I received a rude awakening upon my arrival in Central America. The drive 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 rubbish piled alongside the river. The customs officer when I was leaving Mexico demanded 200 pesos for the pleasure of being 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 the closer I got to Belize City. Stepping out of the bus onto the streets on the outskirts of the city, the place seemed less than friendly. There were few people, but the area was run-down: dilapidated buildings of wood and corrugated iron almost leaning 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 was crossing 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 high 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, but he kept talking, wanting to know where he was from and listing several 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 the money I had, adding the threat: “I have a knife, man. Don’t make me use it.”
I decided that it was highly unlikely that the man had a knife, and I judged from his attitude that he was fooling 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 that I had to wait until tomorrow for the banks to open. This was completely false as he had just withdrawn over $100 from the ATM, but he was not willing to give it up. I thought that saying that he had no money was a better option than telling him that he refused to give me 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 off like a nasty bitch.
I continued on to where my hostel should have been. Unfortunately, it either didn’t seem to exist, or else the instructions I’d 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, Englishman. Do you have money yet?” He was the same man I had met earlier, 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 went. I smiled a little, since he sounded (and looked) quite similar to the 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 just small change, pretty useless to me and amounted to around 50p, 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 accosted 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 action, and he probably would have already done something if he’d wanted to. Still, his yelling and persistent stalking from him were annoying and also drew a great deal of attention to me, which I thought might attract more hostile company.
I ducked into a game room, patrolled by a security guard who stopped my pesky shadow in its tracks. As he was pinned to the door, 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 do just as well. The man’s attentions and threats had put me on my guard a bit, and although I didn’t think the place was especially dangerous, I realized that being inside would be the safest option.
The lady at the reception took me to my room. She was friendly and talkative, in a much nicer way than my street acquaintance. She seemed concerned that the noise might bother me and she told me, “I hope you won’t be bothered by the music from the church next door. It’s Sunday, but they should finish soon.”
In fact, there was a lively, boisterous 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 myself for a much-needed shower after nearly a day on the bus.
I turned on the shower, letting the stream hit my hair and back. However, looking towards the base of the tub, I saw that there was 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, if it had just come out from under the tub or (ugh!) just got 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 was in no mood to be terrorized by giant creatures. I quickly redirected the shower head, and after a few minutes had banished the scurrying creature back to the plumbing system 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 the sweltering night air. A few seconds after I did, the spinning fan blade spewed out a large winged creature that landed on the pillow next to me. After a lot of shaking the clothes, I managed to get this bug out of the door and settled on the 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 agitation 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 flipping 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 he’d hit me. the turn.
I went back to bed and the rest of the night passed without incident.
No breakfast was served at the hotel that morning, but I was served a very peculiar tasting coffee. As I drank this in the main room, I flipped through the local newspaper: stories of police corruption, violent murders on the street, and a shootout between the police and local drug gangs. Enchanting place.
I still had a significant amount of Mexican pesos to exchange before continuing, so I headed to the bank. The bustle of a busy Monday morning restored a familiar sense of normalcy to the streets after the misguided encounter the night before. I walked towards the center of the city along the side of the river, where small shacks perched precariously on the other bank.
These were the homes of many families along the water’s edge, and rows and rows of clothes hung on lines in front of the houses. A few residents of these houses crossed the river on small oars, rowing against the dark, muddy tide that flowed. 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 down didn’t seem like 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 the largest country bordering Belize. There were no exchange offices on the border itself, and a major bank in the capital city seemed an ideal place to carry out the transaction.
However, I was completely wrong in my belief that it would be possible to exchange money. The teller 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 could usually do it. I had found old women in the midst of Bolivia’s most remote villages who could usually handle fair change of about 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 Belizean dollar is pegged exactly to the US dollar, there is in fact no greater fluctuation than there is between the peso and the US dollar. I made this comment to the clerk, who was obviously in no mood to talk about advanced math, and he just repeated that it wasn’t possible.
I tried to make the change at several other banks in the city, but received the same story each time. The currency was too volatile for the bank to keep track of its daily movements.
On my way back to the hotel to pick up my backpack for the next trip, I met a military music band coming down the street from the other direction. About 40 young men elegantly dressed in full military uniform, blowing trumpets and beating drums. I thought I recognized the melody and realized with surprise 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” in front of 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 transfer to the town of San Ignacio, near the Guatemalan border.
