Day 10

Many of you may have missed it, but November 4th 2015 was the day that the soccer team from Ghent was having a big game in some important league. This meant it was a big day for Dirk, so this was about the first (and only) thing he talked about that morning. I never heard about a team of even the slightest importance from that city, so I asked if they even knew how to play soccer. And that is when Dirk decided to apply the ‘women’s rule’. Briefly: according to this rule it doesn’t matter how nice you are or how much credits you have acquired, one mistake will get you right back to 0, having to start all over again. But since I seemed to have been doing pretty well building up credit in the previous days, I was not too worried. He also started to make some comments about Belgium currently ranking first in the world (for however long THAT will last) and that Holland did not even qualify for the European Championship next year. Luckily I care little enough about soccer to be too bothered by that.
In the bus, Dirk continued to bug Chavo about soccer and the fact that Belgium beat Costa Rica two days ago. Next thing I know, Chavo pulls out a big-ass knife from who knows where and starts waving it around… while driving (I guess currently there are no hands-free kits for machete-waving on the market). Maybe here again I should not have been as surprised as I was, because a knife seemed to be standard attire for a great deal of men here and we’ve seen 8-year-old boys running around with machetes about their own size, so it’s probably only natural for Chavo to have one too. Don’t get me wrong I like men to be masculine, so a little bit macho is okay, but (and I realize this opinion may partially be the result of my cultural background) this whole look-how-big-mine-is, is just bordering silliness in my opinion. You either have ‘it’ and then props don’t add much, or you don’t and then the prop (irrespective of its size) only makes it more obvious. So why bother either way? Moreover, I understand that the knife-man likes to take his knife with him when he does his heavy drinking and I guess we can all agree that that’s just plain old stupid.
The relatively long drive we had ahead of us, did not keep us from stopping for another boat ride along the way. You may think that by that time we would have grown tired of it, but we didn’t... This time we had a tour in an estuary, with mangrove forest. As you can imagine the scenery and the animals here were quite different from what we had seen on the other trips. Similarly to other places there was a lot of green, but if you pay good attention, you see that many flowers, birds, butterflies, frogs and even crabs are very bright and colorful. It’s like spotting small treasure in a big sea of lush green.
We then continued our way past the pacific coast. We would drive through stretches of forest and catch occasional glimpses of beaches and the shoreline. Here also, the Americans had tried to take over, but had failed to a large extent. With some money to grease the bureaucratic wheels, investors had received approval for big building projects (hotels and condos) in areas that were protected by law. However when new governments were elected and officials changed office, the approval was recanted again. Instead of either tearing everything down again, or finishing it and allowing the generated income to help protect the area, the high officials seemed to have decided to not do anything. As a result the coast line is contaminated with big buildings, that should and could be quite glamorous, but have not yet had the chance to reach that stage. I’m not saying I could have done a better job, but it would definitely have been a different one.