I’ll apologize in advance if I’m a little incoherent today. After last night’s roach episode, I did eventually get to sleep, but under the circumstances slept rather less well than usual, and I’m still a bit frazzled. (I have been trying to convince myself that a roach is simply a beetle, and a two-inch beetle crawling over you isn’t anything to panic over, it’s merely annoying. I have thus far completely failed. Beetles I can deal with. But roaches are roaches, and no matter how hard I flex it, I just can’t convince myself they’re anything else.)

Anyway, I managed to catch the bus up to Crooked Tree (pop. 800) today, and made it to the festival without incident. It’s a pretty small operation–fifteen or twenty stalls, a live band, some minor prizes–but what it lacks in size it more than makes up for in diversity. You can buy all kinds of cashew products–fudge, cookies, jam, syrup, and wine. The last three are made from the cashew apple–the fruit, not the nut.

Cashews are nearly unique in the botanical world in having the seed outside the fruit. A cashew has a fleshy fruit, the cashew apple, and at the bottom dangles the cashew nut (inside shell and hull). The nut is easy to twist off the end of the cashew apple–it’s only cursorily attached. The nut has some rather nasty irritants associated with the outer shell (this is why some people are allergic to cashews), which are removed during the shelling process.

The cashew apple looks a bit like a small, somewhat withered yellow bell pepper. It’s hollow inside, like the pepper, but is soft and juicy, with a stringy interior. It is not going to win any awards for flavor–when I bit into one I found it astringent, and oddly musky-tasting–but it is sweet, and quite juicy.

Regarding cashew wine, the less said the better. Actually, some of the cashew wines are moderately drinkable (as Paul Simon famously said, “all right in a limited sort of a way, for an off night”), but Napa isn’t exactly quaking in its boots. I’m bringing one small bottle home with me; if you want to delve further into its secrets, get in touch with me once I return.

I did see one very unusual thing while I was there, though: one of the band members was playing a “drum” composed of three tortoise shells! He had the three dangling from a belt attached to his waist, and played them just as you would any other drum. It was astonishing the different range of sounds he produced–hollow clicking sounds, deeper-throated knocking noises, depending on which tortoise he was playing and where on the scutes he was drumming. I got a photo which i’ll post once I get back. I was fascinated, and spent half an hour watching and listening to him.

I should mention that Belize is musically a very gifted nation, with a wide variety of instruments and a strong music tradition. I am unfortunately a complete musical illiterate, so I can’t give you an adequate description–but if you are a music junkie, come to Belize. It’s basically a Caribbean rhythm, but with variations.

I did have one very bizarre moment today, musically speaking. The DJ was playing a song over and over which was hauntingly familiar, but which I couldn’t place. It drove me crazy for several repetitions, then I suddenly recognized it as “Father Abraham”, a British nursery rhyme I’d learned from a pair of British nannies one drunken night in Laos. It’s rather like the Hokey-Pokey, and goes

“Father Abraham
Had seven sons
Seven sons had Father Abraham
And they never laughed
And they never cried
All they did was go like this:”

followed by waving about whatever random body part is indicated for that verse (adding body parts cumulatively as you go).

If you try to imagine a bunch of Westerners in backwater Laos, dining with a hilltribe so isolated that children have never seen white people, singing “Father Abraham” and waving their arms and legs drunkenly about while the Lao whisky goes around yet another time, well…that was THAT evening. I’ll never forget the British nannies who taught it to us, either. Mary Poppins would have had a heart attack–tattoos, body piercings, drinking and swearing. These weren’t no namby-pamby prim-and-proper nannies–these were punk nannies.

At any rate, just as I realized that the tune was “Father Abraham”, it dawned on me that the refrain was “Scooby-Doo, we love you”. I THINK someone was trying to mix the Scooby-Doo theme with “Father Abraham”.

The mind reels.

Fortunately, most Belizean music isn’t like that–it’s a refreshing, original Caribbean mix that’s very enjoyable, even to the musically illiterate ear.

I unfortunately missed the cashew-processing demonstration, which is happening tomorrow–I had been hoping to see how they remove the irritating oils and extract the cashew. It was great to taste the cashew apple, though.

