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2004-08-21 - 2:55 a.m.
Belize was going to be different from the two previous ports in that we were not going to be docked there, but would anchor off-shore and be tendered in. We were told that the water was too shallow for us to dock there. Tendering meant that there would no easy going back and forth from the ship to port, but it didn�t matter to me, as the excursion I was going on was the day�s longest and our group was to be the first boat over, and presumably, the last boat back. The tendering process intrigued me. There was a temporary floating dock attached to the ship that the tender boats tied up against. I wondered if that floating dock had been dragged over earlier by one of the tenders, or was it somehow stored inside the hull of the cruise ship. The tender boats themselves were long and narrow, graceful as motorized gondolas. The one we got on was already there, but the next one was waiting its turn a polite distance off, and there was a third one waiting beyond that. The boats weren�t quite so nice inside�essentially, they were designed to cram in as many people as possible on padded benches that lined both long sides, facing inward, and then facing the benches, there was a long padded central seat onto which people sat with their backs toward each other (an arrangement that reminded me of the seating in the explorer boats in the Disneyland Adventureland Jungle Ride). Once the boat was underway, the force of the engine in the back pushed the bow way up high so that it was impossible to see anything as we moved toward Belize City. I had wanted to film that arrival, but I could see that due to the high humidity, my lens was fogged up anyway. Other ship passengers had complained about getting condensation warnings on their camera�s video screens, something that so far hadn�t happened to me, but I kept my camera in a zip-lock freezer bag when I wasn�t using it, which seemed to protect it somewhat from the changes that occurred by going back and forth between the humid outside air and the heavily air conditioned ship�s interior. As the noise of the engine precluded any easy conversation, I just sat back and enjoyed the feeling of the boat plowing across the water�s surface. After about twenty minutes, we arrived at a dock where we got off and then began the search for someone holding a sign with the name of our excursion on it. Our tour was called �Xunantunich: El Castillo� in the excursion, book, but the sign I saw said �Xunantunich and Marimba.� I showed my ticket to the man holding the sign and he confirmed that this was the correct tour. Then a black woman wearing khaki pants and a khaki shirt, a uniform that made her look like a park ranger, counted those of us who had arrived at the �Xunantunich and Marimba� sign and announced that we were missing about seven people, that we would have to wait for the next tender to arrive to see if they were on that one. Some people complained about that, but as I knew the following tender had moved into place as soon as we left the ship, the wait wouldn�t be very long. And it wasn�t. Once everybody was there, we were taken to a bus, a full-sized �Greyhound� type bus, this time, for which I was grateful. The park ranger woman got on board and announced that she was our tour guide and that we were going to be going on a seven-and-a-half-hour-long tour. Some people moaned at that, as if they hadn�t known that the tour was that long (although the estimated duration had been printed in bold letters underneath the name of each excursion in the excursion book). She told us to not worry about getting back to the ship on time, because she would make sure that we were back on time and besides, since this trip was coordinated with the cruise line, the ship would not leave until we were all back. She then showed us a clipboard with a sheet of paper on it and said she would pass it around for people to write down their name and cabin number. �That way, we won�t be losing anybody,� she said. Since I was sitting in the first seat, she handed the clipboard to me and I wrote down my name and cabin number, and then handed it to the Asian couple that was sitting behind me. They looked at it like I had handed them a rat. I surmised that they didn�t know a word of English, because, though they reluctantly took the clipboard, instead of immediately filling it out, they just held onto it and had a rather long and loud discussion about it between themselves in some kind oriental language. The tour guide and I glanced at each other, and then neither made a move to explain any further, not quite knowing what else would help explain it if her English and my perfectly good example of a name and cabin number on the sheet of paper hadn�t already given them an obvious clue. However, after much discussion, they finally figured it out, wrote down the requisite information, and then passed the clipboard on. The tour guide said, �The name of this tour is Xunantunich and Marimba. �Xunantunich� is the name of the pyramid we are going to see, and at the end of the trip I will not let you off this bus if you cannot tell me the name of the pyramid, so you may as well learn it now. It will not suffice to call it �El Castillo�, because practically every major Maya ruin site in Belize, Honduras, Guatemala, and Yucatan has a pyramid called �El Castillo�, so that name, which is Spanish, anyway, will not suffice to designate this Maya pyramid, which is called �Xu-Nan-Tu-Nich�, the �X�, in case that confused you, is pronounced �Sh�.� She then made everybody say �Shu-Nan-Tu-Nich� over and over. I hope I don�t sound too arrogant when I say that I am a hundred percent sure that I was the only one on that bus who ever learned the name of the pyramid, and I had learned it before we had gotten on the bus. For the first few days, whenever anybody on the ship asked me what excursions I was going on, when it came to Belize, I would cop out and say, �I�m going on the one where we visit the pyramid with the million-mile-long name that starts with �X��. Most people would laugh when I said that, if they remembered having seen the excursion in the guidebook. But after a while, I figured that I damned well ought to learn the name of it if I was going to visit it, so I created a mnemonic to help me: �Shoo, Nan, I�m wearing only a Tunic!� and sure enough, it DID help me remember �Shoo-Nan-Tunich� (remember, the �X� is pronounced �sh�), and I bet now that you, too, doing better than those others on the bus, know it, too. Xunantunich. The tour guide continued, �We have added the name �Marimba� to the name of the tour, because later when we go enjoy a Belizean lunch, we will also be treated to some marimba music, and if the rhythm of the music gets your head bobbin�, you will also be able to buy a CD of the music.� I thought, boy, that marimba music must be something special to hear her talk about it�I hope it�s good, because I would like to buy some appropriate music from the trip to use on the video I am making. �Does anybody here know what kind of an instrument a marimba is?� Nobody answered, so I said, �Isn�t it something like a xylophone?� I really had no idea, but said just what popped into my mouth. �Yes, that�s right, it�s an instrument kind of like a xylophone, made out of very beautiful wooden slats of differing sizes that resonate a scale of notes when skillfully played by hitting each wooden slat with padded mallets. When you see the instrument at the restaurant, take a look at all the different kinds of wood that were used in making the instrument. During the �Mahogany� era, Belize was known for all of its rare and beautiful tropical woods and used to export quite a lot of it. But then those woods, many of which grow in the rain forest, became endangered and the country would not export the wood, anymore. But they still will export goods crafted from the wood, such as furniture, or musical instruments.