a cabin that we had all to ourselves. We walked to dinner and were greeted by a Yucatan Spiny Iguana in a tree high above the dining hall, and I was already enchanted.

We went on a night walk at the Belize Zoo, which is affiliated with the Tropical Education Center. The ridiculous deer pictured with its tongue lolling out to the side (no, I have no idea why) is from the next day's diurnal visit. I didn't get any photos from our night walk, since, owing to the strong chance of rain and the complete darkness, I left my camera behind. Still, between great rushing showers that came suddenly, in a loud whoosh, and receded in just a few minutes, we walked around the zoo to the sound of howler monkeys in the trees. I held a giant boa constrictor (that is, Boa constrictor). She was immensely heavy and seemed glad for my body heat. She was strong enough that I wondered whether I would have any chance of hanging onto her, should she decide to bolt. I didn't find out, perhaps fortunately for both of us.

We fed the animals that were awake and about. I gave a banana, peel and all, to a tapir and watched the muscles in its extraordinarily complex nose as it munched. Tapirs make kind of a gross noise when they eat, as it turns out. Still -- the nose! Fantastic. Here's a photo of a tapir, passed out in his food bowl, during the daytime visit.

We also fed the jaguar, whose name was Buddy, Jr. and who was not even remotely scary and he snarfed whole chicken breasts as a reward for doing his tricks. He used one of his enormous, clawed paws to shove raw meat in his mouth. It was comically adorable, though I'm sure it should have made me think about what he would do if we ran into one another in the forest and he got to take a crack at my soft, undefended entrails. The Belize Zoo has a number of jaguars that they've adopted over the years. Mostly "problem animals", by which they mean jaguars who have attacked humans or been a nuisance to local farmers, where sheep or cattle were concerned. While I suppose it's better than shooting them out of hand, it seems to defeat the purpose of jaguar conservation to take every animal who reminds us it's an animal out of the wild and into captivity.

After the Belize Zoo we were off, into the bus and headed toward a town called Crooked Tree, which is, incidentally, named after a crooked Bullet Tree that used to serve as a meeting place for local people looking to trade goods. We went birding for the second time that day, taking a walk with an Audubon-trained guide named Michael who showed us various birds, including a number of herons and egrets, that were common near the coast. We looked at a lot of plants, and whatever insects we could find. I also tasted termites for the first time, after being told they would taste like carrots. I didn't believe it until I experienced it, but if you're brave enough to put five or six squirming termites in your mouth, you do get a distinct taste of carrots. (Later I would learn that it was species dependent -- there were mint-flavored termites, too!)

We were off. Into the bus again, headed toward La Milpa, which translates to "the corn field" and denotes both an unexcavated Mayan site and a field station operated by the Programme for Belize, a private organization that has acquired tens of thousands of acres for a wildlife preserve in north-central Belize. On the way, we stopped to gawk at a burning sugar cane field, and the guys climbed up on top of the bus for a better look. There were birds diving at the flames, apparently after snakes fleeing the fire.

La Milpa was fantastic, as far as field stations go. We had relatively new dormitory buildings, handcrafted by the local Mennonite population, with second floor balconies and hammocks strung along the porches. They put me in my own room, and Ryan and Andrea in one. This was the first time we encountered composting toilets, but after La Milpa I don't think I saw another flushing toilet until the international airport. This is an infrastructure issue, as there's really not any kind of water system. Lots of houses use rainwater they collect from their gutters in big black tanks to warm in the sun, but they truck in drinking water for weak-bellied tourists like us.

The staff fed us three times a day, and meals were always traditional cuisine, sometimes involving red beans and rice, or fried plantains. With meals they set out pitchers of juice from various tropical fruits -- guava, papaya, mango -- and I decided there was no reason ever to eat a meal without delicious fruit juice again.

Our tour guide, Vladimir, took us on night walks, morning bird walks, trail walks. We walked around and nerded out, exactly like you would expect seven biologists on a field trip to the rainforest to nerd out. There were ginormous trees of the Mahogany and "cedar" varieties (not really members of the cedar family, but their common name is cedar, since the wood is similarly colored and scented). We learned about poisonwood trees, which secrete a black oil and whose bark, when touched, will cause your skin to blister. Some people are so allergic to poisonwood that they can't get within twenty feet without swelling up.

