Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and Belize

Since I last updated this blog, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. died. This is a travel blog and not an obituary, but his death, in particular, is worth mentioning. The title of this blog -- "...and so on" -- is plagiarized directly from his novels. Read a couple of his books and you will find that he sprinkles this combination of words throughout quite a few of them. "...And so on" works well as a title to a travel blog, I thought, and beyond that I really just like the way he uses it: often times "and so on" is used abruptly and flippantly at the end of a sentence, when more information is expected, or when it could even, in fact, be useful to the reader. My use of this as a title was an in-joke that I imagined very few people would understand (probably none), and I also used "and so on" directly in a couple of my entries, ending a few sentences in much the same way that Kurt Vonnegut does in his novels. (Or I attempted to, as the case may be.) I had planned to mention all of this in passing as I wrapped up the blog -- as a recent university graduate, not citing sources makes me feel guilty and fills me with shame -- but this is a better time than any. Surely I am joining others in saying, "God Bless You, Mr. Vonnegut!" You wrote enjoyable fiction.


My meeting with Joe Barolo at the airport in Belize City was somewhat stressful. Like a good 20's-something traveler, Joe had given me the absolute minimum of information necessary to meet him at the airport. "I arrive around 10 AM," he had written in his last e-mail. It was the Saturday of Easter weekend, and had I not been able to find Joe at the airport, I am not sure how we would have found each other; nearly every business in Belize City was closed for the weekend and neither Joe nor I had phones. After walking circles around the airport to find him, then trying to obtain passenger lists from a Continental airlines representative, I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned around. "They lost my luggage," Joe said, and indeed they had.

Fortunately, Caye Caulker, Belize is one of the better areas of the world to not have one's luggage. A small island in the Caribbean, there is not a single paved road on the island. Walking too quickly around town will result in constant admonitions from the locals to "Slow down, mon!" , and all transportation is via golf-cart. For the approximately 72 hours that it took for Joe to finally receive his luggage, nobody appeared to notice or care that he was not wearing any shoes.

The main attraction to Caye Caulker is its status as the launching point for diving the world-famous "Blue Hole," which Joe and I, in fact, dived (dove?). We had heard from a couple of people that it was an "okay" dive, and expensive for what the experience actually entailed. Joe and I completely disagreed. The site takes divers immediately down to 130 feet, where it begins to get quite dark and nitrogen narcosis sets in for approximately 50% of the divers (me!). The Blue Hole was formerly a cave, so at this depth divers can swim through giant, overhanging stalactites and look down into what appears to be an unending wall of dark, blue water. This is unlike any dive I have ever experienced, and, as Joe said, it feels as if you are in outer space. The ascent took us through two schools of 8-10 foot reef sharks, lazily swimming above us.

While on Caye Caulker we also took a snorkeling trip and did a hike around the north part of the Caye, where we spent approximately 30 minutes watching a stand off between some sort of injured Belizean hawk and a dog that was mildly interested in ending the injured hawk's life. Joe and I rooted heavily for the dog, but both animals ended up walking away from the confrontation.

Anecdotes never tell the whole story, but I will include one as an example of life on Caye Caulker. Joe and I had picked up breakfast to go -- eggs, beans, and tortillas -- and decided to eat it at the picnic table of the hostel where we were staying. Suddenly, from the side of hostel the proprietress of the hostel piped up: "Young man," she yelled to Joe, "the old man wants to give you some fish." "What?" Joe asked, confused. "The old man wants to give you some fish!" she repeated, and pointed to an old man at the entrance to the hostel's sandy courtyard. There stood a shriveled, hunched-over, nearly toothless old man, and indeed he had two small fishes in his hand and was beckoning Joe. Joe rose from the table, trying to assess logically where this situation was leading. He walked over to the man and had a 5 minute conversation with him. It was a conversation where Joe understood, as he put it, "about 20 words." The man was an alcoholic, and what Joe did glean from the conversation was that the old man wanted to trade the fish for rum. What luck! One of the other hostelers had left a nearly finished bottle of rum on top of the refrigerator, which we happily traded away for the two fish. Naturally, Joe and I had no idea what to do with these fish, so we wrapped them up in an old cereal bag and placed them in the refrigerator with the intent to later barbecue them. We never managed to accomplish this, and unless someone has since cleaned the refrigerator, they are probably in the first stages of decomposition. Oops.

