Travel Journals by Hilary Hopkins

March 5-25 1993 / South Florida and Belize: Looking for Bitterns, or What's Hidden in Plain Sight

Wandering the Tropical Trails of Florida and Belize
Part 3 - To  Belize and Guatemala

Part 3 - To Belize and Guatemala

12 March 1993 - Belize City, Belize
I'm here now, at the hotel in Belize City.  I can't entirely tell yet, but it seems that most of the other people on this tour are a little older than me, maybe one younger woman.  I think our guide is going to be an intelligent-sounding black man named David.  I like the fine view and sound of water outside my window, but I feel a little lost, and wish for--I'm not sure. 

Being on my own, making my own way and time in Florida was a fine thing.

Later.  Well, pretty much nothing in this group.  The leader seems not terribly competent.  Doesn't seem to know how to make it a group at all, or even that that's important.  So.

I'm not depressed at all, or even really upset.  Just disappointed.  But I think Belize should be fine, itself, and I'm gonna enjoy it.


13 March - Belize City
This is strange.  I don't have much sense of being somewhere new, just yet.  The small city itself seems fairly prosperous, the usual cinder blocks and bright signs, goods, a brand new indoor market, pleasant tropical architecture.  Houses on stilts, with verandas and louvered windows.  Palms.  Scrubby flowering trees.  The people are attractive, the women slender with long faces, almost Nilotic.  Some Rasta types among the men; an impenetrable culture.

We drove first to a wildlife sanctuary where there was a boat ride and very, very many fine new birds, then another ride through undistinguished countryside to a sanctuary for howler monkeys.  A few steps into the thick forest, the young man who's the guide here "howls" for a second--and there appear four large black howler monkeys, a male, a female, and two young males.  The senior male, only 25 feet or less up in the tree above us, defends his family by frightening us with an enormous and unearthly din.  The other animals continue eating leaves serenely.  He works hard to frighten us.  I don't care for this--there are probably thirty people here, all right under his trees, making no effort at silence.  It is expensive for him to defend against us, and useless.  In about five minutes we're hauled off.  I find this absurd, like visiting an insensitively-run zoo.  This was not the way to see these animals.  It's as if these two trips are obligatory for tourists.

I devoutly hope there is better ahead.  I'm still relaxed, though.  One of the women on the trip is a fanatical birder.  I see how she takes David's time (he is an excellent birder also), and I want the pace and the focus to be different.

I don't know who anybody is, much, yet.  They all seem okay but nothing wonderful.  I'm being friendly but feel neutral about everything.

At lunchtime we were served a fine country meal by two women who cooked it, mother and daughter, accompanied by little granddaughter.  It was delicious, and the women enjoyed talking about their food.  But as usual I feel starved for conversation of interest to me.  David knows his birds but he seems just a kid, not especially thoughtful after all.  One couple seems bright and interesting, but they're with each other.  I don't feel lonely, just floating.

One or two of the women express their admiration for my traveling alone.  I try to explain, but none of it really comes out right.  They ask, Do you often vacation without your husband?  Since this sounds wrong to me, I tell how when we are together, that's a vacation; when I'm alone, it's a trip, an expedition.


14 March - Chaa Creek Cottages
Last night a tedious dinner, all sorts of mixups and poor planning.  I'm certainly learning something about how not to do things.  A group must be made, first impressions are terribly important in setting tone, people need rest, there needs to be a kind of festivity to things.

A woman I sat next to at dinner turned out to be a hairdresser.  "Your hair is all broken," she says to me.  That pretty well set me back for the evening.  The one thing about myself that I think is beautiful, and I find it's wanting.  I was quiet after that, my feelings hurt, stupidly, and after sitting for two and a half hours and no end to dinner in sight, came back to my room to read and recover.

We went on an early morning bird-walk again.  I've enjoyed seeing all the new species here, as well as birds of home that are new for me.  And I love getting up at 5:30 and being out at 6.

Some ugly Americans yesterday, pushy, rich, big, loud.  It's so humiliating.

"Evnin', darlin'," the Rasta man says to me last evening as we walked along the street in town.  I think I have that certain air, sometimes.

We'll see what the day brings.  I guess at home, they are having great storms.

Much later.  I am writing these few evening words by kerosene light.  I am about to be in my lovely bed, overlooking a deep river valley, the intoxicating, arousing scent of ylang-ylang heavy in the air, a pleasant dinner with interesting talk

We finally got to a place where I began to hear voices--the voices I have been listening for.

