Scary Ferries, Questionable Coca-Colas, and the Trying Hunt for the Pineapple Home
The strange sights of my first bike ride in a decade
In Caye Caulker, there are no cars. To get from kilometer to kilometer within the small island town in Belize requires golf carts. And the roads are riddled with enough potholes and crevasses that even golf carts have their fair share of work cut out for them. Laboring over the mini-craters between sea and mangrove, the clunky metal four-wheelers leave a lot to be desired.
More astute and able-bodied individuals rent bikes and weave between the abyssal blemishes that checker every dirt road of this vibrant, tropical town. With two wheels, riders can navigate the municipality with ease — incurring only mild whiplash during their more wind-tousled, trying treks.
But merely renting a bike can be an adventure of its own. Asking a local where I can acquire one myself, I’m pointed toward a venue with a row of bedraggled old bikes parked indelicately at the storefront. I walk into the venue and see a series of items more at home in an American Walgreens than a Belizean bike shop.
Eyeing up the third aisle of chips and soda, I assume I must have simply entered the wrong establishment entirely. Smoothly fleeing from whence I came, I peek up at the sign above me, shrug, and amble tentatively back into the outlet once more.
“Do you… uh… rent bikes?” I ask unsurely, a first-time solo international traveler through and through.
As soon as the question emerges, the cashier proceeds to call what I can only assume is a coworker. With her partner on the line, she shifts between languages in a succession that seems to touch upon everything from Mandarin Chinese and Spanish to English and Pig Latin. I can even make out what I’m half-certain is an ancient Mayan dialect interspersed within the colorful linguistic collage.
After a minute, it grows clear there’s a hostility to the interaction. Multi-cultured curse words lattice the crescendoing exchange. Two entire minutes and an unremitting flurry of epithets later, the cashier looks toward me with an elfin grin and a feeble, outstretched hand. In it is a pen and a piece of paper.
Through a combination of gestures and broken phrases, she encourages me to write my name and info onto the blank sheet of loose leaf. Once I’ve finished my scrawling, she instructs that I hand over my ID as collateral, along with a security deposit. Slightly dissuaded by the battery of aggressions that began this interaction, I hesitate. “Forfeiting my ID in this foreign country may not be my best move,” I wisely reason. “Besides, the golf cart rental store let me skate by without relinquishing the centerpiece of my wallet!”
But when the next bike rental venue I visit slaps me in the face with a similarly demanding bargain, I decide that my soon-to-expire medical marijuana card is a token I can handily fork over to the smiley-faced mafioso.
With my wallet a few grams lighter, I ecstatically board my rental and prepare to charge free from the second bike-peddling bureaucracy I’ve encountered in my brief time on this idyllic island getaway. I take off in a childlike whir of excitement, speeding down the dusty byways of the multi-colored village. It’s about 30 seconds into my grand adventure, though, that my chain dislodges from the bike completely. Walking the discouraging walk back into the all-in-one emporium with my immediately broken bike, the store attendant kindly allows me to pick a new one.
And with my second bike, I’m off careening down Belizean back roads with a newfound freedom. It’s my first time riding a bike in nearly a decade, and even with a stark absence of gears to parse between, I’m quickly reminded why I always loved biking so much. In my hilly Pennsylvania suburb, a gearless bike presents its challenges. But even while these streets have more holes than a village occupied by gophers, they’re decidedly level. The lone speed setting is enough to skirt freely between the alleys and thoroughfares of this salty island retreat.
I zoom down strange streets and make my way around the island’s outskirts. The saline air tempers the sweltering sun, but by the time I’ve finished my revolution around this limited stretch of land, I’m nearly as soaked as a snorkeler. After an hour, an icecream, and a shower, I continue my two-wheeled tour.
But completing another six cycles around the same storefronts, I’m reminded just how small this little town really is. And with the reminder, I begin growing curious about what lies across the narrow sea… on the island’s second half. So with sweat trickling along my freshly lathered skin, I elect to brave the palm tree paradise across the water on my beaten-up dirt bike.
