Travel Photography > Isthmus > Monkey River, Belize

We drive south on the one highway that cuts through the Maya Mountains to Belize's southern border, ending up at the Cockscomb Basin, a mountain jungle sanctuary for the jaguar, where there are more jaguars than anywhere in the world. The Cockscomb is both hot and humid; even at night, beads of sweat drip down around your eyebrows. Hot, humid, and noisy; here there are tree frogs croaking, and a thousand birds squawking. Conversation pauses for the occasional overzealous crooning bird to finish a skit.

Vicente, the night warden of the Cockscomb Basin Jaguar Preserve, joins us over beer at our campsite under a moonless night.

"I am from Red Bank," he says, "in Toledo District. I was a banana farmer, but since the hurricane I needed to find new work. So I come here."

"Red Bank is a Mayan town?" I ask.

"Yes, I am Kekchi. We are the people from the south. We have a different language than the Mopan and Yucatec, but we like to think of all the Mayans as one people."

"And that's your native language?"

"Yes, Kekchi. I learn English and Spanish and Creole because those are the languages of Belize, but I was born first speaking Kekchi. "I am trying to pay for high school for my kids. But it is expensive. Almost four hundred dollars to get to the next level."

Vicente, like anyone in any country who is not trying to sell you anything, is genuinely interested both in telling the story of his world - Toledo - and asking about ours.

There are four of us in the jungle. Pierre, a Frenchman, is traveling from Houston to Tierra del Fuego, the southernmost tip of South America, by car. Pierre was one of those guys who always gave up his job for travel. He had driven Africa north to south. He recently drove to Costa Rica to meet a friend. "Its funny," he said, "there was some kind of civil war in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, but the only place I couldn't get to was Panama, because the U.S. had just attacked Noriega."

I asked Vance and Pierre if they would like to go into the jungle to look for jaguars. It was, after all, a moonless night. Jaguars rely on complete darkness to hunt. They smell, they see well. They pounce. They go for monkeys and turtles and turkeys. They like the smell of flesh.

I am the kind of person who jumps at the sight of a spider, gets the creepy-crawlies from bugs, and howls at snakes. So to walk into the jungle on a moonless night gives me the willies. Three miles in, with the Frenchman yapping about the things that French people yap about, I ask if either of them have the willies. Both assure me otherwise. I find this odd; in our walks in the jungle during the day, there is a constant sense of encroachment; of snakes under the brush, of malarial mosquitoes, of getting lost. At night, and yes I certainly have the willies, the jungle seems comfortable, and relaxing. Here, too deep even for the sound of the birds, the shrub layer is biological silence. Everything moves, grows, eats and kills in quiet.

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