That we began our cycling trip in Belize City was largely my mother's doing. Fred and I had been planning to cycle in this part of the world for some time when she invited us to accompany her on a ten-day ecology-oriented tour. She said she would even pay for our plane tickets from Houston, which made the offer too good to pass up. And the tour turned out to be not at all bad. Our group of fourteen got along overall and had its humorous aspects (see Appendix I, with text by Fred). Martin, our Belizified Brit guide, was amazingly knowledgeable --especially regarding flora and fauna\-- and we managed to see a sizable chunk of the country, plus Tikal in Guatemala.
During the first part of this tour, the thought of our bicycles waiting for us back in Belize City had a decidedly menacing feel to it; we would be biking in a strange land for the first time and had no idea what to expect. But as the tour wore on, the bikes began to represent freedom --freedom from the handholding and sheparding, freedom from being trapped at a table three times a day with our unlikely companions, freedom to ride in any direction we felt like. We bid adieu to our elderly traveling companions (including the incredible Sam Adams, who had celebrated his eighty-eighth birthday with us two days before) at the San Pedro airstrip on Ambergris Key, thrilled to be by ourselves and capable of making our own decisions after ten days of being babysat.
We were reunited with our bikes at around eight a.m., in a storage closet of the Fort George Hotel. By the time we had changed into our cycling costumes, checked the bikes and loaded up the gear, it was later than we would have ideally set off in the tropical climate. Even threading our way through the confusion of Belize City, we could feel the heat. The whole fifty-some miles to Orange Walk were pancake flat, against a stiff glancing wind. Also slowing us down (sometimes our pace fell below 11mph) was the compositish surface of the road. The most striking feature of the landscape was its very lack of features: monotonous shrubby jungle broken only by the mileage markers which regularly remind us of our sluggish pace.
By the time the clouds finally started to roll in, at mile marker 38, I seriously needed a break, and an unfinished house in the middle of nothing provided a nicely shaded concrete slab on which to rehydrate and play backgammon for an hour. Coming into Orange Walk after a seemingly endless day's riding, we passed a sugar refinery belching smoke into the sky. Mile-long lines of trucks loaded beyond capacity with sugarcane waited their turn, a preview of the sugarcane fields through which we'd surely be pedaling the next day. Orange Walk is your basic highwayside shithole of a town that smells and feels like some on the smaller towns in Java.
We checked into the first hotel we came upon, which was spartan but comfortable and even had a pool. After chatting with an old Austrian couple who had driven there from San Francisco (yes, the one in California), we went to the pool with postage-stamp sized towels supplied by the hotel, only to discover that the water was probably not treated in any way, and perhaps not a good idea to swim in with all of the blisters and bites we had acquired in the jungle. Our stroll around town was more successful. We even spotted a couple of homos sitting on a bench in the scruffy plaza.
They followed us into a nearby bar, but I didn't notice until we were leaving, so we never got the chance to talk to them. At the suggestion of Emilio \--the owner of the noisy, sleazy bar\-- and the registrationettes at our hotel, we went for an early dinner at Lee's Chinese Restaurant, which proclaimed \"the best food in town\" on their sign. It turned out to be a depressing place with uninspired, greasy food. I made the mistake of ordering iced coffee, which Fred described as having a \"Mister Bubble aftertaste.\" We went back to our room to get a dose of CNN, the only news (or reasonable facsimile) we had come across in nearly two weeks.
The big story was another Clintonian scandal involving his legal defense fund. I found myself surprised by the apathy I felt towards the stock market news. The road ahead took precedence in my thoughts now. I went to bed with a new appreciation of the blank spaces on the map, satisfied with having officially survived our first day on the road, and thinking of the 400 or so kilometers to Oxkutzcab, the next town where I knew there was a hotel.