TRACI'S LUCKY HORSE EYE NECKLACE $19.95

"You are not wearing your lucky seed necklace girl, get yourself one quick, fast & hurry!"

So Traci, who makes hand made jewellery & often seen at her stall on front Street beach near the Rainbow restaurant, currently has a nice selection of lucky seed necklace on stock.

This seed found washed up all along our coastline is locally known as HORSE EYE bean from the Mucuna Species and the scientific name is Mucuna Solanei from the botannical family Fabaceae (Pea). Native plant of Hawaii, Puerto Rico & Florida. This plant is now widely distributed worldwide in temperate and tropical climates of South America, Central America, The Caribbean and Africa.

The ancient Ayurveda Indian and Chinese system of traditional medicine used Mucuna Pruriens for the treatment of stress, male sexual disorders, aging and general suceptability to infections. Other traditional herbal uses include aphrodisiac and nerve tonic.

Locals believe it to be a blessed seed which brings you luck.

Forget the visit to the vodoo woman, forget years of therapy sessions, come to Caye Caulker to get your lucky seed & change your health, your luck & your life. ..........haha

After Traci gave me mine, things have been looking up. I just moved into my new beach suite with this spectacular view & the future looks as bright as the morning sun, when having coffee on the verandah at 6:00 am.


TRACI SAYS about her Horse Eye Jewellery

"LIFE TIME WARRANTY: imagine the rumble & tumble it takes a seed to crash land on our shores & cross our barrier reef in stormy bad weather.....

that piece of jewellery is built to last!

CAYE CAULKER ISLAND FASHION

One of a kind original
Palm frond Bikini
ONLY $19.95 plus shipping & handling!


I am not sure exactly what makes tourists go wild at the Split Bar on Caye Caulker, but they do on a regular basis.

Full Moon only brings out more madness.

When the inevitable day comes (hopefully not too soon) where this little broken beach bar is torn down to make way for a new concrete fancy one which will no doubt lose the charm, well......, all we will have then are these good memories and photos.....

Mandingo, the designer and tourist as model.

SOCIALIZING IN BELIZE CITY CAN BE FUN

In my house, the domestic pressure cooker does not whistle or have any loud shrill alarm, there is no meat marinating in the kitchen sadly & ends-of-day demands are no more taxing than it was all day. I have no one to boil over and bicker with in the evenings thankfully, so leaving the crib for a night out on the town can sometimes feel like a big effort & usually have the attitude "it better be worth it" before I can even inch my way off the island. The Image Factory Art Show of Jia Chang Wu & riverside reception was a breath of fresh air to a usually barefeet islandgirl who is a little bored of sitting around a beach bar.

As usual, it was about 3:30 p.m when I got the call from my friend, Tania Zorilla, a digital artist herself, asking if we were going to attend. Decision time for two notorious procrastinators who spend a great deal of time in a horizontal position, on a computer, where we have managed to skillfully & seperately combine relaxation, work & socializing, without having to go very far from the crib. Plus, I have finally reached a point in my life where I like my own company! We had been discussing the idea of going all week after receiving the invitation. A last minute decision is the best we could do towards any commitment, on any given event we plan to attend and talk about for days.

The Artist, Jia Wu

Water Taxi to the City.
So, Within 3o minutes, we made our reservation at the Luxe Radisson Hotel, the best & most comfortable hotel in all of Belize city & had packed & seated for the take off of the 4:15 pm water taxi from the caye heading to the city. Shyne or Moses as his new Jewish name, the rap artist and son of the Prime Minister, who was recently deported back to Belize, is reportedly relaxing and has the entire top floor above us booked. He was the one who ran into trouble while hanging out with Jennifer Lopez and P. Diddy.

I ran into my friend and art aficionado herself Ms. Karen Vernon, later on in the evening after the gallery reception, at the Travellers Bar up the Northern Highway.

The evening was surreal & great to reconnect with old Belizean friends, plus.... it has been a long time since I have worn high heels & it feels good.

The reception and setting was just perfect and we drank red wine at the water's edge under the moonlight making interesting new friends and seeing old ones!
My nephew Justin Kuylen and his girlfriend Jacinta Gomez, & Bill the once peace corps volunteer to Belize, who is now back in Belize to stay. (Curator of Image Factory)

Well known Belize Photographer Richard Holder.