From Caye Caulker we headed inland to Orange Walk, access point to the Mayan ruins of Lamanai. The ruins are visited by a 1.5 hour river boat-ride, which is equally as, if not more , enjoyable than the ruins themselves. We saw a crocodile (briefly), a number of birds, some bats, and many species of white, sweaty, cruise-boaters doing the same trip as us. Unforunately, this portion of the trip coincided with a five day heat wave that was to break 100 degrees every day. Egad. Even the Belizeans were complaining. Ascending a Mayan pyramid in this weather is not really very enjoyable, but we did it anyway. Later we soaked in the pool of our hotel, where, it appeared to Joe and I, most of the gangsters and thugs of Orange Walk hang out smoking cigarettes and spliffs. The hotel where we were staying had outstanding satellite television, and as this was the first time in months that I had access to such a luxury, one of the evenings saw Joe and I watch six hours of television while laying in bed and drinking cuba libres. Felix Hernandez nearly no-hit the Red Sox, and I was snug as a bug.

After a long day of travel, we reached the final destination of our trip: Placencia, Belize. Placencia is one long peninsula and feels like an island. Once again, island mentality prevailed, and Joe and I adapted ourselves and took things as slowly as possible. We rented a tandem bicycle one day,which resulted in more than a few curious glances, and spent many afternoons relaxing, reading, and swimming. We befriended two young Danish girls, and Joe proceeded to introduce them to the Joseph Barolo brand of American jingoism. After somehow persuading them to perform a duet of the Danish national anthem, Joe laughingly informed them that their national anthem sounded "nice, but is not a real national anthem." Joe began many references to America with lines like, "In America, where we invented freedom...", when such a statement was unecessary or not relevant to the story. One of the girls would explain something about Denmark, and Joe would segue with, "Well, in a real country...." Later, they politely asked Joe where he would be flying to from Belize City, and his response was in good form : "Well, I'm flying back to America, so I guess I'm flying to... paradise...?" Somehow the Danish girls tolerated these statements in good humor. Like a good American, Joe ate 6 cheesburgers during his 10 days with me in Belize. A few of them were eaten as post-dinner snacks.

During one evening in Placencia, the scariest event of my trip took place (an apt reader will note that this must be quite scary, indeed, if it was to be more scary than the incident in Thailand with Gremlin the cat). You know how once in a while you will wake up in the middle of the night and think that you see someone in your room? Quickly you realize that it is not a person, in fact, but not before a quick rush of adrenaline surges through your body. In Placencia, and for the first time in my life, I woke up in the middle of the night to find someone actually standing in my room.

Joe and I had a double room at the hotel, with my bed next to the door. I sleep with ear-plugs, but something roused me enough to cause me to turn over and take a look toward the door. The door was open (very stupidly we failed to lock it that night), and about two steps inside the room was a skinny, skull-cap toting Belizean of about 30 years old. He was staring at Joe's bed, not looking at me, but I quickly jumped up in bed and shouted at him, "WHAT DO YOU WANT?!?" At this point I was in a crouching position and looking to see if he had a weapon. He responded to me, but with the ear-plugs still in I could not hear his response, so again I shouted "WHAT DO YOU WANT?!?" Again he answered, more calmly than I had expected, and after removing my ear-plugs he explained he was looking for "water." He went on to tell me that he was getting water for a couple of Germans, and made an inexplicable flapping motion with his hands. It was then that I realized he was drunk or high on something, and I told him that I was not going to give him my only bottle of water. The situation ended bizarrely. He asked if he could have a sip from my water bottle, to which I confusingly obliged, and he explained that his name was Junior and that we should meet him at a dance the following night. He acted like we were friends, repeated that he hoped to see us at the Tipsy Tuna bar that next evening, gave me his knuckles as a sign of comraderie, and left. What the hell had just happened?

Joe certainly could not answer this question. He slept through the whole goddamned thing! How is this possible, you might ask, with my yelling at Junior? I asked Joe the same question, and he responded that he had simply assumed that I was talking to someone through the screen window. What an assumption! At the time he was actually angry at me for doing this in the middle of the night, and about two minutes after Junior had left -- and while I was still trying to slow my heart rate -- Joe grumpily asked me to lock the door. I slept pretty poorly the rest of the night, thinking all the while about Junior and his unquenchable midnight thirst. The following night we went to the bar and I asked around to find Junior, hoping to explain to him the enormity of his error in judgment. Junior was not to be found.

Now I am in Guatemala with a friend of mine from Seattle, Matt. I met up with Matt in Guatemala City two nights ago, and now we are enjoying the quaint, colonial town of Antigua. We will travel together for two weeks, ending in San Salvador, El Salvador, the gem of Central America.

