Where Time Stands Still In The Sun
Ambergris Caye

Story and Photos by Judy Waytiuk

Veteran Canadian writer, journalist, and broadcaster Judy Waytiuk moved into freelance writing in 1994 following more than 20 years of newsgathering and writing as a reporter, commentator, documentary writer, researcher, producer, senior news editor and on-air anchor for newspaper, public radio, and CBC national and regional television.
The first woman in Canada to become a news director in private television (in 1987 when she joined Global Television's Winnipeg operation to assume responsibility for TV news and current affairs programming), she retired from TV news seven years later to get back into what she loves most--writing. Since her return to print as a specialist in travel, environment, lifestyle/service, and business journalism, she has had hundreds of feature-length articles published in dozens of publications.

The Lagoon restaurant was jammed, its airy, retro-deco interior sodden with muggy heat. Norman Gosney, owner, stood in the kitchen frantically grilling snapper. Mrs. Norman, who lifted weights and whose sinewy torso showed it, waited tables. A girlfriend visiting from New York cleared dirty dishes. This night, everybody pitched in.

Norman's cook had gone to the mainland to deal with a family crisis. Norman's waitress had called in sick. Mrs. Norman scribbled for one patron the maple-syrup salad dressing recipe she got from another friend, before the Gosneys moved to Ambergris Caye in Belize. She wouldn't have believed the dressing would fit local ingredients-- mostly cabbage and carrots. But it did, and so did the Gosneys, his British-born accent blurred by New York twang, hers pure American. Like the other ex-patriots, they've been changing the face of San Pedro. And the locals aren't sure how to take it.

Condos have been blossoming up and down the side of the island facing the Barrier Reef. The Belize Yacht Club, whose name seemed a tad on the grandiose side just a couple of years ago, actually sees yachts moored there these days. The old, tiny hotels in town have been overwhelmed by the fancy condos and beachside resorts punctuating the island's once-undisturbed mangrove swamps, but the little, brightly-painted clapboard places remain bravely open for the extremely budget-minded. They struggle along, living uncomfortably cheek-by-jowl with gift shops, dive shops, t- shirt shops, diners, and bars.

So many people mill around Ambergris Caye these days that a new sewage lagoon had to be built at the swampy south end of the low-lying island. It's a natural lagoon that uses mangroves for filtration. Mangroves-- the red ones, at least-- love waste. They eat it up, and grow, and the mangrove is the building block of many of the tiny cayes that dot Belize's little piece of the Caribbean. Get enough mangroves massing in shallow water, and over hundreds of years, you get a bit of land on which more green things grow. Eventually, you have a caye.

And these days, like as not, someone has built a little resort or villa on it. You can buy cayes; just remember there's no water source on them aside from the seasonal rains. A lot of people use huge, wooden cisterns to catch and save the rainwater against the dry seasons. Ambergirs Cayes isn exactly a caye. It's really a peninsula of land that became seperated from the mainland maybe twelve or thirteen centuries ago, when the Mayans got tired of rowing all the way around (it is ten miles long, after all), and cut a wide channel across the top where the spit of land joined the mainland.

The Caye has been separate ever since, and was isolated for a long time, a sleepy backwater of no interest to anyone but the British, who planted coconut palm plantations here four hundred years ago. The plantations are long abandoned, but the coconut palms remain-- almost outnumbered by resorts and restaurants now. Water is shipped over from the mainland on daily barge-like ferries-- much of it in the form of bottled beer and soft drinks.

Estella Worthington, local girl, runs Estel's Dine-By-the-Sea. Estel serves breakfast, lunch, and cold Belikin beer, but closes up shop by six, to leave hospitality industry night work to others. The Lagoon doesn't even think about opening until six, and has polished linoleum floors; Estel rakes the sand under her wood-plank tables. Norman Gosney has put a tongue-in-cheek "Valet Parking" sign outside the Lagoon.

At Estel's, husband Charlie, sleepy, barefoot and rumpled, muses over the CD player on an old sideboard perched precariously in the sand. Once a salesman who played in a band, Charlie, another American, spied Estel's soft eyes across a room in a Florida club one night, and fell for her. She took awhile to convince, but eventually they ended up together, back on Ambergris Caye, living above the sand- floored diner.