It was the romantic kind of setting of a cocktail party at the mouth of the Belize River, entrance to the main hub of our country & where all the fishing boats came to harbor to offload their catch.

The Image Factory overlooks the Bliss Institute of Cultural Arts on the other side of the river a few minutes away over the antique Swing Bridge.

Image Factory does one art exhibit every two months. You can learn about new artists ane exhibits by becoming a fan of Image Factory on facebook.

BELIZE MEDICAL COLLEGE STAFF VISIT TINA'S HOSTEL

My friend Twinzy & colleagues visited the hostel & Caye Caulker today on her Staff trip.

Poor Mr. Chun, they teased him all day that he had to lie to his wife and tell her he was going to church to be able to come on the day trip. He had a bible in one pocket, and a flask of rum in the other. He had his beach shorts and tank top hidden under his church wear.

WELCOME TO CAYE COOKOO, Happy Tequila to you!

There we were at the run down Split Bar, a couple island girls minding their own business and enjoying one barrel rum & the scenery of youthful hard bodies on delicious looking young men, perched like seagulls on the broken cement sea wall.
Here we were trying to pass the slow season in good spirits with close friends, when they arrived! Loud & boisterous big spenders: fruity rum punch women drinkers accompanied by beer guzzling men in heat, here visiting from beloved sister island.

On this day, we were caught in the middle of imported madness once again, as is the norm for decades, when the "First World educated type" come from our neighboring high end island to get jiggy with it. They pull ashore on the odd weekend, or on day tours in their fancy boat, to our reggage inspired, rustic, broken down, rasta inspired (some of the patrons themselves match the description of the bar) little beach bar at the Split, spilling out of their boats excitedly to mingle with our laid back tribe. Most important for us, beside the fact that we want you to enjoy yourselves, is that you are spending money & helping the island's econmy, leave something positive behind!

We heard the Texans coming before we could see them turn the bend by the mangrove to the West of the Split. They tied up on the fallen tree stump at the edge of the jagged sea weed shoreline & got off the boat, swaggering & talking loudly so that everyone at the bar 60 yards away could hear. We were already looking anyway & everyone there already knew what type of an afternoon to anticipate. They did not disappoint.

With the lively athmosphere at the Split - already filled with young, educated, goodlooking backpackers, great Caribbean music. accompanied by azure waters, puffy white clouds & happy hour - we're positive the First worlders sensed they had arrived at the place they can let it all hang out and they were right.

Hell, the Caye Caulker Split is well known globally & has become legendary, not necessarily because of the locals, the scenery, but for the feeling of feeling free in the Caribbean! There are times when the locals themselves are the tourist attraction, so its nice when others show up to entertain us.

We typically live our lives on this island feeling a little caged, while we let those who pass through our zoo run free & wild. I'm not saying we are angels here, creatures have a way of adapting to their changing environment and every now and again, the animal in us is set free, even in the cage under prying eyes.

Some consider themselves missionary-like who come to Caye CooKoo to teach us "Third World primitives" as we were recently called in International News regarding the incident at UCLA, how to behave in First World...LOL.

The lesson of this day?
How to do body shots!

Texans: (Shouting at the Bar): "Let the Texan's show Ya'all how we do it back in Texas!!"



Texan to Local: "Come here little girl, want to have a belly shot?
Come on try it, you'll like it!"

Texans: "YeeHaaawwwww"
(whenever someone downed another shot from another orifice or crack)

Locals: "YeeHaaaawwww.....(yawn)" seen it too many times before and not just from the Texans.

Other First World Wives of ex-pats, living on sister island (especially those whose husbands spend all their free time in bars drinking), come to Caye Caulker to do their debauchery as well. They happily find Caye Cookoo's Mandingos to fill their otherwise boring free time with. So as not to lose their up-standing positions in their status driven island community, they gladly travel the 1/2 hour by water taxi, as there is an entirely different culture to be found here.

"Come to Caye Caulker & set yourself Free!"
Expect...the coconut wireless! Nothing much misses the eyes or ears in these small rumor rampant little Caribe isles off the coast of Belize. Anyway, as long as you are not breaking the law, SPEND LOTS OF MONEY to help our local economy (especially in this slowest of slow seasons) -> YES, that makes some of the madness more tolerable.


