From Brooklyn to Belize

Just got back from Belize where we went for spring break (Franny's and mine coincided, at least for a week) which was nice except for the part where we almost drowned. Belize, the former British Honduras, is chasing the same Yankee ecotourist dollar people like us have dropped in Costa Rica (see photo, left). They are just not yet as keen on the safety angle.

This time last year, for example, we took a day long whitewater rafting trip in CR. The pre-trip precautions were extensive: our guide spent nearly an hour preparing us for any eventuality -- dumping the raft, say -- and what to do in the rapids should that occur. Later he told me that he had worked on the Colorado River in the US and that Costa Rica safety standards were much more stringent. Having reinvented itself as the premier adventure travel destination in Central America, the government didn't want some tragedy marring an innocent outing and making headlines back in the states.

I got the impression things were a little more...casual in Belize. The jungle lodge where we stayed the first three nights had been in business since the early eighties and was very professionally run. But the trip we took on our first full day was not quite as advertised. It was billed as a sort of jungle triathalon -- horseback riding, caving and tubing down the river -- but everything took significantly longer than we had been told. The horse trip was supposed to be an hour and a half -- but morphed into three, a big difference when you ride a horse about once a year. (Thanks for asking about my ass.) The cave exploration was brief, but partly because the cave itself was so slick that none of our party felt safe venturing too far from the mouth.

The rude surprise was the tubing, though. We traveled with another family of three and were given five inner tubes and a canoe in which we were to slowly wend our way back to the lodge. "It will take about two hours," we were told but when the third hour came and we were no closer to our destination, we knew something wasn't right. Far worse, we learned the hard way that there was a dam upriver and that they were opening gates every afternoon around four, turning our lazy river run into a swift one. My daughter lost her tube, we dumped the canoe three or four times (losing some shoes and drowning my cellphone in the process) and on several hair-raising occasions paddled like crazy to get to our stranded children, reassuring them all the while that everything was as it should be.

Nobody died, of course. But in all honesty, if our kids had been younger or any of us were worse swimmers, somone could have. I thought of Lawrence Gonzalez's great book, Deep Survival -- a collection of horror stories about walk-through-the-park sorts of outings that turned into survival-of-the-fittest endurance trials -- and counted my blessings. Back at the lodge they were concerned and apologetic -- How about a nice pot of cocoa for the girls? -- but did not seem as alarmed as they should have been. Why was there no one spotting us on either end of that journey? Why was there absolutely no instruction about tubing or canoeing down rapids? The news about the dam seemed to concern them less than where we left the canoe.

To be continued...

posted by Sean Elder @ 1:37 PM  0 comments

No show Jones et al

How heartening it was to hear that the Sex Pistols would not be showing up to be inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this evening. Last month the band officially declined the honor with a hand-written note posted on their website that echoed Jon Stewart's famous riposte to Tucker Carlson.

"We're not your monkeys and so what?" someone -- it sounds more like Johnny Rotten than Steve Jones but who knows? -- scrawled. The band was speaking as one. "Your not paying attention," the rant continued -- quoting the note newspapers wrote "sic" in parantheses to demonstrate that they knew the difference between "your" and "you're" but with the Pistols the amendment should be "sick." It was almost thirty years ago now that the band declared rock sick unto death, a pronouncement as surprising at the news that Barry Bonds used steroids.

I missed the Pistols in their last concert at Winterland, the one where they closed with "No Fun" and Johnny squatted on the floor and famously asked the crowd, "Ever have the feeling you've been cheated?" I was late to the party though glimpsing them on TV I knew that I had blown it. For those who loved rock but despaired of the cocaine-and-unrequited love music of Southern California or the nauseating prog rock of the UK, they were like a shot of adrenalin straight to the heart. (In Lipstick Traces, Greil Marcus recounts how Joe Strummer, then in a rockabilly band called the 101ers, ran into Graham Parker, then playing pub rock. "Saw the Sex Pistols last night," Joe said. "Sex...pistols?" said Graham. "Whole 'nother thing," Joe said sagely and the next time they met, Strummer had changed his look and sound and was writing stuff like "Janey Jones.")

"it's where old rockers go to die," Rotten once said of the institution called the Rock and Roll Hall of Shame, and anyone still trying to forget the image of Sly Stone performing at the Grammies last month knows that dying in public ain't pretty. I did finally see Johnny a few years later, perfoming with PiL, howling through numbers like "Rise," reminding the hysterical crowd that "Anger is an energy." For the finale he showed the crowd his bare backside, smiling all the while.

posted by Sean Elder @ 11:08 AM  1 comments