Belize: Day Seven

This morning we left at 7:30 for a full-day Mayan history tour of two major temple complexes, Xunantunich and Cahal Pech. Both sites are near the Guatemalan border, over 2 hours away. Something like 30 people signed up for this tour, so we had to pile into three vans. We didn’t time it right, and all the vans were nearly full by the time we got to the loading area. Doug and Nish climbed into one of the vans, and Kat and Brett followed us to one of the others. There was room for all four of us, but they spied Tom sitting in the front seat and they turned and hauled ass towards the third van, where there was room for only two. So Doc and I lost the battle and had to take another Tom bullet for the team. Surprisingly, Tom made little comment the entire trip, although I feared we were off to a bad start when he asked Lorenzo, the driver, as soon we got on the highway, “So, what kind of engine you got in here?” The morning was very misty with lots of thick white low clouds, especially as we headed into the hills in Central Belize. We saw at least a dozen rainbows, very vivid and close to us. Some of them ended right in the roadway directly ahead of us. Lorenzo told us that in Belize, rather than finding a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, legend has it that you’ll find a boa constrictor. We stopped at a citrus factory along the way (and by “stopped” I mean “pulled over to the side of the road for 2 minutes so we could look out the van windows”) and a tourist trap gift shop that I guess the resort […]

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bacon weevils

so the conversation went something like this: me: i love food.doc: me too. it needs to be tasty, and in my belly.me: yeah!doc: and i say a little thank you to all the tasty animals before i eat them. “thank you, mr. pork chop, for the delicious meal you are about to become.”me: “thank you, bacon!” [thinking about how we don’t call our meat by the names of the animal that it comes from, usually] “mom, where do bacons come from? do bacons live on the farm?”doc: haha! no, bacon comes from big bacon fields. they’re like big cornstalks, except instead of a cob it has two strips of bacon reaching up towards the big blue sky.me: it grows crispy??doc: well, when it starts out they’re kind of floppy and sagging towards the ground, but as the season progresses towards harvest, they crisp up and start to stand up straight. and then it’s time for the bacon harvest.me: <drool> yes, but there is one thing that the farmers must take precautions about: bacon weevils! they have to send in crop dusters.doc: they spray the fields with hickory smoke to prevent the bacon weevils. they’re not so much of a problem these days, but people have gotten used to the taste so they bacon-crop-dust now as much for the delicious hickory flavor as for the bacon weevils.katy: [trying to think of something clever but failing]doc: and all the juices and grease run down into the stalk. you can break off 6 inches of bacon stalk and walk around sucking on it.katy: like a slim jim!

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