The 3-plane hop to Hopkins
Trip Start
May 26, 2007
1
5
Trip End
Jun 03, 2007
Hopkins,
Belize
Saturday, May 26, 2007
Early morning travel without coffee is like snorkeling without your air tube. This we discovered when arriving at Sacramento "International" Airport shortly after 4:00am, only to find no check-in desks open and no coffee or food to be had for a whole hour.
Boarding-passes in-hand from our 'convenient' online check-in process, we were ready to dump our bags at Continental's speedy bag-drop and head for a triple-triple-latte, so smug were we with our nifty 4-wheel suitcases that never topple over and matching backpacks (blame my mother).. There was just one little snag: Sacramento, being the 2nd-rate city that it is, only had room enough for one generic line at the Continental check-in counter, therefore making our online check-in 100% worthless
Dangriga Airport
. The problems continued. In an effort to "speed up" the line, Continental added those little self-serve kiosks in front of the counters to enable you to retrieve your reservation, print your own boarding passes, and check your own baggage. In theory, this sounds great: all you have to do is type in your confirmation number, press a few on-screen buttons, then hand your luggage over to the brain-dead ground staff (who now need less training, no customer-service skills, and a lower hourly rate). Except, of course, the reality was much different.
Now, nifty suitcase or not, we were stuck inline with travelers of all skill and experience.
There are the Technophobe Travelers, who freeze like a deer in the headlights at the mere sight of a computer kiosk and/or proceed to misread the instructions, hit the wrong buttons, freeze the system and end up asking the staff for help anyway; the Helpless Travelers, who fall apart when asked to do anything for themselves and deliberate every keystroke with their spouse or friend; the Unprepared Travelers, who don't know their confirmation number and wait until they hit the front of the line to fumble around in their bag looking for any scrap of paper with their flight information on it, all the while hogging the kiosk; the Clueless Travelers, who are oblivious to the process and step into the shortest line, regardless of whether they should be in it or not, and then proceed to hold up the line as they back-track to complete the steps they missed without losing their place in line; and finally, irate and irritable, the Savvy Travelers, who did everything online 24 hours ago, have their boarding pass in-hand and just want to hand over their cases and go
Dangriga's Runway
! Add to this the stroke of genius that placed twice as many kiosks as there are bag-drop points and the result resembles an ant line after someone has stepped right in the middle of it. And all the while the now customer-service-skill-free staff stare blankly ahead, oblivious to the frustration and chaos around them, performing their 2-step tasks like zombies.
So we wound-up standing in line behind a group of Unprepared Travelers and being usurped in-line by Clueless Travelers previously ten people behind us. We needed caffeine REAL BAD.
With no food or drink available until 5:30, Hubbie and I hunted-down the nearest guest comment card and, in our early-morning disgust, marked "Poor" on every single evaluation. Take that Sacramento "International" (my ass).
Fortunately, things went better from thereon out.
Seven hours and two planes later, we arrived in Belize City slightly ahead of schedule and were greeted by an immigration official who asked us if we were related. (Remember, I have not changed my last name so there is no indication on our paperwork that we are married.) "Yes, we're married," we replied. He eyed us suspiciously. "For how long?" We told him six months. "And how long have you known each other?" he asked. "Oh, ten years or so." "How did you meet?" he proceeded.
(Suddenly I was reminded of my experiences being grilled at the hands of Israeli border patrol who peppered me with questions in an attempt to trip me up and reveal that I was in fact a Palestinian Militant disguised as a U.S
Our little puddle jumper
. tourist.) After a couple more questions however, we realized that his interrogation was for a different reason. Suddenly satisfied, the questions stopped and a look of amusement crossed his face. "Ah, it's just that you look alike, like you're related," he said.
Is incest a big problem in Belize? I wondered, or are thousands of brother-sister illegal immigrants trying to gain Belizean visas by posing as married couples? Either way, we were free to go, feeling just a little icky...Have we really already begun to look alike after only six months of marriage?
At the Mayan Island Air counter were told we could get on an earlier flight to Dangriga, leaving in just 10 minutes! So, back through security we dashed (paying $0.75 each for the privilege - imagine making US passengers pay!) to meet our flight at Gate 1, excited that we would get to spend more time at our resort and less time waiting in a hot and overcrowded foreign airport.
We arrived at our gate, expecting to see a frenzy of activity as passengers were being loaded onto our flight, but what we found were no planes, two perspiring gate attendants virtually falling asleep at their podium, and a group of irritable and uninformed passengers
The cockpit
. Uh oh. "Flight to Dangriga?" we asked, hopefully.
