We did our usual Sunday ride up the beach to Indigo, then cut over to Grand Belizean Estates, where the road is much higher and dryer than anything else on the island. While there, in addition to many birds (herons, egrets, stilts, kingfishers, mockingbird, ibis and others), we saw this gray fox crossing the road.
What a fine day. The storm that has been hanging out near Belize moved northward, and the rains stopped. We saw the sun for the first time in days, which always lifts our spirits. Additionally, my back had been feeling better every day, and Saturday I was able to do a lot more range of motion exercises, stretches, and light strengthening exercises, so I decided I'd try a bike ride today. Good decision -- it didn't bother me a bit!
We did our usual Sunday ride up the beach to Indigo, then cut over to Grand Belizean Estates, where the road is much higher and dryer than anything else on the island. While there, in addition to many birds (herons, egrets, stilts, kingfishers, mockingbird, ibis and others), we saw this gray fox crossing the road.
2 Comments
Last night we had rain, thunder, and lightning AGAIN; and the rain continued coming down in sheets through lunchtime, bringing over 4" to the San Pedro area. This is a result of a low-pressure system that has camped out over the Gulf of Honduras and may be with us for another couple of days. Here are a couple of shots during the peak of the morning rain. This afternoon once the rain had stopped, Barry decided to head into town as he wanted to buy some produce, and I'm sure the cabin fever was getting pretty intense. Truth be told, I would have joined him if my back were healed up. It's getting there, but I want to give it a full week of rest and recovery before getting on the bike again, so I worked on my on-line Spanish lesson while he rode in on his bike. Here are what the the roads just north of town looked like, and yes, he rode through those puddles! If I'd been with him, I would have detoured onto the sidewalk! If he didn't have fenders on his bike, I don't think he would have gone for it as he would have been filthy.
With the produce he bought, along with our whole wheat tortillas from yesterday, we were able to whip up a huge batch of bean, veggie, and cheese burritos to freeze and eat for the next couple of days. I guess it was worth the mess to have plenty of good food to sustain us in case this front hangs around for many more days. We had pretty much given up on getting nice whole wheat or any type of whole grain tortillas here in San Pedro. Small corn tortillas in large stacks are really popular with the locals, and we'd also bought many larger white flour tortillas for wrapping around various combinations of beans, veggies, and cheese; but there were no whole-grain tortillas anywhere. We could either make our own or do without. So, we'd resigned ourselves to using white flour tortillas when making dishes that required larger tortillas than the small corn ones. Yesterday Barry stopped into the local tortilla maker's place, Domingo's Popular Tortillas, and asked if they had any "wheat tortillas". What he meant was "flour tortillas", as opposed to corn, but when the proprietor heard "wheat", she must have assumed "whole wheat", and she told him they no longer made them due to lack of demand. When they do a "run" of tortillas of any kind, it ties up their machine so that no other varieties of tortillas can be made, so obviously they have to make what they can sell. Barry was surprised that they were no longer going to make flour tortillas, so he asked how many he'd have to buy to make it worth her while to do a run. They agreed on ten packs (40 tortillas), and he said he'd pick them up the next day at 10 am. He still thought he was ordering white flour tortillas, and when he told me the story afterwards, I was as surprised as he was that there was not enough demand to make them. So, today he rode into town to pick up his tortillas, expecting a large stack of white flour tortillas. Instead, much to his delight, were 40 lovely whole wheat tortillas! They were still warm, and the proprietor gave him one to try to make sure it was to his liking. Oh yes! The price was only slightly higher than standard flour tortillas, which run $1.25 BZD per four-pack. These were $1.50 BZD (75 cents US) per four-pack. When he got home and I started unpacking the groceries, I was taken aback to see the lovely, still-warm whole wheat tortillas come out of the bag. What a score! I guess maybe my bad back does have a silver lining, because if I had gone to the shop, I would have requested flour tortillas, and we would never have known about this option. Yay Barry! In other food news, the 6 lb. protein powder we'd ordered from GoNature came in today. And even more exciting, we'd also placed an order for five pounds of bulk unsweetened baking chocolate from Goss Chocolate down in Placencia in southern Belize. We'd been surprised that larger sizes of chocolate are so hard to come by in a country that makes wonderful chocolate, and the small bars sold in stores are very expensive. After some online research and email communication with one of the owners, we located this nice company that would sell to us in bulk. This is Belize, so delivery is a little different than in the US. Instead of UPS or Fedex, the chocolate was shipped via Tropic Air Cargo today and arrived in San Pedro this afternoon, so Barry took a second trip into town on his bike to pick up the package, along with the protein powder. In Chapel Hill, he learned to make the most wonderful chocolate "bark" by adding dried fruit, nuts, and sweetener to the melted unsweetened chocolate and looks forward to doing that here as well. Yum. A very good day in food indeed!
