Jim & Harry's Totally Ok Adventure in Belize

So what are you going to call this," asked Harry, "Indiana Jones and the Limo of Doom?"

Five minutes into the trip and my companion and I are arguing over movie rights. As the chauffeur pilots the stretch limo out toward O'Hare, I'm going through my pockets looking for drugs. At last I find them. We each take two tablets of chloroquine phosphate....

The bitter-tasting antimalarial medication will be our only guard against the blood-sucking insect gods of the Mosquito Coast. That and the bandoleer of DeepWoods Off I wear over one shoulder.

This adventure began as an idea for a series of travel articles to be called Necessary Skill. I wanted to visit the ultimate arenas for various sports, to describe, for example, what it was like for a wave sailor to get upside down at Ho'okipa. My editor was reluctant. "The magazine can't send readers to a place where if they don't have the necessary skill, they have a bad time," he said.

"Well, sir," I replied, "at Ho'okipa, it's not a question of having a bad time. If you don't have the necessary skill, you die."

Find a place, he said, where everyone can have fun.

Oh, all right.

I contacted Harry Arader, unindicted coconspirator and board-sailing side-kick, and planned a little adventure. An occasional writer for Wind Surf magazine (as well as a director of marketing for a major pharmaceutical corporation), he suggested the destination. We contacted Tropical Travel in Houston and ended up with a not-uncomplicated itinerary.

It is a simple fact that you cannot have an adventure without changing planes at least once. There are no direct flights to the edge. Every connection is crucial. We stand with our faces pressed to the plate-glass window of the Houston airport, watching baggage handlers load our gear into the belly of a Continental jet. The long purple canvas bag, filled with flaming bundles--four fluorescent windsurfing sails--disappears from view. The couple next to us sighs as three large duffels containing a collapsible ocean kayak march up the conveyer.

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The scuba divers relax as the oversize backpacks containing tanks and regulators join the cargo. The only guys not worried are the fishermen, who carry their $1000 poles in custom cases that fit into the overhead compartments. The plane looks like a Patagonia catalog rolled into a tube, with wings.

We make the Belize connection.

There is a secret to passion: It unlocks the world. A windsurfer looks at a map of the Caribbean and three or four islands jump vividly into his imagination. A diver looks at the narrow chain of islands south of the Yucatán and dreams about the second largest barrier reef in the world. A sports fisherman thinks of secret spots, favorite guides, the quest for bonefish and tarpons. The sea kayakers think of running rivers beneath jungle canopies teeming with tropical birds, of sailing from cay to cay on the warm trades. Archaeologists reading Mayan creation myths dream of a world described as the blue-green plate, the blue-green bowl.

No matter what your passion, near the top of your wish list is the name Belize (or, if your world atlas is older, British Honduras). In the past few years, it has been renamed and rediscovered. Harrison Ford filmed The Mosquito Coast there. A 60 Minutes crew went down to film the kind of hard-hitting puff piece they reserve for Yuppie culture gods such as the Baron de Rothschild. Belize is a Central American country that speaks English, that is free of Contras and camouflage, of postcolonial surliness. It is a country full of characters who make Andy Rooney seem like an uncooked curmudgeon. Belize is a suburb of Chicago; satellite dishes pirate the super-stations, sucking WGN down from outer space and piping it into shacks, turning the natives into Cubs fans.

It is not a country free of danger. On the plane, I catch a glimpse over the shoulder of another passenger of a guidebook to Belize. One phrase jumps off the page: "It won't attack, unless...." I am amused at the kind of soft adventurer who takes some writer's word for such things, trusting the cover blurb that claims the author has lived all his life with sharks or jaguars or surly French waiters and knows every single fucking thing about them.

I understand for the first time the concept of soft adventure. If this were Guns & Ammo or Sudden Death Sushi magazine, I would be expected to hand in some hyperventilating essay: Teaching a Moray Eel to Floss. The author's page would run a picture of me surrounded by 40 heaving breasts, with only a Randall knife clenched between my teeth. Something has changed in our definition of adventure.

