I received a rude awakening upon my arrival in Central America. The journey from Mérida in Mexico to the border city of Chetumal had promised tropical jungle, sun, white sand beaches and sunny blue skies.
By contrast, the border crossing into Belize was a militarized zone of barbed wire, crudely assembled shacks, and trash piled up by the river. The customs officer as I was leaving Mexico demanded 200 pesos from me for the pleasure of having been in the country, while the equally grumpy and nosy woman on the Belize side informed me that I would be charged $19 when I decided to leave.
The weather closed in and the scenery became more drab as I got closer to Belize City. Stepping off the bus onto the streets of the outskirts of town, the place seemed less than friendly. There were few people, but the area was run-down: dilapidated wooden and corrugated iron buildings almost leaned into the streets creating a closed, closed-in atmosphere.
I walked a bit towards the hostel I had booked and as I made my way through the narrow streets I began to feel that the area was safer than I had imagined. However, as I crossed the suspension bridge over the river, I was approached by a man who seemed to be showing more interest than usual in my presence. He seemed to be on drugs or drunk or both, so I decided to walk past him and ignore him.
However, he was not intimidated, and even told me to slow down in case I got a speeding ticket. I didn’t stop walking, but he kept talking, wanting to know where he was from and listing various countries as possible options.
He finally realized that I was English. As I tried to keep up with my fast pace, he demanded that I give him whatever money I had, adding the threat, “I’ve got a knife, man. Don’t make me use it.”
I decided that it was very unlikely that the man had a knife, and I judged from his attitude that he was deceiving me. Therefore, I informed him that he had just arrived in Belize and that I had no money to give him. Today was Sunday, so I told him he had to wait until tomorrow for the banks to open. This was completely untrue as he had just withdrawn over $100 from the ATM, but he was unwilling to hand it over. I thought that saying that he had no money was a better option than telling him that he refused to give him what he had.
Either way, no knife was drawn, and the man fell further and further behind. His only option was to yell after me, telling me not to run away like a nasty bitch.
I continued to where my hostel should have been. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem to exist, or else the instructions I had been given were completely inaccurate. There seemed to be no other accommodation in sight, so I had no choice but to return to the city center once more.
On the bridge, I was greeted with the cry of “Hey, English. Do you have money yet?”. He was the same man I had met before, still determined to get some money out of me.
“There’s an ATM down here,” he continued. “Let me teach you.”
I told him again that I only had traveler’s checks and needed the bank to open tomorrow.
“What’s that in your pocket?” she asked, listening to the sound of some loose change rattling as I moved forward. I smiled a bit, as it sounded (and looked) quite similar to Golum from Tolkien’s books.
I told him it was just my Mexican change since I had just left the country. He asked me to finish it. Since this was but small change, quite useless to me, and amounted to about 50 pence, I saw no harm in handing it over.
I kept trying to get through, but he kept asking questions: where was I going to spend the night? Could he take me somewhere? Was there any other money he wanted to change? He even saw a woman who appeared to be from Mexico and approached her, asking if she wanted to exchange Mexican money with me.
He still thought the man himself was mostly harmless. None of his threats had been backed up by actions, and he probably would have done something by now if he wanted to. Still, his yelling and his persistent stalking were annoying and also drew a great deal of attention to me, which I thought might draw more hostile company.
I slipped into an arcade, patrolled by a security guard who stopped my annoying shadow in its tracks. As he was pinned in the doorway, he could only yell, “Hey man. It’s getting dark. You need a place to stay, man. I wouldn’t want to be here alone.”
This actually seemed quite true. So once I was sure the man was gone, I found a taxi and asked the driver to take me to the hotel where I thought I had a reservation. He led me in one direction, through the dark streets, but my place was nowhere in sight.
Fortunately, there seemed to be another hotel there, so I decided that this place would serve as well as any other. The man’s attentions and threats had put me on my guard a bit, and although I didn’t think the place was particularly dangerous, I realized that staying inside would be the safest option.
The lady at the front desk took me to my room. She was friendly and talkative, in a much nicer way than my acquaintance on the street. She seemed worried that the noise might bother me and she told me, “I hope you don’t mind the music from the church next door. It’s Sunday, but they should be done soon.”