Speaking of tastes, I finally got my hands on gibnut today! Gibnut is an animal generally described as “a 60-pound rat” (I thik technically it’s an agouti), and is one of the “interesting” foods native to Belize. I had almost resigned myself to not finding it, as it’s a wild game animal and thus not on most restaurant menus, but found it in a stall at the festival. It has an interesting flavor…I had it barbequed, and the taste and texture were very similar to slow-cooked pork ribs, but with an odd, soapy flavor. Maybe a bit like cilantro, but without the “green” flavor. On Tien’s exotic scale, it tasted better than rat, scorpion, mealworms, and moth pupae, but not as good as dog or grasshopper. (I’m still sorry I didn’t try bat. *sigh* Everyone makes mistakes.)

However, I can now say that I’ve eaten a R.O.U.S. (Rodent of Unusual Size), which is certainly something. Together with the cashew apple, it’s been a pretty adventurous day.

Off to bed (perchance to catch up on non-roach-infested sleep)–

Tien

I arrived in Belize City at 8pm last night, well after dark, and took a taxi straight to the guesthouse. It turned out to be a ratpit, but as I was only going to be there one night, and one does not wander around Belize City after dark, I resigned myself to the wind blowing through the stuck-open window, the people on the verandah blowing smoke into my room and talking loudly next to my window, and the light streaming in from the hallway. I pulled out my silk sleep-sack (I don’t know where these rat-pits get their sheets–coarse, rough, AND worn to pieces), stuck in earplugs, and tossed and turned, trying to get to sleep.

Then I felt a rustling, and looked up. A giant, two-inch roach had just scuttled across my body, and was regarding me curiously from atop my shoulder.

I leaped out of the bed with a yell, grabbed a book, and went after that roach in a flurry of wild swipes. I missed, and it skittered away.

Well, that was THAT. I hastily gathered my bags, ran downstairs, and fled. Traveling tigresses are intrepid, but even I have my limits–I am NOT sharing my bed with roaches. I found a high-end hotel in the guidebook, and at 11pm, I made it to the Princess Hotel, a hotel-cum-casino that would do Club Med proud. I paid a princely sum for it ($96 U.S., or $10/hour for every hour I spent there), but was it worth it? Hell, yeah. I could sleep in the assurance that no roaches would be peeking over my shoulder.

So now I’ve spent more for one night’s accommodation than I did for the entire previous WEEK of hotel stays, but at least I and my clothes are roach-free. Egad.

Anyway, I’m headed up to Crooked Tree for the Cashew Festival, and am hoping to make it OUT of Belize City today and down to Dangriga and diving, but it seems likely I’ll have to spend another day in Belize City. Grump.

Tien

Sometimes it seems like all of Belize is burning.

As I rode the bus from Punta Gorda to Belize City, every few miles we would pass another fire. Charred stumps, withering branches, a small bush crumpling slowly into flames–and everywhere the char, seared earth and dying coconut palms. Even at night, plumes of white smoke rise into the sky, illuminated by the eerie orange glow of the flames. Everywhere, the air smells of woodsmoke.

This is slash-and-burn agriculture at its worst, and I feel only vaguely reassured that Belize is an environmental “success story”: 36% of the country is set aside as nature preserve, and it is considered one of the best-preserved countries in Central America. If this is the *best*, what are the other places like? I try to picture the great fire, 5 acres a day in Belize burning into a desolation of white ash, and it boggles my mind. And to think of the 2.7 MILLION acres of Amazonian rainforest burned every year…it’s too much to imagine. I see acres and acres of jungle, crumpling slowly into flames as the ashy landscape expands, and the fire burns, and burns, and burns.

I am still amazed that Belize is considered an environmental success. I can’t imagine what the other places are like.

Tien

I did meet with Belize’s Minister for Agriculture and Fisheries today. (He’s also the area representative for Toledo district.)

I had just about dismissed the whole thing as the made-up story of a delusional old man (he’d be neither the first nor the last such person I’ve met), but he turned up this morning with the guy himself! (I will never, EVER doubt my improbability field again.) I was totally not expecting this visit, and in fact was sitting quietly at the breakfast table carving myself a new set of double-pointed bamboo knitting needles when they arrived. One does not normally receive high government officials covered in wood shavings, but life is full of new and novel experiences. (Besides which, he was in shorts and a T-shirt anyway, so it wasn’t exactly a formal meeting.)

