by Levison Wood
‘What are they saying?’ asked Alberto, as a bunch of young men hustled to get our attention.
‘I can barely understand it myself.’
‘I thought you said they speak English.’
‘We’re speakin’ English, man,’ said a young black man with dreadlocks down to his waist.
He had a beer in one hand and a joint of marijuana in the other. ‘You wan’ some special stuff?’
We politely declined. I was hoping we’d find a taxi driver so that we could send our bags ahead to a hotel for the night, but there were no cars in sight.
‘Ain’t no taxis ’ere, man,’ said another Rasta, whose phone was blaring out a Bob Marley track from inside his pocket. ‘Only carts.’ He pointed to a row of electric golf buggies. ‘Take one a dem.’
It turned out that there are no taxis allowed on the island, in fact there are almost no cars at all. It’s so small that people walk. So we walked along the beach, picking our way through the mess. Rotting palm leaves floated in the turquoise shallows as we stepped over the remains of someone’s refrigerator, now half-buried in the sand.
‘It’s the price we pay for living on the Caribbean,’ said Alberto. ‘You just have to accept it as part of life.’
I noticed a group of men hanging around a half-destroyed house, its tin roof dangling precariously from the rafters. It was barely noon, but they all seemed drunk.
‘Hey man, are you David Hasslehoff?’ shouted one of the men towards us. I didn’t ask if he was referring to me or Alberto.
‘Where are you from?’ another bellowed.
I told him.
‘England? Alright mate. Lovely jubbly,’ he affected his best cockney drawl whilst simultaneously taking an enormous swig straight from a bottle of hard liquor. ‘My name is Joe.’
I asked Joe about the hurricane.
‘I lost everything. We don’t have nothing,’ he said. ‘Look,’ he pointed to the ground. ‘Look at my golf cart, it don’t have no wheels.’
I looked down to see a small, plastic children’s car which did indeed seem to be missing its wheels.
The men erupted with gin-fuelled laughter. The Belizeans, despite their misfortune, it seemed, still maintained a sense of humour.
I thought back to the last time I was in Belize with the Army almost a decade ago. I was reminded of that same black humour when I worked alongside the troops of the Belize Defence Force. Laid-back to the point of being almost horizontal in their attitude to work, at least they saw the funny side to life and nothing seemed to bother them.
For some reason, Belize had been generally overlooked by the Spanish conquistadors and despite the fact that the Spanish officially laid claim to all of Central America, this little coastal region soon became a haven for all sorts of people fleeing their tyranny. It wasn’t first settled until 1638, though, when it became a hideaway for pirates and buccaneers from England and Scotland, as well as escaped black slaves fleeing the islands of the Caribbean. A buccaneer and mate of Sir Walter Raleigh called Peter Wallace was one of the first Europeans to properly explore the mangroves and waterways in the area. Legend has it that when he built a fort and a few huts at the mouth of a river, the natives, who couldn’t pronounce Wallace, called it Vallis, since they were used to hearing Spanish-sounding names. That, over time, turned into Ballis, and then of course Belize.
A hundred and fifty years later, the British had fully settled in Belize after fighting numerous battles with the Spanish fleet in the emerald waters. It wasn’t gold that they were after, though, it was timber. The jungle provided a seemingly endless supply of teak, pine and mahogany, which was exported to fund the fledgling empire. The nation of British Honduras was created, the only English-speaking country in the entire region.
The British legacy wasn’t confined to the humour and language, though. We arrived at Belize City a few days later and found ourselves in a place that felt at once familiar, yet also alien. There is the Anglican cathedral and the red postboxes; the Queen’s initials standing proudly on street corners, and her head still adorning their dollar bills. Yet there is an unmistakable West Indian feel to the place, in the manners, the dress, the attitude of its inhabitants. Like much of coastal Central America, most of the population are the descendants of African slaves and their creole children. That said, there are plenty of indigenous Mayans and Spanish speakers, too.