For a precious few minutes we walked through a tangled forest.  David showed us leaf-cutter ants, carrying their green pennants above them.  I don't think anyone cared as much as I.  He showed us the acacia with the thorns in which ants live to protect the tree, that I have only seen before on television.  I try to keep quiet, try to keep from teaching the principles behind these things, which he does not mention.

It is rich and dark in here.  The train of people behind joke and complain about this ten minutes of walking uphill.  For a brief instant David spots an agouti--but then it's gone.  He's at home here in the forest, but he doesn't convey the nature of his understanding to the group.  In the interstices of the talk, there is a heavy silence.

In only a few minutes, they turn back.  This is absurd.  This is what I've come here to see!  I linger, with another woman.  We stand in silence, as their backs disappear.  We listen.  We listen to each sound and try to decode its message, for it's in language we do not know.

We find a gorgeous woodpecker, and watch him.  We whisper, and place each foot with care.  Above the silence rises the steady high whine of millions of insects.  The deep thrum of a hummingbird, invisible to me, stirs the air.  I detect a musky odor.  That's coatimundi, maybe.

We linger as long as we can.  On the return, I take the lead, and for a very few minutes have a little sense of responsibility.  A trail is a trail, after all, even here in Belize, and I know trails.  Then I think to give the other woman the experience of leading--hard for me! but I know it's right to do for her.

We come out of the forest, then there's a pool, an upwelling between two cave systems.  One or two of our group are swimming.  I take off my jeans and go in.  The water is soft and easy.  I have no one to play with, so I play by myself.  Then they pile us back in the bus, and we come here to Chaa Creek.

It's all made for us, to be a paradise for us.  It works.  People have these fecund images of paradise, and try to recreate them in gardens and vistas.

My wonderful hut has heavy Guatemalan wool blankets, thatching, fuchsia flowers at the door, and bats in the night, gently searching.


15 March
Last night I slept profoundly in my sensuous little hut.  About one in the morning I heard a vehicle arrive at the lodge, and a few minutes later, a few molecules of coffee arrived on the moist air.

Everything runs together.  This morning was a pleasure for me, since we paddled about six miles down a wide river, deep green water and thick forest on either side.  But the canoe paddles, made of mahogany, were thick and wide, and weighed a great deal.  I could not even hold them correctly--too thick for my hand.  So it was a lot of work.  There were three people in my canoe, one just a passenger, and we ended up towing another couple, so I had to work at it.  Which was a pleasure.

Others looked at birds, I paid attention to paddling, and wished for a kayak.  Several times we saw grey iguanas high in trees, and our guide took us close to the bank, where a limestone overhang sheltered dozens of roosting bats, which flew out at the wave of a paddle.

But we did not stay to watch these things.

Lunch, in a small town.  Pleasant people.  Rice and beans, spicy onion soup, hot lemon pie.  A beer, stood me by an attractive, intense seventy year old man, with a young wife (well, fifty)--she a writer, with an abrupt sharp manner.

Then, after lunch, miles and miles of bumpy road.  People are tired and cranky.  We drive interminably to where there is supposed to be a cave.  I'm anxious to do more things.  The cave proves to be a kind of enormous vaulted tunnel, jungle at each end.  David says we can scramble through it.  This turns out to be more demanding than he's suggested, and I have to help a lot of people over rocks in the dark.  There is sand and water on the floor of the cave.  I try to picture--to hear the voices of people in here, taking shelter, gathering, but I cannot, I don't know why.  So far, I have heard no voices here in Belize. 

Back into the bus.  Mile after mile, to go to some place to swim.  An undistinguished landscape, no animals to be seen.  Small gatherings of buildings, cinderblock, some thatched, Indian-looking people.  Dark and thin.  Many unfinished structures, or half begun, or finished but uninhabited.  Like Bahamas.  I don't understand this.  Why so many?

Finally we arrive at the place, in a high pine forest.  But it's begun to rain gently, and I'm tired of slogging around on the crowded bus.  So I don't swim.  I have a private conversation with our driver, Cecil.  He is angry, because David has allowed us to get far behind schedule, and we will have to return in the dark.  He doesn't like this, nor do I.  I tell him I'll take care of it.  We're supposed to drive another eighteen miles out of our way to see a waterfall.  That'll be at least another hour.  Too much investment, not enough return.  I drop a hint to David.  "I don't think we're going to have enough time for the waterfall, you know?"  And that's enough, as I knew it would be.  He decides against the waterfall part of the trip. 