It was interesting hearing what he had to say on tourism and development in Belize–he’s certainly well aware of the issues w/r/t tourism in the Toledo district. One interesting thing he said was about the villages. Yesterday, while touring the cacao plantations, Greg had mentioned that the government was issuing land grants of 30 acres to anyone who applied. I had wondered why they were doing a homestead act, but it turns out to be an environmental issue. The indigenous people are doing tremendous damage to the environment using traditional slash-and-burn practices (yesterday’s devastation being an example), and it’s estimated that they’re burning 5 acres a DAY in Toledo District. When a given plot of land is exhausted, they move on to the next one (which is traditional for slash and burn). The government is trying to get the villagers to stop their nomadic (and very destructive) lifestyle, and towards that end is offering each of them ownership of 30 acres. The hope is that they’ll stay put on that land, and not move on to burn more.

They’re also doing projects to help them grow beans and rice. I asked why not cacao, since it’s so profitable, and he said it’s because of the organic farming requirements–it requires a lot of compost to keep the land fertile, and the farmers haven’t been willing to apply the compost. (Greg, the cacao guy, brings them sacks of compost in his pickup, but they still have to haul it all the way to the field–which may be a long way–and spread it.) So after a few years, the soil is no longer fertile, and then they run into trouble with disease etc. They’re working on convincing the farmers that organic farming is much more than “don’t add chemicals”.

Anyway, the net of the conversation was that Chet’s ideas were too grandiose (which was obvious to me as a project manager), he needed to start smaller, BUT if he was able to come up with funding, the minister of agriculture etc. would ask the prime minister to match the funding. Which is a great opportunity, of course. I told Chet that if he put together a really solid project proposal, with a mission statement and precise detail on exactly what he planned to do, what budget he proposed, and so on, I’d see what I could do about getting him funded. (He claims only to need a small amount of money, about $30K–I think the actual bill would be much more, frankly.)

I’d guess that the odds of my actually receiving a good, solid proposal are probably about 2% (Chet is not the most organized person in the world), but stranger things have been known to happen, and I think his ideas vis-a-vis cultural and environmental preservation would be great to implement. I’m not getting any further involved until I get a solid proposal, though–if they can’t get their act together enough to write a good proposal, there’s no way they’ll be able to implement it once funded. So that’s my test; we’ll see what happens.

I’m boarding an express bus to Belize City in about half an hour; it takes about four hours to get there, so I’ll arrive about 7pm. Tomorrow I’ll do a day trip up to Crooked Tree for the Cashew Festival–which I expect to be interesting–and then I’ll head south to Hopkins (a little town near Dangriga), and spend a couple days diving. After that, I’ve been advised to go to San Ignacio (in Western Belize) and play around a couple of days–there are horseback tours into the jungle, a major Inca ruin, and several wildlife preserves to visit.

By the way, as you may have guessed from earlier hints, I’ve started my latest travel shawl. It will be an orange, brown, and gold striped silk shawl, which I intend to call “Tiger Lily”. And started on hand-carved bamboo needles, too. 🙂

Tien

Thank you, AIDS Lifecycle, for transforming my relationship with sweat.

Once upon a time, I regarded sweat as dirty, icky, and generally to be avoided. Then I signed up for the AIDS Ride, and started training. 2,000 miles of cycling later, I finished up in LA, weary, windburned, and triumphant–and with a rock-solid understanding of sweat. You get damp for awhile. That’s all.

And may I say, it has been VERY damp lately.

I got in this morning at 7am, having escaped the Mayan village (very boring), and turned up at the Toledo Cacao Growers’ Association at the crack of 8am. There I met my guide, Greg (a Qeq’chi Mayan), who was an agricultural extension agent and would take me along on his rounds. I hopped into his green Ford Ranger, and we were off.