� Now I understood why having this marimba music at lunch was so important to the tour. It was not only an example of some of the country�s cultural offerings, but the very instrument itself figured in as example of the country�s history and both its former and present place in world commerce. Although she seemed rather humorless, I nevertheless liked this woman a lot. She seemed to have a broad and connected view of the things she was talking about, not just simply giving us facts, but facts and their interrelationships. And that was something that I greatly appreciated. The bus took us on a winding tour throughout the City of Belize, which had very narrow streets. As we traveled, the tour guide pointed out various things as we passed, such as the open drainage along the street or different methods of house design based on which of the four main cultural groups living in Belize built the structure. (The four cultural groups are the Creoles, the Mestizos, the Garifunas, and the Mayas, and where they stand socially is just about in that order, with the Creoles at the top and the Mayas being nearly untouchables.) We drove past a Subway sandwich shop and she said, �Yes, some of your fast food franchises have attempted to come here and show us how to prepare our food, but I can assure you that that is the only fast food establishment that was allowed to root here and there will be no others.� However, she did mention the names of several other business chains that had come to Belize and apparently were welcome. The only one I remember right now was ReMax Realty, which I thought was a very peculiar one to have come to Belize. There were several people roaming around in the streets or riding bicycles. To me, the people mostly looked like Rastafarians, with long, wild dreadlocks and wearing clothing with a preponderance of the colors of green, red, black, and yellow. Both our tour guide and our bus driver were conservative exceptions, wearing khaki clothes and close-cropped hair. The tour guide explained that due to too many hurricanes, the government had long wanted to relocate the capital out of coastal Belize City, the country�s largest city, and put it safely inland. So now the country�s capital is �Belmopan,� a name which was created from �Bel,� referring to the country�s longest river, the Belize, and �Mopan,� which is a smaller river that also runs in that area. I wondered if hurricane destruction explains why Brazil, too, had a seen the need to build a newer inland capital, Brasilia, instead of the capital being coastal Rio de Janeiro. On the way out of Belize City and into the countryside, we passed through the largest and most solidly packed graveyard I have seen outside of the immense one that you have to pass over in Brooklyn when you are on your way to Manhattan from Long Island. The tour guide remarked that you might expect in such a dense graveyard that they might bury the bodies on top of each other, �But that would be impossible,� she said, �because the water table is so high, you can�t even dig six feet down.� Like New Orleans, I thought to myself, and also figured that we now saw a reason for the open drainage that they had back in Belize City. They must have quite a lot of flooding, which would explain all the houses that were up on stilts. Such houses are also cooler�and, in fact, I continued to see that style of building all the way across the country, even into the mountains, where flooding would not be an issue. To me, the ride across the countryside was fascinating and the tour guide�s talk continued to be detailed and informative. It seemed that whenever I saw something that raised a question in my mind, she soon thereafter gave the answer. For example, I saw billboards or signs that had simple phrases or slogans on them, usually roughly lettered in blue paint, but not always. Phrases like �More taxes, gots to get a new government!� or �We need a change!� Some signs merely had three letters on them, such as �PUP�. The tour guide explained that they had recently had an election and the different political parties have their own associative color. I forget which color goes with which political party (I think blue was for the UDP), but the parties were the PUP (People�s United Party) and the UDP (United Democratic Party). To me, on the face of them, both names seemed to represent the same concept, �People,� �Democratic,� �United,� and wondered why they didn�t have something like our �Republican, Screw the People and Serve The Rapacious Corporate Interests Party,� but as I believe that the PUP is still the dominant one, that�s probably the one that serves the interests of those in power. She showed us where the road was that would go to Belmopan, but we weren�t going to go in that direction. Our road was going to take us across the fertile farming region and up into to the Maya Mountains, where the pyramid was. She discussed some of the crops that were grown and the kind of soil that they had there. Once we passed a small herd of gray-skinned, humped cattle and I thought they looked like Brahmin Bulls, which made sense, as I had seen those in Florida, too, because these cattle from India did well in hot climates. But the tour guide explained that the breed that was discovered to work best in Belize was a hybrid of Brahmins, the Red Bull, and the Charolais. I asked her where the Red and the Charolais breeds came from, and she told me that the Red Bulls were from Texas and the Charolais were from England. �When we have our Belizean lunch, you will have a taste of the beef of this hybrid cattle.� We passed through various villages on our way, where there would be more people than out on the highways. Our bus driver would never slow down for anybody, whether it was another bus headed straight for us, a guy teetering on a bicycle, or children playing in the road, he would simply honk and keep on driving at full speed as if he were completely confident that they would get out of the way. Several times I thought for sure we would crash in a head-on collision or demolish a group of kids and I often found myself in the embarrassing position of suddenly leaning in as far away from the window as I could, as if that would make any difference if we did run into something, and when we didn�t, it felt strangely impotent and foolish. Accidents do happen, of course, and while nothing like that happened in Belize, when we were having our tour our Roatan yesterday, we passed two different accidents that had occurred on the same road we were driving on. That reminded me of something Albert Schweitzer had written about his medical outpost in Africa: �We had only one road and two cars and one day, the inevitable happened, they crashed into each other.