Back, yet again, into the hated bus.  If I were David, this is the point at which I would break out some delicious little surprising snack.  Into the dusk.  When we have about forty-five minutes of unpleasant driving left, David tells the grumpy Cecil to stop.  Who wants to hike twenty minutes in the dark down to the riverbank over there and canoe across the river to Chaa Creek?  It's pitch dark.  He's serious!  I'm outta here!  YES!  something to DO.  Six of us go with him. 

The trail is wet and close around us.  I feel I could be a thin animal slipping through here.  Down a steep hill to the river, into two canoes.  I have no paddle but use my hands in the black tepid water.  On the way up the other side, we spotlight some wolf spiders.  David does not explain much about this, so I wait, and then do after he's gone by.  People are thrilled and fascinated.  Their tiny eyes glitter pinkly in our flashlights.

On the tiny "nature trail" earlier, outside the cave, I show and explain to people about the leaf-cutter ants, once David has passed by.  People begin asking me to explain things.  I am deeply gratified, and take my self-imposed responsibility seriously.

This trip is turning out to be a lot less than I expected.  The one fanatical bird-watcher has taken all the energy.  Where and how can I be in the forest?


16 March - Tikal, Guatemala
Frustrated again this morning in my efforts to enter the forest. 

Back into the bus, for a long drive to Guatemala, the ruins--Mayan--of Tikal.  Just short of the border we stop at the Belize ruins of Xunantunich.  These are the first of this that I have seen.  We climb the steep limestone steps to the top of a temple.  The view is impressive.  But I feel no soul here, no sense of humans past.  Below again, another woman and I hesitantly go off on a tiny trail.  I feel that I'm running away, dong something daring.  Suddenly, we creeping along, we hear a rustling.  We strain to see.  At a fair distance, a brown shape, russety, short legs, rounded rump and head--except for the rather artificial howler monkeys, my first mammal.  When later we report to David, he languidly allows as how it was probably an agouti.  I had hoped for many mammals.  But I'm happy with our agouti.

We take a long time to eat lunch here, in the heat, under a thatched shelter.  Than back into the bus.

At the Guatemala border, we stop to shop.  I buy some pretty things, in a little dark open-sided shop.  The woman carries her baby on her back as she takes my money.  They're all trying to make a buck, but the prices are good, and I like these pretty things, shirts, a vest, pieces of woven material to hang on my walls.

I don't like borders, though.  This one is not too bad, but still intimidating.  We hang around on the Guatemala side, waiting for each in our group to come through.  Some men work in desultory fashion, slowly finishing the cinder block building we stand in.  They eye us.  I eye them.

Some relief from the long, hot, rutted road comes when we stop again, many hours and wretched miles later, to buy a few more things.  Young kids swarm around with cheap carvings.  I am nearly made to buy a tiny canoe, a small crocodile.  But I resist.

The very best moment comes when an elegant little gray fox crosses the road: trit-trit-trit and he's over.  My totem animal.

Finally we arrive at Tikal Inn.  Electricity for a few hours, then candles.  Mosquito netting, against vampire bats.  Open walls so everything is heard by everyone. 

After dinner we go out for a night walk.  As I stand at the front entrance waiting, I hear a movement in the grass, shine my light.  First, a small brownish frog--and a few inches from it, an extremely large wolf spider.  Will there be a drama here?  Suddenly the two appear to collide.  The frog is on top.  The two remain motionless for a long minute.  I take my eyes away for a second, and they're both gone.

Most people are thrilled and delighted by the spotlighting.   Lots of huge wolf spiders, one with a backful of young.  Two pauraque birds transfixed on their branches, and the briefest hint of orange croc eye.

But David does not seem very responsible, responsive, or attentive.  He seems bored and distant. 

We all tuck in early, rather companionably across the walls, which do not reach to the ceiling.  My little room is next to the kitchen, and I am lulled to sleep by the sound of quiet conversation in Spanish, as the kitchen crew washes our dishes.

In the night, I am awakened by bats flapping against my netting.  I don’t care, feeling protected, and sleep well.  In the morning I find bat feces on the net.


17 March - Tikal, Guatemala
In the very early predawn, we set out with flashlights, to climb one of the pyramid temples for sunrise and birds.  I'm excited once again to be doing something.

The massive stones appear like dreams in the fog above the trees.  Spidery branches are lace against the gray.  Light rises.  Birds--parrots especially--fly at eye level, squawking at morning.  The sun comes pale yellow into a blue sky.  It's a fine experience.

But people are beginning to grumble.  So much has been unsatisfactory for many of us.  If it had been my trip, I would have carried hot coffee, or at least juice, and some breakfast bread to the top, and shared out a surprise meal at sunrise.  People would then find the experience assuming sublime proportions in memory.  Our guide has little imagination.