Well it's your world, we just trying to survive in it.

Come Enjoy Caye Caulker!

Belizeans love to Dance

We Belizeans like to just enjoy our Caribbean Music & DANCE, especially with nice sunsets, full moon, good friends. Every now and again we bruk-out, for no reason other than its fun, fun.

BEWARE OF CAGED MONKEYS

Island life has great benefits, but also its drawbacks, one of them is feeling like a caged monkey which reminds me of some of the Caribbean stories I hear.

Texan, who we met at the revolution party in July & ended up sailing with SeaFox down to Rio Dulce after I jumped ship in Roatan, likes to tell this story of the days when he was running a restaurant on another Caribbean island and his mis-adventures with Smokey.

At the hotel which had a nice restaurant on the water's edge, on an idyllic Caribbean isle, the owners kept a mini zoo on the property with a monkey, toucans, parrots and other small exotic animal's, who lived off the scraps from the kitchen. The animals naturally warmed up to him quickly and he was soon comfortable enough to go into the monkey's cage to fill the food bowl after meal time & "sometimes even put on a little show" he says.

On one particular occasion, Smokey, the monkey had ripped the head off a parrot and handed back to the stunned woman standing outside the cage, the remains of her pet bird's torso. This after the woman had tried to introduce her parrot to Smokey, and when Smokey stuck her hand out the cage at the bird, the woman mis-interpreted it as a friendly hand greeting gesture.

Another time he says, he was in the cage cutting up the fruits with a big butcher knife when he set it down for a moment and Smokey quickly picked it up & he was suddenly stuck in a small cage with a mad monkey swinging a sharp butchers knife.

As Legend would have it, Smokey managed to escape from his cage and was going up the dock towards the boats at the tip when Texan first heard someone yelling for him. He comes out and See's Smokey walking up the dock and calls out to him, Smokey turns around and they start walking towards each other calm enough & Texan did not think much about impending mayhem.

A hero-wannabe who was eating at the restaurant & witnessing the scene, in SuperHero speed, grabs a fish net he sees lying around the waters edge and proceeds to run up the dock past Texan towards the monkey, net wide open, with intentions to throw it over the monkey and capture it in front of the seaside dining audience and hopefully, to a hero's welcome.

The previously calm monkey walking towards Texan, suddenly becomes irate as one would expect any of us to react, if an ugly gringo was running towards you trying to capture you, so...... Smokey pulls the net out of the guy's hands, throws it in the water as the Hero Wanna-be became a flat Zero rapidly bolting down towards shore flying past Texan, who didn't know whether to look at the fleeing Zero or the charging Monkey. The commotion, then obviously caused a panic with the spectators who previously sat glued looking at the island safari experience in awe & as their food turned cold, not believing they could actually be witnessing such a raw savage encounter between man & beast.

As Smokey chases past Texan and catches up to Captain Zero, his new enemy, he bites him in the calf twice before the guy manages to escape. At this time, the temporarily frozen audience of diners on unexpected Safari, found themselves so quickly in the walk in freezer trying to flee the angry menacing charging monkey.

Smokey was seen leaving the area heading into town, hitching a ride on top of a car and the frightened guests were eventually let back out of the walk in freezer before they became popscicles.

Several hours later, Texan got a call to come and pick him up as he was in the vicinity.

Texan finds Smokey sitting on the hood of a car in a neighbor's yard and hoists him up to his shoulder as he seemed to have calmed down and is always hungry. He hangs on to Smokey with one hand by the waist just in case he harbored intentions of escape again.

Texan: "I can tell you monkeys like two things, eating and fu**ing " he says laughing the kind of laugh that brought tears to his eyes. This was a man clearly speaking from first hand experience & I was intrigued to get the details.

As he is taking the five minute walk back to Smokey's cage with a firm grip, Smokey starts to make himself comfortable between his fingers and whispering in his ear "UGABU" UGABU" UGABU" "which I interpreted it to mean by his ensuing actions as I LOVE YOU" he says.