On Costa Rica and Serendipity

I left off waiting for my parents to arrive in slummy San Jose. As I write this entry it is now my last day in San Jose, and I must say that the city is more endearing than I first thought; San Jose, like fine wine, simply takes time. Pregnant street-dwellers aside, the city has a haphazard ecclecticism (this could also read "lack of urban planning") that keeps things, well, interesting.

The night before my parent's arrival I decided to attend a concert/symphony at the National Theater in San Jose, indisputably the nicest building in the entire city. The concert, itself, was unnotable (to a symphonic layman, anyway), except for what happened before entering the building: as I was about to enter through the iron gate that leads to the double-doors of the theater, a black car with tinted windows decided that, in fact, I was not going to enter through the gates at that particular moment. The car wasn't exactly going to run me over -- the driver was driving 5 MPH or so -- but it was very clear that he was not going to stop for me. The vehicle was either official-looking or slightly gangsterish; common sense dictated that I move out of its way. Out of the back of the black car stepped a crisply dressed, albeit short, Costa Rican man. Standing next to me at that point was a Costa Rican guy of about my age who leaned over to whisper to his friend: "El Presidente," he said, pointing at the man who had just exited the vehicle. I looked back at the official-looking man, who had no visible bodyguards, and then asked the Costa Rican boy, "¿El Presidente de que?" "De Costa Rica," he explained, and I realized that I was standing within arm's length of the President of Costa Rica, Oscar Arias. I turned to Mr. Arias, said "Hola" to him, and he gave me a polite nod of the head. This was the extent of the exchange; we both then entered the theater (I to the third floor, Mr. Arias to the front row). I would love to have this moment with him again, as there are a thousand things I might have said to the Costa Rican President: "Mr. Arias, as a citizen of the United States of America, it is an honor present to you the McDonald's Chicken McNuggets that, as an American, I carry with me in my pockets. I'm Lovin' It!"

My parents and younger sister arrived the following evening, and the next morning we prop-planed down to Drake Bay in southwest Costa Rica. The town of Drake is undeveloped (our baggage was delivered by tractor to our cabins), and the cabins are designed in a classy, if not minimalistic, fashion. Mornings began with hot, Costa Rican coffee served to our door-step, which overlooked Drake Bay and a rising sun that was early for my tastes (6 AM). The town of Drake serves as a springboard for viewing the absurdly plentiful wildlife of the peninsula, and four of the five days saw our family taking "adventures" to do so. We went SCUBA diving/snorkeling the first day, went for a 2.5 hour hike to a secluded bay for snorkeling on the second day, did a combined horseback ride/zip-line canopy tour that left most of us with horrendously chafed legs and asses on the third day, and on the fourth did a guided tour through Corcovado National Park.

As I mentioned, it is the wildlife that is the draw to this area. We saw three types of monkeys -- spider, howler, and white-faced capuchin -- of which a troupe of the latter decided to spend an evening tromping and stomping the roof and trees of our cabin. We saw a sloth, two crocodiles, birds birds birds (the Scarlet Macaw was king), a Basilisk lizard, Jesus Christ lizards, a racoony sort of thing, and so on. On one of our boat trips (boats are still the preferred method of transportation), we spent about half an hour circling through a pod of 80-100 spotted dolphins, who were polite enough to put on a show for us and left us thankful for the existence of dolphins. After these excursions we enjoyed slow lunches with fresh juice, followed by afternoons of reading and hammocking. Dinners were communal and plentiful, and a beer or two (or gin and tonic or two) was all we needed to put us instantly to sleep not long after last of the sunlight had disappeared. It was a very, very good week with my family.

As the title of this blog mentions serendipity, I will explain the second instance of being at the right place at the right time (for the less perceptive, the first ocurred at the National Theater). After SCUBA diving and snorkeling off of Isla del Cano, a small island off the west coast of Costa Rica, our boat operators dropped us on this (very) small island for lunch. Suddenly, two of my good friends from Seattle, Alex Casey and Ana Torve, walked up and said hello. I had no idea they were in Costa Rica, and last they had heard I was simply "traveling around the world." It was good to see them, and we had about an hour to catch up with each other before their boat zipped them back to the main-land. Sing along! "It's a world of laughter, a world of tears..."

My younger sister and parents flew home, and two days later my buddy Nicko arrived in San Jose . Nicko and I are good friends: we lived in a shared-house together last year, a rental house where Nicko and I managed to spread 125,000 "common mint" seeds in the backyard to see if we could successfully introduce and cultivate this wonderfully invasive species in an urban environment. We were surprised to find that we could not.

