Happy Belated Thanksgiving!

Thanks to everyone who emailed Happy Thanksgiving wishes to us! I’ll be catching up on emails over the next couple of days, so you should hear from me.

We had a great Thanksgiving. Cindy and John, a couple from south of Syracuse, New York, were here for the holiday, so even though it isn’t an official holiday here in Belize, it was a holiday for us. Tom, Cindy, John, and Selwyn spent the day exploring Caracol, Rio Frio Cave, and Rio On Pools, and I spent the day doing what I always do on Thanksgiving – cooking, which is something I really enjoy.

A number of people asked via email if the holiday was celebrated here, and as I was cooking I was thinking about how even though it isn’t officially celebrated, I think this is the first Thanksgiving, probably in our adult lives, when we’ve really had time to stop and think about how thankful we are for lots and lots of things. When we were kids, Thanksgiving was just a couple of days off from school, which was an event to be celebrated, but we didn’t think much about giving thanks for anything. When we got out in the real world, it was still a long weekend, definitely a good thing, but I don’t think we ever even took the time to think about the real purpose of the holiday. We were always too wound up about something else – work that didn’t get done before the holiday, travel plans for the long weekend, worry about the weather for whomever was traveling, the expense of traveling, deciding where and with whom the holiday would be celebrated, making food, fretting about other people making food, stressing because we couldn’t be in more than one place at a time, wondering if everybody would get along and behave themselves, worrying in advance about all the stresses associated with the holidays, and…all the rest of the things grown ups worry about on a regular basis, but probably more at holidays.

Here, in the quiet of my kitchen, I actually thought about all the things I give thanks for on a regular basis. A big one is that despite the great distance between our family and friends and us, we manage to remain close, thanks in part to email and modern technology, but mostly to all the people who matter and who make an extra effort to stay in touch with us like they do. Some have even traveled here to visit, for which we’re very thankful, and we’re thankful that we’ve both been able to travel and visit family and friends. On the subject of people, I’m also thankful for all the people we’ve met here who have become friends, and just for the people that regularly take a little extra time and effort to make things go easier for us and everyone else. I’m thankful that we found a place where can live happily with our animals in a beautiful warm spot in the world, and share that place with others. I’m happy that our business is going well, and that I was spending Thanksgiving not just cooking, but doing a job that I love to do at the same time, and that Tom was out sharing Belize with our newest friends and also working and having fun. For the first time in my life – no offense to former employers intended since I’ve always liked my jobs – I was able to understand how people could say that even if they won the lottery, they’d keep doing their jobs. In fact, we feel sort of like we’ve won a lottery living and working here in Belize, and we’re thankful for everything everyone has done for us over the years that enabled us to get here, including Tom’s parents who sent us here on vacation. Little did they suspect what would come of their kind action! We can only hope that those around us can find as much to be thankful for as we do – and if they can, we’re truly thankful.

Congratulations to Selwyn!

It’s been a long haul with a lot of paper chasing, but Selwyn finally has his tour guide license from the Belize Tourist Board. He’s taken all the classes, done all the internships, snipped through all the red tape, and he’s finally a tour guide. We received notice that his application was approved, and the next day had him do his first tour, taking our guests Cindy and John to Caracol and then to Rio Frio Cave and Rio On Pools. Nothing like jumping right in! John and Cindy said he did a great job – of course! – and Selwyn is now brushing up on all he needs to know to tell our next wave of guests all they want to know about Belize.

What’s New?

The answer around here, not much. We’re continuing work outside, landscaping, planting, and trying to get good grass in the pastures for the horses.

Speaking of horses, we haven’t had any Lodo pictures lately, so here’s the newest.

We call him the little Beach Boy because his mane, forelock, and tail are black, but he gets bleached blond tips from being out in the sun all the time. You might have to blow up this picture to see it.

We’re still watching him grow, although we’re a little distressed about Elphie, since she’s almost two years and he just turned five months, and there’s not a whole lot of difference in their sizes. Because of the perspective of this photo he’s not quite as big as he looks in comparison to her, but he’s still way closer to her size than he should be given her age. Plus, he’s a solid little fellow; when we pat him, we don’t feel any ribs or even fat, just a solid little guy.

The only thing that happened of any interest is that Tom broke his thumb, just in time for needing to get ready for guests we had over Thanksgiving. Tom is really embarrassed, because he didn’t even get a good story out of the happening. He was in San Ignacio and met two people he knows in front of the police station. They were walking in front of the station, right in the middle of town, talking, and he just slipped and fell into the two-foot-deep cement ditch that runs in front of the station. And it was on a Thursday morning, a week before Thanksgiving, so he couldn’t even pretend it happened when he was out partying in town!

He went behind the police station to hose himself off – he knew where the hose was from working there – and then rounded the corner and ran into our friend Escandar. He said Escandar took one look at him and asked what was wrong, and as soon as Tom showed him the thumb Escandar whipped out his cell phone and called his orthopedic doctor in Santa Elena, who took Tom immediately. He then sent Tom for x-rays, which showed that he’d completely broken the bone in the first joint of his thumb, which turned out to be a good thing because his thumb nail acted as a splint so a cast wasn’t necessary. He sent Tom home with some pain medication and instructions to keep the hand elevated. Tom, of course, had to finish his errands, so he came home with a very swollen, bruised, and sore-looking thumb, but he was then pretty willing to follow the doctor’s orders (except take the pain pills – they messed up his stomach). A week and a couple of days later and it looks a lot better, although it’s still bruised and swollen.

The only other “exciting” thing to happen is that we got a good long look at a male green honeycreeper in one of the tangerine trees. We hadn’t seen one before, and when we looked it up in the bird book it says it’s another uncommon sighting. It looks like what the Joker from Batman would look like if he were a bird. This website has some good pictures.

We also seem to have a hooded warbler nest right outside the kitchen window since we’ve had lots of baby hooded warblers fluttering around, and Dad seems to be in the habit of perching on the cage right outside the window and checking out what I’m doing in the kitchen. Aren’t they striking?

NBC Today Belize video link

Here's the link to NBC Today's videos. The one called "Wildlife in Peril in Belize" is the Belize Zoo feature, but there are also a number of other pieces about Belize. Look for the Matt Lauer "Ends of the Earth" segments.

Link: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8004316

Driving Pony

Thanks to the great weather for the past couple of weeks, I’ve been doing a lot with the horses. I’ve taken all four saddle horses on long trail rides almost every day for the past couple of weeks, and one day even managed to convince Selwyn and our friend Gonzo to ride with me. That was a funny ride for a couple of reasons. First, as we were riding through the jungle chatting, Selwyn started to laugh. I asked him what was funny, and he said he’d explain later. The next morning I asked him what was so funny, and he asked me if it had registered how the three of us were talking. I was puzzled, but when Selwyn asked what language we’d been speaking, it registered that Selwyn had been speaking Creole, Gonzo was speaking Spanish, and I was speaking English…and we were talking to each other. I’m definitely the weak link of the three of us since those two are fluent in all three languages, but I’ve learned enough Spanish and Creole relating to things we frequently talk about – like things in the jungle – that I had no trouble keeping up. The funny thing was we didn’t even realize we were doing it for quite a while, and then only Selwyn realized. The other funny thing with that ride was that we ended up doing a short stretch on the road right at the time people were driving home from their jobs at the resorts. Since Gonzo and Selwyn are guides and have lived in this area for their whole lives they knew most of the people in the vehicles passing us, and I’m out on the horses enough that most people know who I am. We could see a lot of people doing double takes when they realized who we were, no doubt wondering why the gringa who’s usually out bombing around in the jungle on the horses all by herself suddenly needed not one, but two guides!