� During this drive across the countryside of Belize, I happened to turn around to see something that we had passed and was shocked to see that everybody else on the bus was sound asleep! This immediately harkened back to that evening with my grandmother and her slide show. The tour guide, who had been speaking standing up in the front of the bus and facing backwards, had to have been completely aware that the only person listening to her was me. I wondered that if I, too, had gone to sleep, would she still continue to talk anyway, or would she have simply packed it in. I was now even more impressed by her than before, that she had been willing to impart all that information for only a party of one, and had never made any indication that I was the only one listening, no sign of frustration or disappointment or any other negative emotion. I suppose she was used to it�I don�t guess that these people were any worse than the other tourists she�s had, although in my view, they were shaping up to be the worst among the passengers on the cruise ship. It was bad enough for people to fall asleep at a slide show of somebody else�s trip (I understand that that is fairly typical), but here these people were on their own trip and all they could think was that it was a meaningless drive across country to their ultimate destination. That, I think, may well be the one factor that divides the tourist from the genuine traveler. For the tourist, the goal is the destination (�Been there, done that�), but for the traveler, the journey IS the destination. I�m sure none of these people had been to Belize before, so why sleep through it, but I have gone on trips across country with friends who have never been to Kansas or Montana or North Carolina before, and they, too, would sleep on the long drives and wake up only for the various destinations. (By the way, I noticed just the opposite when two different friends had come to visit me in California from Sweden. We went on what I considered to be very boring long drives thorough ugly brown countryside to get to Los Angeles or San Francisco and they remained wide awake, noticing every detail.) I took advantage, now, of having my own personal tour guide. Whatever questions she didn�t automatically answer by her own awareness and expression of personal magic, I could ask her and get it answered directly. We were passing through a fairly populated community and I thought that out of the corner of my eye I spied some people that looked Amish. It couldn�t possibly be, I thought, and yet there was something about the way they were using that open buggy pulled by the horse, and the shape of the straw hat the man was wearing that seemed distinctly Amish. But I had only had a second�s glance as the bus sped by. We went on for a few blocks, when the tour guide started to talk about the Mennonites who had sometimes chosen to come here for religious freedom (when it was British Honduras) instead of the United States. After she finished talking about the Mennonites, I told her that she just explained what I saw back there that I had thought were Amish. �They must have been Mennonites,� I said. But no, she said that they were Amish, just like I thought, that the Amish had come to British Honduras, too. �They had expected to remain isolated from the rest of the community,� she said, �interested in only being left alone, but with the dairies that they started, and the dairy products that they produced, they found an interested market among the other people in the community, so the Amish quickly became integrated into the local economy, and as a result of the people getting to know the Amish, many converted to their faith.� I never had thought, or would have expected, that there were Amish in other countries. I suppose that was just a figment of the illusion that the United States was the obvious place for an immigrant to choose to go to, but clearly, they may just as well have chosen some other place in the New World to go to, and obviously they did, as did other European immigrants. No Western Hemisphere country was excluded from European immigration�surely Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, and so on, all had had their immigrants seeking new life in fertile and free lands. As we got deeper into the forest, I asked the tour guide about natural and alternative healing. I told her that I understood that Belize was a magnet for people with various forms of cancer or other diseases that western medicine had been unable to cure or to treat successfully. She knew about that, too, and mentioned various plant-based remedies that people had had some success with. She pointed out a special tree in the forest as we rode by and I could see which one she meant, �The one that looks like a hand on top of a tall stick.� She mentioned that elsewhere in the rain forest were medicinal plants that didn�t grow anywhere else. I thought of the movie, Medicine Man, starring Sean Connery, and marveled at how I was now actually in a rain forest that might contain undiscovered cures for many of our worst diseases. Until she mentioned that, I hadn�t quite realized that that�s where we were, in a rain forest. I guess I hadn�t pictured a rain forest as something that had a road through it, but imagined that one would have to hack their way through with a machete! I no sooner realized that we were in a rain forest, when the tour guide pointed a distance ahead and I could see in the mountains the top of the pyramid Xunantunich dramatically rising up out of the steamy jungle. It looked ancient and magnificent, as if we had suddenly stepped backward in time 1,300 years. That powerful sight, alone, was worth the whole excursion, in my estimation. From this vantage point, it seemed impossible that we would be able to climb to the top of it, but of course, we were still down in a valley and the road would take us up higher. We traveled further and the pyramid disappeared from view. After a while, I would catch glimpses of a river over to the right and figured that that was the one that we would cross in order to go up the road to the pyramid. It was that river, and after a time we came to small settlement with some people selling stuff and the bus driver pulled over and parked. Down on the river was a floating wooden platform connected to a long chain, like a motorcycle chain, suspended across the river and running through a hand crank on the platform--that was the ferry. There currently was an old van on it, and the ferryman was turning the crank, which pulled the platform across the river via the chain. The people on our bus woke up, yawned and stretched, and threaded off the bus. They immediately went over to the stands where the people were selling their junk. I was drawn to a table that displayed what at first looked like Maya carvings on slate, but upon further examination, I saw that they had been stamped out on some kind of blackish-gray clay. Still, they did have an exotic Maya appearance to them and it might be worth it to buy one of they were cheap enough. The man selling them looked me in the eye with a hustler�s twinkle and said, �Very beautiful, you like this one, it�s the God Who Protects the Animals.� I thought to myself bullshit, there was no such thing in Maya mythology, don�t give me that crap. I said to him, �We�re going now,� and he said, �Maybe when you come back, then.� I thought to myself, Not a chance, completely turned off by the cheap tawdriness and insincerity of it, plus they were factory-made junk, not honorable crafts. I had read in my Lonely Planet guidebook that virtually nothing sold in Belize had been made there, it was all made in factories in Mexico or other Central American countries. Maybe even in China, for all I knew. The only genuine Belizean products worth buying, according to the book, were natural medicinals and grooming products made and sold by organizations benefiting the rain forest, from which the products came. The crowd stepped on board the ferry and the man cranked us across. I went up to him and said, �You must be the arm-wrestling champion of Belize,� but he only responded by saying, �I�m not the only one who does this.� They certainly were a humorless bunch, these people of Belize. They belied their happy-go-lucky-Rastafarian-Jamaica-reggae look, although this man simply looked like a �Mexican� to me (not black like most of the people I had seen), as did the guy selling �The God Who Protects the Animals.