Friday, December 21, 2018

From Rio Dulce to Livingston

It had been cool overnight, and we were glad to have not only the customary sheet but a blanket, too, but not long after we woke up the sun did as well: it promised to be a perfect day for the boat trip to Livingston on the Caribbean coast. This trip was hailed as a very special experience in the Lonely Planet and other travel write-ups, and at least part of the reason why we were here.


The boat, big enough for about twenty people, with a tarp providing shade, picked us up at nine: we were the first ones onboard and thus had the advantage of getting a look at other hotels/hostels hidden in the mangrove swamps when we picked up other passengers. A short detour to Castillo San Felipe de Lara a few kilometres outside of town, built as protection from pirates in the 17th century at the entrance to Lake Izabal, was an early bonus of the trip.
Before the lake widened we could get a good look at the many mansions, yachts anchored in covered shelters beside the dock, alternating with more modest dwellings and watercraft. It is easy to see the allure of living at a place where life happens on and along the water, where it's never cold (though might be too hot for some during the summer when the temperature rises to near forty degrees during the day and doesn't drop much below thirty at night, humidity hovering around 80% or more). Expats seem to like it here: we heard many English, German and Dutch voices in town, and the owner of our hotel is from Switzerland originally, with many of the guests from Germany and Switzerland, too.



Once out on the lake the boat picked up speed, and soon houses were few and far between, green hills rising from the shore. Other boats big and small passed us on their way to and from Livingston. About an hour in the young captain of our boat slowed down and pulled up beside a small island. Hundreds of cormorants were nesting here, so many that the entire crowns of the trees were white with guano, the stench and noise appropriate.

 
No sooner had we slowed down almost to a stop than small boats appeared from between the trees with women and children offering crafts. It can't be an easy way to make money: nobody from our boat was interested. We slowly wended our way through several little islands, admiring the waterlilies, their leaves a green carpet spread out on the water, dragonflies darting between them, and stopped for fifteen minutes at a hotspring along the bank where we could sit and dip in our feet. 
 


We entered a side channel to drop off a couple of passengers at a hostel. Looking up we couldn't believe our eyes: there was Markus, the German who had hiked to El Mirador with us! What a coincidence that he was out on that dock at the very moment we stopped there for no more than three or four minutes.




We were nearing Livingston now and entered the canyon, its tree-covered walls rising steeply to both sides. The speed of the boat made it impossible to take a good picture of this. Hundreds of white egrets were perched on trees and rocks along the way, a clear indication of the amount of fish in these waters.




The canyon walls gave way to lower banks, and when we turned another corner we had reached Livingston, and with it the ocean. We disembarked, and now had two and a half hours to get a feel for this town that is very different from the rest of the country: here, the population is Garifuna, an ethnic group living along the Caribbean coast of central America, most in Honduras with smaller populations in Belize, Guatemala and Nicaragua. They are descended from groups originating in the Lesser Antilles, from where the British administration exiled them after a series of slave revolts. Dark skinned and mostly tall, they have their own language and music. 


We walked down main street, filled with restaurants and shops selling crafts and specialties, coconut oil and honey among them. The hot noon sun beat down on us, and we were glad when we reached the beach at the end of main street. It didn't look very enticing, the brackish water slapping lazily against the small strip of dirty sand and small rocks in front of a row of small huts. We were looking for a restaurant Dani, the receptionist at GreenGo's, had told us about: The Chill-Out Cafe, and its owner Mario, a friend of Dani's. 'If he can summon a few of his buddies you'll get to hear some great music,' she said. 


We watched a group of egrets fishing in the shallow water, looked furtively at the houses, and walked right past the Chill-Out without seeing it on our first try: it differed not a whole lot from its surroundings. After we turned around we saw the sign, and right after we met Mario, who had stepped out to greet us with a friendly grin. Sure we could get something to eat, he said, the meal of the day on the blackboard seemingly the meal of all days – whatever we wanted: rice, rice and beans, chicken, shrimp, fish ... It was a bit early still, so we told him we'd be back after another round through town. Few people were about, maybe because it was midday, but compared to the rest of Guatemala it felt less welcoming, few of the people looking up, even fewer replying to my greeting. Maybe they didn't like visitors very much. Maybe their history had caused them to be more circumspect, less inviting, or maybe they just couldn't be bothered. 




Back at the Chill-Out Cafe Mario passed our order – rice with chicken for Johann, rice with shrimp for me - on to the cook. We were the only guests for a while, sipped our beer and watched a few men working on putting in some kind of lamp posts. One dug a hole while four or five others waded out into the shallow water near the shore and brought back sand – or was it clay? - by the shovelful, piling it beside the guy digging the hole where the water drained from it. To us it looked as if they were going to use this as a kind of cement. Meanwhile Johann, who had asked for the bathroom earlier and came back with the news that the toilet drained right onto the ground below and that the only water he found for washing his hands came from a pail (nothing unusual, btw), had second thoughts regarding our food. He is the one who will get sick at least once on every trip, and now he had soon convinced himself that he certainly would get sick after eating here. I tried to reassure him: Dani wouldn't have sent us here to eat if it wasn't safe to do so. He wasn't convinced. The food arrived, my order with big juicy shrimps as tender as any I've ever eaten and absolutely delicious. Johann's chicken, too, was well seasoned, yet he couldn't fully enjoy it because he was thinking about the boat ride back to Rio Dulce. Sometimes the result of eating something that wasn't safe to eat had come within half an hour, so the worry was not quite unfounded ...

A few of Mario's friends had arrived in the meantime, their language much like what we had heard on the 'chicken bus' we took from Belize City to the Guatemalan border where we were the only white people in a crowd of mostly Garifuna. It didn't feel like the right time to ask about the music: had we been there in the evening I might have done that. We had to leave soon, however, and Johann, still worried about the effects of eating lunch at this place, paired with an aversion to loud live music, wouldn't have been able to enjoy it anyway.



As soon as all the returning passengers had arrived at the dock the boat left. Quite a few of the people who had come to Livingston with us stayed there to take a boat to Honduras  or Belize, both close enough that we could see their shoreline in the distance across the bay. This time we didn't stop anywhere but headed straight home to Río Dulce, where we arrived after only an hour and a quarter instead of nearly two. Johann didn't get sick, not on the boat and not later, and I was glad we had found Mario's place instead of eating somewhere along main street in a nondescript restaurant. Maybe I wouldn't have felt this way if the outcome had been different ... 

                      

                                                            



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