Belize Border Run! Going “south of the border” when you’re already south of the border

We had just alighted from our bumpy ride over from the mainland on the aptly named “Thunderbolt” when we saw the sign posted in a coffee shop window:

Sit back, relax, order a latte and browse the wanted posters

What kind of place had we just walked into? And what were we thinking dragging our suitcases around the back streets of San Pedro, Belize? Read on to find out…

FAR south of the border

For many, the proverbial “south of the border” phrase conjures up images of folks with “questionable legal status” making a run for freedom over the southern US border. Indeed, if you’ve ever been to the Tijuana-San Diego border,  you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. Its edgy, dusk-till-dawn-movie-set feel makes you want to head back north of the border before sundown. 

But the border I’m referring to in this story is a long way from Tijuana - about 4000 kilometres away in fact. You’ll find it in a seldom-visited corner of the Mexican Riviera, far from the Zona Hotelera and spring break party crowds of Cancun. 

Our route from Cancun to San Pedro. The border is between Chetumal and Corozal. Note that there is no way to get from Xcalak to San Pedro - trust us, we tried!

Cancun: Snorkelling, Micheladas and Crocodiles

The origins of our “assault on the Belize border” can probably be traced back to Cancun’s reputation as a cliche destination for “fresh off the boat” American tourists. Valuing our “off the beaten path traveller” status, the first time we landed in Cancun we put ourselves on the first bus south to Tulum. It was only after renting an Airbnb in Cancun for a week on our second trip there two years later that we discovered some of its charms (which I’ll present here now for “geographical continuity”).

You don’t have to venture far from the Zona Hotelera to find sleepy little joints like this in Cancun

The genius thing about the Michelada is that you’re watering down your beer with tomato juice and at the same time keeping up your salt intake, so it makes for a great non-dehydrating daytime drink option. 

Best Michelada in Mexico, at Los Tarascos Cancun. “Para tacos Los Tarascos” as their slogan goes. I’d argue they should add “y Micheladas”. Although then it wouldn’t rhyme. 

View from the taco stand at Isla Blanca, a little-known peninsula north of Cancun city

Enjoying a “boatie” (“boat beer” a portmanteau of boat and “roadie”) on the ferry to Isla Mujeres

Quintana Roo is one of the safest parts of Mexico - you’re more likely to run into a crocodile than an armed robber.

Pro Tip: you’ll find world-class snorkelling right off the Club Med shoreline on Punta Nizuc. Just walk in off the beach from an adjacent hotel carrying your snorkelling gear and act like you’re supposed to be there. 

Trendy Tulum

Tulum, as it turned out, had already been overrun by hipsters by the time we got there in summer 2017. You’ll have to venture further south than that if you want to get off the proverbial beaten path. That said, there are many good reasons to visit Tulum and spend some time hanging out there - there’s much more to it than the seaside Mayan ruins that it's best known for. In particular, don’t miss visiting one of the many crystal-clear cenotes in the surrounding region - check out this post for more information. Also worth a visit is Parque Xel-Ha, which is a brilliant yet somewhat dangerous combination of water activities and all-you-can-eat-and-drink Mexican food and alcoholic drinks - for an entire day! 

The Zona Arqueológica de Tulum - a seaside Mayan walled city with the most iguanas I've ever seen in one place

Where else in the world can you cool off in the Caribbean Sea after wandering the ruins?

Tulum - come for the ruins, stay for the cenotes

Chilling in a cenote whose name I don’t remember, somewhere between Tulum and Cancun. 

Help yourself to habanero sauce and salad at Antojitos la Chiapaneca, home of the best tacos on the Mexican Riviera.