� Suddenly I realized that they were Mayas, that is, the dregs of the race still remaining after the Maya civilization, city after city, collapsed between 850 and 900 A.D. I shouldn�t be so hard on them; after all, their ancestors had joined others throughout Central America and the southwest desert regions of North America and done a remarkable thing, they brought a bloody and corrupt civilization down by simply abandoning it when they realized that it no longer served them. There are philosophers working today who are now recommending the exact same thing in our own world, but people today are too cowardly or too shortsighted to do anything about it, and I number myself among those who are so far still too afraid and insecure. But not the Mayas, who stood up for themselves, and still survive, �without having to drag stones,� as Daniel Quinn wrote of them. I would have admired the ferryman or the guy selling the clay tablets if they had had a little self-pride, but as it were, I doubted they had a clue as to what their background really was. All they knew of the Mayas was just piles of stone rotting in the jungle. As we were being cranked across the river, we could see bright-green iguanas shuffling around among the grass on the riverbank. While I had just seen hundreds of them in clear view yesterday at the Iguana Refuge, suddenly in their natural habitat they were exotic and exciting. I realized that it had been a very long time since I had seen in the wild an animal that I don�t normally see, and those iguanas served more than anything else to give me the delicious frisson that I was in a foreign land far away from home. A van drove down the dusty road to pick us up and drive us the mile up hill to the National Park. At the entrance to the park, there was a sign that said that anyone holding themselves out to be a tour guide who was not, in fact, trained and licensed as one (as indicated by their displaying their license out on their person in clear view) would be subjected to criminal prosecution that could result in six months imprisonment. They were serious about their tour guides! No wonder our tour guide seemed to know so much�she was a licensed professional! After we got up there, the tourists began slathering on sunblock and spraying on foul-smelling mosquito repellant. I can�t tolerate the smell and feel of mosquito repellant and didn�t put any on, myself, although I did have some with me just in case I became inundated with mosquitoes. Otherwise, I preferred to simply swat them off, if need be. The fumes from the repellant was so overpowering I was afraid my glasses would become etched. At first I figured that at least a good thing would be that due to all their wearing the stuff, I didn�t need to, we were a walking mosquito death cloud, but then I worried that their repellant would drive the mosquitoes over to me, I, who wasn�t wearing any. However, I needn�t have worried; I didn�t see one mosquito or other bothersome insect the whole time I was in Belize. One college-student-looking girl was wearing a cute t-shirt that consisted of a line of surfboards, each one painted in differing American flag patterns. I told her I liked her t-shirt, and she blushed for a moment, and then deprecated it by saying that it was a �Cole�s special.� Then she felt foolish, realizing I might not know what �Cole�s� was. �It�s a Boston thing, Cole�s, kind of a small, cheap clothing store, like, I don�t know, like�.� �Kind of something like T.J. Maxx, maybe?� I said. �Yes, exactly,� she said, relieved at being able to have that cleared up. We were all then directed into the visitor�s center where there were photographs on the wall explaining the restoration projects. It seemed that every fifth sentence had the phrase �civilization collapsed�, as in �when the Maya civilization collapsed,� or �after the collapse,� or �just prior to the collapse,� etc. I have to admit that the emphasis on the collapse, which seemed to be pegged during the fifty-year span of time between 850 and 900 A.D., was even more fascinating to me than the pyramid, or maybe I should say that the two served in marvelous counterpoint to each other, the fascination of the achievement of the pyramids themselves, and then the contrasting fascination of the collapse. The Cole�s girl and her friend were looking at one of the photographs and since we already had sort of a relationship, now (certainly better than I had with any other people in that dreadful group), I said to them, �Notice all this talk about the collapse, and yet not one explanation or guess as to what caused it.� They both looked at me with the expression of a shrug on their faces, but I continued. �I know there are various explanations trotted out as to what might have caused it, a drought, too much war, but the one that intrigues me is that they had become too polarized as to class. In order to build these pyramids, they had to have an almost god-like ruling class that was distinct from a working class that was practically no better than slaves, and apparently as time went on, they had economically squeezed out their middle class. Does this situation sound familiar?� The one with the Cole�s t-shirt nodded, either as an indication that she did understand, or else simply as a punctuation mark. �You�re from Boston,� I said, �so I can say this. Destruction of their middle class equaled collapse of the whole Maya civilization. I find that very intriguing and very telling. There are some who argue that this is where the United States stands right this very minute.� The other girl looked at me for a moment with her mouth open in the shape of an �O�, and I moved on. The tour guide was now showing us a diorama of the pyramid site and I hoped that with all her wisdom, she would be imparting some useful knowledge. But no such luck. As knowledgeable as she had been about the country of Belize, she was to an equal extent ignorant of the Mayas. Or else, she was stymied by her own peculiar sense of ethics, which was, as she explained, �We really don�t know that much about the ancient Mayas and archaeologists are in disagreement about much of it, so I therefore will not discuss anything that is not a pretty clear and accepted fact.� While in a strictly encyclopaediac way this might be admirable, it certainly didn�t make for an illuminating tour. For one thing, it seemed, then, that the only clear things that the archaeologists had agreed on were all the letter and number names that they, themselves, had given to the various structures. What followed was a barrage that sounded something like this: �Structure A-7 was the first to be fully uncovered, across from D-5, which in conjunction with B-12 and C-8 seems to serve as a sort of quadrangle. D-7, this building here, had a sarcophagus in it, and inside the sarcophagus among the bones were ceremonial objects associated with the ruling class, so it was surmised that this was a royal compound, located in isolation from the rest of the population. Notice over here, C-6 the ball court, that would not have existed where the common workers were. We guess that the common workers were located down here, in the region of T-15, which mostly would been where crops were planted.