(Belize City, Belize)

I love trashy music. Reggaeton is good, as is Dancehall. Music with heavy beats makes good dancing, and that makes me happy. Thus, walking the streets of St. Ignacio on New Year ’s Eve gave me a good feeling: there was the latino crowd with their Reggaeton, the creole crowd with their Dancehall, and white tourists who listed to some random pop.

I headed over to join the Dancehall crowd. Dancehall draws from reggae and adds a faster heavier electronic beat. Its lyrics run the gamut from political protests to sex, drugs and violence. And the dancing, while not my style, is great. Watching the crowd gyrate and grind is amazing when it is a crowd that can gyrate and grind. Wonderful stuff. I have to go to Jamaica someday to see the land of Dancehall (or an Enur Raggatronic concert). As midnight came, the crowds poured onto the street to watch fireworks at the police station.

(Belize City, Belize)

The Reggaetown/Dancehall divide runs along racial and cultural lines: on the way from Belize City to Mexico, the bus was playing Dancehall until we reached Orangewalk, a Belizean city near to the Mexican border with a higher proportion of Latinos. Immediately, the bus driver switched from Dancehall to Reggaeton.

(Belize City, Belize)

San Ignacio is a small border town in Belize with a small main street and not much else. The town seemed awashed with American tourists who largely stick with their own. I guess English-speaking Belize must seem much friendlier, which is why there seems more Americans on this side as compared to the Guatemalan side. Both sides serve as bases for tourists exploring the Mayan ruins in Tikal.

(Belize City, Belize)

Glad to be able to hold a full conversation in English after spending so much time in Guatemala, I chatted with my hostel owner and asked about the quaint history of Belize. Belize is a former British colony (hence English) and the national flag depicts two figures standing by the Mayan Tree of Life. Apparently one of them holds an axe (to cut down trees) and represents whites/British. The other is a planter and represents the rest of Belize.

(Tikal, Guatemala) The Tree of Life

I use “the rest of Belize” because there are 12 ethnic groups in the country. Costs are much higher in Belize, a fact my host attributed to the higher land to people ratio. He said that planters here get a living wage unlike the rest of Central America. As Singapore was a former British colony, I was surprised that my host had no idea what or where Singapore is.

My host was an old man and at one point, he tried to explain the rapid changes in technology when I showed him my IPod Touch. “In the past we had fax and now you have that thing…that appliance…where you type a message and it appears electronically…” He could just have said “email.”

Figure 2: Standard of Living Indicators for Pyongyang, DPRK Average and South Hwanghae

Using the recently released DPRK 2008 census figures, I have constructed a “rough” guide to the different living standards in different provinces using some figures embedded in the census. Feel free to take a look and provide comments.

Highlights: Figure 2 provides a clear picture of the large gap between Pyongyang and the rest of the DPRK in terms of access to “high quality” public infrastructure. Using differences in access to such infrastructure as reported in the 2008 DPRK census, I attempt to construct a rough ranking of standards of living in different provinces of the DPRK (Table 2). Caveats apply in determining the accuracy of this ranking.

(Belize City, Belize)

I made the difficult journey from Guatemala to Belize on New Year’s Eve. Because of this special day, regular transportation options were limited. I hitchhiked into city at 4pm after leaving Tikal. From there, I had to take an overcrowded collectivo to Fronterra at the Guatemalan border.

The sky quickly grew dark and I stuffed myself with street donuts and ice cream before hoping onto the van as I was worried about finding food on a holiday. The journey seemed like Grand Theft Auto: we had a swerving driver who had to dodge horses and chickens that seem to pop out of nowhere and people dashing across the road.

(Belize City, Belize)

Just across the border in Belize, Belizean taxi-drivers had grouped together to rip off desperate passengers. They were urging me to pay $15 for the trip to St. Ignacio, a small border town where I could spend the night. Someone said “Belize is expensive! If you want cheap, you should go back to Guatemala…”

(Belize City, Belize)

After getting nowhere with bargaining, I walked over to the border checkpoint and started asking cars passing through if I could hitchhike. The taxi-drivers panicked. One of them came over and offered me a discount (secretly undercutting the other drivers). I ended up paying $7, still a little over what I was prepared to part with. Increasing bargaining leverage does work!

(El Remate, Guatemala)

(Tikal, Guatemala)

After exploring the outdoor activities at the Coban area, I made my way to Uspantan, El Remate and finally to Tikal. Tikal is memorable for the Mayan ruins that lie amidst a dense tropical jungle. Howler monkeys scream overhead and shit over passersby to announce their presence. The ruins were majestic and I will let their pictures speak for themselves.

