Belize

"In Belize we live with ease, we eat our rice with meat and cheese."
-a lyric from some Rasta guy we met who played us too many songs, with too few chords one evening. Then he got pissed off and stompped off. Not very at ease.

The whole Rasta thing is seems like a big excuse not to grow up and an ample platform for judging people who have ambition. By ambition i don´t mean anything grand. A job is too ambitious for some of these guys.

WILMA came. If you don´t know where Belize is, scroll back in your mind (put the cursor over the arrow shapped like "<" and hold down the left mouse button. If you can´t find your mouse, I´m not telling you where it is) to Wilma on the news. Belize was pretty much obscured by the red area just beyond the eye. Not good really.

So day two of our relaxing time (a holiday in a holiday, if you will) on our beautiful tropical island, just about everybody at once informed us there was going to be a hurricane. Cat 5, the lowest pressure tropical system ever recorded. It´s fair to say we were a little unnerved. But in Belize they live with ease.

Most of the tourists started to leave. It was nearing the time of the last taxi boat before it was to hit. We´d spent a night praying and facing our own mortality (rather gleefully, it should be said). We vaguely decided to leave. None of us wanted to go. The ease of the Belize was rubbing off on us. I really wanted to stay.

The Island we were on, Caye Caulker, is both a pimp and a prostitute to tourists. It pimps us out amongst its various landlords all for the sake of their reputation on the Island and a fast buck. It prostitutes itself to us, tourists, because you can make a bit more money fishing the rich westerners, than Baracuda and swordfish. It both sucks and is wonderful. Their is a toursit price and a local price for everything, covert though it is. If tourism colapsed here, the islands four hundred inhabitants would colapse with it. Even the EASE of the rastas is dependent on the prolific marajuanna trade among our kind. It´s wonderful because this place is paradise; it sucks because of the schism between the tourists and the locals.

This is why i wanted to stay. It would be such a completion to our parasitism to leave when the going got tough. So under the final advice of the Pastor and a police man, who we bumped into on our resigned journey to the last taxi boat, we stayed. If our shack was washed away they said we could go to shelter in the school with the rest of the locals. Sounds kind of fun doesn´t it. So we stayed, had some rice and beans and i slept right through it. So i slept through a category five hurricane.