The scene had something romantic in its vibrancy, like a pantomime, perhaps; there were Chinese shopkeepers with parrots for pets, and the melon-selling Mennonites with their pale skin and eighteenth-century German costumes. Filipino sailors jostled for pavement space with money men in Hawaiian shirts and panama hats. It looked like a theatre stage for a pirate adventure and I half-expected Captain Jack Sparrow to come swinging into the act. Every shade of skin colour was represented in the markets and streets of the ramshackle town. To call it a city would be an overstatement. Less than sixty thousand people live there, but it seemed that they did so in pretty decent harmony. For the moment at least, their biggest battle was against nature.
‘Looks like that neighbourhood has been pretty badly smashed,’ said Alberto, as we walked out of the town centre and into the Yabro district, south of the Belize river. Young men were busy clearing the rubble from a collapsed house as we walked by. There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason as to how the hurricane had destroyed some houses and spared others.
‘It must by the quality of the construction,’ I said to Alberto, looking around. Most of the houses were made of wood with tin roofs, surrounded by concrete walls.
‘I’m not so sure, they all look pretty shitty,’ said my guide. ‘I don’t understand how any of them survived.’
‘God!’ shouted a young black man. He was tall and muscular and had been throwing bits of wood into a pile. Across his chest, I could just make out a tattoo of some numbers, but he was black to the point of blueness. His dreadlocks poured down his spine like a cascading waterfall.
‘God, I tell you. He’s da one who saved us. Dis hurricane, it was punishment for de evils we bin doin’.’
Before I could ask what evils, he carried on, not really caring whether we listened or not.
‘Dis place is like Sodom and Gomorrah. People out drinkin’, girls out smokin’ drugs, whores and de rich people goin’ around corruptin’. Dis is what we get. God will smash dem houses of dem dat have sinned, an’ save dem who ain’t.’
‘And what happened to your house?’ said Alberto, although the damage was plain to see.
The man chuckled to himself. ‘Ma house is smashed to pieces. I have most definitely been a-sinnin’.’
We left the outskirts of Belize City behind and embarked on a long slog towards the west. We should have been walking south, but the only border open with Guatemala was towards the setting sun. In the distance, as the highway disappeared in a straight line for as far as the eye could see, were the rolling hills of Pine Ridge Mountain, and beyond that, some of the toughest jungle in the world.
9
Boot Camp
It had been over nine years since I’d last been in Belize, but as I stepped into the little British Army camp the memories came flooding back. Above the corrugated-iron roof of the headquarters building flew the Union Jack. It was like every other Army camp in most respects. Cheaply built, grim-looking, functional, with those awful D-shaped barracks that hadn’t changed since the Second World War. I was waved in by a Belize Defence Force sergeant, who pointed out the building where I’d find the Colonel. It was crammed behind the potable water tank and a few palm trees.
As I walked through the gate, I remembered the last time I’d been here was in the desperate search for my soldier who’d gone AWOL with a prostitute in Mexico, and was found after three days minus his shirt and passport. I wondered if the latest batch of recruits got up to such mischief.
‘No R&R for this lot,’ said the Colonel, a gruff Lancastrian who’d risen through the ranks over the course of thirty-odd years to the heady
glory of running a ramshackle camp in a former colony that had been independent since 1981. ‘They spent half of last week twiddling their thumbs in the hurricane shelter as Earl battered the place. They’re behind on training and we’ve got a general visiting this week.’
I didn’t envy him. Or the students for that matter. When generals visit anywhere, the whole place turns into pandemonium as careers are made or lost. Shouting gets louder and blood pressures rise. Nope, I was glad to be free of all that for now. Still, I’m not complaining. The Army had given me a good career and a hell of a lot of experience, and was ultimately the reason why I was now back at Price Barracks knocking on the Colonel’s door. I wanted to use one of his men.