Cacao is a relatively new crop in the area. It wasn’t grown at all until maybe twenty years ago, when Hershey set up shop in the region. They didn’t offer a whole lot more than farmers could make planting corn and beans, so not many farmers planted it. Then, out of nowhere, Hershey’s pulled out–shut down their processing plant–and the farmers had nowhere to sell their crop. So they formed a growers’ association, and, with the help of a few Peace Corps volunteers, found Green & Black. In exchange for a promise to grow organic, Green & Black guarantees to buy all the cacao they produce for 85 cents a pound. At roughly 900 pounds per acre, this comes out to just over $750 an acre, a much much better return than either corn or beans. Many farmers are now switching to cacao.

(By the way, you can read more about Green & Black on their website, http://www.greenandblacks.com/

We drove first to Greg’s cacao plantation. We drove through a freshly tilled field, which would grow rice later, then walked through a second field and along a narrow, winding jungle path to reach his cacao plantation. It was a blazing hot day, and I was sweating buckets before we’d gone 100 yards.

(People here assure me that this is as hot as it gets in Belize, and that it will cool down in a week or two. Unfortunately this doesn’t do me much good, but I’m glad they don’t have to live in this year-round.)

Finally we arrived at the farm, and I got my first glimpse of a real live cacao tree! They are small trees with enormous leaves, pointed ovals maybe a foot long, and stand maybe fifteen feet in height–the perfect understory tree. I spotted the cacao pods immediately–like elongated acorn squash, they were deeply ribbed and football-shaped, and hung directly from the trunk (no branches)–this is true for many other jungle trees, e.g. the calabash tree. (For the pedantic, this is called cauliflory.) I rushed right up and examined the trunks and branches–inconspicuous, delicate, cream-colored flowers presaged greater harvests to come.

(I was so thrilled I nearly did a little happy dance on the spot. The only other cacao trees I’ve seen were two tiny little ones in Hawaii, fifteen feet away through a fence–highly unsatisfying.)

We tromped through more of the farm, fallen cacao leaves crunching underfoot, as Greg pointed out tree after tree and gave me a running monologue on cacao management. He showed me how to prune them, how to tell if the pods are ripe, and how to identify the major cacao pests. He pointed out criollo and trinitario pods for me–criollo round and smooth, trinitario deeply ribbed.

(There are two main kinds of cacao: criollo, which has delicate flavor overtones but not much “body”, and forastero, which has lots of chocolate impact, produces more than criollo, and has good disease-resistance. Good-quality chocolates will contain some criollo beans for the subtle flavors, but one wouldn’t want to make a chocolate with only criollo beans, because you need the stronger flavors of forastero. Trinitario, which Greg also showed me, is a hybrid between criollo and forastero.)

Finally, we stopped in front of another tree, and Greg asked me if I wanted to try some. Of course!! So he twisted a ripe pod off the trunk, and smashed it against the trunk. It cracked open to reveal a grapelike cluster of soft white drupes, big seeds surrounded by pulpy, slippery, cream-colored flesh. I popped a few in my mouth: tangy, sweet, exotic–much like fresh lychee. The seeds were big, like giant fava beans, and the flesh clung tenaciously to them, so one could only suck at the slippery seeds. Nonetheless, it was delicious. Greg gave me another pod to take home.

As we were passing through the trees on the way back, I suddenly pointed and said, “Hey! Is that a vanilla orchid??” And, sure enough, there one was! I ran up and took a good look–a rather nondescript vine with fleshy oval leaves. It didn’t appear to run all the way down the trunk, but I couldn’t tell for sure. I’d love to know if it’s a ground orchid, or an epiphytic (tree-dwelling) one. No beans on this one, unfortunately. Greg said they weren’t grown around here commercially, but wild ones weren’t uncommon, and promised to look out for other vines.

Next we set out to look at one of his farmers’ nurseries. Cacao trees are planted in little black bags of rice hull compost; it takes two weeks for the seeds to sprout, rising up out of the compost like a giant, soil-encrusted bean atop a sturdy green stem. The crinkly beans split open to reveal the first soft, tiny leaves, and in six or seven weeks the trees are about a foot tall, with a profusion of little branches. At the age of one year, they’re transplanted into the fields. At the age of three, they bear their first crop, and at five, they’re in full production.