Maybe it's our creation myth: The book of Genesis gave man dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over all the earth. So we are used to treating the world as a vicious, surly collection of pissed-off creatures and venture forth as manly men. That's the old notion of adventure: The new adventure sends men into nature armed with cameras or nonpredatory athletic skills. Leave only footprints, take only pictures, sweat a lot. Use sun block.

We land at a funky airport in Belize City: Tommy Thomson, the adventure guru at Tropical Travel, told us to expect a Casablanca-style terminal. He needs a new VCR. It is informal, filled with locals selling wood carvings and conch jewelry and outward-bound tourists converting their Belizean currency to alcohol at the bar. We shift our gear to a 16-seater Tropic Air prop plane and arc over turquoise water toward San Pedro, on Ambergris Cay. A manta ray moves through the shallow waters: The effect is of a giant eye following our progress across the sky.

We check into the SunBreeze Beach Resort and meet David Childs, the local master of windsurfing. He was a ski instructor at Vail from 1969 to 1985. He was there when there were only 65 instructors (there are now more than 700) and everything cost $1000 down--the VW, the trailer, the acre of land, the divorce. He went to Belize on retreat and spent the summer in a room at Rosie's that cost $125 a month (it now goes for that a night). Colorado is a cold memory. He hasn't driven a car or worn shoes in three years.

He takes us on a tour of the town, starting with dinner at Elvi's. There's a tree growing in the middle of the dining room. Appreciate your first impression of San Pedro; it's so small you won't have a second. There are three streets, actually sandy alleys, between tiny hotels, dive shops, bars and restaurants. Hand-painted wooden signs are everywhere: A fleet of smiling windsurfers is the first thing you see, then lurid tropical-aquarium scenes that advertise glass-bottom boat rides and coral-reef dives, along with pictures of parrots and macaws advertising river trips to Mayan ruins.

Quaintness has a spiritual value. San Pedro is protected from the grotesque by the size of the planes that can land there: No one will be able to go in and throw money into the ground to create a Miami Beach or St. Martin. The island is experiencing a building boom, teaspoon by teaspoon. Hundred-year-old working sailboats called sandlighters are tied up to docks; brown-bodied Belizeans unload sand, concrete blocks, lumber, fresh fruit, auto parts, furniture and the occasional satellite dish from the mainland. Workers with wheelbarrows haul the sand and the concrete blocks through the narrow streets to add gift shops or extra rooms to the tiny hotels.

The town is long and narrow. Front Street has the hotels, the dive shops, the bars and the ocean. Middle Street has two great eating establishments (Katangas and Elvi's), some grocery stores and travel agencies. Back Street has housing, the power station and the telephone exchange and fishing boats in dry dock running along the inland lagoon. The tallest building--The Barrier Reef Hotel--is three stories. A canal cuts the island in half just north of town: On the other side are some exclusive hotels (The Belizean and Journey's End), accessible only by boat. South of town, you have Ramone's Reef Resort, La Joya Caribe, the Victorian House Hotel and miles of man-grove-lined beaches. It's not undiscovered, just undeveloped. For years, the Belizean government put a low priority on tourism: "We are not a nation of waiters and waitresses." A change in the government shifted priorities: Now Belize is a nation of fishing guides, dive masters, riding instructors and windsurfing dudes.

We tour the bars, drinking the local beer, Belikin Premium. A Belikin won't attack unless accompanied by several rum punches. I remember the Tackle Box bar, at the end of a long pier, looking down into a pen holding sharks and sea turtles. Some fishermen sit at a small table playing serious dominoes. Clack. None of the bars are decorated with lobster pots and fishing nets. In San Pedro, the tools are still tools. There is an occasional chart of the waters off San Pedro and posters of Bob Marley. Someone has plastered an Escape to Wisconsin bumper sticker over one bar.