The ferry between islands leaves from what the locals lovingly refer to as “The Split.” And what they call “a ferry” is little more than a couple of benches drilled onto a jagged piece of plywood with a MacGyver’d old motor attached. It takes riders between the two disparate ends of the Caye Caulker kingdom.
At the boarding dock to the ferry are two chihuahua puppies. With brazen little barks, they attempt to scare off every bigger dog within a 50-meter range. And with the bevy of homeless dogs that roam the streets of Belize, the strapping young pups are in over their heads. They attempt to scare off a cane corso on its towering black legs and the humble giant saunters proudly on. The chihuahua children both sport smirks that spell “job completed,” dusting off davidic paws from the goliathan foe defeated.
After a couple of thwarted canine-altercations and cursory introductions to my soon-to-be shipmates, our ferry’s arrival is marked by the ominous sputter of its overworked motor.
I’m seated next to a couple from the Netherlands and across from a tall man with a shining tooth, a Caribbean tan, and a yellow shirt fixed with a pineapple logo at its upper right corner.
Observantly discerning the eccentric character housed within the sleeveless yellow tee, I ask where he’s from.
“Texas,” he replies. His accent drives home the fact like a beaten-up pickup truck filled with ten-gallon hats. Southern accents come no thicker than the one he emphatically sports. It’s as though he’s tried to compensate for the latitude lost in his days away from The Lone Star State by simply shifting his accent a few degrees closer to the equator.
“I like your shirt,” I say aloud as the tide between the two islands begins sloshing against the shoddily crafted sea-mobile surely less durable than most modest kayaks. Fortunately, the voyage isn’t far. The maroon waters are a few hues more forbidding than the cerulean blue shallows surrounding it, but the distance between the two isles is only fifty feet.
“Thank ya. Ya see a pineapple house on the island — that’s us,” replies the Texan.
Realizing that pineapples are a part of his personality more than an incidental fixture on his shirt, I ask the obligatory Millennial question.
“So does that make you a SpongeBob fan?” I inquire, a gleeful look toward the two seniors.
“We ain’t know nothin’ bout SpongeBob when we started on the house,” exclaims the man with the citrus-shaped home in an admirable feat of denial. The words emerge along with a loving look toward the eccentrically adorned equal at his side. “Showed the gran’ kids plans for the house an’ one of em said, ‘y’know, you’d get along reeeal good with that SpongeBob SquarePants fella.’”
“Now we luuuv SpongeBob,” his wife chimes in. Her accent seems to have drifted only a few degrees shy of the equator herself. They’re Texans to the bone, yet not standoffish enough to have remained residents of that “Stand Your Ground” state a day longer. That the above-sea pineapple dwellers even own a rifle is doubtful.
“Even had a Mr. Krabs on the property for a while,” he adds.
“He’s just hahdin’,” she retorts thickly and surely.
A short cruise between choppy, churning waters, and we’ve arrived at our destination. The couple usher their bikes onto solid ground before they coast off into the undeveloped distance. The proud owners of the pineapple house begin a journey of their own.
But as I arrive on the island, I decide to take a few minute breather. Free from the hustle and bustle across the sea, though, I come face first with a promenading pelican. It looks toward me with gaping, unfazed eyes and proceeds along its way past the tree beside me. On the tree are the makeshift rungs of a ladder, and emerging from between two giant tree limbs is a disconcertingly lopsided diving board. Whoever would be courageous enough to jump from its snap-prone ledge and test their fates in these formidable waters is an explorer braver than I.
After a few minutes spent in wonderment over the launching pad into these sinister seas and another expressionless exchange of nods with my newfound pelican acquaintance, I reboard my dual-wheeled jalopy. Weaving between potholes and development projects on this unpaved pathway, I ride further and further into the wild and unfamiliar.
