Of Oaxaca, part the first

The countryside on our drive from Puerto Arista to Oaxaca City was gorgeous. Stunning canyons and rolling hills covered with cacti. As we neared Oaxaca, much of the land was covered with neatly planted rows of agave, the plant used to make mezcal and tequila. Your correspondent sampled a couple varieties of mezcal, which is native to Oaxaca (Tequila being originally from Jalisco). We'll stick with tequila from here on out.

Of Puerto Arista

It has been well over a month since your correspondents packed up the shop and departed Guatemala, en route to Washington. It would be a bit silly to give a full play-by-play of the trip, but we'll be publishing photos and selected anecdotes here for however long they last. We also have a couple other major projects from Guatemala that linger unfinished and will be published here and on Flickr at some point, so stay tuned.

Anyway, our final day in Guatemala we stayed at the same hotel, in the same room, where we had stayed for a few weeks while we looked for permanent housing upon our arrival two years ago. I'm sure a more philosophical correspondent would hold forth here about cycles and symbolism and such, but mostly we were too tired for such lofty rumination. We had breakfast with another Embassy employee who had just driven down to Guatemala through Mexico, and seemed to think we were going to die in the barren wilderness of Chiapas because there is "absolutely nothing there." He was closer to correct than we thought, as the coastal road through Chiapas is pretty barren, with not much in the way of roadside fast food or hotels. Fortunately, there was some hyperbole in his warning, and we took a side road to the beach town of Puerto Arista for the night. The hotel where we had made a reservation turned out to be a dump, ramshackle and smelly and probably flea-ridden. We went looking for other options and found them not much less dumpy, so we wound up back at our original hotel, an interior view of which (above) shows the TV, which had two channels and apparently got signal from two completely different antennae(?), which details were provided to guests via Sharpie on the wall.

Scruffy as our hotel may have been, a hotel on the beach is still a hotel on the beach. We had a lovely meal and delicious Mexican beer watching the sun set over the Pacific, discovered that there were actually more biting insects on the beach than in our room, and managed to get a relatively good night's sleep despite some concerns that at a hotel so shabby, our car (or its valuable trunkload of contents) was surely going to be stolen in the night.

It wasn't, and we got an early start the next day for Oaxaca, of which more soon.

Big Money Political Advertising

Guatemalan elections happened on Sunday, September 9. The Holla staff hasn't been in Guatemala for well over a month at this point, so we can't provide any first-hand information about the election or the winners. As of this writing, no results are available, but the expected result is a run-off between the center-left UNE candidate and the right-wing Partida Patriota, which will mean weeks more campaigning.

As in the U.S., the campaign in Guatemala includes television ads (clearly lower budget, the ones I saw were mostly just the candidate speaking to the camera); radio ads, often featuring full-length jaunty theme songs (particularly fun was a peppy Patriota salsa number with a cheery chorus refrain of Mano Dura!, literally "firm hand," but "iron fist" wouldn't be a bad translation); and billboards (uniformly basic with often unflattering pictures of the candidates, a name, and maybe a slogan). As in the U.S., it seems that every commercial space during campaign season is filled with a political ad -- the perilously dangling worker here is probably putting up an ad for the GANA, the biggest party not represented in the other billboards in the picture (click on the picture for a better view of the surely not-at-all-unsafe job).

One local campaign tactic that you don't see so much in the U.S. is official graffiti. The political graffiti in Guatemala is ubiquitous. These are not simple spray-painted slogans; many are wall-sized murals, and all are clearly the result of party-sponsored efforts, despite the fact that such graffiti is technically illegal. There are stretches where every tree or rock (as above, on a road to Belize in the middle of nowhere) for hundreds of yards on end is painted with the logo of one political party. The law-and-order candidates endorsed by the graffiti are perhaps not fans of the "broken windows" approach to tackling big crime by first showing zero tolerance for little crimes.

