To the End of the Road

A Mexican rabble, who is our “guide” rides on the bumper, shouting directions up to me of which way to go. It is of course, not obvious. Have to stop at a fumigation station, where they do a thorough job of spraying both sides of the truck and trailer with some green goo. 80 bucks Belize. Finally we’re led to huge gate, locked, second in line. How that other guy got in front of us is unclear. A vendor sells breakfast burritos off his bicycle, but we’re on the cigarette diet.

Behind the gate a hundred yards is a huge warehouse of boring proportions. It is hot as we wait, truck on, truck off. It is 8:45 by our Mexican time. We realize that Belize is an hour earlier so the gate ought to open soon. Set the clock back. Wait and wait. As the time approaches 9 Belize time, an exceedingly slow and fat fellow wattles out to the gate. He appears to have as much interest in his job as shoveling hippopotamus crap. Languidly he unlocks the huge gate and settles into his booth. So things are an hour behind prescription it would seem. He informs me that I have to pay 125 per document to the Customs broker before leaving. I can just pay him, he tells me. I chose not to, waiting to see how things shake out. Through the gate and into a big yard surrounded by a 12 foot fence that is buttressed all along it’s length with various wrecks. Here we must wait.

Lester come up and tells us that an inspector will verify our VIN numbers with the titles. He wears a lite blue shirt with dark blue trousers. He’ll take the titles now to get the paperwork started. They are reluctantly handed over. An hour passes. Finally a rotund white shirt-black pants fellow comes out. Goes to the first guy and spends what seems like a week with him. Evidently old friends. Then back into the warehouse. More waiting. We’re dozing a little in the truck when there’s a rap on the window. The inspector. Does the VIN check. Has me pop the hood and looks over the engine. Then back into the warehouse. Lester tells us we can do the animal quarantine paperwork now.

Into the warehouse. It is a vast gloom with various offices around the edges. We go into a tiny one on one side. The little room is air conditioned, which is nice. A Quarantine official reviews our paperwork as we explain that some other necessary part of it was faxed down to them previously. He wears green pants and a lite green shirt. He goes through a few piles of papers on his desk and can find nothing. Then makes a call to some other office, speaking in some mix of African and Spanish with an occasional English word thrown in. No hello or good by, just start talking and then hang up abruptly. They must have told him the paperwork went by their office and it must be there somewhere. He consults a superior who points out a folder pinned to the wall behind him. Digging through this, our animal paperwork is miraculously found. Another half an hour of making a few copies, signing in all the appropriate places, filing out some other form, stamping officially, and getting some hefty payment from us.

The entire bureaucracy here in Belize is very dear to these people. Based on some south African model, influenced by east Indian bureaucratic excess, and originating in British Colonial corruption, the “cover your ass factor” has mushroomed into an almost endless miasma of signatures, stamps, triplicate of triplicates, verifications, and indecisive stalling. The computer has not infiltrated into this system yet and all summations of payments are done on a small Casio adding machine. There is no reduction of paperwork act here, no efficiency analysis’s, no customer service consciousness, only grinding paperwork that is shuffled from one desk to another and treated as though it were sweaty gym socks. Every one is color coded for position. Specific colored shirt, specific colored pants. I’m sure some of the epaulets that decorate their shoulders connote their rank. I have seen this in the South African mining system, where each status level has a different uniform, and the wearer is even obligated to move to a different house with each promotion or demotion.

Lester glides over to us, now leaning against the concrete warehouse wall sweating, hoping to suck some coolth out of it. We get our titles back and the news that all is in process. Soon he says the inspector for our truck load of crap will come out to verify some damn thing, and we ought to pull the larger things off the top so it’s interior can be penetrated. He floats off with a lilting step like a adolescent unsure how to walk in public. After each foot is planted, it is bounced up on it’s toe, giving an over all pogo stick gait. Lester is unfazed by the contorted convolutions of paperwork he must expedite, a passive look on his face, one would think he were wading in a seashore sunset.