As he tells it, before he could even figure out how to reposition the monkey without it going loose again, & thinking fast how to save himself from any form of being an unwilling victim of beastiality, Smokey had already orgasmed between his fingers. Texan says he was never comfortable about entering the cage alone again & risk putting on the "wrong kind of show " with Smokey. Texan eventually moved on to a few other Caribbean islands over the years before making a base on his boat at the end of the dock near Kangaroo in the RioDulce or in a fine restaurant somewhere in Roatan.

WRITE AT YOUR OWN RISK

Sea Fox said I sounded a little too critical of the ex-pats in my last blog story of the Grand Opening party the other night and he has a point, they are his friends, peers & countrymen mostly and I didn't mean to embarrass him by implying ..... I also don't mean to offend anybody & defend my words as gonzo journalism and not to be taken seriously by anyone. I am solely to blame if there is any backlash. I on the other hand, don't feel that I will be running for any popularity contest anytime soon and don't see the need to be politically correct at this time, so I asked SeaFox if he could bear with me, that I am unusual in many ways and I love the rush from any shock value I can manage to create, real or imagined.

I am currently intrigued by Hunter S. Thompson's "gonzo journalism" style of reporting based on William Faulkner's idea that the best fiction is far more of the truth than any kind of journalism and the best journalists know this he says. H. S.T. believes you must participate in your story and not be afraid to tell it as you see it or live it, even if it means exposing yourself to your gut or living on the edge, which always makes for good stories if nothing else.

I wanted to go to sleep tonight at a decent hour, half pass ten or so, and was already in bed, cuddled and warm and one gag short of sub-consciously allowing my relaxed tongue to block my airwaves making for a good snore, when the sound of the helicopter blades rotating got louder and louder until my eyes were wide open by the time it was passing directly over the big beach house which sits miles on the outskirts of town where the usual sounds are crickets humming, rotation of fan blades, some days the surf crashing on the reef out front, or Lassie barking at the security golf cart which passes every hour, driven by the ex-policeman in his new position as the head of the neighborhood watch, who was dismissed from the local police force for brutally beating a prisoner in the cell while under his watch.

The helicopter hovering above, usually British Army medical personnel coming from their base in Ladyville, offers extreme emergency only pick-up service to the outer islands of Belize long after regular flights and water taxi's stop running at dark, or after some appointed local makes the call to them after having decided that the emergency was serious enough to warrant an airlift to a hospital in the city. All this noise made me conclude prematurely, that that rotating blade sound at this hour only means bad news, & we are too far out of town or too late to call and bother anybody to get the scoop on the Coconut Wireless tonight.

So the helicopter and Hunter S. T. combined, rustled me out of bed & to the computer here now wondering as I type, if I could be so brave as he HST, the famous writer, to speak of his life, habits & craziness with such openness and honesty. If I could really write like him, then I would tell the truth as to why I felt so uncomfortable sitting in the Police Station today in San Pedro for an hour or so in the visitor's section of the station while SeaFox was allowed behind the counter, to stew with impatience, with all the policemen sitting around deep in personal conversation and ignoring the numerous stressed out people trying to get service at the counter or in some instances, standing right in front of their faces, who are either here to bring food to a prisoner, trying to make a report or bail a guest at Her Majesty's Motel.

A report could technically take no more than five minutes, but is normally delayed for a week or more at times, because who-so-ever you have to see will not be there again at any hour you show up. Never mind that we had been back to the station several times during the course of the week being told in the morning to come back at 4:00pm and when we go back at 4:00 pm, they tell us come back two days later at a certain hour only to be told to come back later which gets postponed again & again for no apparent reason other than the group of uniformed men and women behind that desk don't seem too enthusiastic about performing their duties in any kind of efficient or courteous manner.

I wonder if I would have the courage as HST to talk freely about the gringo with the girlfriend from Orange Walk who has her own marijuana fields patrolled by armed guards?

Or to make mockery in print about the Coast Guards boat that allegedly got stolen while our civil servants were once again not paying attention to their jobs?

Or if I could give details of Island Girl's recent one week trip around the country of Belize, him scouting locations and looking for creative juices, her, in her "un-official" capacity as tour guide hawling along with her three unruly children, & with a hallucinating writer/producer from London, a series of hysterically funny & crazy events followed, & made her dub her experience as the

"trip, Trip, TRIP!!!"

Islandgirl: "I told him, you have no reason to complain and and you should have plenty of material to write.
You got such a good tour of our country that you even know what the inside of the jail looks like."