Hanging with the iguanas at Parque Xel-Ha

Into seldom-charted waters

A further three-hour drive south of Tulum will bring you to Bacalar Lagoon. It’s like an entire lake and tributary system with cenote-like water. Here you are getting into territory where not so many gringos have been, so be prepared to dust off that high school Spanish. We did the whole trip on ADO buses, but if we did it again we would rent a car. Car rental in the Mexican Riviera is cheap (like 20 USD/day cheap), and the driving conditions (once outside Cancun centro) are pretty low stress. If you’re planning to visit a lot of swimming spots, taxis to outside-the-city-limits destinations will quickly add up. 

Of course, you'll need to weigh this decision up against decreased Michelada consumption opportunities :-)

Pro Tip: while in Bacalar, don’t miss Los Rapidos Bacalar, a narrow stretch of river that feeds into the lagoon. Jump in the river up one end and float down to the other. Eat some tortillas and guacamole and grab an ice-cold cerveza from the on-site restaurant. Repeat. 

Cenote Cocalitos - Tranquil swimming lagoon with fossilized stromatolites, a cenote, hammocks & an eatery. (Source: Google Maps. Picture by author).

View from the shore of Los Rapidos Bacalar.

Nan taking a break from floating down the river. This picture was taken in the thatched bungalow that you can see in the picture in the link above.

Probing the border

Now, after that little detour through the highlights of the Mexican Riviera, lets return to the theme of this post: the Mexico-Belize border region. Strictly speaking, you could count Bacalar Lagoon as part of that region as it is just 45 minutes by road from Chetumal (Mexico’s analogy of San Diego in the San Diego-Tijuana border crossing I mentioned earlier). We, however, managed to turn 45 minutes into two days by taking buses all the way to Mahahual and Xcalak - and back again (see map route above). We couldn’t find any online information that confirmed either way whether we’d be able to cross into Belize from Xcalak, so we decided to turn up and find out from the source. After all, it looked so close on the map!

Turns out we couldn’t. But that’s OK. We like to approach our border crossings slowly. With Nan’s Chinese passport, you’re never absolutely sure they’re going to let you in until they actually let you in (or you’ve applied for a visa in advance).  A US tourist visa gets Chinese passport holders into most places in Central America and the Caribbean (albeit usually only for a week or two), but accurate and up-to-date information on the topic is hard to find, especially for small countries like Belize. More to the point, Belize still maintains its Chinese embassy in Taipei, not Beijing, so the odds of being rejected at the border were high. With that in mind, we decided to stay the night in Chetumal before attempting the border crossing. 

No man’s land

It was the kind of border experience designed for locals doing day trips and travelling light. Think chicken buses, no English signs (on the Mexican side), constantly having to ask where to go and what to do next, and hauling your luggage across a long stretch of “no man’s land” between the exit and entry points. The details are somewhat fuzzy, but Shannon O’Donnell’s account sums it up nicely with this line:

“Rather than just following instructions mapped out in a guidebook, we were forced to hunt down a way to cross the border into Belize”

It took us most of the afternoon to find our way into Corozal on the Belizean side, so we spent an evening chatting with the salty old expats at Bay Breeze before catching the 7 am Thunderbolt to San Pedro. To sum up our Belize experience, everything was about double the price of Mexico, it felt less safe, and the beaches and food were “meh”. We promptly booked flights from Cancun to Havana, took the 3 pm boat back to the mainland the next day, and began the process of “figuring out” how to get back into Mexico. 

The view from the Corozal esplanade was underwhelming after coming from Bacalar.

All aboard the Thunderbolt! Hang onto your hat, and bring a cushion. 

Belizean food is more Caribbean than Mexican

The beaches in San Pedro are nothing to write home about. It seems that most of the diving and snorkelling action in Belize happens on day trips to the outer reef. 

So there you have it, that’s how we ended up in a coffee shop in San Pedro, Belize browsing most-wanted posters. I remember the crossing back into Mexico being equally as difficult as the one in the reverse direction. I heaved a sigh of relief as I plopped myself in the passenger seat of a taxi headed for the ADO bus terminal.  It felt amazing to be back in the land of guacamole and micheladas. The driver, sensing as much, glanced at me and smiled. “Estas libre en Mexico” (you are free in Mexico”), he joked. I wonder if that’s what he said to the guy on the wanted poster. 