After breakfast, a long, hot slog through the ruins with another guide, Foster, who's a nice young man whose whole life and that of his family are devoted to this place.  I ask him, at one point (not hearing anything myself), Is there a special place here where you--where they seem to speak to you?  where you feel their presence especially strongly?  He appears not to understand, and defeated, I tell him never mind. But later this sweet boy says he does know what I mean, and that he hears them everywhere.  I feel better, so much better in fact that I wax a little weepy, in trying to tell him, I am here, but I can't get here.  Like a glass wall between me and the countryside.  Of course he is at a loss to deal with this, but he is kind and sympathetic and I appreciate this.

As we hauled ourselves up a series of ladders to get to the intense sun at the top of the tallest temple, we're overtaken by a noisy group of Italians, pushing past us.  One woman wears red platform shoes and a red mini-skirt.  Craziness.   What are they doing here? 

Back on the ground again, and here come legions of young kids with pushcarts full of cold soda.  A dollar American.  Worth every penny.  Old men sweep the paths clear of leaves.  I take a tiny side trail, daringly alone, afraid because of my ignorance.  There is palm brush in the trail, and I'm intensely nervous of it, or what might be in it.  Squirrels, or possibly squirrel monkeys, rummage about in the trees overhead.  Afraid, since I do not know where I am going, and since I will be missed, I turn back. 

I rejoin Foster and the group, just in time for him to show us a tarantula hole, and to lure the tarantula out of it.  He shines the flashlight down into the hole and we can see the, well, fangs I guess, of the big spider grasping onto the twig he's stuck down there.  Suddenly the tarantula turns around, hind end towards us.  Foster leaps away, and explains how they spray acid.  I know they don't.  He must be talking about bombardier beetles.  I ask, Have you ever had that happen to you?  Well, no, he says, But I've seen scars on people.  Later, I find out that tarantulas apparently kick off sharp, urticating hairs from their abdomens toward threats.  The hairs are like those on stinging nettles, and can leave nasty scars on people’s skin.

Spider monkeys, especially a young one, swing elegantly, heedlessly above us, about their monkey business.  And a gray fox mother stole food from a picnic. 

One massive structure seemed to me to have a presence, ominous, heedless, passionless.  I don't like the place.  But this is, after all, its original intent.  To humble, terrify, subdue.  Across the centuries, the message is still clear and successful.

Somehow the countryside seems to have to have no presence.  The landscape is in some way tedious.  I have seldom had this experience.  I think, now in retrospect, that the fault is mine.  Tediousness is in the eye of the beholder...


18 March - Chaa Creek Cottages, Belize
Yesterday evening David and I and two other women--the only takers--went to climb a temple to watch the--well, no, to participate in the setting of the sun.  The other two women see a coatimundi, they think, but David and I are halfway up the steps and do not hear their calls. 

I can't understand it.  These women talk and talk, afraid of silence.  Dusk filters the light and they continue to talk.  I sit in silence trying to edit out their noise.  David remarks on how he enjoys not seeing all the bodies in the plaza below us; there is a small but steady stream of tourists here.  It's not certain to me what they derive from their visit.

But that's my original question, which no one seems to be able to answer: Why do we come to places not our own?

The first step down the pyramid is the scariest, most unlikely.  Then just sidestep down, not looking below. 

On the way back we rush through the darkness.  They talk and talk.  Nothing to be seen this way, of course.

I sleep very well.  All of the sleeping places here have been delicious.  It's been the best part--most sensual part--of the trip so far.  To lie in grace amid the sounds and scents of evening, night, and morning is deeply nourishing.

This morning we visit a small museum of artifacts from this site.  Most moving is a burial, the bones adorned by massive pale green jade beads and bracelets.  We view this fellow human in varying degrees of attentiveness...

Then it's back on the road.  At lunch, by a lake, some entertainment.  A handsome wooden marimba, played by the teacher, dark and wrinkled, and his two young students.  It's like a dance, how they play together in a little row. 

Back over the grubby border, and back here to Chaa Creek.  A few of us swim in the river below, before dinner.  Sifting the stones at the river edge, I find an assortment of worked flakes.

At dinner I hear Vivaldi on the tape deck.  Corn plants are in intoxicating bloom.  Sounds call to me, odor transports me.  But I can't rise.  I don't know where to go.  The glass wall still confines me.

This morning I lie in my snug bed for a long time, capturing and treasuring the morning.  I smell smoke, I hear a rooster.  Clarity of morning, all over the world.