The key to this style of campaign is the simple set of identifiers attached to each campaign. Almost every party has one primary color associated with it, although there is a little overlap. For example, the Patriotas are orange, and the UNE is green. So all you have to do is see that a stretch of highway has its rocks painted yellow to know that the PAN party has been there. On top of this, each party has a simple logo:

The Patriotas have their fist (as you can see, not all the sign-painters are highly trained pros; the monstrously large thumb here is by no means the worst attempt at a fist that your correspondents saw).

The UNE features a pair of hands making a bird.

The Unionista party uses a shining sun as their symbol ("Fritz" is the name of their candidate. His running mate is named "Quique".)

The UCN has a target.

The FRG has a hand holding out three fingers.

The PAN uses a blue italicized arrow.

Rigoberta Menchú's Encunetro por Guatemala party has a circular red-and-green symbol that this viewer thought of as a Christmas wreath and that isn't usually blurry except when photographed from a moving car.

The outgoing ruling party, the GANA, uses a Mayan pyramid. Somehow, we failed to take an interesting picture of one, though. The symbols are so well-known that the party's name doesn't necessarily need to appear -- and they need to be. The ballot features the party's logo, so the voter doesn't need to do any reading, they just need to mark the red triangle if they want to vote for the DIA or the Pepsi logo-turned-into-a-fish for the Bienestar party. Local parties are in the mix, too, with more stenciled lavender cowboy hat or tractor symbols. One personal favorite is the "Mixco Renewal Movement," which appropriately chose a broom as their symbol.


Since the graffiti are illegal in the first place, nobody seems to be regulating one party painting over another's logos. There was occasional re-use of spaces, but some sort of code of graffiti artist honor seems to have sprung up, as many parties seem to put their tags side-by-side rather than covering each others' stuff. Of course, rogue hooligans throw trash or tar or paint at opposing parties' graffiti, but no more frequently than they deface the billboards.

For a few more exciting pictures of Guatemalan political advertising in its many forms, see the full set of pictures at flickr. Disclaimer: This is intended to present to non-Guatemalan audiences a unique element of Guatemalan campaign season. In no way is any of this intended to endorse any party. Every party does this stuff, about equally.

Coming Soon

Our first big post-departure project is about to become a lot less timely. Above is a quick preview of a bunch of material from the photo department about political grafitti in the run-up to the Guatemalan elections on Sunday; we're hoping to have a further photo essay of sorts up by Saturday. So when you see the banner headlines on the Guatemalan election results on the front page of your local paper on Monday, think of us.

Back from August Recess

Somehow we survived the terrible hardship of having to spend an entire month of vacation in the U.S. during August, and somehow you survived a full month of the Holla not posting a thing -- not even a random picture here and there.

Well, we're back. Our final leg, a trek from Colorado to DC via Kansas (as pictured above: The Lovely Katherine contemplating the somewhat-pricey-but-definitely-worth-it glory of "Prairie Dog Town," a legitimate tourist attraction in Oakley, Kansas), Boston and New York, concluded a mere 16 hours before classes were set to begin yesterday. Now we are starting the long slog through eight months of Latvian. (Your correspondent can already refer to his faithful traveling companion as "my little heartflower" in Latvian; it remains unclear what remains for the balance of the eight month course.)

It is our hope that the combination of being stationary and certain budget overruns over the last month will inspire the editors to dedicate significant evening and weekend time to the Holla over the next few weeks. And we hope not all of our five loyal readers have totally forgotten us or assumed that we would cease publication upon our departure. We certainly have some tales to tell and, we think, several months' worth of pictures that we hope you'll like as much as the staff photographer does.

Home Leave

We apologize for jumping ahead in the script a bit, but the staff is currently on Home Leave in Colorado and quite enjoying it. The staff photographer took approximately one million pictures on the way through Mexico of which 999,990 will need to be discarded, and your correspondent hasn't written a word about the trip. But we took a much more manageable number of pictures on a trip out onto the Eastern Plains of Colorado, to such exotic Colorado locations as Brush, Anton, Akron, and a town that is literally no-joke called Last Chance.

