For some reason speaking a language with people who don’t speak your language is way more fun than speaking it with people who do know your language because when they don’t know English, you’re backed against a wall and the only way out is by fighting through the linguistic hordes in front of you. You have to wrack your brains, bravely put yourself forward, and make your rusty tongue form phonemes that you haven’t used in years. And if you get the incantation right, the spell works, and the monsters return to their true forms – shopkeepers, taxi drivers, and cheery old folks. It’s an adventure and those seem to be getting harder to come by.
I can’t really underestimate how much fun it was to speak Spanish again. Language is kinda like magic. It makes wonderful things appear – like nachos and burros, which we ordered from a little shop at the border town of Melchor de Mencos. So if you get a chance, go to a place where you have to pick up another language and fight your way through.
There wasn’t as much opportunity to speak Spanish in Belize but the one time there was, it was something like an adventure or a fiasco.
The situation was that we couldn’t locate our Airbnb. As experienced travel experts, we had a flexible plan. The plan had been to look up the address for the San Ignacio Airbnb before leaving our Guatemalan Airbnb. But as it turned out, they didn’t have wifi. And if you’ll recall, we skipped buying SIM cards. Why would we need a phone when the car rental company had given us an old flip phone, right? Between the emergency phone and the GPS function on a static map my iPhone had, we should be fine. So once we had crossed the border back into Belize, we tried calling the San Ignacio Airbnb.
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- driving back to the border
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- burros y nachos
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- Airbnb
Unfortunately, the loaner phone had precisely enough minutes for one phone call, I guess to say goodbye, which gave us just enough time to get poor directions from the annoyed lady at the Airbnb before the phone became useless.
After a few unsuccessful attempts at finding the place, we did what any Millennial would’ve done: we began the hunt for wifi. This means driving slowly past shops to see if our phones could pick up any wifi signals. Thankfully, we picked up a signal from David’s Superstore which was a little convenience store owned, not surprisingly, by a Chinese couple. Unfortunately, David had password-protected his wifi. So once we had bought a few snacks, David snatched my phone and helpfully typed in the password.
Google Maps failed us. It placed the Airbnb just off a main road in the middle of a patch of green. We had circled that area already and probably freaked out the neighborhood by driving creepily slow past the houses.
Next, we decided to do this the old fashioned way and ask some locals, but no one had heard of the place.
So we drove back to David’s Superstore, which had become our home base, to try wifi calling and messaging through Airbnb, neither of which worked. I had been leaning against the shop wall for a while, fiddling with my phone, and watching people pass. There was a big man, probably Garifuna, dressed like a thug standing a few feet away. I had heard him speak Spanish. So I put my phone in my pocket and walked up to the guy.
“Hola, tienes un teléfono? Necesito llamar mi hotel.” Against all odds, he didn’t have a phone either! But he called over this other guy who had been standing next to a moto. This second guy seemed super reluctant to let me use his phone but finally relented, though he wouldn’t let me type in the number. After two tries, the same Airbnb lady picked up. This time she was convinced we were idiots and said there was a sign for the Airbnb at the entrance right off the main road we had already driven down several times. Perfect.
I returned the phone to its suspicious owner, thanked the guys, and ran back to the Jeep. The sign that the lady had mentioned did not say “the Iguana’s Roost.” It said “82.” We only found the place because we were desperate enough to turn at any and every sign. When we arrived, the lady and her husband were much more civil though the next day, she was also very reluctant to let me use her phone to call the next hostel. It was like I had asked to drink out of the milk jug or borrow her car. I don’t know what it is with minutes in Belize but they must be gold.
To be fair, the hosts weren’t uptight about other things. They run a nice little place with several small cabins and plenty of Iguana’s out front. The proprietors are a British couple who decided to try their hand in the hospitality industry a few years ago. Like I mentioned a while back, Belize is a hot market for Realestate and tourism is growing. Honestly, I wasn’t even sure where Belize was when I started thinking about going there but after doing a little research, it’s easy to see that it’s gaining attention – particularly for those willing to pay for cave and diving tours. But if you go there, just don’t ask anyone for their phone.