This post is part of The Travel Archives series, where I write about my experiences travelling through unconventional destinations. 

Almost Famous: The hardest working man in Nanjing show business

The title of this post was inspired by the 2000 film, "Almost Famous", and of course, the godfather of soul himself, James Brown:

James Brown in 1973. Look how hard he was working.

This is the story of my attempt to become a rockstar in China. I've told this story in bits and pieces in my 2007 and 2009 "Christmas Newsletters", and started writing about it in my never-published 2013 opus, but I've never collected it all in one place before.

So sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride as I recount the crazy tales and surreal experiences that started with singing for fish in Goa, India and ended with me becoming the Dewey Finn of Zhuhai, China.

In August 2006 I moved to Nanjing, China and set about getting myself a guitar and making some "musician" business cards, with the aim of picking up where I left off in Goa, India (only hopefully getting paid more than fish and beer this time).

I got my first gig playing at the one-year birthday bash of a little Mexican joint called "The Slow Life Café". For my two hour gig, I was paid about $25AUD, a few beers, and as many burritos as I could eat.

Humble beginnings at the Slow Life Cafe, Nanjing. That guitar would end up paying for itself many times over.

Pretty soon I found a regular gig three nights a week at a seedy Taiwanese owned joint called "Taibei Station", where I met a hilariously dodgy Taiwanese musician variously known as "Xiaobao" and "Jacy" who would smoke like a chimney while pretending to play easy listening classics that were actually midi files hooked up to his fake grand piano through a laptop.

Master Class with Xiaobao, a.k.a. "Jacy" - "it's all about the white keys"

Jacy took me under his wing, showing me the tricks of the trade, and encouraging me to back him up with guitar and harmonies. Often, we were joined by Jacy's friends, who were a group of 50­something Taiwanese rock stars and the main clients of the bar. They were a mysterious bunch, whose members included two brothers who had lived in Guatemala and who could sing and speak Spanish fluently, and the ever-elusive “Jesse Tequila”, who looked about 10 years younger than he actually was, played several instruments, and had a seemingly endless repertoire of songs. Almost every night, he would turn up with a new beauty (or sometimes several) on his arm, claiming “this is my girlfriend of the far, far future”. Nobody was quite sure what he did for money, but as long as he kept cracking open those bottles of Chivas, nobody really cared.

During my time in Nanjing as a freelance musician, I played gigs in some random places. I've waited on stage behind white curtains amongst the flowers and angels at a wedding while a host in a crisp white suit announced me, and backstage with Chinese lion dancers at a used car sales event. I've drunk imported wine and mingled with models and the nouveau rich at a Mercedes Benz dinner party, and I've played on stage at a University in front of about 1000 people. I've even dressed up in black, played Spanish songs and pretended to be a European musician at a function that a Spanish trade company was putting on for their suppliers to encourage them to do more business in Europe (I remember the interview I had with the Spaniards when I got the case – they said "well, we originally wanted to find some Spanish dancers, but the costumes were too hard to find, so if we can't find any Spanish gypsies by Friday, you're our man"). It certainly kept things interesting.

Meeting the bride at a wedding gig in Nanjing, circa 2007

The Wedding Singer

Waiting backstage with the lion dancers

Another notable example of this kind of "D-grade celebrity for hire" gigs was when I got a call asking if I could find 5 western men to dress up in military uniforms and pretend to be a marching band at a parade in a 3rd tier city a few hours away from Nanjing. What was challenging about the request was that, not only did they all have to be white males, but they all had to be white males between 170­-180cm tall, and not too overweight, otherwise, they wouldn't fit into the costumes. We didn't end up getting the gig :-)

In the spring of 2008, I got a last-minute call to do a gig at a villa sales event in Changzhou. The money was right, so I hired a driver and set off into the darkness east of Nanjing (it was already the night before the gig). After arriving in Changzhou, the first question the host asked me was, "So, can you make pasta?". "I'm sorry, come again? But what does spaghetti bolognese have to do with any of this?" I asked, thinking I was supposed to be playing a gig. "Well", he explained, "tomorrow's event is the opening for the sales of an Italian Villa complex, and we'd lined up an Italian guy to come and make spaghetti for the audience. He pulled out at the last minute, and now you're it. You can play some songs too if you like", he added.