For those who are curious, "Home Leave" is a required month of vacation in the United States between Foreign Service Officers, so that we don't forget what's so great about the country we're out there representing or go native or start identifying with the terrorists or what-not. We're struggling through.

Anyway, if you want to see what the staff photographer has been up to since our arrival, and get to know the part of Colorado that doesn't look like Aspen, check out this quick slideshow at Flickr.

Of Moving

We are filing this report from beautiful Windsor, Colorado. It has been a superb week of travel by land from Guatemala through colorful, beautiful Mexico and less colorful, but still beautiful, Texas and New Mexico. Further reports and photos of the journey coming soon in this space.

But starting at the beginning, we had to first get ready to get out of Guatemala. It got off to a rocky start when the moving company "forgot" to show up at the appointed hour, but it was all uphill from there. The State Department generously allows employees to skip work while the moving company is packing up their belongings. While it might be more useful to have a couple days off for preparation before the movers showed up, your correspondent can't complain about his days spent alternately observing the moving company to make sure they didn't accidentally put any of our super-valuable household items in their pocket instead of the boxes (no problems observed) and reading a history of the Baltic Revolution against Soviet rule in preparation for future assignment in Latvia (problems definitely encountered in the somewhat dry text, but we soldiered on).

Having a moving company pack up all your stuff is, to use one of our favorite words, awesome. It doesn't mean that moving isn't a pain in the ass. It is still a massive pain in the ass. But it does transfer a lot of the physical labor to someone else. I don't know what we'll do when we have to actually move ourselves again someday, although with all the moving we've done over the last few years, we're considering becoming those shut-in types who don't move for fifty years once we land back in the U.S. for good.

Anyway, watching the moving guys work is also impressive. Everything - and we mean everything - is wrapped in paper before it goes in a box. So when unpacking you find things like paperback books carefully protected in a newsprint. This is not a complaint, because the thorough job the Guatemalan packers do should mean very little breakage. We hope. In any case, everything must be wrapped, which means even the odd-shaped pieces of furniture are mummified in paper-bag brown paper. It was almost like watching a master artisan at work seeing the old moving guy whip out a perfectly coffee-table-shaped package for our coffee table. It wound up being, truly, exactly the shape of the coffee table, tightly bundled in a half-inch of cardboard. For example, our couch, as seen from our balcony on the way to the truck:


In all, the army of guys needed just over one work day to completely pack up all our worldly belongings and put them on their truck. We were left with a few suitcases for the trusty Nissan Sentra's trunk as our only possessions for the next month, when we hope to be reunited with in our nation's capitol.

Coming next (and hopefully soon): Driving through Chiapas.

Adios

It´s been two great, and very fast, years. We´ll be back after a week of driving through Mexico with new material about Guatemala published from our new headquarters in the U.S. and other exotic ports of call.

Of the Medio Maraton Las Rosas

Your correspondent's dedication to aerobic exercise while in Guatemala has been a bit spotty. Guatemala isn't really an ideal location for running or biking, although that doesn't seem to stop some small portion of Guatemalans who are out running or biking in full regalia as if they were doing the Boston Marathon or the Tour de France, except on busy highways with no shoulders and clouds of diesel fumes everywhere. As such, there are occasional tests of athletic skill, such as the recently contested "Las Rosas" half marathon in Antigua.

Several co-workers of The Lovely Katherine decided that this would be a fantastic team-building opportunity to do the half marathon together, allowing everyone to participate by walking if they wished. Your correspondent agreed to participate as well, under some delusion that such a goal would motivate him to actually get some exercise to run the race. That delusion dispelled after a month of no training of any significance, your correspondent decided to go ahead and walk the race with the rest of the group.