(Tikal, Guatemala)

(Tikal, Guatemala)

(Tikal, Guatemala)

(Tikal, Guatemala)

(Tikal, Guatemala)

(Semuc Champey, Guatemala)

At Semuc Champey, I continued my spelunking times at a semi-submerged cave system. The cave was half filled with water and I had to swim parts of the journey while holding a lit candle above water.

(Semuc Champey, Guatemala)

(Semuc Champey, Guatemala)

Earlier in the day, I met a Jewish guy from America. He reminded me rather uncomfortably of someone I once knew in undergraduate: the person always tried to make a big deal of the number of girlfriends he had and the number of nationalities they made up. I wonder why some people take such pride in “trophy hunting.” Ego never made anyone happier.

(Semuc Champey, Guatemala)

I recently received an email from a Professor at SUNY Paltz with a very ambitious and very fascinating goal of collecting and translating North Korean comics. I decided to send the one book I had left (I gave all the rest away in China) to him to add to his collection - definitely check out his web archive of the comics.

Through Choson Exchange (more on this project in a few weeks time), I am working to collect more of these comics.

(Languin, Guatemala)

I left Coban for Languin, a small village filled with American and European tourists. The village looked friendly enough, but I was frightened by my hostel, where a guard stood by the gate carrying a machine gun.

(Languin, Guatemala)

As evening approached, I went to the Grutas, a cave that stretches some distance into the earth. I remember once watching a movie about a family that accidentally finds themselves journeying into an underground world of untainted forests, pristine oceans, and of course, dinosaurs! It’s a childish dream I can empathize with. The Grutas was like that, minus the untainted forests, pristine oceans, and dinosaurs. But it was still fun spelunking. At 6pm, hordes of bats poured out over my head to fill the nighttime sky.

(Languin, Guatemala)

(Languin, Guatemala)

I met a Bostonian on the way back. He was a friendly college dropout who ended up working as a stone mason. His natural charm, unassuming self, and quick wit reminded me of my friend Zishuang. We met while serving in the Singaporean Navy. Zishuang recently moved to Taiwan to sell Singaporean food. I wish him good luck!

(Coban, Guatemala)

On the collectivo, I met a friendly Canadian. It was his first time abroad. When we got into Coban, we looked for a hostel together. While checking a guidebook, he left his bag on the sidewalk outside of the police station. After checking in, he realized this and rushed back to find his bag. It was missing.

(Coban, Guatemala)

He went to the police station to ask for help in finding his bag. As he spoke absolutely no Spanish, I decided to follow him to help with translation using my limited Spanish. Of course, with my Spanish language abilities, I was not that much of an improvement except in one way: My Canadian friend’s approach to getting the Guatemalan police to understand his English was to speak faster and explain in greater depth. For example:

Police: When are you leaving?
Him: 6 March… but my sister is sick so I have to leave earlier
Me: [in broken Spanish] 6 March
Him: No! No! No! You got it wrong. I am leaving on 6th March as my sister has cancer and…

(Coban, Guatemala)

Anyway, when I half-mimed and half explained what had happened to the police, they told us to jump into the police truck. We had 4 cops with us. They drove us around the city telling us to identify the robber if we saw him. For the next 30 minutes, I tried explaining that my friend was not robbed and that he left his bag outside. There was no way we could identify the robber.

His experience contrasted with my experience (nearly) getting mugged. The police in Xela simply went upstairs to get coffee when I explained what had happened. I cannot help but feel that race could be a factor.

Anyway, at the end of an unproductive trip, I got the police officers to drop us off at the hostel where the hostel owner could better translate for the Canadian. At one point, the Canadian asked if there were security cameras outside the police station that might have caught the thief on film. The police officer said, “Its Guatemala man!” Everyone laughed.

(Enroute to Coban, Guatemala)

My next trip was to cross the highlands to reach Coban on the other side of Guatemala. The journey takes me from Xela to Huehue, onwards to Aguacantan, then to Sacapulas down to Uspantan and finally to Coban. Half the time, I had no idea where I was going except that a helpful soul at the bus station would point me towards the right van, which I would gladly and blindly clamber on.

(Enroute to Coban, Guatemala)

The view was spectacular and most importantly, I got to do the village-hopping I enjoy. My favorite village-hopping experiences were in China. Some villages were artifacts from the past. For one of my classes at Yale on the construct and statistical analysis of public opinion surveys in China, a pioneer in the field recalls how Chinese villagers would congregate around the surveyor and offer helpful advice to the surveyed individual on filling out the survey. Villages are fun in that way.

(Enroute to Coban, Guatemala)

On the collectivo, I shared my music with the guy next to me. He said to me, “Ahh…you speak Spanish!” No. I just like trashy Reggaeton music (and Dancehall too but more on that next time). Shortly after that, we came across a seemingly flattened mountain. A landslide here killed 3000 people some years back. The road was missing and we snaked around the area.