� Gee, writing it like that, I made it sound almost interesting, which, in actuality, it was not, not all those A-12s and E-5s and C-10s in the midst of insect repellant fumes that by now must have melted the crystal on my two-time-zone travel watch. I drifted away from her explanation of the diorama to walk out into the actual site. Eventually, others followed. The pyramid stood there in squat resolution, a high, symmetrical pile of rocks, not anywhere near as dramatic up close in person as it had seemed from the distance as it rose up through the jungle. Perhaps it was because it really was only about a third restored, or perhaps it was due to all the pink and green-wearing tourists from some other group that were standing up on top of, particularly the one using a bright purple umbrella as a parasol. Somehow a pack of clueless tourists tromping all over it diminished its mystique�yet I soon would be joining them, myself. The tour guide wanted us to look at some stilae that were inside a roofed structure. The stilae were humbled by being positioned in a reclined, recumbent angle. The carvings on them were all but unintelligible and the tour guide was unable to shed any light as to what the carvings were or what they meant. Then we were taken to a smaller pyramid that we were invited to climb. �I hope you will get it out of your system with this one,� said the tour guide, �because the other one is very steep and has no hand railings�if you suffer from vertigo, I highly recommend that you stay down here where it is safe.� As we were climbing up the steps of this smaller pyramid, somebody said, �The Mayas must have been very tall, these steps are so far apart,� but I said, �Actually, they were very short.� But unfortunately my comment did not diminish people�s observation as they climbed that the Mayas must have been very tall, as these steps were so far apart. The very rise of the steps concerned me, because this made the going very tough. I wondered if I would be able to make it to the top of the big pyramid, something I absolutely wanted to do. Once we got back down from this smaller pyramid, the tour guide explained that the Mayas did not know how to make a good mortar, that the stones were mostly held in place due to gravity, not cement. �The rain and the constant jungle moisture continued to degrade the mortar,� she explained, �and when sections of their structures would fall apart, instead of rebuilding them or tearing them down, they would simply build over them.� Now that, I thought, was interesting information. People were winded from the climb, so gathered around to rest in the shade of a tree where the tour guide was standing. �This tree that I am leaning on is the tree from which allspice comes. How many of you thought that allspice was a combination of �all� spices, not the spice from one particular tree? The leaves of this tree can numb pain. When the Mayas were injured from their incessant battles, or from their rituals of blood-letting, they could make a poultice of these leaves and that would help with the pain.� As she talked, we could see a fascinating sight�a long line of rather large-size ants carrying leaves across the ground where we were all resting. I swear, those ants with their large burden of leaves was as interesting as the iguanas! �Those are leaf-cutter ants,� the tour guide explained, �and they have very powerful jaws. The Mayas used them as sutures, like nowadays a surgeon might close a wound with staples. The Mayas would grab an ant and make it bite them across their wound with its jaw, and then the Maya would kill the ant and the jaw would stay tightly closed. They would do this in a line along the length of the wound. After a few days, the jaws would fall off and the wounded Maya would repeat the process until the wound had been healed.� Wow, that was pretty ingenious, I thought. By this time I was getting rather tired of the Asian couple. Since they didn�t understand English, the tour guide�s talking meant nothing to them, so they acted as if she weren�t talking at all. Periodically they would simply talk to each other at full volume whether the tour guide was talking or not. I was further bothered by them due to my observation that the round, moon face of the man made him look like a man I had seen pictured in an article about a particular Japanese sex practice in which the man ties his female partner up with her legs held up and backwards over her head with her genitals fully exposed, and then proceeds to tickle her clitoris with a special feather device, keeping her on the frustrating edge of orgasm for hours. This made me wonder if this man did that to her, and once I thought of it, I couldn�t get it out of my mind so long as I was near them, so I purposely tore myself away from the main group, joining a pair of women who had walked away to smoke. These women weren�t enjoying the tour at all, complaining that the tour guide was boring and since they had been discouraged from climbing to the top of the pyramid, they lost all interest. Both of them seemed drunk, although I couldn�t see how they could be. Nevertheless, it looked to me like they shouldn�t think of climbing the pyramid in their condition, whatever it was. The tour guide came over to us and said to the women, �There is no smoking allowed.� One of them complained, �But we are outside,� to which the tour guide responded, �But you are inside an archaeological site.� Now having no fun at all, the two put out their cigarettes and found a shady place on the ground, to simply sit down and wait out the rest of the tour. One of them continued, �First they make you go smoke in a smoking zone, and then they make you smoke outside, and now, here, they won�t even let you smoke outside, so now where can you smoke, I wonder, are we going to have any rights left?� Funny thing was, their smoke was no bother, but from then on in that compound, I kept smelling the overwhelming scent of smoke�to me it smelled like somewhere there was a wood-burning stove, but who would be maintaining a fire in this heat? The tour guide next took us over to a small structure, where she said some objects had been buried, including an obsidian knife and a sea urchin�s spine, all elaborately decorated, which the Mayas used for their blood-letting rituals. �Blood letting rituals?� someone asked. �Yes, as a religious practice, the Mayas would pierce their tongue or foreskin, allow the blood to drip on pieces of paper, and then they would ritually burn the pieces of blood-soaked paper and allow the fumes to float up to the realm of the gods. They did this in preparation for a battle, or when they wanted to ensure a good crop. Their gods demanded almost endless quantities of blood, which is why they committed human sacrifice, which they did right up there [pointing to the top of Xunantunich].� �They sacrificed people?� said one member of the group, incredulous. I was incredulous that they didn�t already know this. �Yes,� she continued, �they would cut off people�s heads or hold them down on an altar and rip out their beating hearts.� In these statements, she wasn�t quite correct, at least as reported by Douglas Gillette in the book I read, The Shaman�s Secret: The Lost Resurrection Teachings of the Ancient Maya. The blood-letting rituals that Mayan shamans and nobles performed were not to appease the gods so much as to put themselves into a trance which would take them to the other world where they could commune with the gods directly and channel god-like powers down to this dimension. Blood was part of what they called �itz� (as was sperm, and tree sap), which was creative life-giving energy that flowed in a cycle like the Gulf Stream through the overworld (heaven), this world, and the underworld (hell), and a trained shaman, upon allowing the itz to flow through him, could ride that flow into and through the other worlds. Knowing how to do this also showed him how to distinguish the way up to the heavenly overworld from the way down to the demonic underworld, and also would enable him to find his way back to this world. So, according to Gillette, blood-letting like this was a �resurrection engine� and those who had not experienced the pain of blood-letting had not developed the strength to counteract the downward pull of the underworld at the time of death--they did not know the full measure of the universe that involved just as much pain and darkness as it involved joy and light, and therefore they did not have a full measure of spiritual