It turns out that the idea that one might want to walk in a half-marathon race is foreign to many Guatemalans. The race started in a tight pack that took a while to thin out, so even the people who hoped to be running couldn't. But before long the runners sped ahead, putting some distance between themselves and the walking participants. And by "walking participants," I mean The Lovely Katherine, about six of her co-workers, and your correspondent. Through the early going, we enjoyed a symphony of honking horns as cars grew frustrated that the race route was still closed despite the fact that there didn't seem to be any runners on it. Before long, the gap between us and the main pack grew too great to ignore, and they reopened roads to traffic and we moved to the shoulder. A healthy crowd had turned out along many populated sections of the route, and reactions to our efforts were mixed. The majority of observers cheered us on, clapping and yelling "animo!" In the early going, some observers offered kind encouragement, saying "You've just started - you can keep running!" Others were more direct, with "cheers" such as "What are you doing?" or "You already lost!" One kindly woman listening to a radio report told us that we should take the shortcut to the town square, lopping off the last six or seven miles of the race, because the winners were just about to get to the finish line anyway.

Your correspondent will admit that he just about died of embarrassment in many of these stretches. Fortunately, the enthusiasm of the staff photographer for wandering through some of Antigua's outlying neighborhoods in a large group with a mostly understanding crowd won the day. We carried on through the full 13 miles, minus a couple short shortcuts, and returned to the main square to find that they had long since disassembled the finish line timer.

Plenty of Egg, Needs More Nog

The Holla offices are getting a bit hectic as we pack up our reams of meticulously filed notes from various field studies, the presses, the massively disorganized payroll department -- everything -- so we can decamp for Washington in a couple weeks. We of course have a few vital research items to accomplish. Last night, we hosted a going-away party, which the Spanish-speakers of the world, with uncharacteristic efficiency, simply call a "despedida." It was a fantastic evening, with solid representation from chapines and gringos alike, from both the Embassy and Common Hope (where The Lovely Katherine works).

Of course, in our relentless quest to uncover every bit of inside knowledge Guatemala has to offer, and pass it on to you, the loyal reading public, we knew this was our moment to finalize a long delayed task. Guatemala has many legitimate claims to fame, but the sad truth is that their culinary prowess is not among them. But even the cultures with the least enticing cuisine manage to come up with unique potent potables. Some time ago, your correspondent was dispatched to the Highlands of Quetzaltenango and Huehuetenango. In reaching Quetzaltenango, one must pass through the smaller town of Salcajá. There are many towns this size through the country with nary a bibulous product to their name, but somehow, Salcajá is famous for producing two different varieties of distinctive local booze. Your correspondent returned with a bottle of each caldo de fruta ("Fruit Stew") and rompopo. The latter seems the more dangerous, as its primary ingredient is -- no joke -- eggs, which provide its distinctive yellow hue. There are several signs in town advertising rompopo for sale, and after choosing the sincerest rompopería to be seen, your correspondent entered to find a simple room with two glass cases filled with bottles of the vaguely nog-like product, a picture of Jesus, and nothing else. However, the caldo de fruta was sold at the same establishment, but the customer had to specifically as for it, prompting the employee to disappear into a back room and bring out the fruit-filled crimson bottle. In the end, your correspondent could not be sure if he purchased illegal moonshine caldo de fruta or legal moonshine caldo de fruta, but we applaud his willingness to take the risk in the name of journalism.

In the end, the purchased beverages were a bit too vibrantly colored and, in one case, a bit too eggy, to tempt our tastebuds on any given evening. That ended last night, when we shared with our guests/victims the two delicious concoctions. (The rompopo actually says "Delicious Rompopo" right on the label.) Despite the fact that they had languished for about a year in our liquor cabinet, several brave souls stepped up to give them a try.