On Ambergris Caye, beach bikes are a common mode of transportation for locals, and riding along the beach serves as the "road" to and from town to jobs in resorts and at construction sites for many local men, and a few women. There is an unpaved road north of the bridge to San Pedro Town, but during rainy season, where potholes and puddles can grow into ponds, riding a bike on the beach is easier, drier, and generally more pleasant. We do it too.
Since there is quite a bit of bike traffic passing by, and because we live in a first-floor condominium right on the beach, we get a lot of locals offering us various wares for sale as they ride by. It's not something I particularly enjoy, since we really don't have an interest in most of it, and we have a budget to stick to as well. If we bought from everyone, we couldn't afford to live here! But I always feel bad telling someone no, since I know a lot of these folks are subsisting on just a small salary or day-wage, and a good number are unemployed, more now during low season than will be later during high season (Thanksgiving through Easter). Here are the offers we have gotten since we've been here:
We would have preferred a condo on a higher floor to avoid all these offers, but there were no other one bedroom condos available. Just one of the little compromises we had to make to live where we do; and so far, it's worth it. I wish we'd get more vendors selling consumables, like fresh fish, fruit, or freshly baked bread. Maybe someday! The full moon is absolutely gorgeous tonight over the Caribbean Sea. The breeze is from the ENE and perfect as well. Temperature is 83 degrees at 7:15 pm. This is October? Oooh yeah! Only thing not so perfect is my back, which I wrenched getting out of a swivel chair on Sunday night. I've been pretty much down for the count ever since, and have had to send Barry to town to run errands solo for the past two days. How I hate being on the injured reserve list, as I so enjoy our runs and bike rides. I've really never suffered from this sort of back pain before, which makes every movement a bit iffy, and occasionally has me wincing in pain. Even the pool has been a bit uncomfortable. Periodic icing has helped, though, so I am hoping I'll be mostly back to normal in a day or two.
We awoke to a gorgeous day here and headed over to Footprints (the beach bar/restaurant at Grand Caribe) for veggie omelets. After a fine breakfast eaten poolside, it was time for our long Sunday bike ride. We would be testing out our new equipment purchased in Belize City today (handlebars for Barry, saddle for me). We got a mile or so up the beach when Barry's chain fell off, and he realized he needed to head back to tighten it up, so we turned around and rode back to Chico Caribe. Barry did his bike maintenance, then we were off again. We rode north to Grand Belizean Estates, which is a most excellent place for a ride (I've mentioned this before) thanks to the high and dry road and no traffic. There are also lots of birds. It's a peaceful place since building has not started yet (and may never if they don't get electric and sewer in - not a problem for us at all!) We ran into a little light rain while we rode there from a passing dark cloud, though we could see that it was still sunny and bright at the beach. We were both happy with our new equipment and thoroughly enjoyed the ride. Even the rain was welcome as it was a hot day. It's amazing to realize it is October, since it still feels like August here! It's almost as if time has stopped since we left North Carolina. After our ride we were eating lunch out on our veranda when we noticed some guys conch fishing in a kayak. They were getting quite a haul. They retreated to the shade under the Grand Caribe dock to remove the conch from the shells and clean them. I was interested as I love conch ceviche and thought it would be great to get some fresh conch to make some, but I was a bit shy to approach them to see if they were selling. Pretty much everyone is selling something here in Belize, so I figured they would not turn away a customer. Barry encouraged me, and I finally went for it! First time I have ever shopped under a dock! They ended up being younger guys and extremely friendly. The price was so right -- $10 BZD ($5 US) per lb (or approximately a pound, as they had no scale). They cleaned off all the skin and talked to me while I waited. I don't have a scale either, but I think they gave me a very generous pound! We didn't have all of the ingredients we needed for ceviche, except a red bell pepper and tomatoes, so Barry ended up riding his bike back to town for the appropriate goodies (red onion, cucumber, hot pepper, limes, and cilantro). I neglected to give him the bike lock, so he had to be very careful about going into shops. The cilantro proved difficult to find (we suspect no boats come to the island bringing vegetables on the weekend, so it was sold out at all our usual haunts). He finally found it at a local shop, though leaving his bike outside took guts, as he said the neighborhood the shop was in was not the best. Fortunately, it worked out fine, and I was able to make my first-ever ceviche. If I do say so myself, it was delicious! Barry seemed to like it too. There's nothing like eating fresh seafood caught that day. This is one of the simple pleasures of living on an island.