strength enough to overcome in a battle with the underworld demons. Although we did not see any here, in other Maya cities there were elaborate carvings that showed people being beheaded, or having a hand cut off, and the itz that exploded out of the neck or arm was like a fountain of energy filled with flowers and other rain forest growth, snakes, and corn stalks, all powerful, creative, life-giving wave-forms, and so while there was excruciating pain involved, the Mayas viewed this as a spiritual ecstasy. (One may also think of the pain of childbirth.) Sacrifices, while viewed as a benefit to the people of a Maya city, were also viewed as a benefit to the individual so sacrificed. Let me interject, here, an observation, that one could argue, applying Maya principles, that Jesus would not have been able to resurrect himself without a ritual of pain and a bloody sacrifice. Jesus overcame death and hell and found his way back to not only this world, but also heaven, just as the Mayas believed that they could via their own rituals of pain and bloody sacrifice. Gillette reports that the Mayas beheaded, whereas the Aztecs ripped out the heart. I would argue from this, that the Mayas were more intellectually centered, whereas the Aztecs were more emotionally centered. In no way were the Aztecs as well-developed as the Mayas in the realm of writing, mathematics, astronomy, calendars, and other intellectual developments. We were next taken to see a ball court, of which very little was left. The tour guide knew little of ball courts and their significance, although she did inform the group that the losers of the ball game were sacrificed. This, as expected, also shocked the members of the group. Gillette reports that ball courts were considered the gateway to the underworld and therefore they were constructed in low places, into the ground, not high like the pyramids, and within them in the form of a ball game highly serious dramas of creator gods versus demon battles were enacted in the ritual of the game. Thus, in this context, the sacrifice of one team makes sense, although it was not clear whether it was the winning team or the losing team that was so sacrificed. Whereas at first it may make more sense for the losing team to be sacrificed, reflecting the drama, as ball courts were considered the gateway to the underworld, it could be that the winners were considered more fit to enter the underworld in actuality, where they would be more likely than the losers to win against the true demons and therefore find their way to the paradise of the overworld, which would be their reward. Finally it was now time for those of us who were going to do it to climb to the top of the large pyramid. Fortunately the archeologists had constructed a more reasonably-sized stone stairway that bypassed the lower third of the pyramid steps which had rises on the order of two or three feet per step. But the remaining two-thirds was up on the pyramid itself (where the steps were more negotiable), first taking us up the right side past a beautifully restored section of elaborate glyphs, and then stepping us over to the rear of the pyramid. The final third took us up through an interior stairway that landed us up on top where we had an awe-inspiring view all the way around the pyramid, from which we could look over dense jungle and see settlements and villages spaced off in the distance. But it was more than a beautiful view�the effort of the climb coupled with a rapid rise in altitude due to the steepness of the pyramid lessened the available air that one was able to breathe at first. I had to concentrate on breathing deeply, or else I thought I would faint, or suffocate. The effect was similar to being at much higher mountain altitudes where the air is thinner. The effect of this diminishment of oxygen serves to space out the brain, as if the mere fact of being present on the top was similar to a �decapitation,� cutting off or diminishing the power of the brain and opening the consciousness to an altered reality�this I now think of as �the Maya effect.� I also noticed that my heart was beating way more rapidly, from both the exertion and from the need to push more oxygen through the blood. Any heart-ripping-out sacrifice would have been far more dramatic up here and the life-giving blood would have been a much more forceful fountain�this I now think of as �the Aztec effect.� I also realize that the third great ancient civilization in the Central/South American part of the world, the Incas, due to their high Andean location in Peru (such as the city of Machu Pichu) would also share this �oxygen deficit� effect. Some people in our group who had made it to the top were taking pictures of each other. One man wanted to be shown with the great view behind him, so without thinking, he backed away from the camera and nearly stepped backwards right over the edge of the pyramid�s flat top�only the warning shout of the photographer stopped him from taking that final step to his sure death. He, obviously, had temporarily lost the ability to think clearly and nearly had a more realistic experience of the Maya/Aztec/Inca effect than he had bargained for! This place, like no other place I had ever been, really had the feel of an ancient time. I don�t think even artisans of the �Disney/Epcot� mode could succeed in building something like this that would look or feel the same way. It was as if over a thousand years of wind, rain, fingerprints, and footsteps had driven the patina of time deep into the fissures between each grain of sand in the mortar, into each pore in the rock. It was like an ancient, long-hidden burial vault turned inside out, out-gassing its hidden secrets into the modern-day atmosphere, there for the perceptions of the soul to read and understand, a threshold into a timeless world of divine energy and infinite creative power. I climbed the stairs back down from Xunantunich and we all gathered together again. Somebody asked the tour guide at which age students in Belize learned about Maya history, and she surprised us all by saying that they don�t learn it. At first this was hard to understand, but as we walked out of the park, I thought about it, and realized that the Mayas had nothing to do with the present-day Belizeans, who were Europeans and Africans, whereas the remaining Mayas living today were a despised, struggling social class whose present circumstances were hardly even connected to the civilization of their ancient ancestors. All were willing to make a buck off of the tourists, however, without, themselves, having much respect for or knowledge of these fascinating historical sites. I wonder if to them these are no greater in importance than �ancient Indian burial grounds� are to Americans who are not Native-Americans. This could also explain why our tour guide, who was so knowledgeable about Belize, really knew next to nothing about Xunantunich. We then left the site to walk back down the hill to the hand-cranked ferry. Just outside the park, I saw the source of the wood-stove smell that I had noticed before: groundsmen were burning piles of raked dried leaves. I figured their efforts were pouring much more smoke pollution into the archaeological site than the two cigarettes would have. Back across the river, the man selling the gray clay tablets saw me and said, �Are you ready to buy now?� �No thank you,� I said. �Now�s your chance to buy them directly from the artist,� he said. I don�t even remember what my response was, but I felt disgusted. Directly from the artist! Just as I suspected, two days later in shops in Cancun, I saw those things everywhere. Mexico put me closer to the �artist� than Belize did, particularly if the factory that spewed these things were located in Quintana Roo! It was now time to go to lunch and we were taken to a hotel that had a nice restaurant. On the way there, our tour guide told us about hot sauce. �We have five levels of hotness,� she said. �I want to warn you about it�number four is about as hot as you would ever want to go. I, myself, would never even touch number five!