To British Honduras

Two starry-eyed children and their exhausted parents piled onto the plane from Sarasota to Tampa to spend the night before catching the plane to Mexico. It was glory piled on glory for Alex, his first airplane ride and his first hotel. I awoke around midnight to find both children perched on the window sill staring raptly down at blinking city lights and bustling nighttime streets.

Next morning our flight took us first to Havana where in-transit passengers were marched past a series of bond shops and given an unwanted thirty minutes to buy things that could only be a burden to carry. We were transferred to another aircraft and continued to Mérida.

We checked into the gracious old Gran Hotel de Mérida, gleaming with colorful tile work and great carved mahogany columns and doorways. After the children’s naps, we had ample time to meander to the nearby plaza, absorbing the charming foreignness around us.

The next morning we were up at 3:30 and installed in a packed old DC-3 by five o’clock. The children wondered what had happened to their old American habit of breakfasting. Bucher and I were close to violence at not having had our coffee. The aircraft took off chattering with the tinny vibrations I later learned to love in the World War II workhorse of a plane still being flown in Central America and Mexico. Irritating pinpoints of light on the pages of my book disturbed my reading. I was horror-struck when investigation revealed that the light came from sunshine streaming through holes where rivets were missing from the plane’s bare metal fuselage.

The flat green of the Yucatan Peninsula became the white-capped azure of the Caribbean. We landed in the barren, sandy wastes of the Isla de Cozumel just off the coast. It is a tourists’ dream haven now, but I remember it as sand, rocky roads, and a dust-covered, drab village of weathered board shacks. We found a small shop and bought the closest thing to breakfast we could find for our wilting children—bottles of soda, violent orange in color, and sealed packages of limp cookies.

The jeep returned to take us back to the airstrip, and Carli, our sunny little blond doll, metamorphosed into a shrieking Fury. Too many new experiences too quickly had unhinged our happy baby. Bucher fought to pacify the rigid, sobbing shape that he cuddled helplessly. I extracted the pediatrician’s sneered-at tablets. It took both Bucher and me to deposit one of the pills within Caril’s protesting mouth and wash it down to where it might be of use.

Moments later Carli was so profoundly asleep in Bucher’s arms that I thought she was dead. Wary passengers around us lowered their voices lest they precipitate the screams they had feared would accompany their flight. Obviously they did not realize that thanks to modern science and a prescient doctor such precautions were unnecessary.

Carli was still sleeping soundly when we landed in Chetumal, Quintanna Roo, just over the Mexican border from British Honduras. A friendly taxi driver took us to a little family hotel to await our charter plane from Belize. My school Spanish, rusty as it was, proved adequate to explain to the welcoming hotel owner that the children had not eaten. She shooed us into the simple dining room and provided coffee and fresh orange juice instantly. Hot scrambled eggs, toast, and canned natural milk for the children followed quickly. Carli was still limp from her enforced slumber, but was not groggy, we were relieved to see.

The taxi driver returned to whisk us back to the airport, where a four-place Cessna from Belize City waited to take us on the final leg of our journey. I kept telling myself that our trip was a lot more plush than a trek in a covered wagon, but then I never intended to be a pioneer.

The plane banked steeply before steadying and slowing in descent. Below my window rushed a dizzying blur of winding river, pink rooftops, white picket fences, riotous tropical foliage, the greenest of grass, and the bluest of sea. The plane leveled out and flew low over a long, grassy stretch bordering the Caribbean, scattering the horses and donkeys peacefully grazing there. The pilot took the plane around and came in for a cushioned landing on the now-empty grass.

The scene of whirling colors and shapes outside the plane were no dizzier than the kaleidoscope of exhilaration, anticipation, and disbelief I felt as we approached Belize City, capital of the British Crown Colony of British Honduras. Less than a month before, the name Belize was unknown, and the country of British Honduras was but a shadowy memory from grammar school geography.