I’d met Aron Tzib nine years ago very briefly, but it was an experience I’ll never forget. In between shooting targets and hacking paths through the jungle and firing blanks at a pretend enemy, we were treated to a two-day ‘survival training package’. As a young officer fresh out of Sandhurst, with soldiers to entertain, this was where the real fun started.
Two days away from the bosses, where you get to make fires by rubbing sticks together, knock together snares and traps to catch food, learn how to chuck a spear, discover which mushrooms you can eat and which will send you loopy – that’s the kind of stuff they don’t teach you on Salisbury Plain, but we were eager to learn. It is the kind of training that civilians think soldiers do all the time, but the reality is that it’s actually a once-in-a-career opportunity, although they don’t tell you that in the recruitment centre.
Since I was passing through this way on my journey, I thought it would not only be a good opportunity to drop by the jungle school and say hello to an old friend, but also to refresh myself on jungle skills while I was at it. And more importantly, it would be an introduction to a brand-new environment for Alberto, who had never been to the jungle.
‘You can have him for two days and that’s it,’ said the Colonel. ‘Make sure you look after him.’
‘Of course,’ I promised, although I had a feeling that it would more than likely be the other way round.
We agreed to meet with Aron on Pine Ridge Mountain, to the south of the western highway on a plateau that was covered, appropriately, in Caribbean pine trees. To get there, we wended our way along a rough dirt track that had been almost washed away in the rains of the week before. Several trees had fallen so that anyone driving must have had to get out and chop them away with their machetes. By the time we reached the entrance to the forest it was almost dark and so Alberto and I set up our hammocks at the side of the road.
Aron arrived late in the pitch of night. He’d been dropped off by one of the forest rangers and appeared in his camouflage gear, ready for work.
‘Hola, mate, been a bloody while,’ he said, with the strange combined intonation of Creole, Spanish and estuary English. He’d clearly been hanging around British soldiers for far too long.
I greeted him and reminded him of our acquaintance from a decade ago.
‘You probably won’t remember me, but I came with the Paras in 2007,’ I said, shaking his enormous hand.
He pondered a while.
‘Hmmm, 2007. Yes, I do remember actually. Bloody Paras. Hang on, didn’t one of your blokes do a runner with some Mexican prostitute?’ He laughed out loud.
‘That’s the one.’
‘Yeah, and another fella fainted when we slit the neck of that pig.’
I’d forgotten about that, but it’s true.
The flames of the campfire licked the hanging leaves of a nearby tree as Aron stood there, as solid as a barrel, and about the same size. He was every inch the Mayan warrior, looking like the stone reliefs that I’d seen carved in the pyramids of the Yucatán. I imagined his forefathers, naked except for a jaguar skin and a bow, perhaps a feather in their hair. But this modern incarnation, in his camouflage pants and military vest, was just as at home in the jungle as his ancestors. Aron had been training British and American soldiers in the art of jungle survival most of his life. He’d been taught the ways of the forest by his father and grandfather before him, so that he knew every trick in the book.
‘So, you’ve come for a refresher then have you?’ he asked. ‘The boss said you were heading south and needed me to tell you what bugs you’ll need to eat.’ He grinned.
‘Something like that,’ I said. ‘Alberto here hasn’t been in the jungle before, and it’s been a few years for me, so we thought you could help us out.’
‘Alright,’ he said, ‘I’ve got just the place. Get some rest tonight, because tomorrow you’ll need all the energy you’ve got.’
The following morning, we set off into the forest. Pine grew with abundance here, the natural offspring from the British plantations all those years ago, and at first the trail led through the tall evergreen trees that grew in perfectly straight lines up to the cloudy heavens. I was reminded, somewhat unpleasantly, of a military training area. For some reason, wherever there’s pine trees and the chance of rain, someone in a uniform will come along and decide that it will make the ideal place in which to dig holes and fire guns, and wherever you are in the world, whether it’s the Brecon Beacons, the Cypriot highlands, or here in the tropics – they all instil the same feeling of foreboding. I think it’s the knowledge that when you enter that realm, you’re going to be pushed out of your comfort zone and experience things that you probably don’t want to.
