‘You’d better Belize it!’ is the slogan of the tourist board of – you’ve guessed it already, haven’t you? – Belize. It is stitched across the laurel-green baseball cap of the man sitting at the next table. We are drinking surprisingly expensive iced lattes in a coffee bar in Belize City. Our surroundings are decorated in a way that brings to mind Dickens’s description of the Misses Cratchet’s Christmas finery; ‘brave in ribbons’. Much of Belize is brave in ribbons. This coffee house, for example, under its jolly paint-job (obviously the product of several days’ hard work on the part of it’s enterprising owners) and its bead curtains and its chintzy curtains, is a pretty cistern-like set of concrete rooms at the top of a flight of dim, and narrow stairs. The ‘espresso dock’, prominently signed, is an ordinary domestic espresso machine displayed on a Formica table in one corner. It is roped off like an exhibit in the British Museum. The bookshelf is mostly crowded with tawdry and tattered titles by authors who popularity probably expired before they cashed the cheques from their editors.

The most popular daily paper is lying on the table in front of us. Most prominent of the words comprising the headline is ‘homosexual’. It reads ‘The Homosexual High School Administrator’. That’s it. There is no mention what this person may or may not have done. On closer inspection it turns out that the homosexual administrator, who shall remain unnamed, who works at a school, which shall remain unnamed, has been committed hideous sexual crimes, which shall remain unspecified, against a number of young men under his charge, all of whom shall, for their own sakes and that of their families, remain unnamed. Though editors of this paper loudly and pompously proclaim that their whole concern is for the safety of the community, it is hard to see how this long, fact-free, and entirely uninformative rant does so, unless by printing the words ‘homosexual’, ‘sodomitical’, ‘criminal’, ‘appalling’, ‘unspeakable’ and many others in close proximity to each other. Weirdly, the article does note that boys in the school are under frequently exerted pressure to perform homosexual acts by older boys. Perhaps it is a disease, spreading from the evil administrator. It is odd that this evangelical, nonsensical, and unconsciously homophobic reporting is primarily found in Afro-Caribbean cultures, especially those previously dominated by the Victorian British, with their contemptible moral values and hypocritical cant. The story poisons my whole day and infects my view of the people of Belize. I see knives in men’s smiles and the dancehall music that thumps out of road-side stores sounds like baseball bats and boots.

Victorian too are the names painted on the signs; where in the world would you find a young man named Horace H Harrison in this day and age? Or Oliver S Wiggins? One lady doctor rejoices in the title Ms Velda M Flowers MD. They are splendid names; like mango trees splitting the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral. Lonely Planet, with its customary glibness, describes Belize as an ‘incredibly tolerant’ nation. It also does its unconscious trick of constructing, through randomly placed warnings throughout its text, a picture of bone-freezing danger everywhere that takes a while to thaw out. But it’s hard to think of any place that habitually listens to songs about killing gay people as ‘incredibly’ tolerant.

Ms Antolina Griffin is the proprietress of ‘Freddie’s Guesthouse’ on Eve Street. We are six when we arrive and she is adamant that the single female among us should get a room to herself. Unwittingly, she also prevents a more hideous crime from being committed by forcing the two homosexuals to share a bed in a room with a heterosexual Frenchman. Though the sodomites are in a bed together, no abominations are on the cards; not unless we can corrupt the Frenchman in double-quick time. Mrs. Griffin is a small ovoid widow with tightly curled hair and a bright print dress of the sort all our grandmothers favored. Her eyes are dark behind violet glass, but her smile is bright. And she has that voice; that sweetly, richly declining accent that gradually massages sentences flat. Even this starchy widow can ‘tak’ a sen-tennz an’ mak’ it lie oot an’ purrr’. Her demesne of pink wash, cushions and cloth flowers is on the upper floor of the building, where Peaches, her minute chestnut dog taps across the polished wooden floors.