I'm told over and over again that I should try harder to get along with everyone and really should not be so blunt in yapping to anyone who cares how I feel or what I think of a situation, place or person because mostly it won't be pretty as I have become bitter and crude and even more un-sympathetic. The next book I read will be Allan C. Weisbecker "CANT YOU GET ALONG WITH ANYONE?" which will probably keep me from getting anywhere close to the gonzo journalism style of HST that I would like to emulate.

I identify with this writer. HST will tell you without shame that he is tired of the dead-end loneliness of a man who makes his own rules, that life is too short to suffer guilt, that he is happy to get high and wild until he feels like a one ton stingray jumping from the tip of my dock across the reef half a mile out. He is also not afraid to tell you when he is feeling bitter after an event having lost his shoes, his dignity and his sanity sort of thing.

I don't know which way is left and there is no point in being right, so I will hold my breath until I see the light.

PLAYA LOUNGE - New Re-Opening in San Pedro

Moi, Island Meow and Miss H & Sea Fox at the new opening of Playa Lounge on the beach at the foot of the San Pedro water taxi dock in the center of San Pedro town. New owners are brits and promise a good "English Breakfast" all day long....I dream of it on hang-over days and will be back for some.

Oh Yeah....Ms. H on the far right, well, look out for her at the Reef Radio Karaoke final's at Jaguar's Nightclub on Sept. 17th, she will be singing with her beautiful voice & no doubt will have a great performance.

So there we were, a whole bunch of people partying, some I am introduced to over and over again over the years, who go through the motions of shaking my hand "nice to meet you" as I roll my eyes & in slight disgust. They genuinely show interest at the time of introduction, I bother to answer the few personal questions and tomorrow is, as if they have never seen me before and we get introduced again. I guess when you meet certain people over and over in bars, I realistically should not expect them to remember much the morning after.

I downed a couple of the free rum punch until I couldn't stand the sweetness any longer and moved on to the mojito at Mango's restaurant, before heading back to Playa Lounge for more belikin beers, rum & cokes, drambuie and anything else I prayed would give me a buzz to deal with with the civilized looking group. Made me miss a Belizean party, shit, Belizeans are pro's at creating their own excitement when out in this volume like found at Playa Lounge on this night, at least we can be sure of some excitement in the form of debauchery, a good fist or bottle fight and some loose girls gyrating on lonely looking men. Tonight here - No such luck, looking at all the ex-patriots guzzling booze but not moving much. I ho hummed at the dullness I felt, and if I was not out with Sea Fox & Island Meow, I would have regretted coming out at all.

We headed to Fido's which only cemented the fact for me that slow season or maaga season is here. Fidos is the kind of big central palapa bar downtown, with all the tourist trappings of live music, lots of smiling staff, and normally popping. To have had fun there last night, you had to have brought your own man (which I did), your own debauchery (which I did not) or your own friends (which I did & saved the night).

So we spent the next hour at Fido's hoping a group of drunken tourists would pour in and entertain us as I had grown accustomed on past night outs here. So with maaga season here, tourists are a rare commodity these days & the night just didn't wan't to pop. I spent a lot of the time looking at the high beams reaching up 50 feet or so at the center under the tightly woven thatch and wondering if I could be as brave as crazy Leo who often scaled it to the top on the busiest of nights until he was banned, dangling high above a curious drunken crowd, pulling himself up the wide wooden beams with only the strength of an insane person and muscular lean arms, usually leaving the patrons below gawking and expecting him to fall to his death any moment. The sheer adrenaline rush of that horrible thought makes you chug your drink & to me, seemed good for business.

So I wondered if I climb that beam to the top, right here, right now on impulse, create my own adrenaline rush.
I think I could, just too chicken shit to try since I still retain a small portion of my sanity.....before I could act on that crazy idea, the group decided to move on to Tackle Box and probably saved my life.

A BAD DAY FISHING IS BETTER THAN A GOOD DAY AT WORK

Message sent/replied on facebook

Arizona Militia:

"You have any work for me down in Belize or those parts Biggie?

I'll send my resume, I can do anything"

Biggie: "Come on down, I'm sure you can find mercenary work in Honduras or you can hang on my island and fish for Exotic women and snapper."