Village people, prepping plantain leaves for tamales.
“Hi, America”
Welcome to a special Sunday edition of Belizean postcards from a couple of happy-people villages I’ve visited lately.
Scroll on . . . . .
My friend Antonio with one of his four children. He works at a beach resort in Placencia on the southern Belizean coastline, working 10 days and coming home to western Belize for three days at a time. He dotes on his children when home and is as loving a family man as I’ve ever seen.
Saturday at the market I saw a young Belizean friend of mine, Antonio, with his wife Lady and one of their four children. They live up in a beautiful village in the mountains of Mountain Pine Ridge, a place called Seven Miles. (Guess how far it is from some semblance of civilization.)
A school bus runs to market early on Saturday mornings and heads back to Seven Miles promptly at 1 p.m. Antonio and Lady, however, lost track of time and missed the bus, so I offered to take them home.
They live with Lady’s parents on the family’s 55 acre farm with the four kids, a horse, a pig and enough chickens and baby chicks running around to feed Belize.
Antonio’s parents in the younger days.
Lady is camera shy but did catch this snap of her happy face.
Lady’s mom, on the other hand, is a total extrovert, pictured here hamming it up on a neighbor girl’s tiny tricycle.
Antonio’s father in law farms about 10 acres of 55 he owns. He’s rents out another 20 acres.
A view of the family’s beautiful, lush farm. You name it, it’s planted out there: tomatoes, cucumbers, sweet peppers, spuds, pineapples, plantains, papaya and mango trees, among other stuff. Families have everything you need up here, including water service, and excepting electricity, but who needs that–that’s what lanterns are for.
Antonio’s 10-year-old son can’t walk or talk, but loves to go swimming and caving in inner tubes. There’s ancient water caves complete with Mayan bones and skulls and artifacts around less than a mile from Antonio’s home.
Mike’s Place is a popular tourist attraction with cave tubing in ancient caves, and zip-lining. Another popular place for zip-lining, Calico Jack’s, is in Seven Miles Village near Antonio’s family farm.
The horse shares the corn with the chicks, which is the neighborly thing to do after all.
Porky eats like a pig and don’t share nothin’.
===========================
Meanwhile……. back in the village of Calla Creek on the other side of western Belize, I recently went for a long, aimless walk with the camera.
It was here in Calla Creek Village that the ladies of the Living Waters Church were washing plantain leaves for the tamales they made Friday night to sell in San Ignacio on Saturday, market day, when people from villages from 20 miles and farther pour into San Ignacio, the hub of trade and commerce in far Western Belize.
The kids weren’t involved in tamale making; just giggled at the gringo with the camera a lot.
This heavily secured house overlooks the river in a scenic setting.
“Nastase”: the entrance to the riverside place has these fading, Tibetan Buddhist prayer flags at the gate. Maybe the Dalai Lama has a Belizean retreat house at Calla Creek Village?
How to get to the other side of the Mopan River on the swing bridge at Calla village? Holding your breath and praying helps.
The mighty Mopan; hard to imagine the kazillions of Mayan canoes that used to pass here at Calla, which is not far from the big Mayan Xunantunich ruins where you can scale up a temple and see miles and miles of Belize and Guatemala too.
So I got across the swing bridge to find this American expat couple, who have 50 acres of land down the road, buying orchids from a Belizean couple they’d made an appointment with. About 100 feet from there I met an American expat who bought a house he’s living on in 1995, but he only moved to it six months ago and is building a bigger house to stay permanently. It’s not as if I stumble across American expats out in the boonies every day; it was a little strange to meet these Americans all in one walk down the backroads.
Belize is a wonderland of unique and beautiful orchids and flowers. Plant, and it will grow.
Another Calla Creek Village attraction: nice bamboo in places on the riverside, which makes for nice and very nice furniture.
Until next time, don’t be hugging the poison wood trees, tree huggers.
I just enjoyed every moment of reading this and getting as close as I can right now to experiencing it. Thank you. What a gift you bring–to them and to those who read your work.
Great photos from the Belizian Minister as usual. Thanks for the continuation of the travelogue.