This part of my blog has never been writ­ten down.    I’m going to  try to recre­ate it from mem­ory.  It’s only going to get fog­gier as time past.

I left Tikal early, hop­ing to make it to Belize.  I had pretty high expec­ta­tions for Belize, as they speak my lan­guage, and it should be a beach par­adise.  On the way out, I got a bit lost, and needed gas too.  I pulled over and asked a nice older gen­tle­man and his young daugh­ter about gas and direc­tions.  They gave me good direc­tions in eng­lish, and as I was leav­ing say some­thing to the effect of “We’re glad you’re here.  Thank you and please come back.”  It was one of the more touch­ing parts of my trip.    As I was leav­ing him, four Dual Sport rid­ers passed me going the other way.  They were a mix of BMW’s and KLR’s.  For what­ever rea­son (maybe because it was a curvy road?), they didn’t wave.  Some­times, I’ve seen peo­ple doing cool things where I thought I was the only cool one in the world, and they’ve annoyed me.  Maybe I did that to those guys.  Oh yeah, peo­ple ask about the roads.  The roads in Guatemala were very good.  They all seemed to be new, and not very crowded.

Once I got to the Belize bor­der, I thought my span­ish speak­ing trou­bles were over.  Oh no!  For some rea­son, the guy behind the counter didn’t think my pass­port photo looked like my dri­vers license.  It’s the cra­zi­est thing in the world. He ended up get­ting a super­vi­sor to look at it, and after some argu­ing, agreed to let me in.  I don’t have any idea what the prob­lem was — no one else ever said any­thing about my pho­tos.   In the times I’ve had trou­ble at bor­der cross­ing (into Guatemala, out of Guatemala), usu­ally, just play­ing dumb works very well.  I’m going to keep that up.

Once I was allowed in, I was informed I had to get insur­ance to be in Belize.  There was an office out­side the immi­gra­tion office — only one.  I went in and bought insur­ance, and paid what I thought was too much money for too lit­tle time.   Fully insured and cer­ti­fied to be Greg Cain, I headed towards Belize City.  I found the water­front, and rode my motor­cy­cle through the nar­row streets.  It was a dif­fer­ent world than any I’d been in for some time.  Every­one was black, in a Caribbean envi­ron­ment, speak­ing eng­lish.   The roads were pretty nar­row, and not that fun to drive on (rough, and some stone.)  As I was leav­ing the one part of the city, and headed towards the sub­urbs, I pulled over to read my map.  A nice guy doing yard work walked up and started talk­ing to me.  He was pretty insis­tent that it wasn’t safe for me to stay near Belize City.  I was headed away from Belize City, didn’t have the great­est Belize expe­ri­ences, and it was some­what early, so I decided to head for Mexico.

Once out of Belize, and into the warm embrace of Mex­ico, I headed to Chetu­mal. It wasn’t far from the bor­der to the down­town area.  I don’t remem­ber too much about the area, other than get­ting a non-descript room (Hol­i­day Inn was very expen­sive), walk­ing around the non-descript city, and doing laun­dry by wear­ing my clothes in the shower.