Besides riding the saddle horses, I put Elphie back to work. Our training philosophy is to just do a little with the young horses from the time they’re babies, so that nothing we do really surprises or scares them when we start training them. Since we’ve had Elphie we’ve been doing things like putting a saddle and bridle on her, ponying her on trail rides, and over the past few months I started ground driving her. She had a month or so off between the rain and a cut on her eye that we were watching, but she’s been doing great with everything, so after ground driving her around for a little while, I decided to see what she would do if she had to pull something.

We didn’t bring much driving tack with us when we came here, and she’s so small I don’t think most of it would fit anyway, so I’ve been, umm, creating tack as we go. We use an old trail bridle with rope for the long lines, and I’ve tied some baling twine on an old English saddle where the stirrup leathers would go. That keeps the lines at about the right height so they run along her back rather than tangling around her neck. When I decided I wanted her to pull something, I put another baling twine loop below the long line loop, took one of our longish English girths and rigged that up as a breast collar with the ends through the baling twine and another piece of baling twine running over the saddle to keep the “breast collar” at the right height. As a drag, I found a five gallon bucket with a lid, and put a chunk of coconut palm log in it for weight and noise. I put a piece of rope through the handle, and I dragged it up and down the driveway a few times while leading Elphie. She shied away at first, but quickly got used to it dragging beside and behind her on both sides, the side where she can see as well as her blind side. Then I hooked the rope without the drag to the two ends of the girth/breast collar and leaned on it to see if she minded having weight on that. She was great about that too, so I tied one end of the rope to the buckle on the girth, ran it through the handle on the bucket, and then ran it through the buckle on the other end of the girth with a long tail sticking out which I could hold as I drove her so I could let go and let her get away from the bucket if she panicked.

She was great. She dragged the bucket all over the property, walking and trotting, and never even spooked. Tom was working on the computer in the house, and when he heard the big noise he came out and was surprised to see me driving Elphie around with her very calmly pulling the very noisy bucket behind her. It was a little hard for me because the bucket would bounce and roll as we hit rough spots, and I kept having to jump it as we turned – although next time I’ll know to adjust the lengths of the long lines and the rope holding the bucket so the bucket stays ahead of me. We’ll probably pony Elphie into Barton Creek at some point and see if we can find a Mennonite to make a simple driving harness for her. She’s almost two so we don’t think she’s going to grow a whole lot more, but we’ll wait a bit and then Tom can build a little buggy for her to pull. We’re bummed that she’s so small because she’d probably make a great little trail horse since she’s so quiet, but we think she’s too small for me to even get on and ride. There’s a guy in town who works with horses and who is very small, so we may talk to him about backing her so kids could ride her, but we’re not sure he’d want to work with us to do it (cowboys don’t take advice from girls), and we don’t know if he’ll believe us that since we’ve been working with her since she was a baby, backing her will probably just be a matter of getting on and riding. We’re afraid that he’ll want to “break” her Belizean style, which means a big-ported curb bit with three inch shanks instead of my big fat eggbutt snaffle, lots of kicking and whipping and yanking on her mouth, and the general philosophy that you need to scare the sh*t out of a horse to break it. It might be a good test to see if she’s as quiet as we think she is, but we don’t want to do it to her; she’s just too sweet. We’ve even considered just finding a kid to see what she does, but horse accidents happen because people do stupid things, and putting a kid on a never-ridden horse probably counts as a stupid thing.

Hidden lines

Finally, after more than a year and a half in this cabin, we’re getting rid of the hoses and extension cords that have been running over the ground supplying us with water and power. The water is now running up and down the hill in a 2” pipe with valves to keep it where it belongs and moving in the right direction, and the extension cords are being replaced with real electric cable run through PVC. Tom and Selwyn dug the trench mostly with a pickax and shovel, although they had to pound through a few good hunks of limestone with the sledgehammer. The white spot you can see on the side of the trench near the house is pulverized limestone. I think they wanted to take the sledgehammer to me a few times because I got great pleasure out of yelling off the porch and asking them if they were sure the trench was deep enough to get the water pipe below the frostline. Then I’d go in the house and giggle and leave them pounding the rocks. Seriously though, both Tom and I are getting great pleasure out of being here right now since we’ve had an exceptionally beautiful week, and we’ve talked or emailed a few people in the US who have told us that the weather in the Northeast and Mid Atlantic states has been awful.

As I sat here typing…

I’m writing this blog entry sitting on our screened porch. I heard a flapping and looked up, and this Blue Crowned Motmot had just landed on a branch right off the porch. He looked at me, I looked at him, I grabbed the camera since I was in the process of downloading pictures for the blog anyway – and managed to get this shot of him getting a good look at me. Sorry for the graininess – the picture is taken through the screen with our crappy old camera. This bird’s name comes from the hooting “mot mot” call he makes in the early morning just before the sun rises, which is our wake up call every morning. You can’t see it in this picture, but these birds also have distinctive “racket tails,” so called because they pull all the quills out of their tail feathers except for a “racket” right at the end.

Belize to appear on NBC’s Today Show

Tom stopped by the Zoo last Tuesday, and everybody was buzzing because NBC’s Today Show had just been there over the weekend filming for a feature scheduled to air on Monday, November 17 or Tuesday, November 18. From what our friends at the Zoo said, the feature was about the Zoo, but now the whole country is buzzing because the spot is on all of Belize, so the Today Show crew were spotted all over the country – which is even better.

So tune in to the Today Show this Monday and Tuesday, and if you miss it then, I’ll post links on our websites, and I know a link will be posted on the Zoo’s website – and probably on every other Belize website.

Bye-bye, C-Zero!

The camper, also known as C-0 since our cabin is C-1 and the guest cabin is C-2, has made it to its new home. It’s silly, but we were a little sad to see it go. It definitely didn’t owe us anything. We packed all of our belongings in it to make the two-month road trip from New York to here, lived in it during our trip and for the first four months we were on this property, used it for our shower for a little while after we moved into the house, used it as guest quarters until the guest cabin was habitable, loaned it to our neighbors for shelter while they were tearing down their wooden house and building a cement house, and used it for storage until the shop was done.

Four or five months ago I responded to a query on line about whether anyone had a camper in Belize that they were willing to rent or sell. A couple from Oregon, Gale and Art, are in the process of moving to Belize. They own land in Bullet Tree, which is just the other side of San Ignacio, and they were looking for something they could put on their land to live in until they have another shelter built, and which they could then use for storage. The camper isn’t much, but everything works and the price was right, so we made a deal that made us all happy. We were just about to move it when the rains came, but Gale and Art were happy to go with the flow, and finally yesterday Tom got it out of here and situated where Gale and Art want it on their land. We were worried about getting it out of here to the Western Highway, and about getting it back to and parked on Gale and Art’s land, but Tom took his time and made it, with everything intact. We hope Gale and Art find it as comfortable and useful as we did, and that they appreciate the fact that they just bought a camper that is on at least its third incarnation. Not bad for a 32-year old tow behind!