We hotly pull the bikes and some other junk down from the truck, then do the AC thing inside, for us and the melted animals. We wait. Wait some more. I get out and talk to a guy next to us with two 100 pond pit bulls. He takes them over to the shade of some fence wreckage where they bark and bark. Sometime afternoon we locate Lester again. What the hell is going on? What is the interminabdle delay? The inspector came out, he says, but couldn’t find us and the truck was not ready. What the hell? We pulled crap off the truck. We’ve been waiting in the truck. The inspector will come back later. We pull more crap down. Then go in the building to see the inspector. Tan shirt, brown pants. She is a huge woman, sitting behind a desk bullshitting with some cronies. Hard at work. We say we’re ready now. She grunts and say’s we were not ready. Maybe, but we’re ready now. She shrugs the shrug of dismissal and continues her perlather with the others lounging near her desk. Kim is getting furious. I can see the fat inspectors power trip maturing. The more we bug her, the longer this is going to take. We wait, sitting on the concrete against the wall. In an hour she waddles out with a clip board and goes to some other truck, giving us a withering look. The fat power bitch look. Then back in for another half hour at the desk. I am called into an inner sanctum office and sat down with a white shirt, black pants. He has been surfing the computer and says that the value of the hovercraft is astronomical. I protest that I built it out of scrap parts, cost almost nothing. Also that dozens of these things are selling for 1500 to 2000. After much back and forth, it is valued at about 4000. The truck is valued at 6900 US. 900 more than I paid for it 10 years ago. I have a Kelly Blue book print out showing it’s only worth 1500, but he says he has to go by the GET guide book the government uses. Everything is 3 letters in this country. An anthropomorphic compulsion to conform to numeristic of theological trinity. My paperwork is thrown in some random heap and I’m back to waiting against the wall. An hour later, Rita, the corpulent inspector wanders out. She strikes up flirtatious conversation with a swarthy Guatemalan in some unintelligible language. I sense that he’s shining her to get a benefit of her assessment of value for his load. Seems to be working. I’d rather court a 200 pound tick. You’d need a garbage truck to take her to the drive in movie, if there was one. After she assesses his load, gives him her cell phone number. Goes back inside. Rita is fucking holding things the hell up, large. In another half an hour she comes out, with a huge sigh of reluctance to have to do her job, she comes over to inspect and assess our truck contents. It’s all over in 30 seconds. She could care less. Everything down as miscellaneous personal items. Value .. 400 dollars.

Back to Lester who is floating a few inches off the floor near the big bosses office. A crowd of hot and irritated cargo carriers are barraging him. He has a Buddha like smile of benevolence. A cool mist seems to be coming off him, as if the freezer door were opened on a hot day. Eventually he gives me his attention. Everything is in order, just waiting for a signature of one of the big bosses. There is no problem with the boat. Back to waiting. In another hour we are presented with a new mound of paperwork. Go to the cashier and pay the duty. A line. Old friends or realitives blathering endlessly at the window with the cashier. Finally get to pay a massive price, about a grand US. Then must pay Lester about 150. Oh but there is a problem. You must have a license for the boat. But I have everything registered and titled. Yes, but you must get a Belizian boat license. Have to go to Belmopan to get it. The boat must stay here and there are overnight fees etc. can’t leave the yard with it.