19 March - Ambergris Caye
I stood here with a cup of coffee on my little porch to write; I'm just beginning to have some sense of it here, and it's time to go.

Later.  Finally I got forty minutes on a trail by myself--twenty in and twenty out.  I smelled an animal but did not see it.  Kind of the way it's been.

We have a short flight in a small plane to the reef.  Our place is quintessential romantic: palms, blue water, white limestone sand. 

We went snorkeling today, in two or three feet of water.  It was fun hearing people discover this great thing, like spotlighting.  My problem is that it's hard for me when someone else is teaching them.  I enjoyed the snorkeling but like everything else so far, it seemed cursory.

I sat in the bus and listened to an earnest conversation about "signs" and how one can always tell a scorpio or whatever.  I kept my mouth shut.  With difficulty.  It is extremely hard for me to be an indian and not a chief!  I suppose I oughta learn.

This spot is pretty, but all that's offered seems so artificial.  Again I long for a companion to go exploring with.


20 March  - Ambergris Caye
On the early morning bird walk David showed us an alert black spiny tailed iguana in a hollow tree.  It showed its teeth at us.  I'm more and more anxious to get out of here.  I feel suffocated by artificiality.  Things are happening all around me and I can't find them.  I don't like being serviced.  I can't find any bitterns, they're keeping me away from the bitterns.

Later, much better.  We went out two more times snorkeling.  Very fine, almost as good as--or equal to--Australia.  The two best things were an inquisitive, nervous pair of squid, their large eye rings and eyes giving them a puppy-like gaze, their elegant wings rippling like veils.  I discovered that they are ornamented with iridescent turquoise spots.  And one of the young boat drivers pointed out to me a pair of squirrelfish, brick red and silver, with silver spiny dorsal fins, which they raised in apparent battle, vibrating their caudal fins and fanning up sand.

It turned out that one of our group, a large and very nice man, a New Yorker, husband to the fanatical birder, wanted to snorkel but had problems.  David did not assist him.  If I had known, I could have.  He said, sadly, that he felt like a failure.

Riding the boat back and forth to the snorkeling, an attractive man and I struck up a conversation.  It became more and more intimate, approached and entered more and more intimate topics, until we ended up spending an hour on my little porch sharing stories of importance to us.  I gave him advice and counsel, and he listened to my stories.  As we sat in close conversation on my porch, members of our group came by and looked at us with curiosity.  This pleased me.

On this trip I have been settling into the delicious beds between eight and nine, and relishing the mid-night wakings.  The trip has been very easy, physically and even socially.  The group is decent, if for the most part uninteresting, and the interesting ones I've engaged.  I guess it's a spiritual dimension that has been missing.  I have no sense of immediacy, now-ness.  Perhaps this was because I turned out to be looking for certain things in the landscape: the rain forest.  And, not being given time to find this, saw nothing else.  Or responded to nothing else.  I'll try to remember that.


21 March - Ambergris Caye
It is the first morning of spring, which means nothing here.  I sit under a low palm tree whose fronds touch the limey white sand all around me.  The water, a few feet away, is glassy.  I hear the voices of the kitchen crew mixed with some of our group at breakfast.  Nearly invisible gnats chew my legs.  Vine-like trails of crabs mark the sand.  A few coconuts lie here and there.  There are birds.

Today's the last full day with the group, and I'm glad.

Later.  We took a long boat ride to a couple of mangrove islands, looking, of course, for birds.  Slowly we circled the clump of red mangroves in the hard sun, peering into the inner tangle.  David walked into it, alone, to see what he could see (why didn't I go with him?).  His idea of explaining where to look for a bird is, Right there, and pointing.  The sun was painful.  I had covered myself with clothing, but others fried slowly in the white-hot glare.

Then we drove to a small island and got out and walked in the shallow water around it.  David showed us one or two things.  He led those of us who wanted into an interior swampy area, red-brown with tannin, thick with escaping gas.  I was delighted.  In desultory fashion he peered into a few hollow snags saying, Sometimes a boa can be found here.  But nobody seemed interested except me.

We careened back over the shallow blue-green water.  Most of the long hot white afternoon I read.  I am restless here.  Not my kind of place.

Before dinner I had a silly conversation with one of the men I'd thought the most competent thinkers.  He certainly thinks he is.  What sign are you? he asks.  I tell him flat out it's garbage and how surprised I am that he puts stock in such idiotic nonsense.  Later I overhear him telling this to his wife.  What is it with these people?