A couple of kilometers further down the dusty trail, I’m met with a sign pointing me toward a store. Whatever sort of establishment might be at the other end of the rickety boardwalk beside it is one I’m curious to see for myself. Solar-powered cameras are fixed to jutting posts stabbed into the bed of the swampy lagoon. Tiptoeing along the well-surveillanced walkway of defeated old boards, I enter deeper and deeper into an alien marshland. Frogs and crickets and macabre swamp monsters culminate in a chorus alongside the miasmic waters.
On the other side of the walkway is a man selling a limited assortment of chips and sodas from the first floor of his home. Given the short supply of options at hand, I decide to down what must be my fifteenth Mexican Coke since arriving in the country. “When in… Central America,” I muse to myself for the fifteenth time. A few sips into the drink, I notice the remnants of rust lining the mouthpiece.
In Belize, sensible laws have turned plastic bottles into an increasingly rare commodity. But the religious recycling of glass has introduced problems of its own. Oftentimes, a glass bottle will come with a napkin lining the mouthpiece in the expectation that drinkers will perform a quick rust removal wipe. Forgetting this Belizean responsibility, though, I wade deeper and deeper into my Tetanus-laced cola with a cavalier disregard for consequence.
Without a place in the world to be other than chatting with my new store attendant friend, Pablo, I finish my metal-tinged pop as we exchange brief life stories. But by the time we reach our boring chapters, we seem to agree that it’s time to part ways.
Continuing along neglected streets and nearly untrodden trails, the realization that I’m slightly lost enters my mind’s eye. But I shoo it away and pedal down a puddle-lined gravel path. The excitement to be biking trumps the fear that I hardly have the first clue where I’m headed on my two-wheeled contraption. And where I’m headed is through brush, between bushes and swaying trees, and to a salt-water lake with a dead dog decaying graphically along its outer edge.
Twenty feet away, I encounter a group of gawking tourists, two of whom are the couple from the Netherlands. One of them gives me an undeniable “rock on!” gesture. However, due to cultural differences, my assessment of his hand sign is less than accurate. What I assumed was a mere response to my Beatles-blasting AirPods could more accurately be translated to “watch out for the puppy-killing crocodile looking ominously toward you.” But I’ve never been good at charades and cultural barriers only make matters more confusing.
We spend a few minutes eyeing the crocodile within the mini lagoon before parting ways. “If you continue further along, you’ll get to the pineapple house. And if you stand out in front of it for a few minutes, the owners might just give you a tour of the house,” the woman explains, having clearly just gotten the tour of a lifetime. We part ways with a sarcastic exchange of “rock on!” gestures and peel away from the crocodile-infested waters headed in opposite directions.
“I wonder how much further down this island the pineapple house could be…” I muse to myself a couple of kilometers and light rain spatterings later. I don’t know whether to be skeptical that these aging Texans could have effortlessly hiked this entire distance, or impressed by their obstreperous pilgrimage to the fruit-shaped abode. But Pablo and I bantered long enough over my questionable Coke that maybe even a gargantuan journey like this may have been possible for the undeterred Southerners.
A couple of kilometers further, I’m met simultaneously by the understanding that there’s hardly a septuagenarian alive that could hike this distance in under a day and the brutal epiphany that my vehicle isn’t long for this world. As the realization sinks in deeper, the churning rain clouds overhead give way to a relentless downpour. Removing my headphones from my ears, I decide that no fruit-shaped home is worth risking my safe return.
With a stark halt to the music and a swift 180, I hear the companionless gear of my relic on rims creak and click with each grating revolution. What had been smooth riding an hour prior has evolved horribly into the high-pitched groans of ancient axles and spindly spokes ready to snap at their seams. As I endure the deluge, the shades I’d been using as a dirt shield grow ineffective. Without windshield wipers, they do more harm than good in the face of this unceasing storm.