I remember pushing through the swinging doors of Sandals, listening to a reggae/rap band with one member playing the only two notes he knew on the trombone. Their faces smile the way matches flare. David gets on stage and sings Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville. (Buffett once played in the town square to an audience of 65 people, but that's probably true for every island in the Caribbean.) A girl radiating reckless (continued on page 161)Belize(continued from page 128) abandon dances with a possible accountant, while another guy takes pictures with an auto-everything camera. Then she dances with two or more men at a time. Then she falls onto the stage, knocking over the trombone player and several amps. As she staggers out, she addresses the entire bar: "If you're ever in San Diego...." She is replaced by the most beautiful body in the Caribbean, in a green sheath dress, surrounded by scuba divers. Lonely guys at the bar plot ways to eliminate the divers, hoping that the woman will turn to them in her grief.

At some point in the night, we stop in a tiny store for a torta--a chicken-and-chili-pepper sandwich guaranteed to ignite and burn off the blood-alcohol concentration. Whatever, it works. We awake without an overhang (the local word for the morning after). We are ready for the serious business of having fun.

In the morning, the town is deserted: Everyone is out on the water or under it. David points to a row of brand-new Mistral boards tied to a floating hitching post. "Take one," he says. "The keys are in the ignition. The motor's running." In this case, the motor is a 15-to-20-mile-per-hour trade wind blowing directly on shore. He explains the playground: The reef creates a channel of flat water, perfect for screaming reaches or cruise-till-you-snooze daylong voyages. You can sail eight miles north to the Mexican border or about 30 miles south to Belize City (a yearly race covers the distance in less than three hours). Harry and I choose boards and launch. We spend the morning cruising past anchored catamarans, past fishing docks with grass huts (called palapas), over water so clear your mind defies gravity. Looking down, we see fish, rays. Dolphins arc out of the sea beside our boards. Squids take flight suddenly. (David once had a squid get caught in the flow of air around his sail--it floated there for about five startled seconds.) Frigate birds hang in the sky like kites, waiting, connected to the sea by long threads of anticipation and hunger. Beauty never attacks unless you are open to it.

Here and there, suspended between white sand bottom and the actual surface of the water, are humans. I wonder about the divers. Where's the adrenaline? It seems to me that if boardsailors are the barnstormers of water sports, then divers are the airline pilots. They strike me as control freaks, changing their buoyancy with weights or inflatable vests, calculating their blood/nitrogen content as though it were soil.

Back at our hotel, I stop one of them on the balcony. He is a small-parts manufacturer from Ohio. He was certified the week before in a swimming pool; his first open-water dive happened to be in one of the natural wonders of the world. He petted a nurse shark, touched a parrot fish the size of a beer keg, followed grouper and went down at night to discover legions of fish. He flew, did barrel rolls and faced climbs up coral cliffs. "It's like having forty minutes of sex without climax," he says. "You have to go down again."

Later in the week, I meet Becky and K.C., two white-water rafters from Idaho who have come to Belize for some blue-water adventure. Over drinks one night, K.C. discusses the similarity of diving to flying: "You're twenty feet down and suddenly a crevasse opens up that's sixty feet deep. You go, 'Whoa'--that old fear of falling kicks in--but then you just let it happen. You let your hands drift back, you dive. You do a barrel roll and watch your friends fly in slow motion."

Becky discusses the calm: "It's a given. You want to conserve air. You don't even use your hands to swim. You try to make a tank last forever. But then you see something exquisite and start talking with your hands like an Italian. Next thing you know, it's time to surface."

"Yeah," says K.C, "that's why we have diver chalk boards."

Restraint. Speechlessness. Winding up the spring until it's ready to burst.

Both speak of the sense of contact; diver as E.T. "How do you describe what it's like to enter a world of marvelous creatures who don't realize what assholes we really are?"