We spent a day together in San Jose, and the evening saw us take advantage of one of those San Jose nuances that has caused me to become increasingly fond of the city: there is a video game arcade in San Jose that has video games exclusively from the 80's and early 90's. Street Fighter? Yes. Tekken? You got it. 1943? Dig. I convinced two Canadians to join Nicko and I, and together we drank beer and played video games. Nicko and I placed 4th and 5th, respectively, on the all-time high-score list for "1943."

We then headed to Cahuita on the Caribbean side of Costa Rica, a town that is laid back to the point of zombie-hood. The locals have a Caribbean, island-type mentality that contributes to this, but the tourists are not far behind; the oppressive heat, coupled with the copious consumption of marijuana, creates a scene where people seem to be milling about aimlessly all day long. Nicko and I had a very difficult time finding a hotel, as nearly all the hotel owners were nowhere to be found. There is not a paved road in the town, and a couple of drug-selling locals seem to have sampled too much of their own.

Nicko and I were productive, though. Our first day was spent on a beach where, inexplicably, a pack of approximately a dozen horses went racing down the beach; there was no owner in sight. Our second day we took two-hour surf lessons, and on our third day we took a four mile hike through a national park, where we saw a lot of monkeys (and a dead one, still hanging upside down by its tail!).

On day one we also visited the Afro-Caribbean museum of Cahuita, the most improbable museum I have ever seen. Nicko and I first passed this "museum" on rented bicycles: it is in the living room of a dilapidated house, with a bedsheet functioning as a "door" to the living room and music BOOMING out of the house. The music sounded like a Caribbean version of The Doors -- it was very, very keyboard-heavy. As this was unlike any museum I had previously seen (or heard), Nicko and I promptly entered the museum and met Sankey, the owner.

Sankey is a great guy -- he is a big black man with dread-locks and an infectious laugh -- but I have to say that he sort of half-asses it when it comes to entrepreneurship. His "museum" had some old work equipment, as well as an old, Mercedes-Benz bicycle, but it was in the middle of his living room. He also had a sign up for a "sauna" in the back, which didn't seem to ever have existed. According to a local surf-instructor, Sankey also constructed home-made, tent-style accomodations in his backyard for tourists. It was a plan that never took off.

But -- BUT! -- Sankey loves music! It turned out that the keyboard we had heard upon entering the "museum" was Sankey, himself. His real passion was the bass, and after I told Sankey that Nicko plays guitar and I play the keyboard, we arranged a jam session for the following afternoon. Our jam session lasted about three and a half hours and we came up with some pretty good music. All of us were plugged into an amplifier in the living room, and Sanke cranked it up well enough that the neighbors were forced to listen to us. The majority of Sanke's musical repertoire, naturally, is Caribbean music, and his bass-playing reflected that fact. Rhythmically it is a completely different style than anything Nicko and I are used to, but we had a good time with it. Our set ended not too long after a clinically crazy town resident -- a grey-haired, former New Yorker named Michael who somehow managed to get himself down to Cahuita, Costa Rica and then stayed there -- burst in the living room through the bed-sheet door and tried to add his harmonica to the mix. He was terribly drunk and shrieking and almost knocked over the keyboard.

From Cahuita Nicko and I headed to Rio Cuarto, in northern Costa Rica. On my flight from Puerto Rico to Costa Rica I met Carlos Colon, a retired Puerto Rican man of about 45 years-old who now owns a farm in Rio Cuarto. Generously, he extended an invitation for me to visit, and Nicko and I spent two days in Rio Cuarto with him. He treated us to an outstanding, river-lobster dinner in town the first night, and Nicko and I spent a half-day fishing in the lake on his property. (I caught one fish and threw it back.) His farm is 75 acres, he has about thirty head of cattle and a few goats, and everything is green. Absolutely exhausted from fishing (please read this as a joke), Nicko and I retreated to the hills of Rio Cuarto for five hours of thermal pools. We could not find Carlos the following morning, so we caught a bus and headed back to San Jose.

Now I am back in San Jose, Nicko having departed very early this morning. It is my last night in San Jose, and although I would like to celebrate that fact, it is Maundy Thursday and everything -- everything -- is closed. Tomorrow I fly to Belize, where I begin a ten-day excursion with one Joseph Barolo, a friend of mine from California who has been known to wear bunny suits publicly. More to come.