Poisonwoods always grow next to the tourist tree, so named for its flaky, red bark that resembles the sunburned skin of unfortunate travelers. The sap of the tourist tree can be used as a very effective salve for the rash produced by the poisonwood, and its convenient location close to its antagonist seems bizarrely well-planned. Good job, nature.

We learned about various fruits and nuts and plants. The fruit pictured in my hand falls to the ground and dries, and each individual seed flakes off in a single sheet and blows away in the wind. There were nuts from Cohune palms, which the locals carve into little armadillos or turtles or almost anything you can imagine, but whose fruits are too hard for any animal in the forest to be able to eat. The agouti, a small ground-dwelling rodent, comes closest, gnawing off the thin film of nutrient-rich material on the outside of the nut, so that every specimen found bears the unmistakable marks of rodent teeth.

At night, the grounds teem with leaf cutter and army ants in their distinctive trails to and fro, the leaf-cutters carrying bobbing pieces of leaves through the dark to their enormous mounds under the canopy. Pictured is an abandoned nest which had been excavated for a documentary about ants. I found this kind of sad, but I'm told the ants just move on, with a new queen in a new location. Their nests seem unfathomably large, for animals so small.

Profound accomplishments in building were also achieved by humans at La Milpa. It was a very similar feeling to looking at the ant nests -- awe, at what could be done by a culture that never invented the wheel. Disappointment that our society isn't building anything that will still be standing in two millenia.

La Milpa is particularly eerie because, unlike the other Maya sites we saw over the next week or so, it was almost completely unexcavated. It contains one excavated building, but otherwise remains exactly as it has been since it was deserted, the forest doing its damnedest to reclaim the stones that were so carefully quarried and stacked. Weeks before we arrived, a tree had fallen, knocking over a stela (a giant rectangular column carved with information about building dedications and the ruler who commissioned the structure in front of which the stela is placed) and breaking it in half.

The valley contains towering trees, but most of the low-growing plants have been removed to give an idea of what the main plaza was like. The ball court is clearly discernible, where they played a game involving a rubber ball and either hoops through which the ball passed, or columns to hit to score points, sometimes for sport, and sometimes to decide religious questions or demonstrate power. My favorite application of this sport was political: when a foreign king was captured, he was imprisoned and starved for a few days before being made to play ball against the reigning local king -- the winner, of course, being judged the most worthy. Or something.

In the plaza, we found black orchids, the national flower of Belize, growing out of a giant fallen tree. With my camera's autofocus inexplicably broken from the beginning of the trip, I spent considerable time trying to get a decent photo of this flower, which is pretty tiny and epiphytic, mostly growing up in trees where my limited zoom couldn't adequately capture it. Black orchids aren't remotely black, and are in fact very purple.

We found bizarre lantern bugs, with huge, ridiculous noses that science still hasn't found a use for -- unless it's a sexual selection thing. And really, what ridiculous adaptation can't be blamed on  sexual selection? Ken, an entemologist, said he'd been waiting his whole life to see one in person, and I take that to mean that they're pretty rare. They were, at the very least, funny looking, all mottled to look like tree bark, with peanut-shaped heads.

Before we left, Vladimir gave us a bit of a lecture on Belizean culture, including the various ethnic groups around the country, including the Creole, the Mestizo, the Garinuga and various immigrant groups from elsewhere in Central and South America. My favorite part of this lecture was the very end, in which he described their mythical figure Tata Duende, a tiny old man charged by the Maya with protecting the forest from those who would do it harm. He's described as being very short, maybe two or three feet tall, with a huge hat. His feet are on backwards, and he has no thumbs. He is, however, extraordinarily jealous of people with thumbs, and when encountering new people in the forest, will ask to see their hands. Children are instructed only ever to show Tata Duende four fingers, because otherwise he'll rip your thumbs off out of spite (nevermind how he grips them, having no thumbs himself). He's believed to be able to imitate people's voices and lure people into the forest, where they get lost searching for their friends. Supposedly, he loves to play the guitar and will ride any horse left outside overnight, going so far as to braid their manes and tails. This is supposedly the reason that many people cut the manes and tails of their horses short.

Our little introduction to culture was a nice end to our sojourn with Programme for Belize. On New Year's Eve, we packed up and left La Milpa, heading to Lamanai and beyond. More on that later, when there is no longer homework to be done.