Back From Belize, Part One

The photo is an artsy craftsy shot of a mahogany sculpture in the open air dining room at Chaa Creek, one of my favorite places in the world. The Inn at Chaa Creek is an Eco-Lodge in central Belize near the Guatemalan border. It was our first stop on our yearly two week getaway to Central America with Bud and Janet Simmons.

Chaa Creek is not what one would call an EXTREME Eco-Lodge. We don't have to take showers under metal drums that collect rain water. We don't sleep in a tent with creepy things crawling all over the place. We don't have to walk 50 feet to use an outhouse, or anything like that. I mean, I approve of the concept of Eco-Lodges; I just don't want to go off the deep end.

No. We stay in the spa villa at Chaa Creek situated above the spa and all that implies: body wraps, coma massages, fingernails, toenails, soft music with no discernible melody wafting over you. The spa villa is also air conditioned, unlike the other more ecologically correct cabanas with bay palm thatched roofs and overhead fans that do nothing to fight off the 100 degree temperatures and 80% humidity. We do have to walk down the hill (136 steps - Bud counted) to get to the infinity pool, bar, and terrific restaurant. There is a river at the bottom of the property with canoes ready for any guest who wants to paddle upriver to a botanical garden, or float downstream to San Ignacio. The lodge will send a van to pick you up if you are too exhausted from your float to make it back upstream to the lodge.

In the morning you can have a guide take you around the 300 plus acres to spot 350 varieties of tropical birds. In the afternoon another guide will take you for a medicine walk and show you all the healing properties of the burgeoning vegetation on the place. You can take a horse back ride through the enormous organic garden that supplies the kitchen, or look at the furniture shop that supplies all the rooms.

Like all great places, it is filled with a staff of over 120 smiling, happy Belizeans who have been lucky enough to score a job at this place. Founded some thirty years ago by a young traveling couple as a farm, it has evolved into a show place that hosts educational seminars from all over Central America and funds numerous scholarships for lucky locals.

If you like birds, rivers, organic farming, great food, talented bartenders, this place is for you.

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Books at Chaa Creek

Every vacation is a chance for me to read until my eyes fall out and this was no exception.

I finished Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel on the plane to Belize City. It is a historical novel about Henry VIII that pretty much goes over the same events as A Man For All Seasons, but instead of focusing on Thomas More, who appears to be more stubborn than heroic, it focuses on Thomas Cromwell and his impressive machinations to keep the kingdom running through all of his monarch's whims and furies. I'm not an avid historical novel reader and this book gave me some trouble at first, but the last third is magnificent.

When we got to Chaa Creek, I switched to The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson. Jim, my lawyer friend at the Y, recommended it after we had had a conversation about other Bryson works. He wrote A Walk in the Woods, must reading for anyone who likes to hike, and a bunch of other works too numerous to name but all eminently readable.

The Thunderbolt Kid is a memoir set in the Des Moines of the fifties where Bryson spent his childhood. I was initially interested because Des Moines, Franny's base for so many years, is a place I have grown to love, plus I like reading about places that are familiar to me. I soon discovered that the book could have been set anywhere in the midwest. The important thing was his nostalgia for the fifties. Feel free to roll your eyes, but I feel sorry for anyone who didn't get a chance to grow up during that decade. Everything Bryson said and felt I have said and felt, only not nearly so eloquently.

There is nothing in the book that was necessarily new, but that is what makes it so great. On the other hand, I think it has a pretty esoteric audience in mind. When I started reading about Grand Avenue and The Des Moines Register, I thought Franny would love the book as well, but the further I got into it the more I realized it was about a time that no longer exists and its appeal was pretty much exclusively to people my age and older.

My timing was perfect as I finished Bryson's book on the day we left for Guatemala. More on that in the next post.