It’s not fair for me to make Belize sound like paradise.  I like the warmth, the friendly people, the lack of rules, and the almost unlimited opportunities that present themselves.  Some things I don’t like:

CRITTERS.

It never freezes here, so the bugs never die!  They just multiply.  When we moved into our little temporary house, we were immediately assaulted by ants—four sizes of them.  Solution: I went out and got some “Super Shelltox Cockroach & Crawling Insect Killer”  which is so strong that you may not be able to get it in the US.  (It’s canned up in Jamaica.)  They won’t cross a line of it.  Second Solution: Wipe countertops with Clorox.  Ants hate it.

The mosquitoes are ubiquitous, but only at night.  Solution: Sleep under the covers & don’t stick your arms out.  Or if you do, spray them with repellant.  The nifty-est repellent we’ve found is OFF! Skintastic, the first non-oily repellent.  Those other oils & cremes make me feel dirty, and this doesn’t. It has aloe in it and feels good going on.

There are folk tales about lotions that repel mosquitoes.  Avon “Skin-so-soft” lotion. Watkins (the traveling salesman guys) Insect Repellent. We used a mellalueka soap which contains repellent when we were down here last May and it mostly worked.  Except in the swamp.

They have “mosquito coils” which you can burn, and citronella candles, which the old hands laugh at.  However, you can grow citronella plants around and in the house, and that helps.

Chiggers abound in Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma & Louisiana; why should I be surprised to find them down here?  Discovering chiggers is always fun.  They’re a microscopic red spider mite, about as big as a spec of red pepper, that lives in the grass.  They leave a big red byte that itches for 48 hours, and stays red for a week. I walked out in my “lawn” barefoot, which resulted in fifteen of these beauties on each leg.  Solution: The disclaimer on the OFF Skintastic bottle says it only works for a couple hours, but one light application to my socks keeps them off for the duration.  (as long as I don’t change sox, and I’ll never tell you how long that is.)  New. Or... try Clorox (see below.)

BITES IN GENERAL

We are experimenting with different anti-itch creams.  The general approach is “antihistimine”.   The best we’ve found so far is Benadryl Itch Stopping Cream (Extra Strength 2%)  A couple of beers helps you forget the itch.

New: (Jan 06)   Mike -- in Florida -- tells me that they have Fire Ants there, and if you rub the bite with Clorox, it stops the itch!  Thanks, Mike!

SPIDERS

We found a scrawny black one in the shower as big as the palm of my hand.  It was the biggest non-tarantula I’ve ever seen.  (We had tarantulas in Arizona.) After a lot of jumping around, it succumbed to the ShellTox.  Because beans are a staple in the diet, we also have very loud barking spiders.

SNAKES

We’ve only seen one little one. About as big around as my little finger, this two-foot fellah wandered in to Ron & DeeDee’s Bar up on the border one night while we were there.  The cook came out and used the dull side of a machete to send it to snake-valhalla.‘  It was so flattened out and beat up, I couldn’t really tell what kind of head it had, but I think it was a garter snake.

DOGS

It’s “spring” and the female dogs are in heat. The males roam the streets in packs of 10, 20 or 30, and get in fights in front of my house at 2AM.  The yard dogs, owned by everyone with a fence, are jealous and they start barking.  Solution: I have taken the law into my own hands.  I go out with a sturdy cudgel which I collected from the back yard (5 ft long, almost 2” in diameter)  and at the top of my lungs I shout “Bad Dogs”,  “Go Home”.

And they do!!   At least they go somewhere else, and they are scared to death of me.  Maybe I can teach the neighborhood how to deal with noisy dogs. <???>

TRAFFIC

Corozal is tiny (pop 8500) and manageable.  But the road to Belize City (pronounced Bleece, I now discover) is a two lane road called, optimistically, “The Northern Highway.” It is about like the BEST road in the rural Black Forest area I lived in, in Colorado.  The busses pretty much dominate this road, much like the Semis rule I-35 and I-40 in Texas.  The sugar mill in northern Belize is closed, so all the sugar trucks have to go 30 miles down to the sugar mill at OrangeWalk, and they sometimes clog the roads. Everybody passes them regardless of whether they can see and it’s very exciting.

No more exciting than Belize City itself, which has such narrow streets that they have mostly been declared one-way.   This is not a problem for me, since I’ve only been a passenger there <hee, hee> but we seem to go around in circles because of the one-ways, and I’m having trouble learning the city.  It’s really only pop. 75,000 but both cars and pedestrians ignore stop signs, and it is HARROWING. The trick, I think, is to get somebody ELSE to drive. <grin>

Right now, the yard dogs are barking, but I think it’s a good time to retire.   More later.

Thanks for hanging in, if you’re still here;

Sr. ric & Sra Carlotta

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