On Tuesday, we went to the closest Mayan ruins. They weren’t particularly big or impressive ruins: I’m told that across the border in Guatemala, Tikal is simply astounding, worth spending a couple of days exploring. These ruins–Nim Li Punit and Lubaantun–were pretty low-key, really. Lots of rocks tumbled about, with reconstructed piles showing how it might have once been. But both ruins had local Mayan women selling crafts. In Nim Li Punit, they had tables, but at Lubaantun, the women had spread blankets on the ground on the path up to the ruins, almost like a Californian tag sale, the kind people have in San Francisco. (Garages are rare there, but tag sales are not.)

On the way up, I spotted a wooden crocodile. It wasn’t anything impressive. Belize had lots of wood carvings for sale that looked almost machine-made in their precision. This was more like a piece of curved wood in which a not-very-experienced artist had seen a crocodile. The lines depicting the croc were rough and jagged, a little wobbly. But he had personality.

I ignored him. What do I need with a wooden crocodile? But on the way back, I couldn’t resist. I stopped. I picked him up. He was smooth and solid in my hand. He felt real, in a weird way. Warm from the sun and heavy. And he had such personality. Little black beads marked his eyes and his crooked teeth were smiling. I liked him. I paid $15 for him, thinking maybe I’d give him to my nephew as a souvenir.

In the car, on the way home, I decided he needed a name. Suzanne suggested Shane and I rejected it immediately. I could tell he wasn’t a Shane. I thought maybe Ramsey, after the captain of our boat. That night, falling asleep, I felt something solid and startled awake. It was Ramsey. I’d left him on the bed. I went to sleep with my hand over him, smiling at the memory of another magical day.

Alas, in the morning, he was gone. I looked everywhere. I shook out the sheets, lifted up the pillow, looked under the bed, searched along the window ledge. No Ramsey. I tried all the same places again. No Ramsey. I looked through my pile of clothes, not so neatly stacked on the floor. No Ramsey.

I got determined. After all, I went to sleep with the crocodile in my hand. Ergo, he had to be in the bedroom. I dumped out my bag on the bed. Re-folded and sorted through all my clothes. No Ramsey. Re-packed everything. No Ramsey. Made the bed, shifted all the objects around it to look under and behind them. (We were staying with Dale, a friend of Suzanne’s husband, Greg, so it was a house, not a hotel–there were crates stored under the bed and extra blankets.) Still no Ramsey.

R had a bed on the floor in the same room. I saw no way that Ramsey could have wound up on R’s side of the room — I don’t generally throw wooden objects in my sleep and Ramsey was heavy enough that I’m pretty sure I would have woken up at least a couple people if I had — but he must have gone somewhere. So I started sorting through R’s clothes, picking each item up and dumping it on top of his backpack.

No Ramsey.

The weather had gotten cooler. We hadn’t run the fan the previous night. But R hadn’t used the blanket Dale had set out for him, so I picked it up. No Ramsey. But what was that?

I think I was almost calm as I said, “There’s a scorpion here.” Then I added, less calmly, “I’m going to jump on the bed and say ‘eek!’ until someone comes and deals with it.” I jumped on the bed. I said, “Eeeeeeek!!!!!”

I’ve actually seen scorpions before. My parents had them once or twice. This scorpion was not like those. As soon as S sends me the pictures I’ll post one, but I’m not sure the picture will do it justice if there’s nothing in it to show the scale. This scorpion was BIG. Big and black and terrifying looking. It wasn’t a bug-sized scorpion. It was the size of my hand. It was to my parent’s scorpions what a jaguar is to a house cat. Standing on the bed and squealing was absolutely the only sensible reaction.

Dale and Suzanne came running. Suzanne to take pictures, Dale to kill the scorpion with a broom. Mild chaos ensued. My contribution was to stand on the bed but Dale and Greg collaborated to kill it and then sweep it out of the house.

Lots of adrenaline, lots of laughter, lots of relief. Wow, it could have been bad. If R had put that blanket on during the night, he would have been stung for sure. It would have been miserable midnight madness.

In the midst of the laughter, R reaches down to pick up his plastic bag of toiletries, now lying in the middle of the floor. And then he paused. In an absolutely calm, absolutely deadpan voice, he said, “There are babies.”

Major chaos ensues.

At the end of it, I realize that I am sitting on something hard. I’ve collapsed on the bed, and my pillow is digging into me. Somehow Ramsey the crocodile–who has been invisible, even though I’ve moved my pillow approximately eight times–was in my pillow case all along.

If I hadn’t been searching for him, I wouldn’t have moved R’s blanket. R might have found a mama scorpion, with babies, the hard way that night when he pulled the blanket over him. I am very, very, very grateful to my new lucky talisman. He is definitely not going to my nephew. He’s going to be sitting on my desk, watching me write, from now until forever.