As we descended towards the Rio Frio – the cold river – the vegetation suddenly and unexpectedly changed. We took a right, off the track, and immediately found ourselves in thick, tropical jungle. It was as if we’d entered an entirely separate biosphere, in fact that’s exactly what we’d done.
Aron led the way, hacking a trail with a black-handled machete. It was the sharpest thing I’d ever seen in action and put my jungle knife to shame. It cut through the jungle vines like a samurai sword, leaving a trail of destruction behind it. Aron seemed to move like some sort of spirit animal. His footing was always sure and I didn’t see him lose a step once. Barely sweating, he kept a steady, deliberate pace as Alberto and I concertinaed behind him. We were in an alien environment now altogether, and I’d forgotten how particularly treacherous it could be. I’d traipsed through some rainforests along the banks of the Nile, and the foothills of the Himalayas, but this unfathomable bush was an altogether different beast.
To begin with, the fringes of the jungle were secondary jungle, that is to say forest that had once been deforested by humans, whether ten years or a thousand years ago. It’s likely this area had succumbed both to the stone axes of the ancient Mayans who created the destruction of their own civilisation by destroying the environment to fuel their pyramid habit, and to the chainsaws of the British Colonial era. Most of the larger trees had been felled, meaning the undergrowth was much thicker, since it had been able to grow up in the absence of a full canopy. The primary rainforest was still some miles away, beyond the Rio Frio, but for now we had to hack and sweat our way through some of the thickest vegetation I’d ever encountered.
‘This is a total bastard,’ said Aron.
Alberto, for the first time on the journey, was totally silent. He was sweating buckets like me, and blowing out with every step.
‘You’re not wrong,’ I huffed, remembering back to the last time I was here with the Army, although I was younger and fitter back then. Old soldiers call it the green hell. When you’re hanging out in this awful humidity, and every branch and thorn seems out to get you, and every creepy-crawly wants to ruin your day, it’s understandable that some people literally lose their mind in the jungle. It is an unforgiving environment, and unless you prepare, it’s one that will easily defeat you. That’s why we’d taken this detour, to make sure that for the rest of the journey we’d have the knowledge and skills to be able to survive – particularly in the Darién Gap.
‘We’re not going too far today, though,’ said Aron. ‘Down there is the Rio Frio, and where the lesson begins.’
H
e pointed into the wall of green. Visibility in this sort of bush is less than ten metres, so it wasn’t until I’d pushed through a matted knot of palm leaves that I saw a steep cliff leading down to a gushing stream.
We slid down the cliff, grasping at vines and tree shoots along the way for stability until we reached the bottom, and with it, the crystal-clear waters of the river. By the time we’d got to the bottom, we were all so hot and sweaty that it was impossible to resist jumping into the refreshing pools. I went first, bags and all, sending the schools of fish darting across the water. Even though it was waist-high, it was utterly transparent to the very bottom. Aron jumped in after me, drinking straight from the water.
‘It’s perfect,’ he said.
‘Don’t you need to filter it first?’ asked Alberto.
‘Not this. There’s no people for miles around, and no cattle either. This water is the purest you’ll find anywhere. It is filtered naturally by the rocks and the soil. Come and fill your water bottle.’
Alberto, unused to getting his feet wet, initially tried to balance on a rock, bending over to dip in the Army-issue water bottle I’d given him.
I was about to grab him and pull him in and tell him off for being a wimp, but nature beat me to it. The Mexican slipped and in a bid to avoid falling on the rock, almost did a backflip, ending up head first in the cool river, emerging like a flailing puppy who had been thrown into the water for the first time.
‘Chinga! Its fucking freezing,’ he shouted, gasping for breath.
Aron laughed. ‘They don’t call it the Rio Frio for nothing.’
After cooling off, we waded upstream for a couple of hundred metres, until we found the place where Aron had wanted to bring us.