As we tromped on through a young cacao plantation, I smelled smoke nearby. Greg and I went over to investigate, and through a thin screen of jungle I spotted a plain of ash! It was still smoking in places, and Greg warned me to be careful of hidden embers, since I was wearing sandals. I stepped out, onto the moonscape.

It was like a scene out of nightmare: half-burned palm fronds and blackened branches stuck up from the white ashes of scorched earth, and plumes of smoke still rose from several areas. Heat waves rose from the ground, and the scent of woodsmoke clung to my clothes and hair. For several hundred yards in every direction, the soil was covered in white ash, and only burnt-out shells punctuated the landscape. I nervously examined my Tevas, to make sure they weren’t melting.

This was slash-and-burn agriculture.

In slash-and-burn, the jungle is first cut down, with machete and axe, and left to dry for several weeks. Then, fires are set, and the brush burns down to the ground, leaving only ash. The ash is tilled into the ground to enrich it, and the cleared land is planted–for several years, until it is exhausted. Then the farmer slashes and burns another plot of land, and leaves the first piece to recover.

This particular piece of land was being cleared for a cacao plantation, and I suppose the slash-and-burn method does make a great deal of sense for clearing jungle. It doesn’t pay to haul the brush away, and burning the area is quicker than composting and waiting several years for the greenery to rot: you get the same nutrients a lot faster. Nonetheless, it was startling to step, in one instant, from full, vibrantly healthy jungle to lifeless moonscape.

After this field, we went to several other nurseries and farms, and Greg inspected the young trees for disease and non-organic practices. He told me that some farmers get impatient with using rice-hull compost (which needs to be hauled laboriously into the fields) and try to sneak in chemical fertilizers, but that one could easily spot it by examining the leaves on the trees. Green & Black is a certified organic chocolate, so one of his jobs as an agricultural extension agent is to make sure that the farmers are complying. He also teaches workshops several times a week, and warns farmers about pests and disease. He’s been growing cacao himself for fifteen years.

As we were passing through yet another jungle path, Greg stopped abruptly and said, “Vanilla! Can you smell it?” We stopped on the path, and sure enough, a sweet, floral smell drifted through the branches. We tromped through the jungle for awhile looking for it (Greg cutting away branches and vines with his pruning shears), but couldn’t find it. We did, however, find a cohune, which is a big palm tree with incredibly long fronds (used in roof thatching). The cohune bears long, datelike clusters of tiny coconuts, and Greg twisted down a few of them. Later, one of the farmers would split one open for me, and I ate the nut inside–it tasted like a cross between coconut and Brazil nut, and was very good. (I still have a couple more, and am trying to figure out how to get into them. I may have to buy a machete. Mmmm…machetes.)

After that and a trip to a rosewood-carver, we finished up for the day, and I came back to the Cacao Growers’ Association, where I bought two and a half pounds of fermented, but unshelled and unroasted, beans. They don’t taste like chocolate; they have a slightly chocolatey, slightly winey flavor from the fermentation. I plan to take them home, roast them, and grind them up with cloves, orange peel, and other spices, Mayan-style, for my own teas and chocolates. (They’ve already been inspected for export, and I plan to roast them anyway, so I’m not especially worried about bringing in pests. I do plan to be careful, though.)

Still considering what to do tomorrow morning, but think I may take the 3pm express bus from Punta Gorda to Belize City. It’s either that or fly. (The traveling tigress is not even considering 6 hours in a rickety ancient schoolbus stopping every few miles–twelve hours on one in Vietnam, stuck next to a snorting pig, has convinced me to avoid such travel for the rest of my life.) The owner of this cybercafe has recommended a good, friendly, not-too-expensive guesthouse in Belize City, and I plan to stay there tomorrow night before striking out to Crooked Tree (and the Cashew Festival) in the morning.

I think my strategy after the Cashew Festival will be to go down to Dangriga and do several days’ diving, then come back to Belize City and do several day-trips around the area. I’m trying very hard to stay away from the tourist traps of San Pedro and Placencia–I find heavily touristed areas to be more or less identical the world over (think Cancun), and I’d really like someplace quieter. I’ve been very happy with Punta Gorda. I’m hoping Dangriga will be less touristy than some of the other places.

Tien