THE REEF: The dorado and barracuda pictured left were caught just outside the reef on the one day winds were calm enough to let us through. Other days we fished inside the reef for snapper, jack and smaller barracuda. The Belize reef is the 2nd largest in the world, after the Great Barrier reef. Ocean acidification threatens the reefs and the corals which build them. According to some scientists, the Belize reef could be dead by 2050. Get your fishing in soon.
LEAVING BELIZE: A few extra Belizean dollars to get rid of, Lin drops by the arts/gift store on the way to the airport. We get a send-off; they’re playing Credence Clearwater. “Me mom’s music”, the salesgirl explains. Old hippies run the world down here.
TWO CRIMINALS: To get from Belize to Guadalajara, it’s either a 12 hour layover in Mexico City, or we catch the puddle jumper from the island to Belize City Airport. Then United to Houston, stopover, United to Guadalajara. Three flights, three countries, twice through customs. Exhausting day. I’m a smuggler: smuggling frozen fish in a cooler inside my duffel to Mexico. (Which is soaked by the time we get to Mexico). Meanwhile Lin gets tagged as one of three arbitrarily chosen passengers for a full screening. Beep! – beep! – flash! – flash! my god, it’s a SUICIDE BOMBER carrying EXPLOSIVES IN HER SHOES! hands on their gunboats, ICE walks her through a 2nd time. Machines don’t react. Nothing. No headlines. Our skies are safe. (Oh, and just for the irony, I watch two movies on the two flights — both about elderly criminals).
RANCHO LA SALUD: Mexico’s first co-housing community. We’ll have our own electric grid (solar). Our own water wells and sewage system. A few dogs and somebody’s horse that trotted in one day and decided to pasture here. Will grow a lot of our own food and herbs, including greenhouses for a bottling plant for ginseng and turmeric pro-biotic sodas. Mountains behind, lakefront on Lake Chapala, Mexico’s biggest lake. Our welcome meal includes the fish I’ve brought. Some of us don’t speak much Spanish. At least one doesn’t speak much English. I’m startled to discover we also have a Lakota inIpi (sweat lodge). Ceremony conducted by a Lakota shaman and local Indian shaman together. I like that idea. Haven’t met them yet.
I’m here because when we traveled through last year, I was visiting friends I lived with back in the 1990’s. Lin was here 24 hours and decided she was moving here; I could come along or not. The Jarvis house was falling apart. I’d had my spirit dreams about this part of the world.
