Exploring the Country

The children scrambled over each other and us getting into the car for our first Sunday expedition. We headed out of Belize on the Western Highway, through Lord’s Ridge Cemetery with its white crypts and crosses. The road had one roughly paved lane, with passing bays at regular intervals, and potholes at more frequent, irregular ones.

We drove through savannah—flat, sometimes marshy, country studded with scruffy pines—and past angular calabash trees with contorted limbs. To the south was an eruption of small, separated hills. These were limestone domes covered with foliage and studded with caves, many full of relics from the Mayans who used the caves in past centuries.

Gradually the road led up into the low hilliness of the pine ridge. Tall trees, luxuriant bushes, and vines formed rough green walls close along each side of the road. Lianas laced the undergrowth together. Soon we were in high bush and tropical rain forest. We drove mile after mile without a hint of human habitation.

Years later when the Western Highway was widened and repaved, the heavy growth that formed the narrow tunnel of the old road was cut down. Suddenly groups of houses, thatch-roofed, adobe huts and simple frame cabins, appeared along the road on both sides. Most had been there for years, hidden from sight by a few feet of jungle.

As we reached Cayo District, heavy forests gave way to open fields. We passed the government agricultural station, Central Farms, where British experts experimented with crops, breeds of cattle, and citrus, training British Hondurans as they worked. We passed groves of orange and grapefruit trees. Scruffy, angular local cows and newly imported Brahman and Santa Gertrudis cattle grazed peacefully under the tropical sun. Spectacular cohune palms lofted their great fans of fronds in open fields.

Past the farms we came to “Cayo,” the informal name for El Cayo de San Ignacio y Santa Elena, twin towns built on opposite sides of the deep ravine created by the Macal River.

The improbable Hawkesworth Bridge, one-lane with board tracks across a steel grid, was suspended from one high side of the gorge to the other. We could not believe that rainy season floods sometimes crested within inches of the bridge, dozens of feet above the river bed. We understood that these were known as “top gallon” floods. Later we read that the phrase originally was “top gallant” floods, taking the name from the highest sails on the British ships that in earlier days plied back and forth between far-off England and Belize.

Following the twisted, rocky trail past Cayo, we reached the picturesque small village of Succotz, with the Mopan River bubbling and gurgling its tumultuous way alongside the road. The women of the village, many of them direct descendants of the storied Mayas, did their laundry on the rocks at the river’s edge in happy community while children splashed nearby.

At a short distance from Succotz, on the other side of the river and up a series of steep hills, stood the Mayan ruins of Xunantunich.

Archeologists had partially cleared the main temple. One side showed parts of rooms while on the adjacent side, a tall bas relief of Mayan figures was exposed.

I do not remember whether we visited the ruins on that trip, but certainly we did so several times, crossing the river by dory (dugout canoe) or on an antiquated ferry, hand-cranked back and forth on sagging cables.

A little farther on we came to the charming little town of Benque Viejo del Carmen. Small frame buildings were set close together on streets with names like Victoria, Elizabeth, and Churchill.