Estel's niece, Zoby, hustles Belikin beer, onion rings, and fried fish from kitchen to tourists. Charlie regards himself as the public relations department. Estel, whose dark eyes are still soft, has a small frown etched on her brow. It could be from squinting into the sun, but it could be the pain. She's favoring a bad ankle.

Ambergris Caye's fast track to resort status has its share of sleeping policemen, for which you slow down or lose an axle. Sunset Bob slowed to full stop at the Sunset Bar, on the roof of the Casablanca Hotel, which Norman Gosney ran above his restaurant. When we stumbled into him, we had come up to have a Belikin beer and wait for a table downstairs. Bob had been up there for three nights running to watch the sun go down. He drove his ten-year-old white Caddy down through the midwestern U.S., then Mexico, into the Belizean rainforest looking for a shaman. Bob had some sort of lung disease, but he wouldn't say what it was. The shaman made him feel better.

In any case, his Caddy was parked at the Belize City airport and he was running an ad in the paper to sell it. If the Caddy sold, he said he might call that an omen and stay here. Sunday morning, we found him on the pay phone beside the Tropic Air terminal at the airstrip, trying to reach Plymouth, Indiana. Bob was one of the footloose.

Others, like Bruce and Victoria Collins, with their jeep Frankenstein, put down roots for awhile anyway. Once California realtors, they came to squeeze in a rushed four-day holiday. They went home, sold up and came back. They bought the San Pedro Sun newspaper, one of whose columnists, another ex-pat, also plays guitar and sings around town, and sometimes begs the tourists to stop asking for Margaritaville again.

Saturday mornings, the Collinses used to have brunch at Fido's Courtyard overlooking the sea. On one sunny morning, the American who moments earlier had owned Fido's stood at the bar beside the two Americans who had just bought it. All three were in celebratory mode, unaware of the children splashing in the shallows a few feet away. The kids, with the strong features and mahogany skin of Maya, noisily scrubbed conch shells they would later try to sell to tourists. The Collinses had just brought Frankenstein back from bodywork on the mainland. They had to explain that in their paper, after the town fathers banned the import of more cars.

There were too many on the island. Silent electric golf carts and bicycles were getting muscled aside on the sand roads by monoxide-belching North American monsters. Local yellow dogs couldn't even doze in the middle of Front Street any more: carts, bikes and pedestrians went round, but San Pedro pups couldn't depend on cars to swerve for them. Norman Eiley has always sidestepped the dogs.

Born and raised here, he was a fisherman until the co-op came in and there wasn't enough fish to share out. He went building houses, but on the side, he was putting together his boat, the Southern Beauty. It took a few years. The boat was his way back to the sea, not to fish, but to carry tourists. Sturdy, with glass bottom, she has a side door for clumsy snorkellers, and a heavy wooden shade cover. She's thick-waisted and stubby, and wallows alongside the fibreglass cigarette boats sporting canvas tops, but Norman Eiley is proud of her, and of his teenage son, Francis.

Francis goes with Norman on the boat, to guard the precious live reef from souvenir- hungry fools. As the ex-patriots crowd into San Pedro waving development schemes and condo plans, the locals flee in their skiffs, to make livings carrying tourists to fish, swim, or go to Caye Caulker or the mainland. San Pedro's long jetties are crowded with these boats in the evenings.

Norman Eiley strolls the warm sand along Front Street, nodding pleasantly to the tourists. Charlie and Estel are locking up the restaurant, on their way to a charity fund- raiser at the Lion's Club. Their door has stuck again, swollen from salt air. Norman Gosney's cook came back from the mainland, enabling Norman to leave the kitchen and lean against the Lagoon's porch post with the menu stapled to it, chatting with the tourists, telling them he might move on in a few years; he becomes bored quickly, and moves around often.

In fact, Norman became a pillar of the community, but one day had a small altercation of sorts with local officials that caused the Lagoon to be shut down. The precise nature of this altercation was not made clear, and by then, the Collinses were not around to report on it. They had sold the San Pedro Sun, and moved on.

Norman Eiley, on the other hand, isn't going anywhere. The Southern Beauty, tethered until morning, slumbers in the moonlight.

Francis is off partying at one of the loud bars at the north end of town. The tourists fill the sand streets and dining spots. Eiley turns off the sand road to walk the beach, dodging gaggles of noisy North Americans, nodding and smiling gently to each group of night beach-walkers. The smile seems just a little wistful.