The verdict? Caldo de fruta tastes exactly like 80-proof Robitussin. And the rompopo? As the winning smile on the face of our test subject shows, rompopo is an acquired taste. You might be able to come close by mixing egg nog with cream of wheat, blending, and then adding some more eggs. Suffice it to say that while we will be returning to the U.S. with a small supply of a number of Guatemalan delicacies, such as coffee and Zacapa rum, we will not be sneaking any bottles of rompopo across the border.

Special thanks to Todd, who was perhaps the most willing of many who risked their lives by drinking rompopo last night. We hope to see him at work on Monday.

Jugando el Golf

Nearly two years ago, we packed up everything we own and shipped it to Guatemala. Much sporting equipment has languished in our "maids' quarters"/sporting goods graveyard since that time. Somehow, the skis just didn't come in handy. But as the final weeks of our engagement in Guatemala tick away, your correspondent finally found an in to do some vital research on the links of the Land of Eternal Spring.

My co-worker Carlos's family is now a member at the tony San Isidro Club Campestre, which is a really old-school country club. I would guess that they would allow American diplomats of any shade into their clubhouse, but I'm not sure that there has been a test case.

They have a full locker room with wood-paneled lockers and complimentary shaving cream.

They have a bar that is actually, literally called "The 19th Hole," with a sign and everything, and, as near as we can tell, no women allowed. (Women are allowed to be members, and to participate in the primary 18 holes of the facility, but I guess men need to be able to tell sexist jokes in peace over a drink. Maybe there's a women's 19th Hole that we didn't see, decorated in pink or some such.)

They have caddies. Our first trip out, one of the caddies told us we had enough time to play out holes 1 and 2, and then play number 18 back, and then it would rain for the rest of the afternoon. We did as he advised, and literally as we were walking off the 18th green it started to pour. Smart caddie. And since we carried our own bags, he wasn't even getting a tip out of it. The downside of the caddies were a few holes where we saw literally 10 people milling about one green, as four or five guys and their various attendants all shuffled about -- and they had golf carts to carry the bags. I guess the caddies are really just there to let people know how many more holes before it rains.

On the 4th of July, we actually made it out early enough to get in a full 18 holes before the rainy season's afternoon storms ended our day. Of course, daily afternoon downpours left the course in middling condition -- I had a couple nice drives into the fairway that plugged into the dreaded fried-egg formation in the rain-softened ground. No matter; the course was beautiful, set in the rolling hills above the city (which city you can see over the horizon in the above picture), and while our host was not an excellent golfer (which you can see by him missing the ball in the above picture), he was an excellent host.

Of the Kaibiles

Some of our more attentive readers, or perhaps just the emotionally needy ones, will recall that in a previous, slightly jumpy (ok, we admit it, schizophrenic) post about Belize, your faithful correspondents promised you more detail about a contact working on a special assignment training with the Guatemalan version of the Green Berets. We weren't kidding. Upon further reflection, however, we have determined that given certain exigencies of our other, more lucrative, employment, we should not in this forum editorialize about the Kaibiles, or Guatemalan Green Berets.

So, just the facts. Apparently, in training to work as the Defense Attaché in a Latin American Embassy, many of our men in uniform actually go through the officers' training classes of our Latin American allies. Guatemala is one of those allies, and so, a Major friend of ours from the Embassy has spent his months here training with the Guatemalan army. One of their tasks, as it was described to this civilian, involved hanging out in the jungle for a couple days, running up mountains in the middle of the night, swimming down rivers, and such. I would have imagined these to be tasks more befitting an enlisted man, but I will again caveat my complete ignorance of such matters.

Anyway, on our way up to Belize by road, all of four weeks ago at this point, we stopped to pick our Major friend up from his jungle outpost, which happened to be on the way. Said outpost (see illustration, supra) features castle-turret themed guard posts along the perimeter, and a sign that translates as: "The Kaibiles of Guatemala / Respected by their adversaries / Loved by their people / Have a nice trip."