By far the largest building in Belize City has to be the Palace Casino on the waterfront; a twelve-storey, concrete building in a town where, as a disgusted former citizen informs us; ‘Three floors is high-rise’. You can’t really walk up to it; it is made to be approached by car only. Inside, a blissfully frigid lobby; a cinema entrance on the left; a trio of bored looking professional girls knocking their knees together under a potted palm in the centre and, on the right: the casino floors winks and flashes evilly from behind a cordon of tinted glass. A sign warns that no Belizean not in possession of three hundred dollars will be admitted. Theoretically we could swan past the bulky security guards, flip-flops, smelly tee shirts and all. But my companions don’t feel like it tonight, which relieves me. I harbor a restrained horror of all houses of game and those in impoverished regions most of all. Dreadful enough the spend-palaces of North America, to which the elderly flock in their Winnebago’s only to leave by bus; more awful by far are the money-prisons of the developing world; gleaming vaults protected by gun-turrets and surrounded by miserable shanties whose dwellers tell tales of gleaming white toilets where men in tuxedos hand out mints. The Palace is a huge white bunker. Though it is reputed to be a cash cow for the community; bringing money and jobs to the city; it looks and feels like a parasite; sucking money into its depths and generating only a spectacle of hopeless desire. We turn to leave. Outside the hot night air blasts us again. Back at the guest house, there is a large spider climbing the wall of our room, I flick it into a water glass, which I take outside and upturn into the road.

Even though it is a poor country, Belize loves it's pet dogs. The people seem indifferent to the independent and economical cat but every yard has it’s mutt, pooch or ravenous carnivore yapping, snarling or comatose in the heat. The grocery stores are hardly bursting with produce but every one has its corner stacked with sacks of Chum, Purina and Winalot. It’s not cheap stuff. A child could eat for less than a large dog in Belize.

We decide to leave Belize City. Only myself and Peter are going west to San Ignacio (or Cayo, after the district). Goodbye to Carl, the French anti-Corporate investment banker. Goodbye also to Caroline, the Canadian English teacher on 72-hour exile from Mexico for visa reasons. And farewell to the Czechs from Harvard, hyper-intelligent and already appalled by the warm, morbid morass of Central America. We leave town on a decommissioned US school bus; the high seat backs reduce us all to children again. We have the windows open are far as they will drop, and the cross-breeze is warm but fresh. But the hot-blooded Belizeans wither in the cold and slam them shut. After a while, it starts to rain; a hot, booming sky-wash that turns the interior of the school-bus into a steam room. We’re soon as wet as we would have been had we been riding on the roof-rack. As we drive past orange orchards and banana fields, I catch up on the litany of horrors that makes up Central American history. No wonder they smile so much; it reads like Titus Andronicus; ‘Why do you laugh, Sir? I laugh because I have tears no more to shed.’ Somoza, Avila, Cortes, Reagan; the book even has a special box: ‘The Top Five Bastards’.

I’m going to switch to the past tense, just for practice.

The journey west didn’t take long; we arrived in Cayo, or San Ignacio, before darkness fell. A few miles from the Guatemalan border, Cayo (shorter, see?) is a favourite staging post for travellers west and a posting for other ex-pats; mainly archaeologists working on all those Mayan ruins out there, all still buried in soft limey soil and strangled in jungle creepers. This shows. At the Pacz Guesthouse, we were shown a decent room by a South African forestry consultant named Jeroen with a huge squeezy handshake and an voice so erratically tuneful, it sounded like a harmonium with a hole in the bellows, or as if his voice was about to break again. Three beds this time; the last time there were only two and three of us in need. Oh well; no spiders. Stretched out on the verandah was an old sod of some variety smoking through a cough like the gargling of rotten eggs; a truly horrific sound. In the street, two pubescent girls, one white ex-pat, one Hispanic, playing with a ruptured pink plastic ball and trying to outdo each other in insane sexualised giggling; another sound calculated to strike cold fear into my heart.

The people of Belize are an odd mix. We met Mennonites on the bus; Mennonites! Young men with thin wispily-bearded faces and huge hands pulped by hard work, wearing granddad shirts, dungarees and broad-brimmed hats. They wanted to know whether we spoke German. Did they want to practice their ancestral language on us, or had they always spoken German since they arrived here, in this yellow and green swamp? I was amazed. Then there are the aged Rastas; their eyes like peeled lychees under the vast striped turban of their dreads; their arms wiry and corded. They watch the swaying Caribbean princesses go by; picking their path over the rough and sodden ground in the strappiest, sparkliest, least practical shoes ever seen in such a place, balancing on their stiletto heels the sultry bulk of their swaying buttocks and breasts, straining through emerald chiffon and flamingo lycra. It’s an amazing combination of tensions and sexual packaging. They don’t sweat though, the shoulders six inches in front of me on the bus are as softly, as plumply dry as powdered doughnuts. The young Hispanic men lurch down the side walks in bandanas, flat-peaked trucker caps and tawdry bling-bling; their trainers prison-white, their outsize shirts horribly screen-printed with airbrushed heroes; Bruce Lee, Tupak, Bob Marley, 50 Cent. Their tiny mamas are all thin-lipped disapproval as they scold their resentful mustachioed and glum-eyed daughters.