� At the pretty restaurant, I sat down at a table with the two girls from Boston and the guy who had almost stepped backwards off the pyramid. We selected a table by the window that overlooked a garden, but were then chastised by the hostess, who said, �You can�t sit there, you have to sit closer to the front of the restaurant!� I don�t care to be asked to move, but we did as we were told. Although I could come up with several guesses as to why we weren�t to sit there, I never really did know why and that table remained empty the whole time we were there (which, triumphantly, I noticed, as is always the case when restaurants ask you to move). We were treated to a drink of something quite close to lemonade, but then if we wanted, we could additionally order wine, beer, or soft drinks that we would pay for ourselves. The rest of the meal was included in the price of the tour. I ordered a Diet Coke, which came in a can. The hostess (the same one who had asked us to move) asked me if I wanted a glass with ice, and I said, �Yes.� But then when she brought it to me, I immediately questioned the purity of it. Which was odd, because I had enjoyed several frozen margaritas on the catamaran in Cozumel and drank a fruit punch and had a lunch with impunity in Roatan, but now, suddenly, I was afraid of Montezuma�s Revenge, which until this very moment I hadn�t even thought of. It was because of the nasty attitude of the hostess, something within me felt like insulting her somehow. While my concern would be legitimate, my bringing it up now was more of a negative reflection on her, a suspicion of the standards of the place (which, by the way, is irrelevant, because one time I got very sick from the ice in a margarita in a very expensive and elegant restaurant in Mexico in San Miguel Allende). Before I poured my Diet Coke into the glass, I said, �Does this ice come from the water purification company?� She answered, �I cannot honestly tell you that it does.� I looked at my glass as if it were full of amoeba cultures and said, shocked, �You mean this is impure ice?� �No,� she said, �I do not think it is impure. It comes from our hotel water supply which is filtered, it�s the water we use for everything.� For some reason I still wasn�t convinced, but a part of me knew that I had already had the lemonade so whatever damage had already been done (to all of us), so I watched my body take over my emotions and my hand automatically poured my Diet Coke into the glass, fizzing and spilling over the dice-size shapes of ice. I looked at her and said, �Okay� and decided to get over this thing I had against her. And ultimately, it had been no problem at all. Nothing of any sort made me sick on this trip. My dining companions could not have been more dull. They had virtually nothing whatever to report or to share about the experience at Xunantunich we had just had. The guy who had nearly suffered the ultimate experience on the pyramid (i.e., his death) had simply gotten his photo taken, so that was all with him, and the two girls hadn�t climbed to the top, so they had had no experience with it. The guy was traveling alone, like me. He had had a group of friends who all had planned to go on this cruise together, but in the end, they flaked out on him and at the last minute he just decided to go anyway, even if that meant going by himself. I respected that, so said, �It is sometimes so hard to get everybody together to agree on where they want to go and to have everybody available at the same time that I usually don�t even fool with it, myself, I just go. I think it is great that you did, too.� However, he hadn�t had as good of a time as I did, because his personality wasn�t as extroverted. He said that he had eaten every meal alone and that had been embarrassing. �You didn�t tell the maitre d� that you wanted to share?� I asked. �That never worked out,� he said. I explained to him my discovery that you have to go to the dining room at the busy time in the middle of their hours, not close to the beginning or the end when they are nearly empty. �You�ll share a table then, for sure,� I said. It�s funny, because after that I saw him at several different meals and he was always with people, so I don�t know if my advice made the difference, or did he just luck out. They brought us our lunches. There really was nothing there that I considered too unusual or exotic�they had beef in gravy, salsa without much liquid (mostly chopped tomatoes, onions, and so on), black beans, a fried banana half, something like coleslaw, and tiny white corn tortillas�if regular corn tortillas were quarter-sized, these would be dime-sized, which I thought was perfect, because I could fill them up like little tapas. The people at the table looked at it all as if they had no idea what to do with any of it. Sitting on the table was a bottle of hot sauce. I picked it up and looked at the label and the others looked at me if I were handling a scorpion. �Is it a five?� asked the guy. I showed him the label. �It doesn�t indicate anything,� I said. �No number, no grade of hotness, no special warning�it couldn�t be a five, just put here like this. It�s probably the mildest grade they�ve got.� To their shock, I poured a little tiny drop onto a piece of shredded cabbage from the coleslaw and took a delicate taste. All three of them expected me to suddenly scream out in pain as if I were piercing my tongue in a Maya bloodletting ritual, but instead I nodded my head and said, �It�s quite good, not hot at all, there is a slight taste of sweet carrot juice in there� (and, indeed, carrot was a major ingredient on the label). So then I squirted it out in many drops all over the coleslaw. The guy pointed to the coleslaw and said, �What is that, anyway?� �It seems to be a kind of coleslaw,� I explained, �but not full of liquid. You know, it�s like shredded cabbage and carrots and I don�t what else. It�s good.� I then took a tortilla, put on some salsa, beans, coleslaw, and beef, and rolled it up and started to eat it. The combination was really quite good. I said to the others, �Here, take a tortilla,� which the guy and the Cole�s special girl did, but the other girl shook her head and said she would pass. Those people did not put anything into the tortilla, but merely chewed on it like a piece of bread, a nearly tasteless piece of bread, so they gave up on it halfway through and dropped it to their plates. Both gingerly chewed on the beef some, but would not touch the salsa or the beans or coleslaw. I explained what the salsa was, and identified the beans, all pretty normal foods that anybody would get at home, nothing to be afraid of. They seemed especially fearful of the coleslaw for some reason and I tried to imagine what it must look like to their eyes�a pile of crab eye stalks, perhaps? If anything, I might have expected them to balk at the beef, and only because it was a hybrid of three different kinds of cattle, particularly the Brahmin, which might have made them squeamish, but since they had slept through that, they didn�t even know about that. Suddenly the guy kind of shouted, �What is that,� pointing to his fried banana with his fork, as if he were just now seeing it for the first time. Maybe he was seeing it for the first time, as he obviously had not the slightest idea what it was and therefore it might not have registered anything on his brain until after having had several sightings of it. �That�s a fried banana!