On a windless day, I decide to give it a try. I sign on for a glass-bottom-boat cruise, the ultimate coffee-table book. It isn't enough. I sign on for snorkeling and follow schools of indigo- and neon-blue tans, chase long silver gars and delight in angelfish while a guide leads me through canyons of staghorn coral. I look at a fat brown oval known as brain coral and think, So that's where I left it. In the silence imposed by my equipment, cliche echoes like a sound check before a rock concert in an empty hall. "Teeming with life" seems to apply. I become aware of the time that this reef represents. I've stared at the aquamarine face of glaciers and seen time as compressed layers of snow. On the reef, life, freed of gravity, teased by sunlight, has etched wild patterns, razor sharp.

I develop respect for the divers. They go out before seven, again at two, again at seven for night dives. Some are gone all day, on trips to the Blue Hole, a hole 1000 feet" in diameter that goes straight down. The earth's last step. They achieve the same peaceful exhaustion I feel after a day of boardsailing, an honest man's play.

Over drinks one night, I try to explain the appeal of windsurfing: It offers exhilaration and adrenaline, but calm is the ultimate goal. The secret to most sports is keeping your head. Windsurfing is a simple sport, it's just not easy. The basic moves--weight transfer, flipping the sail, trimming--are transformed by shifting conditions. The matador jibe I practice in light air is the kata for the combat of wave sailing. Years ago, I read an interview with a basketball player (Kareem?) who had made this incredible shot, almost upside down, behind the basket--a shot that was replayed on television for weeks, a shot that became known as The Shot. He explained the secret: practice. For 20 years, you teach your body to do a simple lay-up so that when you are upside down and see the backboard and net, your hand performs the familiar, simple, basic everyday shot. It's called being in the zone, when you fasten your feeling to technique, your technique to feeling and let muscle memory do its stuff. I practice the simple moves of windsurfing so that when I am screaming in the liquid smoke of water blown sideways by the wind, my hands will remember to spin my partner, the sail. What I seek is not adrenaline but something called nor-adrenaline--the calm in the eye of the storm. It's clear that the local sailors are in it for the adrenaline.

Tacio--the best of the locals--was given a board by a tourist; he fashioned his own sail, made a harness out of duct tape and taught himself the sport. Taking Tacio under his wing, David formed a sailing club for the sons of fishermen: They traveled to Guatemala and beat every sailor in sight. They are training for the Olympics. The local kids love speed: They race jet skis under the docks, ride dirt bikes through the jungle. Tacio is amazing. After watching him get air off chop the size of raised eyebrows, I stop trying to keep up. Harry suggests a handicap: Tacio should sail with a keg of beer strapped to his board. I am here to work on muscle memory, to lay down layers of technique. When I watch Tacio sail, I see genetic memory, generations of men who work the sea in wooden boats, at play with the fiberglass and fluorescent toys of my sport.

The week is a series of pictures waiting to attack. Every night at sunset, I watch the sandlighters set off for Belize City or return. These gaff-rigged boats, with sails the color of parchment, assume a timeless, coinlike quality. I want to get a picture of a windsurfer in front of the boats. On our last day in San Pedro, Harry and I are practicing light air jibes when one of these ancient rigs sets out. We race it, the three natives laughing at the competition. For three miles, we keep up as the water turns purple. In the dying wind, the huge sail gives the sandlighter an advantage. We sail until it is clear to all the exact dimension of that advantage.

We are like the squid caught in David's foil, only we are trapped by the beauty of the past. I wanted this picture, now I am the picture.

We are not content to stop at sunset. Tacio goes into the dive shop and comes out with Glow Sticks. We crack the tubes and watch the eerie phosphorescence pulse. Tying the sticks to our masts, we go out under a full moon. The sea bed is visible beneath our boards. We sail for hours, surprised when the huge shapes of anchored boats loom up out of the dark, startled when a manta ray sweeps under us. The colors of the sail are different in moonlight, more celestial. We are ghost sailors.

Harry and I have long conversations about culture, about what will remain of San Pedro after a few decades of tourism. We bitch about the electric lights. We get precious, then we get drunk. The next morning, we decide to head upcountry to bash around the bush in search of Mayan culture. The good old days.