I could barely contain my laughter, but couldn’t really refuse either, now that I had come all this way. Luckily, I can make spaghetti bolognese Even funnier, they assured me that I just had to pretend that I knew what I was doing and that nobody would actually be eating the stuff, but then during the show, they invited all the kids in the audience up to taste it! I wasn’t even sure if the meat was done yet, and I found myself actually taking pride in my cooking, going “wait, it needs more salt!”, but thankfully, the reviews were neutral to positive, and nobody ended up in hospital.

So tell us, does everyone in Italy know how to make pasta?

Doing my best Elvis impersonation at another random villa sales gig, circa 2008

At these villa sales gigs, a common request was to supply a "Latin band". Other common acts included magicians, and girls dancing around in mini skirts pretending to play electric violins. One such gig with Jacy at the Zhongshan Golf resort was a prime example. The show was for a corporate dinner; the concept: three Chinese guys and me wearing matching Hawaiian shirts, Panama hats, and oversize pants that had to be scrunched up around the waist and held up by the belt. Backstage, I picked up what I could as Jacy barked orders at his troops in Chinese. Among the colourful shirts, large straw hats and instruments, the dancers painted on their makeup, and the MC practised her lines in a red miniskirt. The gig itself was a blur of flashing lights, maracas, “ganbei” (Chinese for "bottoms up") and lucky prize draws.

Soundcheck with the "Latin" band

Shortly after I met Jacy, I started working with a percussionist from Barbados, 'El Ché' Leon Christopher "Comandante" Corbin. Every now and again Ché would pull something awesome out of the hat, like the Mercedez Benz gig mentioned earlier. We found ourselves surrounded by "nouveau riche" and models, and playing on a spacious stage with great sound support while being broadcast on a huge screen. We pulled together a 4­-piece band for the first time, with the addition of Tino, a big, beefy, long­haired Belgian, on bass, and Jaco, a guitar wizard from Indonesia. We dubbed the band "Coastline" (named after the island nations that three of us hailed from and our reggae-influenced style), and for a while there had an agent helping us to find gigs and even wrote a song. Unfortunately, as I've learned the hard way, the lifespan of expat music groups is inversely proportional to the number of members. You can see some Coastline footage here and here.

Che "El Comandante" and The Captain

Coastline Gig, Christmas 2007

Early Coastline promotional poster

The Pivot - from reggae to country

The Coastline break-up was a bit like the lyrics of "Summer of 69" - "Jimmy quit, Jody got married...I should've known we'd never get far". But I learnt a valuable lesson from that experience, that would change the way I approach doing music gigs to this day. Our agent at the time, “Maoxian”, as she called herself (which loosely translates as "risk") was a thirty-something Latin dance instructor who was running a salsa night at the bar we had a residency at. After Coastline disbanded, she said something to me that made me change the way I thought about the business of playing music. She said it didn’t really matter who else was playing or what we played; as long as I could keep finding foreign musicians, she would keep finding me gigs. I realised I had to let go of the idea of a "band", and instead focus on developing and maintaining a contact list of “zero-practice”, gig-ready foreign musicians.

I had already started grooming a potential "band" member – his name was Terry “Cannonball” Taylor, so named because of his erratic ten­pin bowling style. He had a big, gruff, tenor voice that suited belting out rock­a­billy Creedence Clearwater Revival­-type numbers. He had been hanging out and coming up on stage at my solo gigs since way back when I started in late 2006, so he knew a lot of my tunes already. We had “Cannonball” fill in for a gig in January, where we played a totally different, bluesy rock style of music, with Terry as frontman, me on rhythm guitar and backups, and Jaco on the bass, and in a strange kind of way, it worked.