We'd been wanting to go to Belize City for awhile to do a little shopping, since availability and prices of goods are reputed to be better than on Ambergris Caye. We'd also been wanting to try the ferry, as we've always taken Tropic Air to and from the airport on our trips here, so Friday seemed like a good day to have a little adventure. I was a bit wary of the city (often called simply "Belize" by locals), having read about the crime there, but we got some good recommendations online. These included this highly informative blog entry entitled "How to Survive in Belize City" (http://www.sinnvollereise.de/?p=1368) and this commercial site, which is refreshingly honest about some of the less desirable sides of the city: http://www.belize.com/belize-city.html. Seems if we stayed on certain streets during the day, we would be okay. Still, I insisted on preparing a "give-away wallet" (recommended in the blog above) with an expired credit card, some other expired/unusable cards, and a small amount of money, just in case. Although we'd planned to go Friday, we kept wavering as the weather looked dark and threatening down south, but after watching the online Doppler radar for a bit, it appeared that most of the rain would have passed through already by the time we got there, so we decided to go for it. We grabbed our backpacks, water, rain jackets, and camera, and walked the roughly two miles to town to the ferry terminal. We were running a little late due to some neighborly socializing outside our building, so we had to make tracks, and it was awfully hot in the bright sunshine on the way, but we made it in time and paid our $55 BZD ($27.50 US) per person for round-trip tickets. The ferry over was not too crowded, and the sea was glassy most of the way, making for a nice, smooth ride. But as we closed in on Caye Caulker, the only stop along the way, the skies turned dark, and we hit some fairly heavy rain. It was kind of neat to watch the sky and sea change from the comfort of the covered ferry. By the time we arrived in Belize City, the rain had stopped, and we were fortunate in that we never had a drop of rain while we were there. It was overcast, keeping the temperature moderate, so really ended up being the perfect day to go. As we pulled into the ferry dock, we noticed the row of brightly colored buildings, a part of "tourist village" for cruise-ship visitors. Love the Caribbean colors! However, this was not a cruise ship day, so tourist village was closed, with just some renovation work going on. The ferry terminal and small restaurants/gift shops there were clean and secure, so I was starting to feel a bit more comfortable. And then we emerged from the safety and quiet of the ferry terminal onto the streets. Wow, what a change. The closest I can come to describing it is like New York City, a seedy part of New York City. There were taxis lined up everywhere and drivers offering their services. There were a lot of men loitering around, sitting on the curbs, and since this was not a cruise-ship day, and most of the folks who disembarked the ferry with us appeared to be locals, Barry and I definitely stood out like sore thumbs or fresh meat! There was a lot of traffic, and no stoplights in this area, only stop signs, so the traffic movement seemed pretty chaotic, and it was not easy to find a good place to cross even at pedestrian crosswalks, since there were no "Walk" signals. No, Dorothy, we were not in Chapel Hill any more! We knew which streets to stay on downtown once we exited the ferry terminal and crossed the nearby swing bridge, but finding the swing bridge was more difficult than we expected. A city at street level looks just a bit different than satellite view on Google maps! Fortunately a taxi driving by (with a full load already) pointed us towards the bridge, and we were on our way. We had to wait for what seemed to be an entire school's worth of kids coming the other way on the narrow pedestrian walkway over the bridge, but we finally made our way across. The view of the sailboats in the harbor was really pretty, I thought. Again, loved the colors. Once we came off the bridge into the city, it was once again a bit of a disoriented feeling, but we figured out which street we needed to be on to get down to Brodie's, a large supermarket, only a couple of blocks down. We were happy to see a sign stating that Fri-Sat-Sun were 10% off days. Score! They definitely had a larger quantity and variety of goods than in San Pedro, but not all prices were better. Fortunately we've been shopping at various groceries on the island long enough now that we had a good idea of which items were good deals and which were not. We picked up some peanuts, olive oil, cereal, and a few other items. I was hoping that wine prices would be lower than in San Pedro, but alas, they were not, so I am still wine-free. I was also sorry to see that the price on the box of 100 bags of green tea I had just bought the day before on the island was less than half the price at Brodie's -- wish I'd waited! As we walked along the street, a couple of panhandlers approached Barry wanting "a dolla, just a dolla man", and they were pretty aggressive about it. We just kept walking. Fortunately, we didn't have to surrender our give-away wallet to anyone. Barry wanted to explore more, but I was a bit wary of staying on the streets any longer than needed to do our little shopping, and most of the stores we passed were not appealing (blasting rap music, hoochy clothes, etc.), so I urged him to find the bike shop we wanted to go to so we could get going back to the ferry terminal. I was afraid we would not find the street it was on, but suddenly, there was the street, and there was the bike shop, Hop Sing! Ah, the familiar smell of rubber tires made me feel instantly at home. It was a nice shop filled with cruiser bikes and a variety of parts and accessories. Very different from the high-end bike shops back in