Livingston - Home of the Garifuna

In transit to Livingston

We took a boat Monday morning from Rio Dulce to Livingston. Livingston sits on the Caribbean sea, right where the rio dulce pours its sweet water out to sea.

The ride takes about 2 hours and goes through the river and a number of adjacent lakes. The view is breathtaking with lots of birds, water lilies and a forest that grows vertically from the river's edge up a few hundred feet. You barely see the actual mountains - only green vegetation. 

 

Notice the forest climbing up: 
 

It seems very "tranquilo" living on the river: 
 

The watch I'm carrying - a $5 watch from walmart that I picked up instead of carrying a more expensive one - is designated as water resident to 156 feet. Somewhere between Rio Dulce and Livingston it became clear that it has a special built in feature - a humidity sensor. They way it works is like this: you look at the watch and see water condensation on the inside of the screen, hiding the time from you. The amount of water is directly dependent on the humidity. Who'd have thought?

Livingston Lessons to Learn

We got to Livingston and quickly got situated in a hotel with hammocks outside the rooms. We quickly discovered the need for a verb for lying in a hammock. Our Belgian friend, Jean, says the conjugations go something like this:
I hammock
WE hammock
YOU are in my hammock and need to leave now.

We spent the first day touring the main road. It starts at the river port, climbs up on a hill and comes down half a km later on the Caribbean. We booked a tour for the day after then went hammocking.

The locals are a mix between indigenous indians, mestizos - mixed spanish and indians, and the Garifuna - descendents of black slaves who's ship was lost at sea and they intermingled with the local population.

The heat is oppressive and showers are very welcome here. You know how in the more sophisticated showers you can set the temperature of the water with the cold and hot faucets, then use a third faucet to shut off the flow while keeping the temperature where you like it? The locals have invented a much simpler system that needs only one faucet to work the whole thing. It works like this:

There's only cold water. The outside temperature moves from scolding hot to just mildly warm with a nice breeze. All you have to do is pick the time of day (temperature) when you want to shower. For example, if you wait till too late at night, the guy hammocking a floor above the shower will comment that that was a nice scream you uttered when you got under the cold water flow.

A 1001 Marias - Tom Clancy Eat Your Heart Out

We closed the day with dinner at Maria's Tilingo Lingo restaurant. We got there by chance - we walked till the pacific end of main street, then looked around and there her place was. Maria can cook anything from local food, indian curry, chinese cuisine to Israeli Shackshuka. We decided we want to eat there and asked her to tell us her story. Here's the abridged version:

Born and bred in mexico. Met her first husband in her home town while visiting. He asked her to marry her on the second day and she accepted on the third. He was from India so they moved there.

After two years of marriage and with a 6-month old kid, Maria decided she's had enough of her mother-in-law not accepting her and escaped India with her kid.

Back in Mexico, Maria met husband number 2 - a Sri Lankan this time, and had a second kid. While there, her natural affinity for detective work asserted itself and she found some evidence on a number of crooked police officers. Running for her life, she crossed the border to Guatemala where she's lived ever since.

Think it's over? No way! While living in Livingston, Maria identifies an American tourist as a wanted murdered. She gets some evidence, sets a plan in place, gets the FBI involved and helps them catch the guy.

That's all we had time for - she had to go back to cook.

Truth? Who cares. It was the best dinner entertainment we've had in a long time.


The Next Day

We took the tour of Livingston in the morning. Once you leave the main area, it's a jungle (or at least tropical vegetation) with small houses, more like shacks, sprinkled all over the place. All around were fruit trees, including coconuts, cacao and more. If there wasn't a lot of trash thrown in certain places it would have been perfect.
The walk was nice and included seeing the church and cemetery, walking between the huts to climb the local hill and see Honduras and Belize in the background, a short kayak ride through a river to the beach, then walking to a natural pool formed by a waterfall. Police accompanied us throughout the journey to keep us safe. The most exciting thing that happened was that I discovered the two logs making a bridge across a small stream were rotten when I actually broke one walking on it.

Below you can see Jean demonstrating the use of the verb "to hammock" on our lunch break during the tour: 

 

A parrot crosses the road, goes into a restaurant and says...

Getting back, we hammocked for a bit, showered once more, then went back to Maria's. Today she promised she would make us some Tapado - a local soup made with fish, coconut milk and bananas. It was surprisingly good.

These kids came by just as our food arrived and I just had to take a picture. 
 

Then, while we're watching incredulously, a parrot crosses the street (walking), goes to the restaurant's doorway, climbs the step, then climbs the door post and perches on top. Walking across the street, it passed a cat that did not attack it simply because we just fed it a bone. It turns out the parrot lives in the house nearby and just came to visit. When the waiter picked it up, it sat there for a sec, then flew away across the street.

That's it for Livingston. Next stop - Flores and Tikal, capital of the ancient Mayan civilization in the area.