Unusual Visitor

The Holla offices are too busy preparing for our pending return across the continent to be exploring Guatemala as fully as our loyal readers have come to expect. But we did find this guy hanging out on our sixth-floor balcony, flat on his back, creepy little legs waving helplessly. Not unlike previous creepy visitors we're a bit baffled how he got up six floors and then fell over on our balcony. Being lovers of life as we are, we tried to set him aright and let him go on his way, but he promptly flopped back over on his back, apparently suffering from a cramp from climbing six floors up our apartment building. Guatemalan folk wisdom does claim that all variety of bugs try to gain access to human habitations when the rainy season starts, but that was well over a month ago now. In any case, since he was too wounded to wander away, we had no choice but to photograph his predicament in a warning to any other insectoid intruders contemplating scaling our building.

Water Hazard

I guess it proves that I'm American and will never truly understand the beautiful game that I don't know what the ruling is if the ball lands in small inland sea that has formed in the middle of the playing field.

On Language

All the Americans in our Embassy are trained and tested in Spanish before they are shipped to post. Most of us have what you would probably call "functional" Spanish upon arrival, moving into "proficient" Spanish after a couple years here. Some few colleagues who served in the Peace Corps or grew up speaking Spanish are better-off, but most of us come to a point where we can hold our own.

The Guatemalan employees, who outnumber the Americans by a significant degree, almost all speak fluent English.

It makes for an interesting workplace. I can carry on a pretty fluent conversation in formal Spanish. And I can mostly get by with more colloquial Spanish, guessing slang words or run-together words on context. But in either case, I still have to think about it. Imagine your average cube-farm sort of workplace where you can overhear the conversations of your ten closest neighbors. It's pretty hard to concentrate. And whenever you go by the water cooler, you're going to pick up a little of what everyone's talking about. You can't avoid it, short of covering your ears and yelling "la la la la I can't hear you," because the language you've spoken since you were two drifts by your ears, and you would have to be completely transfixed by something else to not hear what your neighbors are saying. understanding spoken English for me is unconscious, and even if I would rather not be distracted, it takes some effort to stay focused on work if there's another conversation in earshot.

In a mostly-Spanish-speaking environment, the script is reversed entirely. I can walk into our little kitchen where several colleagues are chatting in Spanish and unless I make an active decision to listen to them, it's just as easy to fill up a glass of water and leave, blissfully ignorant of the latest gossip. And when we're all at our little government-cube desks, everyone else in the place can be chattering away and I can maintain constant focus on my work (or my personal e-mail, while we're being honest).

It's definitely a big plus for productivity. Of course, in a managerial sense, one begins to realize how much there is to be learned by just picking up bits of conversation from colleagues. The "management by eavesdropping" strategy is a little harder when the boss has to drop everything and actively listen to the speaker to tell if she's whining about her husband or if she's whining about the boss.

As Promised: More on Belize

Following the Holla's usual production schedule, we are exactly one week late in bringing you a report on our trip to Belize. Hopefully you'll find that the extra time has allowed for further reflection and refinement of the ideas inspired by our time in Belize.

Which would be a surprise, since your correspondent is struggling to come up with much to say about Belize beyond a catalog of things we did. We scuba'd. We snorkeled. We consumed island delicacies. We soaked in the Caribbean atmosphere.

As regards the scuba, it was pleasant. The reef there is magnificent. The most exciting (and really, only) major animal sighting was a few huge spotted eagle rays gracefully swimming by. We also saw an abundance of what are technically known as Pretty Tropical Fish in formats that we're pretty sure we hadn't seen before. But further taxonomic precision escapes us.