Based on this initial trial, Maoxian booked Terry and I for a gig (Jaco exited the scene due to visa issues around the time of the 2008 Beijing Olympics), but I needed to find a 3rd wheel because Terry didn’t play an instrument. Maoxian suggested we bring in Ian, an eccentric, long­time Nanjing resident who was originally from Ohio, and who had a beard that just about reached his belly button. So all of a sudden here I was with these two US country boys, belting out country tunes. It was a complete 180-degree turn from Coastline. Terry, who comes from Kentucky, suggested that we name the band after his home state, because it was close enough to “Kentucky Fried Chicken” for the Chinese to associate it with us, but not close enough for anyone to claim we were ripping off the brand name. It was about then that someone suggested we go out and buy some fake cowboy hats so that wearing them would become our trademark. And so “Kentucky” was born.

Kentucky's first-ever gig

Over the next few months, we would do some wacky gigs in some far-out places, piling into minivans and performing for the locals in small Chinese towns (I must stress here, they were only small by Chinese standards), which seemed very appropriate for a band called “Kentucky”. Along the way, I added members to the band as I needed them – I found Corey, a Canadian accordion and keyboard player, a very professional musician who really got into his country yokel character; Sebastien, a German violin virtuoso out on a university exchange program who lowered himself to playing country fiddle, and “Diamond” Dave, whom I met when he was instructing a yoga class; he was an old sea­dog of the Japanese, Hong Kong and Shanghai ex-pat music scenes, and at the time, (luckily for me) anchored in Nanjing because he had found a well paid, steady teaching job. He was an amazingly versatile musician who knew so many classic tunes, had all his gear sorted, and even had his own cowboy hat already!

From left to right: Corey, Ian "Uncle Jeebers" Clark, Benson "Captain Corndog" Wallace, and Sebastien

"The tray biens"

On the road with Kentucky, around about the time of the bird flu epidemic

Kentucky promotional shot circa summer 2008 - Terry "Cannonball" Taylor is on the left

'

"The Don Quijote Sessions", summer 2008, Nanjing. "Diamond Dave" is on the far left

Almost Famous

In September 2008, just before I moved to Shanghai, we had started to gig quite regularly, and a Nanjing TV station ran a story about us.

After moving to Shanghai and a quiet 2009 on the music front, things picked up again in late 2010 through early 2011, and I started getting called out to Nanjing more often to do “quasi-Kentucky” gigs with Ian. Working with Ian gave me another opportunity to be on Chinese TV (here's the first time, if you haven't seen it yet), this time in a one-off special called “Jiangsu's got foreign talent”, which was a staged competition for foreigners living in China who could sing Chinese songs. You can see our performance, which was filmed in December 2010, here.

There is an amusing story behind it (as if those Chinglish subtitles weren't amusing enough to begin with), being that during the preliminary rounds (only the final was broadcast on national television), we sang quite slow, pentatonic versions of what were supposed to be traditional Chinese folk songs. Jiangsu Television's resident musician and composer, tasked with arranging the soundtracks to be palatable to the national audience, had different ideas. After diligently practising our traditional folk versions, we rocked up for rehearsal only to be told that we would no longer need to play our instruments (yes, we were miming – and in the interests of disclosure, I should add that the vocal soundtrack was pre-recorded also; I can't really jump around on stage like Flea and sing harmonies that tightly), and that the composer had produced these hilarious pop-funk-rock versions of the songs for us. Ian was initially resistant and tried to maintain his artistic integrity, saying things like “this is not my style of music”, “it's not how I want to be broadcast on national television”, and so on – remember that Simpsons episode where the Red Hot Chili Peppers play in Moe's bar and are asked to tone down their lyrics (“no way man, our lyrics are like our children”) -  but eventually he just let go and had fun. I felt very comfortable channelling my inner Chili Pepper – listen out for the Keidis-inspired “uh” right at the beginning of the track. 

