The Nomads

roadside lunch of home-cooked doughnuts and coconut milk...YUM

Day 33 Monday May 12

Left Isla Mujeres, Quintana Roo on 6:15 AM ferry

Temp: 36 degrees

Sunny & Hot

Early start, left the hotel at 5:30Am to catch the first ferry and beat the Monday morning traffic to Cancun.

Stopped in at the Cancun International airport to see if we could get a guidebook or maps of Central America, especially Belize…..no luck!

We decided to spoil ourselves and stay for coffees at Starbucks and watch the Cancun bound Norte Americanos coming and going with ten times as much luggage for seven days as what we took combined for three and a half months! How many clothes do you need to go from the hotel to the beach to the hotel to the airport???

I ended up buying a new pair of driving glasses to replace the ones I broke. We wasted forty minutes at the airport and paid for it with night driving for the last 150 Miles into Belize City….a bit hairy but fortunately the road surface was in much better shape than previously indicated by the information available on the web. Thank the lord! Because the visibility wasn’t the best and a lot of the road was through jungle with nothing and no one in sight for almost 150 Km on a twisty very narrow road with no shoulder and a six inch drop-off to the pavement. That’s no biggie in a car but on a big bike….a nightmare.

We had an amazing experience between Puerto Morelos and Felipe Carrillos Puerto. Heavy continuous swarms of gorgeous black and blue and red swallowtail butterflies coming at us like a black snowstorm for 190 km. the road and ditches on both sides were littered with dead or dying butterflies. And when those big butterflies hit you at 110 km/hr, you’d think someone was shooting at you with a pellet gun! Ouch!

So was it a flurry of butterflies or a bury of flutter-bys……..??? More like the latter!

We had anticipated a lot of hassle and expense at the border of Mexico and going into Belize and, again, were pleasantly surprised to find that it was relatively painless, reasonably priced and expeditious…Buying Belize insurance, having the bikes fumigated, obtaining import license for the bikes and getting our passports stamped didn’t take more than about fifteen minutes.

It went so well in fact, that we scrapped the original plan of staying in Chetumal for the night and struck out for Belize City instead. We gained an hour in timeline and pulled in to the “City”, a ramshackle collections of buildings with mostly dirt roads and some potholes the size of bathtubs, in the dark at about 6:30 Belize time (Belize was devastated by hurricane Mitch and is still struggling to recover). It took us thirteen hours to do what normally is a six or seven hour ride!

How can it be so dark at this time in Belize?? At Isla Mujeres we would stay swimming at the beach until at least eight.

My first impressions are that Belize is a hardscrabble country with an even larger proportion of the population in abject poverty than Mexico; friendly, though, and helpful.

It seems to be a given that little kids with nothing, running barefoot in what, at home, would be called “rags” are so happy and laughing and smiling all the time. Politeness and shyness are the norm, in sharp contrast with the materialism, the posturing and attitude of kids at home. They spend a lot of time playing together and looking after each other and have a lot of care and contact from their parents. In the evenings people congregate in the public areas and play with or sit with the children and you see a lot of displays of affection for the children. It reminds me of when I was little, before television, when you had to use your imagination to make your own fun

I fIu’IIf you"re wondering where this is coming from take a look outside your window and count how many little kids you see running and playing together in groups out of sight of their parents and how much childish laughter you hear. I think we live in a different form of poverty.

Kilometers - Daytrip: 563 km total: 8760

Gas: $23.00

Lodging: Gulf Hotel $49