As regards the snorkeling, it continues to surprise your scuba-snobby correspondent. I have been snorkeling a total of two times in my life, both after I was already scuba certified, and have thoroughly enjoyed it both times. Assuming one is doing it in appropriately shallow water, one gets just as close to the sea life as one does diving. You'll never see some of the really magnificent stuff snorkeling, but you'll see other really magnificent stuff. In this case, there were more Pretty Tropical Fish. But also at one of our snorkeling sites, the sound of the boat is associated with fisherman dumping off unwanted fish entrails (or so we're told) and so a whole swarm of stingrays (and one huge barracuda) show up whenever the boat does. It sort of felt like cheating. Then again, watching stingrays swim is so cool, it was worth cheating for. Thus, the photo department's first attempt at just-barely-underwater photography, seen above. Obviously still a few kinks to work out of the system.

Which brings us to the matter of the island delicacies, of which there are apparently two. First, June 15th brought the beginning of lobster season to Caye Caulker, so every restaurant in town had a cheap lobster special. I'm not so into lobster and the attendant labors of eating it that I would ever order it in a restaurant in the U.S. But on the opening weekend of lobster season, a $15 full-lobster dinner is hard to turn down, so I had two. The other island delicacy is a drink known as the "Panty Ripper," which is a simple mix of coconut rum (in the States, you could use Malibu, I think the Belizeans use something that one of their fellow islanders distills in his bathtub) and pineapple juice. Your correspondent does recommend the combination, although he couldn't bear too many as they are a bit too sweet and fruity for his masculine pride. In any case, such a simple combo shouldn't be exclusive to Belize, but if you do a Google search on "Panty Ripper," several of the top hits are about Belize. (At least, that is, if you've set Google to filter out all the pornography.) If any loyal reader is a Malibu fan who enjoyed this drink under a different name, perhaps in your sorority days, do let us know.

Lastly, there is the Caribbean atmosphere. If you haven't been, the rumors are true. The ocean is gorgeous turquoise. There are lots of guys selling rasta-themed souvenirs. There is way too much reggae music, though it was a nice break from the reggaeton music that is inescapable in Guatemala. There is no rush to do anything at all. In fact, the motto of Caye Caulker, inlaid in mosaic on the dock where the water taxi drops you off upon your first arrival, is "Go Slow." We met one guy who had moved from Florida to Belize for the express purpose of going slow. Well, that and because there were too many Mexicans in Florida, so he moved to Belize so he wouldn't have to learn Spanish. Anyway, he now makes his living slowly, selling barbecued shrimp kebabs from a hibachi on the beach. Many fugitives from all over the world come to Belize based on the understanding that the police there will also go slow. As for your correspondents, we have a hard time with going slow, especially when we've only got a three-day weekend minus travel time to cram in as much sightseeing as we can. But you don't really have a choice sometimes on Caye Caulker, so we went as slow as we could.

Truth in Advertising

From Caye Caulker, Belize, where advertisers apparently favor the direct approach. More on Belize coming soon.

Inclusivity

We went to an all-inclusive resort. We drank fruity cocktails. We lounged.

One of your correspondent's colleagues departed Guatemala for good today, and to send her off in style, a crowd of hearty diplomats rushed the Royal Decameron Resort in Salinitas, El Salvador. For your correspondent, and his faithful traveling companion, this was something of a change of pace. We're more accustomed to $20 middle-of-nowhere lodges where one prays there is hot water. Many in our traveling party raved about how great the price was at the Decameron, whereas your correspondent was suffering a bit of sticker shock. Traveling party responded to any hesitation with the irrefutable reply: "But it's all-inclusive!"

Faithful readers may recall our previous visit to a resort-style destination. But that trip was Scuba-focused. This resort is rather more for the "sit in a beach chair and drink Mai-Tais" inclined. Which suited us mostly fine, and we had a great time sitting in the pool and chatting with our friends and enjoying ridiculously named drinks like the Banana Mama and the Pasión Tropical.

Ridiculous activities were available for the more active set, such as water aerobics done to deafening 180 beat-per-minute techno music (which appeared to be mostly just an excuse to have one extremely fit "instructor" of each sex to girate rhythmically at poolside for the viewing pleasure of participants and non-participants alike (mostly non-participants)), or some game where teams of two use towels to toss volleyballs around a circle. We, despite considering ourselves "active," declined to participate.