"Yes, yes, 10 minutes, just wait over there," one of them said, waving us to a wooden bench away from the rest of the travelers, appearing to indicate we were not going wherever they going- we hoped.
20 minutes later we were still sitting on that wooden bench and there was no plane to be seen.
Fortunately, what we were experiencing was just our first sampling of Belizean Time as, shortly thereafter and with little fanfare and certainly no explanation, a little 14-seater plane parked itself within eye-shot and we were walking across the tarmac to board.
I made a mental note to readjust my internal time-clock to the speed of life in Belize.
Our transportation to Dangriga, about half way down the eastern coast of Belize, was a little propeller-driven puddle-jumper clearly about ten years past its retirement date
The view from the puddle jumper
. We bent double to reach our worn, grey seats and plonked ourselves down about two rows from the pilot. I was momentarily torn between the emotions of "Cool, I can see all the instrumentation, this is going to be fun!" and "Uh, oh, this is going to be a bit different to a 747!" The latter wasn't helped much by our inability to secure our seatbelts.
In we clicked, out it popped. "Um, does your seatbelt lock?" I asked Hubbie. "Nope." Click in, pop out. "What are we doing wrong?" Click in, pop out. "I don't know." Click in, pop out. "I don't think ours work." Click in, pop out. "I don't think so either."
Suddenly, without so much as an "Everything ok back there?" from our pilot, the door closed and the propeller began turning; we were beginning to taxi away from the gate! Click in, pop out, click in, pop out, clik in, pop out. The clicking was getting more frantic and now we were heading down the runway. There was nobody to get help from and nobody who seemed to care if we were strapped-in or not.
And then, there we were, in the air.
"Well, if it crashes I don't think these will help much anyway," said Hubbie in an odd attempt to reassure us. With that, we resigned ourselves to the perils of unprotected flying and enjoyed the ride.
~
Dangriga airport appeared to us about 20 minutes later as a worryingly short yellow strip of earth just off the coast. To say we were heading into the non-commercialized area of Belize was obviously going to prove to be an understatement. Our wings waved left and right at the little white structure coming up in front of us that would end up being Dangriga's airport building - one room, one counter, a tv, some chairs, and no air conditioning.
Click here to view a video from the landing
The walk between the plane and the "terminal" was so short and the plane so dinky, that I almost went to the luggage hold and picked-up my bags myself. It seemed a bit of a waste of time to wait for the two porters to wheel it twenty feet across the tarmac and into the building for you. I tell you though, it was the fastest and most efficient baggage-claim service I've ever been through!
~
The 30 minute drive to Hopkins Village, where our resort Hamanasi is located, gave us a good taste of the area.
Dangriga is the center of the Garifuna people in Belize, direct descendants of the "Island Caribs" and a group of African slaves who escaped two ship-wrecked Spanish slave ships near St. Vincent in 1635 and then forcibly removed from St. Vincent by the British in 1797. (Those damn Brits!) So, the area in culture and the look of its people is more reminiscent of the Caribbean than of Hispanic Central America - somewhat of a surprise when you consider that Belize is squashed between Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras. In fact our driver, Golden, was a Garifuna himself.
The mixture of the two cultures has resulted in a type of music called Punta Rock, which mixes the feel and melodies of Reggae, with the frenetic rhythms of Latin culture - basically Reggae on steroids! (iTunes has a Punta Rock mix if you're interested in hearing what it sounds like.)
The journey also revealed that the region is pretty poor. All the usual hallmarks of a developing nation were visible on the ride:
* How they dispose of their trash - everywhere and anywhere.
* How they drive on the road - everywhere and anywhere (and always accompanied by periodic beeps of the horn to anyone you pass, whether or not you know them)
* Unfinished, half-built, and uninhabited buildings - everywhere.
Bumping down the dirt road through Hopkins, we passed shacks that pass for homes, cinder-block boxes that pass for schools, and tin-huts that pass for restaurants. On first glance, the town looked deserted but our driver told us that there were 10,000 residents, so you found yourself looking hard to find them. With little space inside the houses and a sauna-like climate year-round, pretty much everyone in town was lolling lazily around outside or in the doorways of their homes. Unmoving, often staring into space, the only movement you saw was from children playing in bushes, seemingly oblivious to the heat, or the odd man biking home from work through the dusty roads.
About a quarter of a mile south of the village, dust billowing in our bus' trail, we turned off onto an inconspicuous gravel road and into our resort.