Still blazing hot. Unhook the hover and trailer, wedging it in next to some dilapidated cars who’s owners chose to never come back for. Their overnight charges must be in the millions, judging by the tangle of vines growing through the windows. Ok .. can we go now? Yes, all is in order, you can go. Finally. To the exit gate, sans hover. The guard analyzes the paperwork. You cannot go. You have not paid the duty on the contents of the truck. Back into the maze. Wait at the cashiers for the fellow to take a half hour crap, then his cousin has to catch up on happenings in OrangeWalk. In an hour I pay another few hundred. Back to the gate. Cleared to go this time. Then to the insurance company, conviently the fist biz on the right. Dinked for another 50 US to drive the truck in Belize. Finally cleared and on the road. Now the dark thing. It’s about 5 in the afternoon. No way in hell to get 350 miles south on unmarked roads. Corozol is 15 miles away. The road goes through the center of town. A standard vintage town, no building over one story, somewhat colorful, but shabby. Signs are in English, which is nice. Through town. No Visible hostel. I see a sign for the Miracle Hotel down a dirt road and head off the highway for that. It is an old Victorian house, alone in a field, rasta people lounging all around the outside. Albert the proprietor is nice enough, though he looks like he can fall over at any time due to the huge multi colored bag on his head. There must be enough hair in there to make socks for all of china. The room fair whit a weak AC unit. Albert doesn’t mind that we have a menagerie of animals. Dog romps in the fields around the place, a thousand new smells and skittering things to make a symphony of delight. Animals settled, fed, chasing lizards in the room, we head for the bar. No food. Have to drink dinner. In casual talk with Albert, the subject of Ganga comes up. Presently he reaches under the bar and hands me what appears to be a dried rat without the tail. The light is bad, the rum is kicking in. On inspection, mostly by nose, it is determined to be a huge bud of marijuana. This is nice, but no thanks for now. I have enough problems. The crime here is 6 month in jail, or 1000 US to pay your way out. Not too many of these bubble heads appear to have a thousand US Dollars. The Prison must be crammed with pot smokers. We take beers back to the room, which clatter on the tile floor. The small cat is all over the room like an electron trying to catch a fast lizard. The bed and the exhaustion catch up to us. A nice night with regga thumping downstairs and tropical birds chirping out the window.

The relief of night over too soon. A lounging rasta claims he’s been watching the truck all night, although he wasn’t there when I came down with the first load of animals. I give him a few bucks anyway. Back on the road. But now we feel safe. The land not hostile, pavement fair, directions easy, as there is only one road. A dozen miles past Corozol, the road devolves to dirt, then huge rutted and mud holed country road. Sugar cane is 15 feet on both side. To far we go on this before we realize we have gotten on a parallel road to the highway, having stupidly gone straight where the unmarked cutoff was. The good news is that the road rejoins the highway in another 20 miles. We decide to tough it out, but regret the decision more than a few times before we find pavement again. Back on the slab. Barreling along. Local instructions are to cut a right after the police check station to Barrel Boom, thereby bypassing the nightmare of Belize City.

Do the check point, pulled over and questioned at length, but with no dire result. The turn off is 10 miles past this, rather than just on the other side as informed. Eventually to Belmopan, where further bureaucracy prevents getting the license for a few days, needing signatures and the usual delays. On down the road, now into the “forgotten land”. The Maya mountains are beautiful and lush, palms and mysterious trees leaning over the road. On and on it goes, through villages in abundance, bicycles populating the sides, the people ever standing along it, waiting, waiting, for what unknown. Places are kept well in Belize, garbage at a minimum. On and on we go, ever south. And now, the evening upon us again.

Finally into Punta Gorda, the end of the road. We stop at the property we bought and hike into it. All is wet and dripping. Kim is quiet, peering into the dark of the jungle trees. Where is the Ocean? What is this? Disappointment is all over her. We are a block from the sea, I explain, but this does not appease the reality of the dank twisted tangle of vegetation. The dank moisty air. We head over to the hostel of my friend. His wife grumpily greets us. Yes, there is a room, but no animals allowed. This we cannot do, the animals need out. Back to the property. I ask the neighbor for permission to drive across her lawn to get next to the place. Larry with an adjoining property has a house started with an elevated floor. Now the dark is on us. We hastily set up the tent under this elevated cement floor. The bugs are rampant, biting the hell out of us. The bedding soggy, the tent a sour pit full of animals, of which we are as they are. Tomorrow will be better. We’ll build stairs to get up on top of the platform, off this bug ridden ground. We sleep in exhaustion, again. Now at the destinations end, in this strange land, this strange place, discomfort still on us like saran wrap on a microwaved burrito. Creatures without rustle and squawk all around. This first night in our new land, a grumpy dud.