Belize, Part Two

We now present part two of this unintentionally serialized story of our brief trip to Belize. When we last left your correspondent, we was describing the group's arrival in Belmopan...

... Maybe we were just punchy from the drive, but we laughed and laughed. Such is the result of wandering off into the jungle for hours, only to reach the exotic post of assignment that would, in fact, not look out of place along the interstate beltway circling any American sun-belt city. Except that instead of having a highway next to it, it had a dirt road cutting through scrubby secondary growth. To some extent, the joke was on us, as in our 90 minutes in Belmopan we ate at a Chinese restaurant that was far, far better than anything in Guatemala City, and actually would give most any option in Washington, DC a run for its money; coupled with beer that proved without a doubt that Belize was a British colony, not a Spanish possession (despite some continued Guatemalan opinion to the contrary).

After this delicious feast, we really had seen just about everything there is to Belmopan. Our traveling companion shuttled us through Belize City and off to the airport in her beau's stylish Jeep. And, as we were getting the autograph of legendary Belize City airport bartender named "Jet," our friend was driving said Jeep back to her sleepy little gated community. And as we were possibly in the air on the way to Guatemala via El Salvador, she blew out a tire (or something) on the wide Belizean highway, flipped said Jeep and rolled it several times on the Nebraska-flat landscape near Hattieville, totalled the S.O.'s Jeep, and walked away while various Belizean on-lookers gathered to dig through the glove box for anything portable and valuable. She spent a night in the hospital and a week away from work, but the bigger tragedy is that now she's trapped in Belmopan without a car, despite all our efforts, and nothing to do but eat the best Kung Pao Chicken this side of California.