Day 4. Catch-up Day.

Day four was a rest day. We were supposed to head to the Monkey River (which took our mind) but it was absolutely pouring that morning and the trip was cancelled. Not much happened that day; we played Mexican Train with the neighbors (Sander came in second, I came in last), hung out, recovered, talked, swam a bit, and after lunch played Miniature Golf.

That’s right folks, in a town with no discernable infrastructure, roads, or airport security (more on that below), I found Putt-Putt golf. Having heard rumors of it on a tourist sheet of paper (yes “sheet of paper,” it’s a smalllll town) I HAD to track it down. Ahab had Moby, Sander had the whale shark, and not I had Putt-Putt Golf. The good news is that apparently I have two things going for me. One, I guess having grown up in Florida, I have some sort of migratory sense of direction for finding Putt-Putt courses, and two, I guess having grown up in Florida, I’m the only one who likes the game. We found it quick, and we found it barren. It was located on the grounds of another “resort” and when I asked if we could play, the guy actually laughed in, what I’m assuming was, startled amazement. He actually did the chest pat thing looking for something to give us, wound up setting us up with two clubs and two balls, and then sat on the porch of his little shop with a buddy and watched us play. And play we did. It was bug infested, but we had OFF, and it was rained out in sections (loser had to get the balls out of the yuck), and it was basic (Astroturf, some wood blocks for obstacles, and maybe some hills-mother nature provided the water obstacles) but it was putt-putt dang-it! And much fun was had by all.

Since that was basically it for day four, I’m going to take this time to describe the area. First, the airport. Well, “airport” is a stretch. It was a small building with shed attached. There was one strip, and it jutted out with the “highway,” looping around it like a little runway peninsula surrounded by a public road. Oh, and did I mention that it didn’t have a fence? None. Zero. Not, it had a fence but it was torn down in parts. Not, it had a fence along the sides. Not, it had a quaint picket fence. There was NO fence. Once, after a plane landed, a guy rode his bicycle from the road, across the runway, and back on to the road to town. The airport was his short cut! People actually think, “Hmmmm, I don’t feel like taking the long way around, I’ll just cut through the airport.” The best part? The people that work at the airport waived to the guy. Everyone smiled, must be cousins. So I know what you’re thinking. Maybe no one has fences in Placencia? Nope. Directly across the street is a lot, with nothing of any discernable value, that has a big fence all around it. Protecting nothing is more important than protecting the airport. Just cracked me up.

Want to know what else cracked me up? The sign near the end of the runway on the road that read, “STOP! All vehicles must give way to aircraft landing and taking off. Belize Airport Authority.” So the same “authority” that lacks the pull to score a fence would at least demanding that you to yield to their oncoming airplanes. It would have been much funnier if I didn’t keep noticing cars blowing through the signs. Assuming they at least looked kept me from having a full on panic attack for the return flight home.

So lets talk about the “highway.” It was dirt. Not dusty, not rugged, not cobblestone, dirt. Actually, let me go back to dusty. It was insanely dusty, because with a dirt road there’s pretty much an endless supply of dust. We were just covered in the stuff. When a car passed it was like a smoke screen. Dust in our eyes, dust in our hair, dust in our teeth. Dust, dust, dust. While we were there, I guess they were doing repairs because we kept seeing dump trucks driving around and huge mounds of dirt everywhere. Then the dirt went away, and the road (path?) was smooth. It looked like the dump trucks dumped their dirt, some people smoothed it out, and at the end of each day the same five guys in a pick-up drive along the recently redirted dirt road and loaded the larger leftover stones into the back of a pick-up truck. One road into Placencia, and it was dirt and apparently managed by hand. But friendly hands. As we drove to and from town each day, we encountered lots of waves. Probably because we were the only tourists that far making us the “daring” tourists. It also made us the “darling” tourists, because as we drove through the little village next to our resort each day we became the defacto public transportation system. Each morning we loaded people up onto our little golf-cart and took them into town. Everyone was nice and talkative, and by the end, we couldn’t walk through town without running into someone we gave a ride to. Honestly, it made the town seem that much more quaint. It’s always nice to see a smiling face waving at you in a foreign country.

And the little village next to our hotel was little…and poor. Very, very poor. Much poorer than the locals section of San Jose Island. I’ve never seen poverty like this. We found out that homes were built on stilts not because of flooding, but because the biting bugs stay close to the ground. Homes were made of whatever was handy, no windows, no screens and I didn’t even see power lines to many of them. Locals walked nonchalantly barefoot down roads that I would have traversed like they were made of hot coals. It was stark, and honestly, scary. You don’t realize how much you and your eight-year-old boy stand out driving a golf cart through a town that looks like you could buy it for a big screen TV and a subscription to People Magazine. But we never had a problem, not once, not even a little.

The other thing I remember about Placencia is the heat. It was H-O-T hot. And humid. If you got away from what little breeze there was, you just baked. And without said breeze, the bugs were prolific, horrific, and definitely not terrific. Hot, humid and buggy, Placencia would be nothing without the whale sharks. But oddly, our expert James said that Placencia was the fastest growing area in all Belize. I really wanted to see what that chart looked like. Because if ten people move into a town of ten, that’s 100% growth, but its still a Podunk town. And what does that mean for the rest of Belzie? Now watch, I’ll go back to Plancencia in 10 years and it will be a thriving metropolis. Maybe. But now, it’s a tiny little village where “Air Conditioned” is a huge and rare draw for restaurants and “resorts.” But in all fairness we were waaaaaay far out of town and didn’t really explore or bond with it. I might have had a better feel for the real town if we stayed in it. Which is what I recommend doing.

Speaking of hot. I also tried the local hot sauce. I like hot sauce, makes me feel manly. So as we’re eating pizza one day (When traveling, I think its important to eat like a local), and I put a dollop of the local hot sauce on my bite as I’m casually talking to Sander. Then my mouth goes nuts. I can’t describe the heat. I’m down with Tabasco and wassabi, but this stuff was unreal. I probably moved Al Gore’s chart up a notch with the heat coming out of my mouth. His next slide show will have a picture of burning oil fields, smoggy cities and me and a bottle of Belizaian hot sauce. To the younger generation, “I’m sorry.” You couldn’t sell this stuff in America; there would be too many lawsuits. Just writing about it now is making my mouth water. Sander, of course, thought it was hilarious that I kept reaching for my diet coke and choking. It probably was; I was like a desert wanderer at an oasis with that diet coke. And in true eight-year old fashion, he kept asking me about. “Was it hot daddy?” “Like how hot?” “How come they have it here if it’s so hot?” “Do you think the people that live here use it?” “It was probably real hot, right?” “Can you IMAGINE what it would be like to drink a whole bottle?” and so forth for the rest of the trip. OK, so maybe I overreacted a bit, but it was hot.
Placencia did have gelato store though. That was a big thing for us to do after each of our adventures.

I guess in summary, putt-putt and gelato, how bad could be?