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Belikin is about the only beer you can get in Belize, or at least in Ambergris Caye and although it’s not very good it’s nice to be able to simply order “beer” without any specifics. And Belikin grows on you.
The thing about Belikin is that the bottles are about 4 times as heavy as American beers, like the old Coke bottles so you continue bringing an empty one to your mouth thinking it’s near full.
We ordered rounds, several of them, fresh off the plane at the Sundrift Hotel where they have the “world famous” Chicken Drop every Wednesday. Becker had read about the Chicken Drop somewhere in Alaska before the trip so I guess that would validate the “world-famous” claim.
Before he explained what it entailed, I immediately assumed that chickens were dropped for some high altitude and you would applaud in Third-World frenzy as the splattered. After our trip last year to Costa Rica, Becker and I toyed with the idea of moving there and starting a pig-skeet farm, where we would raise pigs and then fire them into the air on catapults for tourists to blast with shotguns. Chicken Drop sounded like it might infringe on our master plan.
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The Chicken Drop in actually far less brutal. Simply, a chicken is tossed onto a board of numbers - 1 thru 100 - and whoever has purchased the number that the chicken shits on first, wins.
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Chicken Throw
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We bought 20 tickets and we won. The chicken shit on number 22, my new lucky number, and we won 100 dollars Belize, or 50 bucks U.S.
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Winner!
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Meanwhile, the boil-goiter on the back of my neck kept growing. Quit pickin it, says Honey.
It was raining when we arrived and when it stopped it still stayed gray. The major form of transportation, besides walking, is the over-priced rental golf cart. The roads are dirt but in the rain turn to a fine, clay-like mud that - as Becker put it - made the cart steer like a Ouija board.
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We didn't have time to fuck around and wait for sun since we were only there for four days. There was tons of shit to do and we didn't want to do any of it, to be honest. We'd considered the baboon reserve or the cave tubing but they were full day affairs and pricey and we were all kind of keen on just drinking on the beach and watching our fat grow. But we'd come all this way so we settled on snorkeling in Shark Ray Alley.
They call it Shark Ray Alley because of the Sharks and Rays. They could have at least used Spanish in lieu of originality but it sold us so there you go.
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They take you out to the reef and give you a rote speech with all the excitement of a senior telemarketer on his last day of work, sucking any imagined risk out of the proposition and then you jump in the water and swim around with these enormous rays and other marine life. Don’t get me wrong, it was still fun as fuck but it would have been really fun if the guide himself had acted like he was scared out of his tit.
But instead, he pleasantly loaded us back onto the boat, handed out water bottles to all of us like children who didn’t cry at the dentist. He started up the boat, hit the throttle and after a moment of seeing no progress, he realized that the propeller had fallen off and was now on the bottom of the sea.
Back at shore - courtesy of another boat in the area that still had it’s propeller - we were now ready to drink for three days and make excuses for doing little else.
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Becker likes Belize.
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We stayed at the perfect hotel on the beach called the Playador which probably translates into "nice place" or some such thing. Every Spanish name translates into something vague and simple like "warm water" or "big house". They never translate into "misplaced ambition" or "blood-caked offspring", nothing but the obvious.
Becker likes Belize more than I do but I like it just fine. I just don't feel like I'm "away" as much as I did in Costa Rica.
The dirty here is more of an American dirty as opposed to an undeveloped dirty. You walk down the beach and you see conch shell followed by plastic cup followed by hermit crabs and styrofoam plate. Not East River pollution by any means but each peice of refuse I spot, I can't help but imagine it was left there in a malicious, purposeful manner by some American tourist. A raging fraternity wrestler from Arizona State yelling with his friends about some fruitless date-rape attempt that he was too intoxicated to consumate as he pisses of the pier - dick in one hand while the other tosses garbage. I don't consider that sometimes plastic cups just get blown into the sea, nor do I want to.
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It doesn't take long before you get your fill of slogans like "You'd Better Belize It!". Becker found a Hawaiin shirt that had You'd Better Belize It all over it and bought it just to irritate me.
So we drank and we skinny-dipped and we slept and we ate and we took pictures of the girls skinny-dipping and when they sobered up we claimed that we'd deleted those pictures and then we drank some more. It was still overcast when we caught the puddle-jumper back to Belize City to catch the flight home.
Airport security? The 12 seater plane back to Belize City was full when I got on so I got to ride in the co-pilot seat. Nice.
Getting off, we had to claim our bags inside. I couldn't find my claim tag and the luggage guy didn't seem to care that I was the only person of the 12 on board left trying to claim that the only bag left. He asked my name and then checked the permanent tag on the luggage. The name was not mine though - it was the name of whomever left it at the thrift store where I'd purchased it. Becker was laughing at me and I told the luggage policeman that my camera was in the top pocket and had pictures of me throughout. I began to scroll through as he looked over my shoulder and immediately hit the vein of skinny-dipping pictures of our naked wives.
The laugh made the whole vacation.
Upstairs in the airport bar, the entire staff was wearing the exact same "You'd Better Belize It!" shirt as Becker.
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