I carry on along what I hope is the right road until I go foot-first into a pond-sized puddle. I slosh my soaking sock and shoe back onto their proper pedal and check to see if I can pull up a map on my phone. As rain obscures the screen and not a solitary bar of service emerges, I’m forced to speed forward despite my desperately dwindling resolve. I begin wondering whether the pineapple-shaped refuge may be my best hope at salvation. I float the idea of redirecting course once more when another thought occurs to me.
“Surely the ferries don’t run all day…” the realization dawns as dusk approaches.
And with a frantic look toward the setting sun, my desperate peddling grows utterly feverish. Powering through the rain, a natural sea forms in the shoe that had remained dry up to this point. The complete outline of my body can be seen through my soaking-wet clothes. With waterlogged socks and a haphazard spread of mud blotches covering me from head to toe, I begin to look more like a raving Woodstock attendee than a biker. And like a proper deadhead, I’m sporatically tie-dyed with dirt. Like an over-partied Jerry Garcia, I climb back on my fraying leather saddle and keep on tragically truckin’.
One series of second guesses and a slowly rising crocodile lake later, settings begin to grow refreshingly familiar. A woman bikes toward me going in the opposite direction and spells a happy sign of nearing civilization. She’s got a chair propped impressively atop her head as she cruises along the country lane nearly carefree. A second chair-clad woman follows behind her.
“It’s this way to the ferry?”
“Yep!” the second confirms, surprisingly unencumbered for a woman trudging through the rain with a hardwood chair planted perilously atop her head in a Mumbaikar feat of balance.
But as she says the words, a shocking sight stops me dead in my tracks.
“The pineapple house…”
It glimmers like a beacon through the pouring Belizean rains. Pineapply appendages emerge from its roof in a fructose-laden display of glory. But the fruit crown remains inert before the force of the rushing stormwinds. As thunder sounds overhead, the home glistens a noctilucent glow more enticing than a siren song.
I stand meekly at the cartoonish compound’s gates for a few moments in hopes of hospice, but they’ve either provided their final tour for the day — or see little reason to provide shelter to the fellow Spongebob aficionado from hours prior. Without so much as a movement inside the citrus-shaped palace, I resume the final leg of my journey. Racing back to the unruly interregnum between two islands, I’m resolved not to brave riptides with this rapidly rusting death trap of a dirtbike clenched firmly within one hand. But without a ferry — and with a flight to catch in the morning — the possibility of leaping from the diving board with the two-wheeled hunk of metal begins to seem like an increasingly probable course of action.
Back at the ferry pickup point, I’m greeted by three men speaking an unfamiliar language, each more equipped for the torrential conditions than the dripping wet tourist before them. Two of us wait beneath a tree in a commiserating silence.
The others stand in the rain with the unperturbed grins of locals who’d blithely endured whole hurricane seasons. We board the ferry as rain collides with its tattered canopy. The smell of salt and a directionless din of fried food enters into noseshot as the vessel struggles across the dire waters. My bike nearly falls to an aquatic grave with each lurch of the boat.
Arriving back, I’ve never in my life felt so thankful to be flooded with the faces of picture-taking travelers. They look toward the wind-whipped storm survivor with curious eyes and continue snapping compulsory photos and sheltering beneath awnings. “Thanks for running another ferry,” a Spanish-speaking passenger mutters toward the man that I doubt could be aptly called a captain.
My bike groans and grates erratically as I return to the retail store, having pushed my mud-covered rental to unconscionable extremes. With disheveled black hair draped across my forehead and legs prematurely preparing for collapse, I surrender the extemporaneously fixed contraption with a heroic sigh and make a pointed walk toward refreshments.
Back at my hotel, I revel in my new dwelling. Moving on from my Mexican commune, I’ve regained the right to walk free from rain-covered clothes and drop them into a wet puddle on my tiled bathroom floor. I dance a wobbly dance in my properly working shower as mud and salt water form silky rivulets along my salt-battered skin.