In fact, there was a boisterous and joyful choir singing from the building next to my room. A moving rendition of He Who Wanted to Be Brave cut through the night air as I prepared for a much-needed shower after nearly a day on the bus.
I turned on the shower, letting the stream fall on my hair and my back. However, looking down at the bottom of the tub, I saw a giant brown centipede about 8 inches long wriggling around the plug hole. I had no idea if it had been there the whole time, had just come out from under the tub or (ugh!) had just gotten out of the shower.
Either way, I resolved to get rid of the creature. I didn’t think it was poisonous, but in my already slightly bewildered state of mind, I wasn’t in the mood to be terrified by giant creatures. I quickly redirected the shower head, and after a few minutes I had banished the elusive creature back to the plumbing system where it had come from.
Now that I’ve showered and freshened up, I lay down on the bed and turned on the fan to cool down the stifling night air. A few seconds after I did, the spinning fan blade flung out a large winged creature that landed on the pillow next to me. After a lot of shaking of the clothes, I managed to get this bug out of the door and settled into bed once more.
I was just dozing on top of the covers in my shorts, rolling onto my side. There, in the dimness of the room, right where my right hip had been, was a dark, lumpy shadow on the bed. Already in a state of turmoil after the centipede monster and the flying bug, I thought it was a new creature trying to get into bed. Jumping to my feet and turning on the lights to identify the intruder, I realized, to my humor, that it wasn’t any kind of animal at all, just a collection of small coins that had slipped out of my pocket when I’d hit it. the turn.
I went back to bed and the rest of the night passed without incident.
There was no breakfast served at the hotel that morning, but I was served a very peculiar tasting coffee. Sipping this in the main room, I flipped through the local paper: stories of police corruption, violent street killings, and a shootout between police and local drug gangs. Enchanting place.
I still had a significant amount of Mexican pesos to change before continuing, so I headed to the bank. The bustle of a busy Monday morning brought a familiar sense of normalcy back to the streets after last night’s unjustified encounter. I walked toward the center of town along the side of the river, where small shacks sat precariously on the other bank.
These were the homes of many families along the water’s edge, and rows and rows of clothes hanging on lines in front of the houses. A few residents of these houses crossed the river on small oars, paddling against the dark and muddy tide that flowed by. Crossing the swing bridge, I looked out into the water and saw several long, green, slimy creatures swimming in the water. These were neither snakes, nor fish, nor lizards, but a combination of all three. Falling didn’t seem to be an option for sensitive people.
I found a bank and went to the counter to exchange pesos for dollars. This did not seem like an unreasonable request as Mexico was only a couple of hours away and was the largest country bordering Belize. There were no exchange offices on the border itself, and a major bank in the capital city seemed like an ideal place to transact.
However, I was completely wrong in my belief that it would be possible to exchange money. The cashier informed me that it was not possible to exchange pesos because the exchange rate fluctuated and daily monitoring was not possible.
I made the observation that this was generally true for most currencies, but that banks were generally able to do it. I had found elderly women in the midst of Bolivia’s most remote villages who could usually handle a fair change of around six different currencies, but I refrained from sharing this fact with the bewildered clerk.
I was informed that the peso fluctuated too much to be tracked against the Belize dollar. But since the Belize dollar is pegged exactly to the US dollar, there is in fact no greater fluctuation than the one between the peso and the US dollar. I made this comment to the clerk, who was obviously not in the mood to discuss advanced math, and he simply repeated that it was not possible.
I tried to make the change at several other banks in the city, but each time I received the same story. The currency was too volatile for the bank to keep track of its daily movements.
On my way back to the hotel to collect my backpack for the next trip, I was met by a military brass band coming down the street from the other direction. Around 40 young men smartly dressed in full military uniform, blowing trumpets and beating drums. I thought I recognized the tune and realized with a shock that it was the traditional British hymn Onward Christian Soldiers.
It seemed a bit ironic to imagine this group of boys in a small Central American town being Christian knights “marching like to war.” They did not carry the “Cross of Jesus” before them, and there seemed to be no apparent “Enemy” to defeat. The spectacle seemed a strange relic from the days when this was a colony of the British Empire, and all public ceremonies were accompanied by the spirit of Protestantism.
It was a short walk from my hotel to the bus station, where I planned to move to the town of San Ignacio, near the Guatemalan border.