That night, we return to the house after a day that included a pleasant wander around Placencia, a ride on a purple school bus, a delicious lasagna dinner and early evening bird-watching, some fun stories from a couple of former hippies including one with the punchline “But you have to wear a mask!” that would be way too complicated to explain in the midst of this novella but that made R and me laugh and laugh and laugh again on the plane on the way home when we were remembering the trip. A truly nice day, as in fact, all of them were in Belize. And I’m in the bathroom when R gasps and my heart leaps into my throat until I hear him say, great relief in his voice, “Thank God, it’s a cockroach.”

I bet that’s a sentence you’ve never heard before.

The view from the window at the place we’re staying in Maya Beach.

Suzanne is taking photos so when we get home, I’ll have some better images, but we saw a crocodile in that water yesterday and a huge iguana in one of the trees. The iguana’s head looked just like a T-Rex, continuing the Jurassic Park theme.

We took a sailboat from Caye Caulker to Placencia, camping two nights along the way, and arriving Sunday night. The sailboat was a “fun, but…” experience for me. Twenty-four people on a small boat is sort of a lot, and sitting on hard fiberglass for hours of sailing got old. It was incredibly windy our first night of camping and I didn’t get a lot of sleep. The second night of camping was on Tobacco Caye, a lovely little island with lots of small, colorful houses clustered together on white sand, with scattered palms and mangroves. Also a bar. Right next to where we were camping. During spring break. The people bellowing out ‘Don’t Stop Believing’   were having a great time, and I did think about going out and joining them — resistance feeling futile — but instead I just sweated in the hot tent and wished for the night to be over.

That said, sailing was beautiful. The snorkeling means lots of opportunities to see amazing creatures — lion fish, moray eel for R, spotted eagle ray for S, conchs and sea urchins, and of course, colorful fish of all shapes and sizes. I love the moments of discovery with snorkeling, when you are simply floating and suddenly you realize that an entire school of fish is busily chewing on the seaweed below you. The boat would stop, sometimes in what seemed like the middle of the ocean and the captain would say, “okay, go ahead” and there would be entire worlds under the blank expanse of blue.

The captain and his crew were incredible, too. I live in a major tourist capital, so I know how good people can be at smiling for the tourists but also how hard that can be for anyone to maintain hour after hour. These guys were still smiling, cheerfully answering questions, jumping to help out, singing and laughing and making jokes three days in. And Captain Ramsey was a fantastic cook. Turns out I do like conch, at least in his conch ceviche and another conch dish he made, and that conch doesn’t actually have to taste like shoe leather. His food was easily as good or better than that at the restaurants we’d eaten at and with more options. He did a coconut curry fish that was delicious, and at the same meal, shrimp sautéed in butter and jerk spices with a little parsley and cilantro and then rum that I am going to try to make at home because it was so very, very tasty.

There is so much more that I want to write about but I am ever so tired of fighting with this Internet connection and iPad keyboard and everyone else is now up. Time to start the day. I think we’re going to start with a hunt for milk for our coffee. The local supermarkets are an adventure in themselves.

View from our window at Caye Reef

I suspect that all my pictures are going to be of early morning, because so far it appears that I left the battery charger for the camera plugged into my wall at home. I’m grateful for the iPad, but I do not intend to carry it around with me all day long so that I can take bad pictures with it. For morning, though, it’s nice.

Caye Caulker is a tiny, mellow, colorful island. Most of what there is to do seems to be to go elsewhere, on sailboat tours, snorkeling, manatee watches, dive trips. You can rent bikes or get a ride on a golf cart, but there are no cars and the roads are sand. The front street is lined with vendors and shops and rustic, open air bars and restaurants. Yesterday day, Suzanne and I theorized that this was a night time town, quiet in the day. Then we went out to dinner and wandered home in the dark and revised our theory to it being a peaceful town. It’s probably not the most crowded time of year, but it’s really gorgeous. Writing on the iPad is quite the pain, though — it just tried to convince me that although I had typed ‘gorgeous’ what I really meant was ‘ogre dust’, because that comes up in conversation so often.

Last night, I tried conch for the first time at Rose’s Grill. The grill is set up outside a bar and you pick from platters of raw fish, shish kebabs and crab claws. I always want to try the thing I’ve never had before so conch it was. Conch tastes like leather. Well, no, it tastes like nothing, but chews like leather. Good to know! The fish creole at the Lazy Lizard the night before was fantastic, though, and I’m looking forward to today’s food adventures.

The rooftop deck at CayeReef on Caye Caulker. I sat up there this morning, waiting for the sun to rise and drinking a truly horrible cup of coffee. (The horrible is what happens when you try to make coffee in the dark, in a strange kitchen, while trying not to wake up the sleeping kid three feet away, no reflection on the island or hotel.)

My camera ran out of battery charge almost immediately, but it has a couple pictures of the undersides of birds on it. I went up there before dawn and sat in the dark as it shifted to half light, thinking I’d see a lovely sunrise. Instead I saw these incredibly spooky silhouettes of pterodactyls overhead. Suzanne tells me they were frigate birds, but I was pretty sure I’d entered Jurassic Park. I cowardly retreated back to my room.