We took our good friend, Pamela, up on her generous invitation to stay at her home in Alaska and moved on. We are going to take advantage of the peace and quiet over the coming month, using it to plan the next phase of our adventure together.

Nearly every day, I have been taking Kimo for a walk. We generally get as far as the breadfruit trees. Now that they are beginning to bear fruit, I have been bringing breadfruit back with me to fry up as chips.

The first time I put the leash on Kimo, she panicked. She refused to follow me and finally just lay down. During the past three weeks, we have been building mutal trust and respect. It amazed me at first how like a horse she was in her reactions to new stimulus. Each walk produces more progress and breadfuit. I can now walk her through neighborhoods with other dogs and past really scary things like the power plant and herds of goats.

But this little (500 pound) bull was a bit too much for Kimo. She strained at the leash in an attempt to put more distance between herself and the bull. I was literally stuck in the middle. When the animal got within 6 feet, I made my choice and lobbed the breadfuit at its forehead. It landed square with a “Boink” and he made a U-turn and gamboled off.

Trouble came to the island along with the storm and soon everybody was stirred up. During the next few days, so many people arrived that the entire culture of the island was changed. No one was able to sleep through the night. Even after the furious winds subsided, the mood remained vicious.

On Saturday, the frenzy reached its peak in the early afternoon. After that, lots of people left and the next day, finally, all was calm again. The sea was crystal and aqua, sparkling and inviting us to play.

Bob and I celebrated by going snorkeling in the warm water to look at the wreck of a large steel boat just off our beach. As we swam out, the fish schooled languidly in and out of the coral while the sunlight filtered through the top of the water onto the sand below in hypnotic patterns.

The wreck itself was more formidable than we had imagined. It consisted of large slabs of rusted metal, mute testament to the kind of storm we witnessed last week. We stood on the deck in defiance of our fears.

As we swam away from the submerged disaster, we felt as if we were leaving the anxieties from the past week behind us. Three very large tarpon circled us in curiosity. Tiny neon colored yellow-tailed damselfish glowed florescent in and among the coral below. All was well with the world as we allowed the gentle surf to push us towards shore.

We are routinely mesmerized by the tiny crazy ants, stung by the black fire ants and alarmed by the size of the nocturnal carpenter ants. We are forced to throw away sugar, spray poison and flee in pain, slapping at our legs, from the vicinity of stinging ants.

“Crazy ants” are close to microscopic in size and whirl in so many directions that they confound their observers. I often don’t realize there were ants on the object in my hand until I feel a little tickle halfway up my arm. They are remarkably quick to retreat. When I see them in the sink, I only have to turn the water on to make them all disappear.

The “crazy ants” are unpredictable. At times they run along the edge of the counter, avoiding the towel, and at others they avoid the counter and travel solely across the towel. I picked up my toothbrush only once to find it covered in ants. Why they chose that day to enjoy the leftovers there, I cannot say.

The other day I was clearing breakfast dishes from a table at the lodge and stopped, plates in hand to look at a perfect row of tiny ants drinking from the edge of a water spill. They looked like zebras lined up at a water hole.

Outside our outhouse door is a new row of ant lion lairs, which fascinate me. I wonder how long it will be before I see a successful capture and wonder if I will be able to watch.

There are so many ants at Casa Iguana that I feel it is only a matter of time before they carry off one of the iguanas or perhaps one of the dogs.

During our year in Belize we woke one night to a torrent of Army Ants marching through the house in search of prey. We were forced to abandon the bed and the house. Tucking our pillows under our arms and picking up the cat, who was clearly in big trouble, we fled down the hill and slept in one of the cabañas. The next morning we returned to find the empty carcasses of scorpions and lizards that had been flushed out, consumed and abandoned by the marching ants.

“If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.” – Edward O Wilson

It must come from wholesale art clearinghouses, which specialize in non-specific, un-obtrusive and inexpensive art. And what about the artists? When an artist creates something worthy of reproduction in the hundreds, it must be like a recording artist getting an album contract. The folks who create hotel art must be making pretty good money. I wonder if they have to wear sunglasses when they go out for dinner?