Things We Ponder in Belize

Maybe this is a sign that we have too much time on our hands, but here is an example of the types of things we ponder here.

Why do bats arrange themselves so neatly when they sleep during the day? Whenever we look at these bats, they’re always parked almost equidistant from each other. Sometimes the line goes around the corner, and then the bats around the corner are arranged with the same distance between them.

I don’t want to take my boot trees out of my good tall dress riding boots, but these boots need trees so the ankles don’t break too much. So, for the past week or so, I’ve been trying to figure out which liquor bottle is the best size for my boots. At the moment, I’m leaning towards the Caribbean White Rum. The One Barrel bottle is too fat, and the Bel-Mer wine bottle is too thin. It figures that the Caribbean White is the right size, because that’s the one type of bottle that we don’t save for the local beekeepers since it has one of those stupid dribble tops that don’t detach. Guess we’ll just have to finish another bottle of Caribbean White.

Drying Out

The Flooding of 2008, as the Belize media is calling it, seems to be over for the Cayo District, although serious flooding is still occurring in the Belize, Orange Walk, and Corozol districts to the north and east of here. Tom made it home on Saturday, and by the beginning of the week we were able to get in and out to the Western Highway without any trouble. The road crews have been very busy repairing washouts all over the country, from washouts like the ones between here and the Western Highway, and major washouts on the Western and Northern Highways. Spanish Lookout became accessible Thursday afternoon over the Bullet Tree Road, and just this weekend most of the low lying bridges are expected to finally be above the levels of the rivers.

Here are pictures of the washouts that prevented Tom from getting home last Friday night.

This is the culvert that washed out in Cristo Rey. You can see how far the water has eroded the road bed under the roadway.

This is the view from the top. The road drops off on the side that is flooded, so you can see that the washout under the road took out a pretty good chunk of support.

Just outside of Georgeville, a private road goes up the hill. The water came down that road and down the Georgeville Road in the flash flood mentioned in the article in the previous blog entry, and washed big rocks into the road, as well as a lot of loose gravel and a significant amount of mud.

Even when the flash flood subsided, water was still running down the road, covering it in many places. Tom said a lot of water must have been running down the hills to move the rocks he saw in the road.

The wet weather was pushed out of this area by a front that moved in from the north. We’ve had a very nice week with lots of blue sky and pleasantly cool temperatures only in the low 70s during the day, and the high 50s at night. We’ve had a little more rain just last night and today, but we’ve been able to get lots of outside stuff done this week. Tom and Selwyn finished putting up the fence to divide the back pasture into three paddocks, and we’ve started turning all six horses out to graze for a few hours every day since the ground is now dry enough that their hooves won’t do too much damage. Tom and Selwyn have also been nipping off the tops of the grass in the new pasture so we can get enough seed to plant the second half of the middle pasture and the front pasture. Selwyn seeded half the middle pasture before the rain started, and while the rain washed some of the seeds to low spots in the ground, it looks like some of it has taken and the front half of that pasture is starting to get green.


Selwyn also weed whacked the grounds, so it doesn’t look like we’re being overtaken by the jungle again. The camper is due to disappear this week. We sold it to some people in Bullet Tree and we were just about ready to deliver it when the rain started. We hope it’s finally dry enough this week that we can get it to where it should be.


A few weeks ago we planted coco in front of the guest cabin, and that has really taken off and makes it look like we’ve made at least a feeble attempt at landscaping. We’ll have to dig it up eventually, but then we can either plant something else, or, since it grows so quickly, plant some more coco. We planted it this time just because it does grow so fast, it will make the place look nicer for this year’s tourist season. I also planted a row of papaya seeds behind the coco, and to my surprise they sprouted.


Selwyn’s mother gave us a really good papaya a few months ago, and when I said how good it was she told me to save the seeds, dry them, and then plant them. When she gave us another papaya, I took out the seeds, washed them, and then put them on a plate on top of the refrigerator for a couple of months, stirring them around when I thought of it. They looked all moldy and dusty and I didn’t think anything would happen when I planted them, but they sprouted. We left some in front of the guest cabin, gave some of the seedlings to neighbors and friends who wanted them, and moved some of them to this spot where one of the big cages used to be and where we’re now planting different kinds of bananas along with the papaya seedlings.

Tom hasn’t worked with the boys from next door for a few weeks between being busy with guests and the wretched weather. Today, however, was dry enough that they’re out chopping property line. Tom says the boys (Ronald in the back row, Wilton and Hector in front) are doing a great job, and it’s a much more economical way than the way we originally got the line chopped through a very expensive contract with Bol, Selwyn’s dad.

Animal Update

I finally got brave enough to take Tony out for a ride. I correctly predicted that things would have fallen in the trails with all the wet weather, so despite the fact that he’s slow as mud, I took Tony rather than Glin or Es because it’s easier to chop with him than with either of the mares – I can actually chop high stuff from his back if I’m careful, and if I have to get off, I don’t have to worry about him turning and running for home (Es) or sticking his nose out to see what I’m chopping (Glin). Plus, when Tony gets stuck in vines he stops and does what I tell him to get out of the tangle, where both of the mares tend to go straight up when that happens. The mares’ method is actually more efficient as far as getting unstuck, but Tony’s way is definitely calmer and safer. The trails were still pretty wet, and some of the trails seem to have turned into hopefully-temporary streams even though it hadn’t rained in a few days. Seeing the condition of the trails after a few days without rain made me feel less like a wimp for not going out before this – part of me had wanted to ride and was telling the other part that I was being a wimp for listening to Selwyn’s caution about flash floods, but it looks like the caution was well founded. It was really nice to get back out in the jungle, and a few good wildlife sightings enhanced the ride. I saw a flock of aracaris feeding in a trumpet tree, which I haven’t seen for a while, watched a collared forest falcon fly through the canopy, and was accompanied for a short way along one of the trails by a hollering troupe of howler monkeys. I was looking for big cat tracks since we’ve heard more rumors of a jaguar in the neighborhood, but the ground was actually too wet to hold any tracks. The birds are reminding us that while it’s getting cooler here, it’s getting much cooler in the north and we’re seeing a lot of the migratory birds. We’ve had a noticeable increase in warblers, thrushes, and tanagers, and the Birds of Belize book has been well used as we try to identify the new arrivals.