In the final of "Jiangsu's Got Foreign Talent", December 2010

In Autumn 2011 I even started to break into some Shanghai gigs with my old buddy “Diamond” Dave, who was in Shanghai on weekends at the time, because that's where his wife was based. We started playing cushy gigs at villa openings in various outer suburbs of Shanghai, where we got to sit down and play a few sets to no one in particular and take regular breaks to sip coffee and graze on the snack buffet. Those gigs were fun and challenging because Dave played a different style of music to the set Ian and I did; more like a fusion of Western Classics and Chinese Pop, and so Dave asked me to play bass instead of acoustic guitar. I say challenging not just because I had to get back into bass guitar again, but because Dave was the kind of guy who didn't believe in practice; he would rock up to the gig and hand me a few pieces of paper with song titles and chord sequences written on them, and then say “Ok, let's do soundcheck”. So it was often a case of sightreading/fumbling my way through the first verse and chorus, consolidating what I played the second time through, and then trying to pick out some harmonies over the last few choruses. In contrast, practice for Ian and I was all part of the fun, it was a good excuse to hang out on the weekend, whereas Dave, whose wife and daughter were in Shanghai while he worked Monday to Friday in Wuxi (an hour's train ride plus a suburban commute away), didn't really want to spend his Friday nights with me practising Eagles, Carpenters and C-pop.

Fumbling my way through a gig with Diamond Dave, autumn 2011

Just as I was about to leave Shanghai, in late 2012, I had one of those “almost made it” moments, playing a Christmas gig with a professional Brazilian performer from the Shanghai Jazz/Latin scene, Veridiana Pereira. I had gotten her contact details through Diamond Dave, during preparations for a previous gig that ended up falling through, and couldn't believe it when she told us she had the free time (this was a 23rd of December gig and Christmas is a busy time for gigs) and was willing to travel to Nanjing to sing with Ian and I. This was someone whom I'd seen on stage with the JZ Latin Band at the Shanghai Jazz festival just two months ago, and who was doing 3 or 4, 2000RMB+ gigs per week in and around Shanghai. Although I was very nervous when we first started practising (in the whole hour of spare time that we had before the gig), the gig went very well, and Ian, Veridiana and I pulled off some awesome 3-part harmonies. Alas, that has to this day been the only gig I have played with Veridiana, as she returned to Brazil for her Southern hemisphere summer break, and by the time she returned I had already moved away from Shanghai.

Prologue - The Zhuhai School of Rock

In 2013 I decided to stop trying to be a rockstar and focus on being a STEM Education Warrior. Nonetheless, I've still been able to mentor some student bands at the schools I work at, as part of my extra-curricular offerings, and I still do some duo and trio projects with other musically inclined colleagues now and again.

A special mention must go out to "Watts the Frequency", the student band that I started at Zhuhai International School in late 2014 with a handful of reluctant middle school kids, which matured along with the students until they graduated.  Eventually, we grew into a respected band in the Zhuhai music scene that got invited to play at charity festivals and popular expat bars. 

With Watts the Frequency, a.k.a WTF, at our school production rehearsal in June 2015

As you can see from the poster above, I've gone full "Dewey Finn" - blasting it out on stage with my students, and living vicariously through the band I was never quite able to put together myself.

So what does the future hold music-wise for me? Well, since moving to Ho Chi Minh City, I haven't managed to get much traction with either student or teacher bands, but I'll keep chipping away at it. Have I given up on the rockstar dream then? Well, not entirely. The Burns Marquee bass is still sitting in the corner of my apartment, and I'm just waiting for an excuse to dust it off. So if you know anyone looking for a bass player in Ho Chi Minh City, tell them to call me, or Facebook message me...or whatever app it is I'm supposed to be using these days :-)