And what about the buyers? Someone with a designer background must be responsible for procuring hotel art. It must be quite challenging to find just the right images to dress the walls of say, 500 rooms. It seems to me you would go looking for art you liked in the appropriate color schemes and then order 500 sets.

My point is (and there is no easy way to say this) given that paid professionals put a fair amount of thought into what should go on hotel walls, why is so much of it bad?

We have seen a fair amount of hotel art and the majority of it fell into the range between “forgettable” and “downright disturbing”. It surprises us that something that requires so much planning and forethought turns out the way it does so often. What am I missing, here?

We began our journey by asking the women at the front desk where to find the store. All three took a stab at conveying, in the correct blend of Spanish and English words, the directions. The final consensus was that is would take us 15 to 20 minutes to get to the FarMart.

We arrived at our destination a mere 7 mintues later. In keeping with the pharmacy (farmacia) theme, the wall outside the Far Mart advertised, in large letters a myriad of plastic surgery procedures, including botox and liposuction.

Inside, we found and bought coca cola, candy bars, peanuts, cookies and cheese puffs but not hair clippers.

On our way home, Bob spied a shortcut, shearing another 2 minutes off the walk, reducing the commute to a mere 5 minutes.

I have not read a news story since last year and generally manage to avoid contact with the media even though we have computer access and an impressive collection of magazines in the lodge. But today I had time to kill. Breakfast was over and I was waiting at the lodge for a guest to return and settle their bill.

I dished up a bowl of beans and rice and settled down on the couch. Feeling like a voyeur, I began to shuffle through the pile of magazines. A recent copy of Newsweek caught my eye and I picked it up.

The first three pages were full-page ads. Only 54 of the 118 pages in the February 14th issue actually held news stories. The other 64 pages were dedicated to advertising, including 8 pages each for prescription drugs and money management and 5 for designer food.

What, exactly is the point, I wondered, of a Light’n Fit CARB CONTROL Smoothie? As far as I could tell, the purpose of this product was to separate insecure people from their money by taking advantage of their phood phobias. Worse, the plastic packaging was designed to load up the landfills with a petroleum-based product. I mean, “Hello – We’re fighting wars for this?!”

It immediately became obvious that years of self-imposed cultural deprivation and real food have ruined my appetite for such disgusting examples of conspicuous consumption. I was so distracted by the hawking of financial and medical services that I was unable to read the news stories about retirement, war, entertainment and so on.  Twas a pity…

We live in the second poorest country in the Western hemisphere. Our guests come from the richest countries in the world. No matter how much we try to prepare them for life without all the creature comforts, there are always a few who are shocked by the cold showers and the bugs.

In order to provide electricity, for instance, we need to keep generators in good repair and receive regular shipments of fuel for them. However, we sometimes pull up alongside the weekly freight supply boat to find that they were unable to bring us any fuel.

When supplies do arrive, they are passed from person to person and from boat to boat and then moved to the lodge via wheelbarrow and bicycle. We do our best to walk the tightrope between comfort for the guests and strain on our fragile resources.

As I go about my day, radio at my hip, smiling at guests while hurrying towards the next emergency, this scene from the Wizard of Oz comes to mind:

You’ve probably heard the phrase, “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” Personally, I find it offensive. I believe we all need someone and to assume that all of the people we don’t need happen to belong to the same sex is, well, sexist.

The women who would make this generalization were perhaps victims of a spoiled relationship at one time or another. To quote another phrase, “Hell hath no fury as a woman scorned.”

The image of a fish on a bicycle is ludicrous and I doubt that many people have actually seen such a thing. The other day, however, Bob was transporting barracuda while riding a bicycle and found it to be serious business.

He caught his thumb on the teeth of one of the fish, and immediately began to bleed profusely. I later heard him telling some of our guests that he was “bit by a barracuda on a bicycle.”