Recona dressed up as a purple-eyed dog for Halloween. Really, what happened was that she got a botfly infestation right around her eye, and her eye was looking more and more swollen. Fortunately we’ve learned to recognize the symptoms, and we’ve come up with what seems to be an efficient way of treating it. I’m not sure if it’s available in the US, but here we can get a purple spray that is an antiseptic, antibiotic, and insecticide. It’s great for all the little scratches the horses and dogs get because it cleans the wound and keeps the bugs off the wound. It’s really great for botflies, because it kills the larvae in the animal, and keeps the breathing hole from getting infected. We just spray it or wipe it on the infected spot, and in a day or two the larvae dies and the breathing hole scabs over. All we have to do is pull off the scab. Sometimes the dead larvae are attached to scab, and sometimes we have to squeeze the spot and the larvae come out in a gob of pus. It must feel good to the animals to get it out because they never complain or try to pull away. We squeezed five very small larvae – about as long as a grain of white rice, and about a quarter of the diameter – out of Recona’s face, and she never pulled back or snapped at us. Fortunately, we haven’t yet had the need to try this method on people, but it’s certainly easier on the animals than the way Selwyn removed the one from Tom’s arm.

This weather has been tough on the animals. Recona and Ness both had botflies, and I feel like I spend half the morning running around and taking care of the rest of the animals. Elphie cut half the eyelashes off the eyelid of her good eye, so I’ve had to treat that carefully. Lodo has a scrape on his leg and a cut on his nose, both of which require purple spray at least once a day, which involves both of us getting purple spots all over since he hasn’t learned to just stand still yet. All the horses have rain rot, and have little clumps of hair peeling off their rumps, and I’m just waiting for them to get scratches or thrush, which they’ve somehow managed to avoid so far. Recona has a swollen foot, and we’re not sure if it’s another botfly, or if she has an out of joint toe. Good news for the dogs is that we’ve found that Frontline Plus does kill Recona’s fleas, so all five of the dogs are scratching a whole lot less than they were a month ago.

We feel very badly for people with lots of animals, because if we’re having this range of difficulty with animals that are basically our pets, we can’t imagine what the farmers with herds of cattle, sheep, and pigs need to do. We have heard that lots of farmers lost crops or pasture – which quickly adds up to tens of thousands of dollars for them – but as far as losing animals in the floods or needing to provide extra veterinary care, the news seems to be mostly good. The government is telling farmers that they should vaccinate their livestock against black leg disease, an infection that seems to be more prevalent when the weather is wet, but we have not heard of any big livestock losses due to this disease.

Tom’s next project…

…is going to be building an ark. It isn’t raining now, but it rained most of the day yesterday and all last night, it’s still gray, and the weather report is for showers through tomorrow morning. Yesterday, Tom went into San Ignacio to do some construction things at the police station. He’s working with a community group that is trying to form good relations between the police and the community, and since he can’t attend a lot of the meetings because they’re at night in town, he’s chipping in by building a wall in the police station so they can have a private meeting room. Somebody else donated the building materials, and Tom is donating his time.

Anyway, he wasn’t home at 7:30 last night, and I started to get a little worried. I, of course, had visions of him trapped in Tinkerbell upside down in a torrent of rushing water. I turned on the computer and the satellite to check email and Skype. He’d emailed at 7:00 saying he was stuck in San Ignacio because both roads to here, the Cristo Rey and the Georgeville Roads, were closed due to flooding – so my awful visions really weren’t so far from what could have happened. He emailed later to say he might have made it through after he ate his dinner last night, but when I scanned the news sites this morning, I was very glad he remained in San Ignacio for the night. When I’d started to think about him being so late coming home, I realized that I hadn’t heard any traffic on the road, and the news sites confirmed that both roads were closed.

This is from the www.lovefm.com Friday newscast about the San Antonio/Cristo Rey Road:

Rene Montero; Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries, Area Representative Cayo Central
“Since this morning the causeway from just outside Cristo Rey was washed away. We have the personnel from the Ministry of Works working in the area but it seems as if though it is very difficult to fight against nature as soon as they fix it the water just wash it away. I would want to advise people using that road to be extremely cautious because that creek is constantly going up. And although we have the personnel from the ministry of works it is very difficult to keep up with it because the water is very strong. It’s constantly raining from 7 miles, San Antonio, Cristo Rey, Georgeville and if this continues I think the people in Georgeville has to be very cautious because the water is coming very strong from the Mountain Pine Ridge.”
Late this evening NEMO Cayo closed off the roads to Cristo Rey, Mountain Pine Ridge and Benque Viejo as water continues to rise in those areas and the access roads have been compromised. Back in the Belize River valley area the focus is on the Crooked Tree causeway and residents along the river where water levels continue to rise. We spoke to area representative Edmund Castro this evening about the conditions in his area.

And this is from Channel 7’s newscast about the flash flood on the Georgeville Road, which is the site of the big washout a couple of blog entries ago.

http://www.7newsbelize.com/sstory.php?nid=12481

One good thing about this weather – I’m catching up on blogging and email!

If you're even thinking of coming to Belize...

...check American Airlines. They're having a great fare sale to get to Belize. I checked round trip from Boston and it's $261, and round trip from Atlanta is $140. Sorry, Tim, LAX is still pretty expensive, as is Rochester.

Still Raining

It’s still raining. The floodwaters in the western part of Belize where we live have started to recede, but all that water has run through the rivers to the eastern part of the country, which is now having flooding problems. And it’s still raining. And meteorologists expect it to continue to rain for the foreseeable future, thanks to a big blob of wet weather sitting in the western Caribbean. The country’s meteorological department is issuing a daily flood forecast, and while they’ve observed that the flooding in the west has gone down, they’re not making any promises that it won’t go up again if this rain continues. This is their forecast for our area for Saturday based on where water levels are now, and what they expect of the weather between now and then:

SATURDAY OUTLOOK: MACAL RIVER: AT CHALILLO AND MOLLEJON RESERVOIR LEVELS WILL REMAIN ABOVE SPILLWAYS AND WILL BEGIN TO RISE ONCE AGAIN. ABOVE LOW LEVEL BRIDGE AND RISING LEVELS AT SAN IGNACIO. MOPAN RIVER: STEADY FLOOD LEVELS AT BENQUE VIEJO. BELIZE RIVER: IGUANA CREEK: ABOVE LOW LEVEL BRIDGE AND STEADY FLOOD LEVELS. CROOKED TREE LAGOON ABOVE CAUSEWAY AND RISING LAGOON LEVELS. LEVELS NEAR MAYPEN AND DOUBLE RUN TO THE COAST WILL REMAIN AT FLOOD STAGE AND CONTINUE TO RISE. NEAR LORD'S BANK, LADYVILLE, AND THE PSW GOLDSON AIRPORT RISING FLOOD LEVELS. LOW LYING AREAS IN BELIZE CITY MAY EXPERIENCE INCREASING WATER LEVELS IN THE MORNING.

We’ve had a couple of breaks of sunshine over the past few days, but it seems that within a couple of hours it clouds up again and starts to rain. We wake up and hear rain on the roof at night, and in the morning we ask each other if that really was rain, or if it was just part of a bad dream…and every morning we’ve determined that it wasn’t just a dream.


In the lowlands around here, people are starting to think about moving back into their homes, or whatever remains of their homes. But, they’re keeping an eye on the skies and the weather reports, and keeping their options open. Here in the highlands, it’s just muddy – mud like even our NY horse friends wouldn’t believe, nor would our Vermont relatives who even have a season called Mud Season when all the snow melts and turns everything to mud. It’s impossible to even walk down the driveway to the road without getting muddy, and doing the horse chores results in mud smears and splatters over at least 80% of our bodies.

