Dispatch from Monkey River Town, Belize
Text, photographs and web design by Erik Gauger

Everything is going just fine. We have made it to this small dot of a country in the underarm of the Yucatan Peninsula, on the Caribbean coast. We are leaving the small Garifuna fishing village where we spent the night hidden in tents in the underbrush of a beach. But Vance starts screaming. You know, not the scream of anguish - the scream of the willies. The monkey scream. Pulls off his shoe, and this giant spider crawls out - you know, a furry half-dollar that starts running all over the truck.

"I felt this pulsing in my shoe. Something tapping," Vance said. Then he yells. Not the yell of the willies, but the yell of the creeps. "The spider was just trying to get out of my shoe."

The spider crawls under the floor mat, underneath the dashboard, and we can't find him. This would mean the bugger would be creeping under the floor mat for the duration of our route to Monkey River Town.

There is a lesson with this spider. It is the first rule of tropical camping. Don't leave your shoes out at night. That goes along with the second rule. Always keep your tent zipper closed. The third rule is probably this: cover your body in deet. We had acquired a large amount of ninety-percent deet. A potion of mosquito repellent that is so powerful it stains your clothes and swells your skin into rash.

Malaria, yellow fever, Dengue fever and cholera are not fatal if treated appropriately, but they are also avoidable with a healthy lathering of deet. The real bugger you have to watch for in the Caribbean lowlands of Central America, however, is the fer-de-lance. This pit-viper has a bone in its body that vibrates proportionately to the amount of weight of a nearby animal, allowing it the sense to estimate how much venom to inject you with to send you to your grave based on a calculation of your weight. The fer-de-lance, approximating the weight of a horse-bound jungle traveler and his horse, has been noted to slash the horse with an amount of venom based on both the horse and the rider.

This lends credence to sticking to the trail. Nobody walks outside of trails in the dense riverine jungles of Central America. Even the Mayans who inhabited this region built paths and roads. Too dense to walk, too dangerous to consider.