Twenty four hours ago, I was sleeping in a pitched tent inside the Cancun airport. The last fourteen hours I've passed on a crowded bus, rumbling down the Riviera Maya. Suffice to say, I've been eagerly anticipating my destination. When at last we cross the Frontera, a reggae beat drum-rolls its way onto the radio, crowding out the unwanted ranchera,. The aire of forced accommodation and assimilation into Mexico is lifted like an unwanted shroud, carried off in the Caribbean breeze behind our bus. Belize is an amalgamation of all sorts of strange and wonderful chemicals - sapphire ocean glow, flawless almond skin, music that makes you move your head and hips, pastel clapboard houses not crowding for the coastline but sprouting up wherever the land seems suitable - sometimes on stilts, sometimes in burrows, but always unique. Belize doesn't attempt to be anything - it just is. It is ragdoll yanked nearly to pieces between Stubborn Britain, Catty Spain, and Nothing-to-Lose Guatemala - still somehow maintaining an indomitable smile and a carefree attitude - never more visible than on faces of the easygoing dreadlocked Garifuna, abandoned here as the slave-driving Spaniards pushed north and west in search of El Dorado, the City of Gold.

Perhaps it is an overdose of this Rastafari Psychadelia that gives way to such bizarre and unexpected pleasures - a roadside stand called "Mister Dickhead's" which sells, among other things - Seaweed, Fishballs, and some other food (not pork) offered "with or without Pigtail"; towns with names like Ladyville, Orange Walk, and El Remate (Fleamarket) and trees which grow no leaves but bloom abundant with what look like Marigolds. From within the bus, we absorb the mottled culture, Spanish, Mexican, Black, here and there a group of clandestine Mennonites trudging around in in full length overalls and long sleeve shirts, studying the world under straw hats that shade them from the smoldering sun.

As I follow a canal in Belize city, studying the direction of flow to gain my bearings, a sun-weathered man asks in a slow, scratchy voice if I'm a Rasta Man. "Only on the weekends", I tell him. He tosses this response around in his head for a moment and, after a beat, smiles, claps me on the shoulder, grabs my hand in a tight grip, pulling it close to his chest. "Respect" he says, staring at me intensely with eyes so blue it seems as though they contain a dose of the Caribbean itself.

Respect indeed.