We’ve said to people that we’ve never seen anything like this, and that while we knew Belize had a rainy season, nothing led us to believe there would be this much water. The response from Belizeans has been that they’ve never seen anything like this either, and while everybody expects rain and mud and some flooding in the rainy season, this is way beyond the usual.

But, we can’t do much about it. We now understand why people build their houses on legs here; if we had a basement, it would have been flooded a week ago. Our biggest concern is the horses, since the town of Spanish Lookout is flooded and cut off from the rest of the country, and that’s the only place we know of to buy horse feed and hay. The feed stores in San Ignacio usually sell it, but they get it from Spanish Lookout too, so supplies are dwindling. However, we’ve learned that horses love avocados, and we have two trees that are dropping quite a few, so between avocados, some time in the new pasture every day despite the mud, and the good old “tie the horse to a rope in the ditch” trick, they probably won’t starve.


We’ve been very impressed with how people are responding to the flooding. Everybody seems to be helping everybody else however they can. We have not heard any reports of looting, and we’ve heard lots of reports of people helping each other. People with boats are helping others get in or out of their properties, and sometimes shuttling supplies across rivers when needed. The government seems to be stepping up to the plate and keeping NEMO crews where they’re needed, and keeping the road crews doing whatever they can to keep the roads passable – although they obviously can’t do anything about bridges that are still under 10+ feed of water. In reading the reports of what’s going on in the rest of Central America as a result of this weather, we feel very fortunate to be in Belize where there haven’t been any casualties, unlike some of the other affected Central American countries. Regarding the roads, we’re glad to see that the two roads we use to get in and out of here are on the list of roads that are both being watched now so they’re kept passable, and which the government is planning to continue to work on when this stretch of bad weather is over so they won’t wash out so quickly if this happens again.

Mark and Don made it out, and actually flew out of Belize City a couple of days early. They left here on Monday, knowing that if they waited flooding would only get worse towards Belize City. They had to drive over the flooded Roaring Creek Bridge, which Mark said was a somewhat creepy experience when he looked out his car window and saw a man rowing a boat right next to him and not much below eye level. The bridge was flooded, but the police were letting high vehicles like SUVs and trucks cross. Mark emailed when he got home to Minnesota and said it was raining there too – but he was still glad to be home.

Besides the Rain…

We’ve been staying busy with Mark and Don, who arrived a week ago Thursday. They’ve been staying here despite Mark having a house down the road because he fired his caretaker, who wasn’t taking much care of his place, and Mark has felt awkward hanging around his house and watching the caretaker pack up his eight kids and farm animals and get ready to vacate the premises. He’s had a lot of business to take care of while he’s here between straightening out the caretaker situation, doing what he needs to do for the next orange pick, and trying to open a Belize bank account for all of this, but we did manage to have a little fun before the deluge began.

Last Sunday, we went up to Caracol. Mark and Don hadn’t been there before despite multiple trips to Belize. Fortunately we went before the rain started so the road was still passable, and it ended up being a beautiful day. We found that the BDF isn’t requiring Caracol visitors to go with the military convoy, although they do offer an armed escort in your vehicle if you want it. Because we were already cramped in the front of the truck, we declined, but had a brief moment when we second guessed ourselves. When you’re almost to Caracol, you go down a long windy hill with a lot of washouts just before a concrete bridge over the river. As we came down the hill and around the last turn, we saw an old Suburban parked sideways across the road, blocking the bridge. This was the area where a number of robberies happened a few years ago, so Tom and I both, as we found out when we talked later, did an immediate inventory in our heads of what we had that was stealable, and what plan for resistance was practical. Fortunately, the Suburban was just turning around – although that’s a really weird place to turn around – and we just had to squish over to the side of the road so they could head up the hill with everybody in both trucks nodding and waving and smiling. We have no idea what they were doing, but our heart rates were all back to normal by the time we got to Caracol.


We made Don, Mark’s father-in-law, climb Caana. We told him that he didn’t have to climb any of the other temples, but said that he should climb Caana since there’s no way to truly see how big and impressive it is from the ground.

Despite two fake knees, Don made it up and down safely and said it was worth the climb when he got to the top.

Wet and Wild

These pictures say it all. Belize is flooding. A tropical depression (TD16) formed about a week ago in the Western Caribbean, and during all of last week moved along the north coast of Honduras, then into Honduras and southern Guatemala, where it stalled, and continued dumping massive amounts of rain on Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvadore and Belize. Rain started here Monday and continued through the week, and by Friday things were pretty wild with water levels rising in all creeks and rivers almost to the point where they were when Hurricane Mitch, the last big hurricane to hit Belize, blew through in 1998.

Tom was out with our guests on Friday, and they barely made it home because the creek running through Cristo Rey and into the Macal River was over the bridge, and some vehicles were choosing to turn around and head back to San Ignacio. Mark, Tom, and Don chose to drive through and made it, but said they were almost stuck again when they got to a point on the road just before San Antonio where a flooded spring had turned the road to deep and heavy mud.

The buses were already stuck, but thanks to Mark’s Prado’s high suspension and 4WD, they made it through.

On Saturday morning we decided to head out and see what was happening in the rest of the Cayo District.

We weren’t even sure if we could get out, but although the road was bad, the Prado was able to get around the washout on the Georgeville Road. We headed towards San Ignacio down the Western Highway and decided to see what was happening with the ferry to Spanish Lookout.

We couldn’t even get as far as the ferry because the river had formed a branch and was running through these cow fields and across the road. We watched an Isuzu Trooper drive through the flood, but decided not to risk it since we had no burning reason to get to the ferry.

When we got into Santa Elena, we joined a lot of other people looking at the Macal River where it usually flows under the low lying bridge to San Ignacio. The bridge is entirely submerged. If you look at the two phone poles in line with where the road should be, the bridge starts where the second phone pole is sticking up from the water.

We got in line to drive across the Hawksworth Bridge and parked on Burns Ave. near Celina’s. This is the view from the San Ignacio side of the low lying bridge.

This is the market, which is usually well above the river.

And here’s a peek between a couple of buildings on the square where the taxis and buses line up. These buildings are now riverfront on the market side.

After we left San Ignacio we decided to drive through Succotz and into Benque to see how high the Mopan River was.


It was up and rising, and was already crossing the road in a few spots. If you look at the “FLOODING SHOT” threads on this BB, you can see that it went up even more overnight and this morning, and the Western Highway is impassable through Succotz and Benque.

All but the highest bridges are covered. In fact, the only bridge I can think of that isn’t flooded is the Hawksworth Bridge. According to the flood report, even the bridge between Belize and Guatemala at Benque/Melchor is under, and possibly gone or damaged depending on the rumor. The bridge at Roaring Creek is under, and we’re hearing mixed reports as to whether it’s passable. We know from the flood report that Spanish Lookout is cut off from the rest of the country, and if the Roaring Creek bridge isn’t usable, that means San Ignacio is cut off as well.