Chapel Hill, it was still a perfect oasis for us as there are no real bike shops on Ambergris Caye, just a small selection of very basic parts in a couple of hardware stores. We purchased a flat handlebar for Barry to swap out his cruiser handlebars, and a saddle with a cutout for me. They only had low-end saddles, so it remains to be seen if this is an improvement on my big cushy cruiser saddle. I kinda need the cush, with all the bumps on the beach paths and unpaved and cobblestone roads here, but I also want a cutout to prevent chafing. I know that Serfas makes saddles that have both, so I may ultimately end up needing to buy a new saddle in the US, but I will give this one a try. It was only $19.95 Belize (around $10 US), so I'm not out much at all if it proves to be too firm for the type of riding we do here. After leaving Hop Sing, we beat a hasty retreat (at my request!) back to the ferry terminal and were offered several cab rides along the way, even just a block away. Once inside, I could let down my guard and relax after our foray into the gritty city, and the Belikin I had from this little snack bar/gift shop went down really nicely and left me feeling nicely tranquilo. We had a bit of a wait before catching the 3 o'clock ferry back to Ambergris Caye, so took a few more photos of the area while we waited. The ferry back was packed! It was people-watching heaven. One young local gal seated near us was playing loud music on her iPod (or equivalent) without earbuds, much to the chagrin of all of the rest of the passengers near her, who were rolling their eyes at each each other. I guess she was completely oblivious that this was rude, but since she was built like a linebacker (in fact, Barry thought she was a dude!), no one dared to say anything to her. She wouldn't have heard anyway, over her music and the drone of the three mighty outboards off the stern. Once back in San Pedro, we had to quickly walk up the beach to the nearby water taxi dock as we were within a few minutes of the next run north; if we'd missed that boat, we'd have had to wait an hour, and we were too pooped to schlep our backpacks full of heavy groceries back home. Plus we knew Paisley would be missing us and wanting some exercise. We made it with only a couple of minutes to spare and packed into a very crowded boat. On the ride north, we talked to a couple from Florida next to us who are considering a condo purchase on Ambergris Caye and gave them our card in case we could help answer any questions they might have. It's amazing how almost everyone who vacations here ends up wanting to buy property here, or so it seems, anyway! Guess we aren't that crazy after all.
Today Barry installed our new bike parts. And, we are eight for eight. It didn't rain overnight, but we had a brief shower in the afternoon, a perfect record in October so far. The streak of days with rain in October is unbroken! Yesterday was just a light shower, and it had already stopped by 6 am, but the pool deck was wet, so it counts. This morning I heard rain as I was lying in bed early this morning thinking about getting up. I also heard one loud clap of thunder overnight, worried that Paisley might get scared, then promptly fell back to sleep. It had stopped by the time we headed out for our Friday morning run. It's nice having most of the rain come early, leaving the rest of the day for fun and frolicking!
Stay tuned for tomorrow's blog entry as we took the ferry over to Belize City today for some shopping. We'll have a report and photos up sometime tomorrow. Happy weekend! So, it's rained five out of five mornings in October, and we're wondering how long this streak will go. Nearly every afternoon and evening is nice, but come morning, it's gray and raining. This morning's rain ended early, allowing us to hit the beach for a nice little run, but then returned with a vengeance after we got home, as sheets of rain pounded on our windows, obliterated our view of the reef, and made us feel very thankful we hadn't set out on our bike ride to town at our usual time (around 9 am). Here are a few shots Barry took of the rain, and the aftermath. Finally, after lunch and some cooking chores, we hit the road to town. We knew that the road around Reef Village that we have to ride to go over the bridge at the cut and into San Pedro Town was going to be a disaster, as it's been getting worse daily with the rain. Several of the puddles span the entire roadway, so you have no choice other than to ride through them, which can be a bit daunting as you can't see the bottom to figure out the best line with the shallowest water. The only good thing about these puddles, I guess, is that they give everyone who has to ride north of the bridge something to discuss and a common bond; the road is on everyone's minds! On the way back from our marketing, we had a chance to witness quite a spectacle of workers on many, many levels of scaffolding, working at the top of this condo building. They were passing full buckets of concrete up, level by level, and also passing the empties back down, almost in a synchronized "dance". It was actually kind of beautiful to behold so many people working in such harmony towards a common goal. Here are a couple of photos of Barry braving the puddles with the groceries in his rear rack. And yes, I went through these too. Thank goodness for Chaco sandals that can be rinsed off after a ride! Dinner tonight was a tropical pizza with jerk chicken, pineapple, papaya, red onion, red bell pepper, jack cheese, cilantro, and Barry's delicious homemade crust. Thoughts of rain, bad roads, and muddy bikes were left far behind while noshing on this! Will it rain again tomorrow morning, making October a solid six for six? Supposedly the rainy weather pattern is going to ease a bit in the coming days, but I will believe it when I see it. Stay tuned!
Maybe only I think so, but here are some kinda cool things from today.
|
UPDATE!
|