Jitterbugging for Jesus

My Mayan friend Margarita, who catches a bus to market here in Old San Ignacio, BZ, from her home a few hours west in Guatemala on Saturdays, does a good business selling her herbal concoctions.

I like her divine, flaming incense made from resin, which I burn in my home. It’s a strong, flaming incense that would set off fire alarms if I had any.

See the photo captions for more.

For $10 US Margarita will sell you this fabulous resin/incense wrapped in palm leaves.

Cut a piece small or large, put it in a pan or on some kind of fire friendly surface, light it and it will burn for as long as you prefer, producing a divine scent. I put a small amount on the floor of a spare bedroom and the incense wafts around the house. Some Mayans and shamans in Central America and the Caribbean will tell you it keeps the evil spirits away, including the spirits of bad health. By the way, once you’ve scrubbed the sticky resin off your fingers your fingers will still smell good for a long time.

Maria speaks no English but her friends help her translate for the many tourists who stop by her table, intrigued by the piles of strange leaves and spices and exotica she offers.

She sells herbal tea barks and leaves and medicines like Rue, which is the English name for what is Ruda in Spanish.

This is dried Rue, which Mayan healers boil down to make tea that lowers blood pressure and has other health benefits. But travelers and tourists be forewarned when buying pure, unadulterated herbs in rainforest countries like BZ: an herb like Rue is so powerful that too much can lower the blood pressure to a risky level, especially if, like me, you have a history of serious hypertension and have to take 20 milligrams of BP pills to keep your BP at a perfect rate.

Me, I drink at least one cold, 4-ounce glass of Kombucha tea for good health every day, preferring the ginger-flavored tea I buy from another Mayan healer. Because it’s a rainforest country, BZ is an herbal-remedy culture and the Kombucha Culture is a big culture within the culture. Cheers.

And as an extra-added Roadside Attraction from my stroll through market today, meet the Belizean who is new in town whose name is Ale (pronounced Ah-lay.)

This is Ale, who moved to San Ignacio/Santa Elena recently to sell her beautiful sea-glass jewelry like the necklace she’s modeling here. (She’s a most camera-shy model, by the way, who I couldn’t get to flash her great Belizean smile.

She is from Punta Gorda, way down in south Belize in what is serious rainforest country which lies just across the beautiful Gulf of Honduras from coastal Guatemala. (PG was the setting for the Harrison Ford book The Mosquito Coast based on the Paul Theroux novel by the same name. You may recall I rode down there in February on one of my motorcycle adventures on my trusty motorcycle Heavy Lunch which slam-dunked me earlier in the week. The soreness has finally left me and the bruise the size of a large Montana map is slowly starting to fade thank you very much for asking.)

Many of Ale’s crafts are on her Facebook page at Ale’s Beach Treasures.

Ale moved to San Ignacio (she actually lives across the river in the twin city of Santa Elena) because she sells sea-glass jewelry and San Ignacio is a big-time tourist where handmade jewelry sells like pancakes.

Punta Gorda (Belizeans call it PG) is a more laid-back Belizean town where there are few tourists and making a living doing anything other than fishing is a challenge for some people.

“I started collecting sea bottles that washed up on the shore in PG five years ago and making jewelry out of it,” she said. “Everything I sell is from glass from bottles that might be many decades old or so old that the pirates used them hundreds of years ago. The water softens the glass up for such nice jewelry. I really enjoy it and trying to make a living from it.”

Check out more of Ale’s antique-glass jewelry on Facebook at Ale’s Beach Treasures.

Y’all come see us now, ya hear?

Some of Ale’s sea-glass antique jewelry fashioned into modern jewelry.