While Belize is being cut into pieces by raging rivers, things are generally quiet up here in the hills. It’s possible that we (“we” being the Mountain Pine Ridge and the villages of San Antonio and 7 Miles) may be cut off by road damage from the flooding, but we saw yesterday that the road crews are working to prevent that where possible. When we came home yesterday afternoon, we decided to come through San Antonio even though we’d heard that the flooding spring had washed out the road.

The road crews were there dumping gravel and big rocks and running heavy machinery over the road to firm it up, and they said that their next stop was to fill in the washout on the Georgeville Road.

The sun was shining briefly yesterday afternoon, but shortly after dark it started raining again and it rained all night. We’ve had showers, some heavy, off and on today, and the weather report looks very bad with another big wet tropical depression sitting in the Caribbean just off the Belize coast. The forecast is that the depression will continue to dump rain over the country for at least another two days, and it could turn into a tropical storm. So, we’ll be keeping up to date on what’s happening in the country via the internet, and hoping that the rain stops soon.

All that aside, we’re doing fine up here in the hills. Yes, it’s wet, and we have standing water in places we thought would always be dry, and the wet mud is everywhere. Nobody we’ve talked to has any dry shoes left, and if people don’t have dryers, they don’t have any dry clothes. Taking care of the animals is an endurance test as we slog through the mud, and the horses aren’t too happy about all the rain and mud. Little Lodo was cold on Friday, so Tom and Selwyn built a little shelter, and we haven’t seen him shiver since then so apparently he’s using it although we had a colt/woman mud wrestling session when I tried to drag him into it for the first time. The water from the pipe is running brown because the rivers and streams are all running so fast, but we just shut it off to our tanks and have been collecting rain water – and there’s no shortage of that. We have enough food up here that if we are cut off for a period of time, we’re not going to starve.

Our biggest worry is that Mark and Don are scheduled to fly home on Thursday, and we’re not sure if they’ll have any difficulties getting to the airport – but at this point, there’s no sense worrying about four days from now, and if we have to come up with a plan before Thursday, we’ll figure something out. This is our road about a mile from our house. It used to be two lanes, or at least two cars could pass.

Tourists: Enjoying & Being!

We’ve had a very busy week between taking care of tourists and being tourists ourselves. We had guests the last few days of September, and are scheduled to be pretty busy now through December, so we figured we’d better take a little time to see and do some of the Belize things we haven’t done yet.

Last Sunday we picked up our guests, Shari and Nikki, mother and daughter from South Carolina, in Belmopan. They wanted to see the Inland Blue Hole, which is only about 12 miles out of Belmopan on the Hummingbird Highway, and since we’ve never seen it either we thought that would be a good diversion before heading home. Now, for all of you who know I was an English teacher and are wondering about the verb tense in the previous sentence, we’ve still never seen it.

We did, however, see the entrance to St. Herman’s Cave, have a great hike, and climb the fire tower near St. Herman’s Cave for a beautiful view of the hills around the Hummingbird Highway. We were a bit foiled by the weather, which was copious rain on that day. The park is in two parts: one has St. Herman’s Cave, another cave named Crystal Cave, the fire tower, and lots of hiking trails, and the other has the Inland Blue Hole. The Caves part of the park is closer to Belmopan, so that’s where we stopped first. We took off on the 10 minute hike to the cave, armed with headlamps, so we could go into St. Herman’s Cave. It took us longer than 10 minutes to get there because we had to wade through knee deep mud, and then when we got there we found that the path into the cave was flooded with about three feet of river water running over the path.

Undaunted, we took off for the fire tower, which the signs say is only a mile hike, but which seemed like about 5 miles given the weather conditions.

But, as we got to the tower, it cleared up and we enjoyed an incredible view from the top.

We then hiked back to the truck and went down the road to see the Blue Hole. However, even though it wasn’t officially the park’s closing time, we found the gate closed and locked; apparently we were the only visitors to the park on that rainy Sunday, and it wasn’t worth keeping the staff around for four people. We’d been told that the Blue Hole was more brown or green that day anyway, so we’re just adding that to the list of things we still have to see. And Shari and Nikki are planning on coming back to Belize, so they were great sports and are adding it to their lists too.

Driving back to the farm on the Georgeville Road, we found that it had also been raining hard there during the day, and at one point the road was washed out to the point where we had a tense couple of seconds driving Tinkerbell over what was left of the road, not sure if the washout extended under the roadbed, and with no extra space on either side of the tires.

We should have known, since this is what the Iguana Creek Bridge on the road to Spanish Lookout looked like that morning. We made it, but because of the depth of the water in the flooded creeks, we did a bit of quick replanning for Monday’s activities, which had been for Selwyn to take Nikki on a horseback ride to Big Rock Falls to be met by the rest of us with lunch before taking a driving tour of the Mountain Pine Ridge.

Instead, Tom took Nikki and Shari into San Ignacio to see the sights there and to do some shopping. They tried to go to Xunantunich, but found that the ferry was closed due to the high river, so they saw Cahal Pech instead.

Fortunately it didn’t rain much on Monday and Tuesday turned out to be a very nice day, so it worked well to switch Monday’s activities to Tuesday.

Nikki had a lot of fun on the ride, learning about the jungle flora and fauna from Selwyn and taking lots of pictures.

We met them for a picnic at Big Rock, and then I ponied the horses home while Tom, Selwyn, Shari, and Nikki visited the Rio Frio Cave and Rio On Pools – which Tom said were as high as he’s ever seen them.

On Wednesday, unfortunately, Shari and Nikki were scheduled to leave here to go spend a couple of days in Hopkins. Since Tom and I had been thinking about a few days away, we took advantage of heading towards Belmopan with Shari and Nikki and after eating a “local” lunch at the Belmopan Market – rice and beans, venison, gibnut, and tamales – we got Shari and Nikki on the bus and we headed to Jaguar Paw for a ziplining adventure.

Neither of us has ever done it before, and while we’ve heard that the Jaguar Paw course is considered a fairly short “beginner” course, we had a great time and thoroughly enjoyed flying through the trees.

The only scary part for me was rappelling down from the last platform, where they asked me if I wanted to go fast or slow. I’d had a lot of fun going fast on the ziplines – but they don’t take you freefall fast, and I let out a yelp as I kicked out off the platform and made it to the ground in about half a second. Fortunately the guides there know what they’re doing, and I landed quite softly and gracefully (at least for me!).

Tom knew what to expect so he managed to get down without yelping, and we headed for the Zoo.

Sharon has been telling us to come spend a night at the Zoo’s Tropical Education Center ever since they took the first batch of cage material last January, but we hadn’t wanted to both be away from the farm during Mellow’s last few months. We didn’t think it was fair to either Mel or Selwyn to leave Selwyn with a dog that sometimes crashed going down the stairs – and that could die at any time – so we just put trips together on hold. But, we now feel we can leave Selwyn in charge for a few days and this was a good chance to head to the TEC. The TEC is beautiful, and we had a very enjoyable evening visiting with Sharon and the TEC staff. We saw a crocodile in the pond, and lots of birds that frequent the wet savannah instead of the hills of the Mountain Pine Ridge. The TEC cooks created an absolutely delicious dinner and a wonderful breakfast the next morning, complete with fry jacks. We started talking about cooking and they discovered I love to cook, and asked if I make fry jacks. They laughed when I told them that I refuse to learn because Tom and I both love fry jacks – which are as fatty as they sound, but utterly delicious – and if I could make them, we’d eat them every meal and we’d both weigh 300 pounds.