This is apparently not a top-notch, five-star resort, as evidence by certain online reviews bemoaning the lack of "towel art" in the rooms. I would guess at the really pricey resorts of the Caribbean, you needn't leave your lounge chair to order another Makers on the rocks. That was not true here. This resort's tactical response to all-inclusivity was a three-pronged attack of cheap plastic-bottle booze, dixie cup servings, and no waiters. Here, we counter-attacked by bringing our own Big-Gulp sized cups to minimize trips to the bar and befriending the bartender so we could without hesitation ask for just a bit more vodka and tabasco in that Bloody Mary. (By Sunday, your correspondent had consumed as much rum and citrus juice and pre-mixed colada as he could handle and had to stick to vodka, perhaps a positive sign for Northeastern European days to come.)

In any case, your correspondent values the rich tapestry of personalities that makes the human experience so varied and interesting. But people who choose to go to places like this for their whole vacations leave me baffled. Though the staff photographer did enjoy the near-studio light on our balcony, as seen above, your correspondent was getting a bit itchy about all the doing nothing on day two. A whole week would be fatal.

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.

Belize

It has indeed been forever since I rapped at ya. There has been some amount of nothing happening. And I've been laid low by some of the things that have happened. But this last weekend, we checked off one of the final Central American destinations we had yet to visit, the erstwhile 22nd province of Guatemala.

Many think of Belize as a destination for lazing on the beach or snorkeling from one of its many Caribbean islands. Not your intrepid correspondent. One of our dear friends from the Embassy is being temporarily assigned to Belmopan, Belize for six weeks while they are desperately understaffed. Recognizing the islands as the primary attraction of the location, she was dedicated to driving so as to avoid being trapped and car-less in the jungle interior. This involves some amount of remote highway frequented by brigands and highwaymen. So we agreed to pile in the 1998 Chevy Lumina with her and trek down the mountains, across the desert, through the jungle, and on to Belize, seeing some of the Guatemalan countryside we had not yet enjoyed. The Lumina was a late scratch, and a gentleman friend of our colleague agreed to loan her his Jeep (for the whole six week assignment!). Slightly later than originally planned, we set off down the treacherous mountain. Hours of highway driving stretched on, and we eventually met the owner of the Jeep in the remote jungle lair where he was training with the Guatemalan equivalent of the Green Berets. (No, really. More on this later.)

After a day of not really that many hours on the road, we were nevertheless drained by the challenging road conditions upon our arrival in Flores, Peten. The travelling party was dedicated to enjoying our last evening together for six weeks, and so managed to drink a variety of tasty beverages while barely keeping our eyes open. The next morning, we met up with our police escort for the notorious final two hours to the border, crossed into Belize with just about the expected amount of hassle, bought Belizean car insurance, and pushed on for the capital city of Belmopan.

The exhausting weekend of driving was proved entirely worthwhile upon seeing Belmopan. The city was created in the middle of nowhere when the government grew weary of the capital, which was then located on the coast in Belize City, getting knocked over by every hurricane that passed by. As capitals go, you might say it is a little sleepy. There may be as many as 15,000 inhabitants, but I doubt it. There is a modest city center, a few blocks of small residential developments, and then a few blocks of scrubby undeveloped land split by dirt roads, and then one runs into the massive, thoroughly modern U.S. Embassy. Then, after a few more blocks of scrub and jungle and dump, one finds the U.S. Embassy employee housing complex, built half a mile away from the nearest development, surrounded by a 10-foot-high, bright yellow wall and containing 14 identical tract houses. Maybe we were just punchy from the drive, but we laughed and laughed. Such is the adventure of venturing off into the jungle for hours to reach the exotic post of assignment that could possibley