Travel Photography > Isthmus > Monkey River, Belize

The botfly infests Southern Belize, where we are headed. This fellow makes a clean round incision on your skin, uses a poison to numb your senses so you cannot feel him placing larvae under your skin. The larva incubates, sticks a little snorkel out of your skin to breathe, and then hatches and flys away.

With all of this goodness in store, I figured this would be the perfect place to answer that unanswerable question. "Do you think that we'll find the answer to life here?" I asked Vance.

Small places have a way of having large voices. Singapore, for its rules, Gibraltar, for being British, Israel, for its violence, and Tonga, for its overeating. But Belize has little voice in the world. Belize is not much bigger than Israel, but Belize is no barking rat-dog. The Caribbean lowlands are a place of historical turbulence; left-wing insurgencies, right-wing executioners, drug cartels, murderous Spaniards, barbarous Pirates. In all of this, Belize's short modern history is one of inventive politics and an uncommon culture, in complete ambivalence to the rest of Central America.

We met Doug Singh at his home just north of Belize City. Mr. Singh, Chairperson of the opposition party, the United Democratic Party, is running against the Senator from his district. "Will you win?" I ask.

"I don't know. You know, the other guy is very popular. But the current government has promised a lot of things they can't deliver. They promised jobs and lower taxes. They delivered on neither. They've promised more domestic development and construction jobs, but all the building materials are imported, so you still have more money leaving Belize than staying in-country."

Doug and his wife, like many other couples in Belize, are part of the complex ethnic mix of the country. He explains about the Garifuna, a mix of former black slaves and Carib Indians, who escaped to Southern Belize. He talks about the Creoles; a mix of black and European. He mentions the Mennonites from Austria, who drive around in buggies. And the Lebanese, and the Chinese, who retreated from Northern China when the Japanese began their slaughtering. He talks about the difference between Latinos and Ladinos. The former being a straight up mix between Spanish and Mayan. The Ladino's ethnicity is so mixed, it's pretty much a wrap-together phrase for 'I've got it all.' The Mayans themselves, the only natives of Belize, often speak everybody else's language as well as their own.

Doug himself is East Indian. When Belize was British Honduras, the Indian's farming expertise was needed on the banana plantations. His wife is Puerto Rican. There are a lot of shades of pink and brown in Belize. Too many, perhaps, for anyone to get too worked up about it.

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