� I said, as if that explanation were all he needed. But no, that was incomprehensible to him, but the Cole�s special girl, she was at least sensible and ate not only her own, but asked him if he wasn�t going to eat his, could she have it, too, and he let her have it. Again, I tried to distance myself from my knowledge of the fried banana and tried to look at it from his point of view. Maybe it made him think of a fried banana slug�you know, it does kind of look like a huge slug, cut in half. You can see a hint of digestive tract down the middle, and maybe some internal organs on either side of the digestive tract. I�m sorry I said that, because now you henceforth will be unable to eat a fried banana! But honestly now, these people making such a fuss over the most pedestrian of foods. I guess that�s what happens when you�re raised on McDonald�s Happy Meals. (Now that/s disgusting!) The marimba had started playing at about the same time the food was brought out, so all of us pretty much forgot to listen to them until the time that the waitress and hostess cleared our plates. I wonder if that hostess noticed that I was the only one who ate anything? If my question about the purity of the ice disturbed her (but it probably didn�t it), maybe my eating everything demonstrated that I had made up. The marimba music didn�t excite me and I sure didn�t want to buy their CD. The instrument itself, though, was made from some really pretty wood, and it seemed to be mostly an orange color wood. The bus trip back to town was uneventful and quiet. The tour guide now had nothing else to say and I was content to be quiet, too. I don�t even know what the other people on the bus were doing, sleeping again, I guess. I just looked out the window and tried to imagine what life was like in the various kinds of houses that we passed. I noticed that there was a preponderance of a lime green color on the painted houses. That to me now is indicative of Caribbean tropical houses, the lime green paint. I reflected on my how grandmother had taken an around-the-world cruise on a very famous and well-loved Cunard Line cruise ship called the Caronia, but nicknamed �The Green Goddess.� (That ship is now long gone, but there is a very detailed web site devoted to it. Cunard later bought the ship Vistafjord and renamed it the Caronia, a ship that still sails. My grandmother had sailed on the Vistafjord�s twin sister, the Sagafjord, which was the one that had docked in San Francisco and we had gotten to spend a whole day there on board as her guest.) The �Green Goddess� was painted that same tropical lime green color, because the shipbuilders said that that color would make the ship very cool�this was before air conditioning. I wonder how true that is, and if so, then maybe that�s why so many tropical houses are painted that color, it helps to keep the house cool. Later, in the ship�s gift shop, I was looking for a souvenir for myself and they had these cute flat plaster tropical house sculptures for putting on the wall, and I bought a tropical lime green one and a white one, both very beautiful with multi-colored flowers in window boxes and nice architectural details. We got back to the tender dock in Belize City and our tour guide asked the passengers what the name of the pyramid was. �Shoo, uh, shoo�.� But she let them off the bus, anyway, probably glad to be finally rid of this crowd. There was a quadrangle of shops there and all the vendors intone the same mantra, �Come and look, come and look, come and look.� I almost bought some hot sauce and one vender had the lowest four grades in one box, but I mostly wanted the fifth one and nobody had any above the fourth level, so I didn�t buy any. Hot sauce, hell, it�s everywhere here, anyway. I looked around for some natural rain forest products. The only thing I found was some natural insect repellant, which I probably should have bought, but I balked at the eight dollar price for a miniscule perfume-bottle size. I hadn�t needed any insect protection anyway, so I decided to save my money. Okay, time to get on the tender and return to the ship. It wasn�t so crowded this time, and they didn�t drive as fast. I could talk. There was a teenage boy sitting next to me, reading a book. I probably would have disliked that as much as the people sleeping on the bus, except that I like to read, myself, although not while I am out experiencing things. Is being tendered on a boat from Belize City to a cruise ship so commonplace that a person would prefer to simply read a book during it? I guess so. Some people probably would read a book while riding a camel across Iraq during the American display of �shock and awe.� I couldn�t help myself, I had to see what the boy was reading and it was Speaker For The Dead. Oh, a good book, as I told the boy. He smiled and asked me if I had read Ender�s Game. I said, �Oh yes, I liked it better than Speaker For The Dead, although friends of mine who are real Orson Scott Card fans said that the Ender series died after the second book, so I never read the third and the fourth.� Well, he wasn�t sure he wanted to continue past this one, too, and then he went back to reading it. Back aboard the Norwegian Sea, since I knew this was either the last or near the least tender boat back to the ship, I went up on the top deck so that I could look down and see how they handled the floating dock. I got my answer, a little boat, not one of the tender boats, all of whom went back over to Belize �toward the left�, tied the dock to it and towed it out toward the Belize shore a little bit over to the right, making me think that they were two different companies. Somebody walked by me drinking a frozen Blue Hawaii in a clear plastic glass, which was the special drink of the day, so a cocktail waitress walked past me later and I ordered a Blue Hawaii for myself. But what she brought me was a Blue Hawaii in a very tall, horn-like purple rubbery-plastic container with a very long straw�this was some kind of a souvenir glass. Well, I didn�t want that (plus it cost several dollars more), but I didn�t want to create a fuss and accepted it like that was exactly what I wanted. And once I started sipping that drink, I was more than happy. It tasted so good that I could have had ten of them. I was completely content to just stand there on deck enjoying my tall Blue Hawaii (feeling happier and happier as I sipped that drink down), enjoying the movement of the ship as it sailed away from Belize, and talking with whomever dropped by to enjoy my same spot. There was a family from San Diego with whom I talked for about an hour, mostly the man. I wish I could remember what we talked about, but I remember the taste of the Blue Hawaii more, which probably explains it. I had dinner in the main dining room, but because I had enjoyed being up on the top deck so much, I messed up my timing and got there after the big crowd, which meant that there was nobody to share, so I was seated by myself. I wasn�t so happy about that, thinking that today had been a total social loss, the only nice people I had talked with all day was that family from San Diego. However, my loneliness was rectified by having Junior from Jamaica as my waiter again�he was the painfully funny waiter I had had my first night there. And he remembered having teased me. I think Junior was having a not so good night that night, waiting on some unsatisfied people. Although he was doing a good job of hiding it, since I had had him before when he was at his best, I could tell that he was in that �hacked mood� and his smooth timing was off. People must have been sending stuff back, which, if nothing else, wastes the time of a busy waiter. This is looking at it from the po
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