We took a minor detour Thursday morning on the way to the water taxi to San Pedro, which was the second part of our mini-getaway. On Tuesday, I’d slipped going down our steps, wrenching my back and shoulders by catching myself on my elbows, and giving myself a bruised butt like I haven’t had since the last time I fell off a horse and landed butt-first in a pile of jumps. I was telling Sharon about my fall, mostly to make her feel better because she’s still nursing a pinched nerve in her back as a result of her fall down the same steps early last spring. Coincidentally, she was planning to visit her doctor – chiropractor, acupuncturist, and masseuse – in Belize City after dropping us at the water taxi, so she asked if we wanted her to switch her order and get me into the doctor as well. I was all set to pass, not wanting to take the time or spend the money on top of my general aversion to doctors, but Tom had been watching me limp and wince for two days, so he told Sharon that was a great idea. So, for $60BZ and an hour of time I had my muscles massaged, my bones straightened, and a few pins stuck in my back – and walked out feeling better than I’ve felt in months (and maybe years), with the exception of the bruised butt which isn’t fixable by anything but time. Tom is now looking for an excuse to go to Belize City so he can get himself realigned and get something done about some tennis elbow which has been bothering him, and when he finds the excuse I’ll go along to get whatever is aching at the time fixed!

We got the 1:30 water taxi out of Belize City to San Pedro on Ambergris Caye, arriving at about 3:00. We were immediately surprised by how civilized San Pedro is – streets, cars, shops, restaurants, resorts, apartment buildings, just like lots of other beach towns we’ve visited. We decided we had to go to San Pedro because lots of tourists have asked us about it, and we had to keep telling people we just didn’t know. We hadn’t really rushed to get out there because everyone who knows San Pedro and knows us has said that we should probably just stick to Caye Caulker because we’d like that better. But, we had to find out for ourselves, and we’re glad we did because we had a great time. Not what we expected, but lots of fun nonetheless.

We were planning to get a hotel room, go out for dinner and a few drinks, get a bottle of wine and sit on the beach, then go to bed and get up early Friday morning to go snorkeling in the Hol Chan Marine Reserve and Shark Ray Alley. That’s not quite how it worked out, due to synchronicity and the fact that Belize really is really small.

Shortly before we moved to Belize, we found that the son of one of our neighbors in New York has owned a condo in San Pedro for about 20 years. These neighbors are the ones who gave us our Doberman, Midge, when the husband died and didn’t want his wife to be hurt by the overly energetic dog. After the husband died, the wife sold the house to good friends of ours and moved to Virginia to help one of her sons and his wife with their B&B. We’ve kept in touch despite my dreadful correspondence habits because she’s also kept in touch with our friends who bought her house, so if I neglected to write to see what she was doing, Claire would tell me. Anyway, Claire told Betty that we were moving to Belize, and Betty just happened to be in Belize visiting her son in San Pedro. She said that if we ever got there, we needed to look him up, and he told us that she’s asked every time he’s been there if he met us yet.

So, after dumping our knapsacks in the room, we decided to wander down to Banyan Bay and see if our old neighbor’s son just happened to be there. It was sort of funny because we had the sons mixed up, and thought that the one she’d moved in with was the one with the condo. So, we walked up to the Banyan Bay reception desk, and Tom asked if the son was there. The girl looked at us sort of funny, and then pointed to the computers right behind us and said Mr. B was sitting right there. We didn’t think he looked like the son we know – no surprise now, since he isn’t – but we walked up and introduced ourselves and within a few minutes had figured out who everybody was and that we actually did know his mother…and we were the people she’s been asking him about for two years now!

After getting that straight, we went to his condo for a Belikin and to call his mother, who sounds just like she’s always sounded even though we haven’t seen her in three or four years. He had dinner engagement planned with a Belizean friend, and as Tom and I were making noise about leaving so he could get ready for his evening out, he invited us to go along. We made sure he wasn’t just being polite, and since we were having so much fun talking about Belize and people we know in the US, we went with them for a delicious seafood dinner at one of the restaurants near his condo. Then he decided that we needed to see a bit of the real San Pedro, and took us on a tour of the “backatown” bars where we were generally the only three white people in the place – but it didn’t matter at all since we’re all used to Belize, Belizeans, and life in the slow lane, not to mention seedy bars everywhere, and we ended up running into a number of people we either know or at last know of, and since Mr. B has been spending big chunks of time in San Pedro for 20 years, he’s a local anyway. At one of the bars we caught the tail end of the vice presidential debate, and the Belizeans watching were quite passionate about it. When they found that we are US citizens, they very enthusiastically encouraged us to vote for Barack Obama, and told us that we owed it to the Belizean people to cast our votes for them, for Obama.

When the bars closed at midnight or 1, we went to the all night clubs and went dancing. Apparently I need a little more work with the doctor in Belize City since this white girl had trouble loosening up her hips to satisfy the Belizean women we were dancing with, but we all laughed a lot and had tons of fun…and didn’t get back to the hotel room until 3AM. It’s been a long time since Tom and I have been out dancing that late, and we weren’t able to drag our aging butts out of bed until 10 the next morning, too late for the snorkeling trip. We spent the day wandering around, eating nachos and ice cream. I didn’t realize how much I miss good ice cream. When we go to Spanish Lookout, we always go to Western Dairies for an ice cream and it’s good. But it’s not real good, real coffee ice cream which is my favorite. In San Pedro, you even have the choice of coffee ice cream or coffee custard, which is utterly delicious. And, the woman who owns DandE’s Custard likes to make animal noises as much as I do, so she and I had fun comparing our versions of the Belizean potlicker noise, which is very distinctive. Maybe my tired body was just craving the sugar and caffeine, but it gave me enough energy to go out for an abbreviated re-do of the previous night, and even though Tom didn’t have coffee ice cream, he found the energy too. We went to another equally good restaurant for more seafood, then to the backatown bars on the north side of town. Unfortunately, I started to fade around 11, so we skipped the dancing part of the evening and went back to the hotel. Again unfortunately, the tropical depression that just ran into Mexico was at that point passing over the Yucatan Peninsula, so the constant torrential downpour and wind kept us from snorkeling on Saturday morning. But we had a great breakfast with more fry jacks at a restaurant where a friend from San Antonio works, as well as a good visit with the friend who was our waiter.

