"Stranded on the New River" Belize Travelogue by Elmsaafir

On our one day off during our time in Belize, we took a trip down the New River to some Mayan ruins called Lamanai. As the sun rose, the day got muggy. We spent the first hour or so dropping some of the kids off at school (including Nelly, who later told me that she would "see me in her dreams..." Don't quite know why she said that, but for a 21 year old guy to hear a cute girl say that, it was pretty cool.) and checking out some of the local ruins. It was here that we dubbed our leader, "El Pato Grande," or "the Big Duck." We were in a Spanish speaking country, and wanted to show off our minimal skills, so we gave him the nickname. For the record, he looked nothing like a duck.

Our destination that day was Lamanai, ruins up the New River from Orange Walk. We were to get there via motor boat that we hired from some Mennonites there in the area. As we drove up to the settlement, it was like stepping back in time 100 years. There was little in the way of mechanized equipment, and the women scurried to get out of the view of our "outsider" eyes. I was able to get one picture of a woman walking off with two children.

We stopped the van down by the bank of the New River, and all hopped out. There were sixteen of us all, 9 of us "gringos" and 7 of our Belizean friends. We looked around for the boat that would take us down to Lamanai, but all we saw was a small, 15 foot or so launch with a single 30 horsepower motor on the back. There was no way that we all would fit into that. Or so we thought. After a few minutes of milling around on the bank, two Mennonite men came abling down the hill toward the water. They looked German, tall, fair and blonde, compared to the short, brown, Meztizos that we had been staying with. To us, it appeared somewhat out of place.

They started talking with Moises, our host, and then got into the small boat. It was then that we realized that that indeed WAS our ride. Some smart guy (me, actually), made a mildly humorous comment about Gilligan's Island, and several of us broke into song, hoping that our captains hadn't ever seen the show.

Larry and Darryl (in the boat)

Somehow, we all shoehorned ourselves into the boat, with the drivers, now nearly 20. Larry and Darryl (but no other brother Darryl) as we dubbed them shoved off, and started the motor as we started to float downstream in the gentle current. Despite the boat's low profile in the water, none of it seemed to be coming into it over the sides, so we just settled in for what was supposed to be about a 1 hour ride upriver to the ruins.

The wooded, jungle banks slowly drifted past us as we put, put, putted up the river. After a few minutes, the engine sputtered to a stop. We all just looked at each other as if to say, "Great...now what?" Larry and Darryl were not phased, though. They just reached under the seat in front of them, and pulled out another motor. They unhooked the one from the gas tank, pulled it into the back of the boat, and set the other one in it's place. A few pulls of the lawnmower starter cord thingy, and we were off again. They spent a few minutes tinkering with the first motor, when the "new" motor stopped working also. They simply repeated the previous exchange, and started the first motor up again, and began to fix the second one. This mechanical ballet happened at least five times. Put-put-put-put-tinker-tinker--fix-replace. Put-put-put-put-tinker-tinker--fix-replace. Put-put-put-put-tinker-tinker--fix-replace. Finally, after an hour and a half of this, with the trip moving far slower than expected, Larry consulted with Darryl, and the boat swung to a small clearing on the side of the river. "Six of you must leave the boat," Larry said in heavily accented English. We quickly rock-paper-scissored ourselves into a smaller group, and five of us got out. As we stood on the bank watching a small boat get smaller in the distance, we wondered if perhaps they HAD seen Gilligan's Island after all.

Our clearing on the bank...

We sat a while on the bank, listening to the sound of the sputtering boat engine, fading into the sound of birds and bugs, and then got up to see what was around. The clearing we were in was a turn around for a seemingly seldom used dirt road that led to the river. This road in turn intersected with another little used, mostly overgrown road. Without maps, we pretty much only knew that we were on the east side of the river, somewhere south of the ruins.

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