“We should have asked that couple there to be in it,” a super-dyed blonde told her husband.
He angled his neck around the other three couples posing for a photo and shrugged at us. “Sorry about that,” he said.
We shrugged back. “We’re outcasts,” Nick whispered to me with a giggle (he giggles when we’re on vacation). “We just peaked too soon,” I reminded him. It was true; this was on Day Six, and we had made our friends on Day Three. Unfortunately, our Day Three was their Day Six–see where the math goes wrong?
There are, we found out, People Who Do Belize. It may well be that I just haven’t taken enough normal grown-up vacations yet to know that this happens everywhere, or it may be that rain forests really do make people crazy. After hearing the howler monkeys while our guide bent over jaguar tracks, standing up to announce that they were fresh, I am inclined toward the latter explanation, but either way, Turtle Inn was home to a startlingly large number of serious Belize-o-philes. (And they just added two more with us, of course.) And so we cozied up early to die-hard snorkelers and divers, not realizing that the place was about to be overrun by the Mayan-ruin crowd.
We did have a brief “in” with them: a man wandered by our breakfast table on about the fourth day. “I hear you two are from Paris,” he said abruptly, and told us a story about his son, who speaks French, before wandering off toward the pool. We had been too surprised to even introduce ourselves, and later that day a Real French Family arrived. Deciding that circumstances had stacked up in favor of classic honeymooner solitude, we kept mostly to ourselves after that…although we did eavesdrop on the French family. They were lovely, but it was all too jarring for our tastes, much in the way of a pop quiz in the middle of July.
Not surprisingly, though, the most interesting people were the staff members. Even our shy concierge slowly opened up about her love of water; our jaguar-tracking tour guide filled hours with fantastic stories of agriculture, national history, home cooking, jungle medicine, running from vicious predators, and just the slightest whiff of smuggling.
The best, though, was Marvin.
Marvin is a server in the main restaurant who initially stood out because of his perma-smile and awkward jokes (awkward only because the Spanish-and-Jamaican-tinted English spoken in Belize kept throwing us off–we tended to “get” the jokes only about thirty seconds after he had left the table, crestfallen). After a few days, though, we pried a bit and got some background on the resort. Here it is, more or less:
“Mr. Coppola bought this place in the beginning 2001; the hurricane came at the end, or maybe just into 2002. It destroyed the whole thing–most of it ended up across the lagoon. That’s when this place started. He built all this in…eleven months. It took them eleven months, with two hundred workers, working all day, and…well. All day always, and sometimes all night, too. I know; I was one of them.” With that he beamed proudly, puffing out his chest in its gleaming white coat and turning the label of the bottle he was holding expertly for our inspection.
It was good.