Belize Day 3: La Isla Bonita

San Pedro has adopted the fitting moniker, "La Isla Bonita" from the Madonna song.  But she says the island is purely a work of fiction, and that the song is "a tribute to the Latin American people, and to myself."  Mostly the latter, I presume.  Why else would she dance in a Flamenco dress in the video - a custom from Spain, a whole continent away from Latin America?  I guess the color of your dress trumps cultural accuracy.

Anyway, we reserved day 3 for some serious tropical downtime.  No schedule.  Just Amy and me and a hammock and some beach reading.  Me, I'm tackling The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder - clearly a computer nerd's beach read.  But it captures the psychology of computer scientists with deadly accuracy, even though it was written in 1982 before the Internet, GUI's, mice and cell phones were commonplace things.  Amy is reading a selection from Oprah's Book Club, Anna Shreve's The Pilot's Wife.  She says it's kind of hokey  but it's a page turner suitable for taking one's mind away from the beautiful scenery for two seconds.

It's like we never left Ithaca!

We don't want to be total slugs, so we got on our bikes and scoped out the north part of the island. We rode up the beach, which was a pretty easy drive except for some harrowing spots of soft sand.  San Pedro is technically two islands with a $2BZ bridge in the middle.  ($2BZ is $1US - Belizean currency is tied to American's at a fixed exchanged rate).  Not knowing this, and because the bridge is so small, we almost blew right past the toll both, and we heard "Hey!  Toll bridge!"  So we went back and paid our toll, and headed for North San Pedro Island.

It was an interesting mix of old settlements and new construction there.  It was clearly for the Americans and Europeans who wanted resort living, who didn't want to go into town much.  It didn't quite fit the Belizean asthetic, as far as I understood it.  I saw an Asian man with dreads.  I saw two huge monitor lizards crawling through a construction site (like the one on the right).  It was like that.

Amy had scoped out restaurants for our trip, and the most exciting one was El Fugon (The Fireside Hearth) which we saved for day 3.  And WOW!  It was excellent on so many levels, but totally unexpected.  You walk into this compound, unshielded from the sun, with about 5 picnic tables.  They give you a menu with 5 entree choices - grilled chicken, grilled fish, grilled lobster, grilled shrimp and shrimp in orange sauce.  That was it.  We started with Coca Cola and Fanta ... the server ran out the door, evidently to the store down the street, and came back with two cold bottles of soda.  (We though they may have run out, but he did it with the couples that dined after us too!)  For $35BZ (about $17 US), you got an appetizer, entree and dessert.

OMG!!!  For the appetizer, we had Fish Balls -  get your mind out of the gutter - which were minced fresh fish with garlic and deep fried ... and conch fritters which were about the same with fresh conch.  They were heavenly - crisp, light and they had the lime sauce you wanted to drink from the dish.   For the entree, I had the Grilled Fish and Amy the Shrimp in orange sauce.   That they were fresh was a given.  But the fire grilling it them shot the taste over the top.  It made you close your eyes and savor every smoky bite.

For dessert - key lime pie.  But not just any key lime pie ... this was frozen.  But instead of being crystally and granular, it was cold and smooth as a milkshake.  It was kind of a miracle - solid and liquid at the same time.  It tasted good, but it FELT good too.  Key lime pie is one of my favorite desserts, and this was the best I had ever had.

If we had been a food coma before, this was Food Life Support.  We knew we would now refer to our lives in two eras - before El Fugon, and after El Fugon.