We got the water taxi out at 11:30 and got to Belize City about 2 hours later. We took a cab to the bus terminal, and then took a bus to the Zoo where we’d left Tinkerbell. Besides wanting to be able to tell people first hand about staying at the Zoo and about San Pedro, we wanted to get a little experience dealing with Belize’s public transportation system. We found that the experience was good. The cab fare from the water taxi terminal to the bus terminal was $8BZ, and the bus fare was $2BZ each – much cheaper and easier than trying to park Tinkerbell in Belize City for three days. The bus terminal is chaos, but lots of people are around to help, and since buses only leave the terminal in two directions, you’d probably really have to work to get on the wrong bus. Tom became the center of attention on the bus because one of the vendors getting on the bus to sell snacks to the passengers told him that he looks like Chuck Norris (which he hears a lot here) and then everybody on the bus had to get up and take a look at him, with a running commentary in Creole. Tom was a little embarrassed, but I thought it was hysterically funny, of course. The bus got rolling in about fifteen minutes, let us off at the Zoo, and we retrieved Tinkerbell and headed for home. Selwyn had done a great job taking care of the place and the animals, and we’ve spent the past couple of days getting back in the swing of things and getting ready for guests arriving on Thursday.

So, did we like San Pedro? You bet. It wasn’t what we expected, and we didn’t do what we’d planned to do, but we had a great time. We’re not going to go back every week or even every month – we couldn’t afford it either physically or financially! – but it was great for a change of pace and we know plenty of people who would have way more fun there than they would on the more laid back Caye Caulker. And we have to go back to do the snorkeling trips we were planning to do this time. Now we can say we know what it’s like…but we definitely need to do more research!

Small Business Thrills

Sharon and The Belize Zoo staff thrilled us by putting information about Moonracer Farm on the Zoo’s website. We’ve been sending people back and forth, but the Zoo just did some website updates and expanded their Lodging page with Moonracer Farm information. See us becoming famous here!

Other Wildlife Sighting Thrills

Last night Tom went to close up the shop and realized the army ants were on the move. This is actually a very narrow stream of them; sometimes they move in a mass 10 or 12 feet wide, and it can take a swarm of them an hour to pass. With these narrow streams, it’s easy enough to jump over them, but if they’re in a mass too wide to jump, you have to either try to go around, or run through as fast as you can – and you’ll still get bit a few times. They’re actually sort of cool, because they swarm through the jungle cleaning up everything. You can tell when you’re near an army of ants on the move because you can here buzzing and rustling in the leaves on the ground as everything tries to get out of their way. We haven’t had them in the house because our house is up on metal-capped poles, but we’re told that if an accessible house is in their path, they’ll go right through – and that’s a good thing, because they’ll get rid of scorpions, spiders, other ants, and any other type of bug in their way.

We’ve seen a number of interesting birds around here in the past couple of weeks, although we haven’t had the camera handy for pictures. I was walking behind the guest cabin and heard big wing beats and breaking twigs, and turned around just in time to see a laughing falcon heading up through the canopy with a snake in its talons. It stopped on a branch so I could get a good look at it, and then flew deeper into the leaves with the still-wriggling snake. I (of course) looked the laughing falcon up in the bird book and found that their diet consists mainly of snakes, both venomous and non-venomous. Now we know why they sometimes sound so hysterical as they “laugh” in the jungle.

I also saw a collared forest falcon in the trees near the back pasture last week. I knew as soon as I saw it that it wasn’t one of the more common raptors we see around here, but I followed it through three flights and landings and got a good enough look at it that I could make a positive identification from the bird book. This website has a decent picture – which is actually a painting – and information about the bird. This website has a good audio of the very distinctive cry of this bird; click the first audio link. Tom and I had been hearing this cry for a while and didn’t know what it was because it’s somewhat like the laughing falcon’s call, but the laughing falcon’s call is much less extended.

One morning as we were eating breakfast we were watching the Great Kiskadees hopping around in the trees in the yard. They seem to be getting almost tame, and will perch on branches right outside the porch screening - no doubt wondering why the people are in a cage. This particular morning we were startled when one of the kiskadees suddenly launched itself off the branch right at the screening, and grabbed a clackety-clack butterfly right out of the air right in front of our faces. The Kiskadee took the butterfly to a nearby branch and enjoyed breakfast with us. By the way, we don't know the real name of the clackety-clack butterflies, but we gave them that name because they fly around the citrus trees and make a very loud clacking sound which sounds like a loud electrical short, presumably part of a mating ritual. Here's the mangoverde link for the Great Kiskadee.

As we were riding up the government feeder road between our two lots the other day, we saw a number of violaceous trogons in the trumpet trees. They’re fairly common in the area, but we don’t usually see them right around our house, and for some reason we consider the trogons an interesting sighting. We’re not quite sure why, except that they’re colorful and distinctive – sort of like the toucans, which we also see regularly, but which still give us a thrill. This website has pictures, information, and audio clips of the violaceous trogons.

Pet Photos…thrills a minute…

Not much has been happening around here this week. We’ve had a few pretty rainy days, but it’s still been nice enough for at least part of every day to get outside and do things – or get some pictures of the animals.


Lodo finally got comfortable with his halter, but it didn’t take him long to learn that when we were near him, we were going to hold on to it, and maybe even clip a lead rope to it, so he started playing “Catch Me If You Can” with us. That lasted all of about 10 minutes, and as soon as we caught him we put a catch rope on his halter so when he’d sneak up to nibble on our clothes, we could just turn around and grab the rope. He’s finally willing to let us then clip a lead rope to him…


…and sometimes even allow one of us to lead him. He’s still playing games, stopping and starting, threatening to run, or nipping at us, but for the most part we can walk up to him, grab the catch rope, clip on a lead rope, and he’ll follow as we walk away. He’s definitely a colt though, and he’s testing his boundaries. The other day I took Ness and Lodo out, groomed Ness, and then turned her loose in the yard to graze while I groomed Elphie. Lodo was running loose with Ness, but the temptation of a cute little filly tied to the fence was too much for him, and he quickly made a pest of himself. He’d sidle up to Elphie, nip at her, and try to mount her. Somehow he figured out pretty quickly that if he came up to her on the side where she can see, she’d kick him, not appreciating the pesky little brother’s antics. However, if he approached her on her blind side, he could get much closer – close enough to jump on her. Elphie gave him a couple of good kicks and became very aware when he was approaching on that side, and I grabbed a dressage whip and gave him a couple of good whacks on the nose when he got too close. He finally decided he’d go back to grazing with his mamma, but not before I figured out that he’s not at all head shy and he’s a pretty quick study.


The dogs are all well. Nock’s eyes are very cloudy, but she still loves to stand on the porch and look for lizards. Lou doesn’t seem to hear much, and the only ways to get his attention are to clap, really bellow at him, or stomp the floor. I think he made himself deaf by his constant whining. I never realized how annoying he could be until we came here, since he doesn’t whine when he’s around me; he whines because he’s not around me. In our old life, I’d go off to work or up to the barn or somewhere far enough away that I couldn’t hear him. Here, the doors and windows are always open, and the tack shed where I groom and tack the horses is close enough that I get most of the effect of the unceasing, annoying whining. Yikes. Thanks to everybody who put up with the annoying little creature for all these years!


The Ruckus Twins are still puppies. It’s hard to get pictures of them because they never stop moving. They chew on me, chew on each other, bark at Recona, and generally create chaos.


By standing up and twisting their collars, it only took five or six shots to get a picture of them being relatively still.


But then it takes no time at all for them to go back at each other. That’s Beli with Stout’s paw in her mouth.