Musician Frank Zappa famously said that “you can’t be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer.” In his memory, I embarked on a quest to find the best beer in each of the Central American countries we visited, including Belize. It’s a dirty job, but someone’s gotta do it. Right?
Author: Tom Peeters
Dangriga, Belize: things you should and shouldn’t do in Belize’s cultural capital
First of all, before anyone gets any big ideas about the concept of cultural capital: Dangriga is no Paris, Rome or even Mol. It mainly got its status as the hub for Belize’s contingent of Garifuna.
But even though Dangriga does not feature highly on most tourists’ lists of places to visit in Belize, we thoroughly enjoyed our time in this scruffy seaside town.
Here are the five things you should and one you definitely shouldn’t do in Dangriga:
Five things we learned about the Maya in Central America
Who doesn’t know the game in which one person says a word and the other one completes with the first thing that pops into your head? I have no idea about the purpose of the game, except to prove that you have a dirty mind. Until a year ago, if you’d asked me to play and threw the word ‘Maya’ at me, I’d probably have replied ‘the bee’.
What about you? Be honest. Unless you’ve visited Central America or have a degree in history, you likely don’t know much about the Maya. Continue Reading →
Between Gratitude and Hope on the Lenca Trail: travels into the mountainous west of Honduras
When thinking about indigenous people in Central America, the Maya are usually the ones that come to mind. We had our fair share/overdose of Maya culture in Belize and in Guatemala. Honduras has Maya too – exemplified by the ruins of Copán which we’d visit later in our trip. The most numerous indigenous group in this country, however, are the Lenca. They’re famous for their tenacity and their fluorescent headdresses. A sharp tourism marketing genius dubbed their homeland the Ruta Lenca or Lenca Trail. We were keen to explore those rugged and inhospitable mountains of southwestern Honduras and the string of traditional villages that lies within them. Continue Reading →
Laguna Chicabal, a sacred volcano lake, or: How I Learned to Stop Being Impatience and Love the Slowness
The evening before our trip to Laguna Chicabal, we watched a cartoon called Zootopia. Don’t judge! When spending all day going to Spanish classes and trying to cram as many irregular verbs in your head as possible, we all need time to cool down our slowly sautéed brains. For those less educated in animated films, Zootopia is about Judy Hobbs, a rabbit from Bunnyburrow who tries to make it as a police detective in the big city.
Assigned a case about a dozen missing predators, Hobbs and her unlikely partner Nick Wilde, a red fox, head to the Department of Mammal Vehicles to have a plate run. Alas, the department is staffed entirely by three-toed slots which are stamping and stapling forms at a speed that would make the latter Pope John Paul II cringe. It’s easily the best scene of the film, and I laughed my head off. But Anete, as ever more prescient, asked: “Would you be laughing if it happened to you? Continue Reading →