Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Pete from England

We started March with a three-night visit from Pete, a physics teacher from England spending two weeks traveling around Belize and hiking. Pete has traveled and hiked all over the world, so he’s quite comfortable going out in the bush on his own, armed only with a GPS. Fortunately Tom and I have finally tracked some trails and set some waypoints on our GPS, so we were able to recommend three different hikes for Pete and send him off without worrying that he would end up in Guatemala. He helped us on a couple of the trails because now is the time when the leaves are falling from the trees, and the weather has been remarkably clear, so Pete was able to create new, more complete tracks with more accurate mileage since the GPS could make more constant contact with the satellites.

Pete also impressed us because he’s doing this trip entirely under his own power and only using public transportation. He took the bus from Belize City all the way to San Antonio – not San Ignacio – and walked the last couple of miles to get here. We’ve had a number of guests using public transportation rather than renting a car, and it works well since public transportation here is very efficient since so many Belizeans don’t have their own cars. However, everybody else has had us transfer them to and from San Ignacio, and Pete was the first to do the whole thing on his own. When he left, he had to get the 7AM bus out of San Antonio, so Tom and I decided to have a little compassion and Tom made the 10-minute drive into San Antonio so Pete could catch the bus rather than having him leave here at 6AM to walk into San Antonio.

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