We rent a Suzuki Samurai in Belize City and drive inland to the Mountain Pine Ridge reserve area. The Chaa Creek cottages are accessible by four-wheel-drive vehicle or by canoe (a two-hour trip down the river from San Ignacio). They are run by Mick and Lucy Fleming, two characters who look like they belong in a PBS series. They met in Kenya, where they befriended a chap who had caught polio when he performed an autopsy on what he thought was a rabid monkey. It had bitten two guests. Handling its brain had crippled him within 48 hours. The friend talked the Flemings into following his wheelchair to Belize. They ended up buying a piece of mountain bush from an R.A.F. group squadron leader they met in a bar. They started building thatch-roofed cottages surrounded by vivid purple bougainvillaeas. There's no electricity there, just good conversation. I love being in a world that's still inhabited by people like this.

We hook up with Becky and K.C.--the two river runners from Idaho. We decide to hire a guide and tour Tikal--the most impressive Mayan ruins in Central America--just over the border in Guatemala.

Two hours later, we arrive at a city that once housed 50,000 Mayans, who disappeared without explanation 1000 years ago. In the late 1800s, archaeologists discovered a site that had been lost in the jungle for centuries. They saw a valley filled with hills. Under the tallest hill was a 200-foot-high pyramid and beneath the other hills were more than 150 temples, palaces, steles and altars.

We walk among the gray stone mysteries, listening to birds and monkeys cavort in the canopy overhead. The Mayan creation myth says that the gods attempted to create man four times: They wanted a creature that would speak their language, sing their songs, revere and pay homage--any parent's dream. The monkeys were the next-to-last try--godlike in form but capable only of gibberish. The fourth attempt was the Mayan, a man who could see all of time in the moment, who offered to his god the still-beating heart of enemies.

We stop at the museum to look at carved stone, the skeleton of a Mayan ruler unearthed, at shards of pottery carefully pieced together to reveal the faces of God. There is a mystery here. We are seized with the frustration of knowing that it will not be solved in our lifetime.

I spent a week creating muscle memory; I look at stonework that is the muscle memory of an entire culture. Five hundred years of pumping stone, and then nada.

Climbing the stepped faces of these pyramid-temples is an offering of heart. I stand at the top listening to my blood throb, wondering if what I feel is fear, awe or aerobic collapse. For these people, physiology was religion.

I walk around a ledge on top of one of the temples, 150 feet above the jungle floor. As I go around a corner, a cloud of hornets (they seem to guard the tops of ruins) gather round my head. If they sting, if I flinch, I will fall off the ledge, as simple as that. I look at a hornet as large as my life, try to sense the pain and put it behind me. "Nice hornet. You know, we have a car named after you back in the States."

I make it around, down and on to the major plaza. The climb up temple two is just this side of technical. At the top, a woman from San Francisco is panicking. I relieve her of her camera and say, "This is not the time to be preoccupied with material possessions; not when one misstep could cost you your life."

Distraction is better than a slap in the face, so I continue: "Is this thing auto-focus? Do you think it's fast enough to catch a falling body? If you plummet, remember to look up. Newsweek never prints the back of someone's head, even when it's splattered over a thousand-year-old sacrificial altar."

She makes it down, then it's my turn. I sing a windsurfing song a cappella. It is my offering to the gods, New Age surf music.

Becky hears me singing and insists on introducing us that night to David and Melinda, a couple from Seattle. David sings background vocals on commercials. The day before, while exploring a 400-foot cavern filled with stalactites, he sat Melinda down by a pool of clear water and walked round her in a circle, singing all four parts of My Girl.

That night, we sit in a thatch-roofed cottage, watching the moonlight fall on hills covered with fireflies and try to make our voices fit. We are archaeologists playing with shards of pop culture. We sing street-corner doo-wop, Little Feat, Smokey Robinson, John Prine, Lyle Lovett. The bits of sound seem to form the face of a smiling god.

"The Belizean government put a low priority on tourism: 'We are not a nation of waiters.' "

" 'It's like having forty minutes of sex without climax,' he says. 'You have to go down again.' "