Bang, You're Dead

Last night we saw the movie, “Taken,” about a 17-year-old girl and her friend who travel, unescorted, to Paris. The two are spotted at the Paris airport, then kidnapped and sold into the sex trade.

The young woman’s father (Liam Neeson) is an ex-government agent—-a preventer-—recently retired. On the phone with his daughter when the kidnapping occurs, he promises the men responsible, “... I will find you and kill you,” which he does.

After the movie Frances said of our recent trip to Latin America, “Think how lucky we were. Just imagine what could have happened if our Honduran taxi driver, Flash, decided to turn off onto some country road somewhere.”

Frances believes Flash hijacked us when he convinced us to buy his taxi services after our water taxi from Puerto Cortes, Honduras to Belize City, Belize didn’t show. Rather than wait a week for the next water taxi, we chose to pile into his small pickup truck and drive to another location. This water taxi, he promised, would get us to our desired destination. En route we discovered that Flash was driving us through the Honduran border into Guatemala to reach that taxi.

On another occasion a young traveling Danish couple warned us, “Never allow anyone near your backpack on the bus. You could become a drug runner without knowing it.”

Earlier, a young woman seated next to me on a Belizean bus told me I was smart to hold my backpack on my lap during our bus ride. If I placed it in the back of the bus with the other luggage, it—-or some of its contents—-could go missing.

Frances talked with a man on the same overcrowded bus who ate his meal as he stood in the bus aisle pressed tightly against other standing passengers. She told him she was impressed that he could eat under those circumstances. “Well, if I don’t eat it now, it won’t be there later,” he replied.

We learned in Belize that plastic bags filled with a white powdery substance found floating in the water or resting along the shore were known as “white lobster” or “box fish,” a/k/a crack-cocaine. Dumped overboard by drug runners evading the law, they were later retrieved. If these bags disappeared, though, the drug runners searched for the interlopers instead and spoke an international language, “Bang, you’re dead.”

It’s not uncommon, we were told, for local fishermen to find white lobsters floating in the sea. Often these struggling fishermen couldn’t resist temptation. One bag, quickly sold, could buy a cement block addition to their tiny one-room house. Of course, they also had to move their family out of that house for a year or two until their risk of being caught—-and murdered—-diminished and the addition was completed.

How do you balance the risks of traveling in unfamiliar territory against the excitement and adventure? After seven weeks in Latin America I still don’t know the answer to that question. I do know, though, that I gained untold experience and information that will help me on future travels.