Just got back from Belize where we went for spring break (Franny’s and mine coincided, at least for a week) which was nice except for the part where we almost drowned. Belize, the former British Honduras, is chasing the same Yankee ecotourist dollar people like us have dropped in Costa Rica (see photo, left). They are just not yet as keen on the safety angle.

This time last year, for example, we took a day long whitewater rafting trip in CR. The pre-trip precautions were extensive: our guide spent nearly an hour preparing us for any eventuality — dumping the raft, say — and what to do in the rapids should that occur. Later he told me that he had worked on the Colorado River in the US and that Costa Rica safety standards were much more stringent. Having reinvented itself as the premier adventure travel destination in Central America, the government didn’t want some tragedy marring an innocent outing and making headlines back in the states.

I got the impression things were a little more…casual in Belize. The jungle lodge where we stayed the first three nights had been in business since the early eighties and was very professionally run. But the trip we took on our first full day was not quite as advertised. It was billed as a sort of jungle triathalon — horseback riding, caving and tubing down the river — but everything took significantly longer than we had been told. The horse trip was supposed to be an hour and a half — but morphed into three, a big difference when you ride a horse about once a year. (Thanks for asking about my ass.) The cave exploration was brief, but partly because the cave itself was so slick that none of our party felt safe venturing too far from the mouth.

The rude surprise was the tubing, though. We traveled with another family of three and were given five inner tubes and a canoe in which we were to slowly wend our way back to the lodge. “It will take about two hours,” we were told but when the third hour came and we were no closer to our destination, we knew something wasn’t right. Far worse, we learned the hard way that there was a dam upriver and that they were opening gates every afternoon around four, turning our lazy river run into a swift one. My daughter lost her tube, we dumped the canoe three or four times (losing some shoes and drowning my cellphone in the process) and on several hair-raising occasions paddled like crazy to get to our stranded children, reassuring them all the while that everything was as it should be.

Nobody died, of course. But in all honesty, if our kids had been younger or any of us were worse swimmers, somone could have. I thought of Lawrence Gonzalez’s great book, Deep Survival — a collection of horror stories about walk-through-the-park sorts of outings that turned into survival-of-the-fittest endurance trials — and counted my blessings. Back at the lodge they were concerned and apologetic — How about a nice pot of cocoa for the girls? — but did not seem as alarmed as they should have been. Why was there no one spotting us on either end of that journey? Why was there absolutely no instruction about tubing or canoeing down rapids? The news about the dam seemed to concern them less than where we left the canoe.

To be continued…