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Wheelies
By mcdog | April 5, 2007
You can hire a golf cart from many places on Ambergris Caye for an hour, a day, a week, a month, and probably any other time span imaginable. Most are a standard design but you see some with chrome steering wheels, extra lights or a pickup box on the back, some are even stretched. Some are a large white bubble-shape like a modern Buckminster Fuller design, some are green and rugged-looking, capable of climbing the imaginary mountains of Ambergris Caye and some have fancy lighting around the number plates; all are fun to drive.
It’s the roads that they’re driven over that make it fun. Some of the roads in the centre of town are paved with hexagonal concrete blocks about 8 inches across and the same deep and there’s is a big push to pave more. Every morning the crew arrives at 6am and starts sweeping the sand from the newly-laid road and pavement and levelling the sand on the road to lay more hexagonal blocks. The one-way road system in the centre of changes almost everyday as the work progresses but this is the Caribbean, man, and nobody gets too excited when a tourist drives down, or up, the wrong way. In the rest of the town, and elsewhere on the island, the roads are sand tracks, sometimes with overhanging trees and bushes.Parts of the road are fairly smooth and driver and passengers can relax as the cart speeds along at a hair-blowing 15mph, but beware of speed bumps and potholes. Some of the bumps are made from old mooring ropes laid across the highway and those are vicious enough but the more modern ones, or those on busier stretches of road, are built from concrete, usually with a cart-made pothole on either side, so the cart wheels go down into the pothole, climb over the bump and then drop into the hole on the other side causing passengers to hold their stomachs. If the driver doesn’t see the bump till too late then the cart slides along the road (audibly warning any passers-by of impending amusement) and there’s a sickening thump as it reaches the triple obstacle and any passengers on the back seats bounce into the air. Some of the roads, not all of them outside town, are so badly potholed that carts slow to walking pace as drivers try to find a way through what appears to be a dried up riverbed.
Passengers can, however, exact revenge on the driver by inducing a ‘wheelie’. By standing on the platform at the back of the cart and jumping at the right moment the front of the cart will rise majestically into the air to the consternation of the driver and the amusement of the passengers. This method seems particularly effective as the driver starts to accelerate away from a speed bump. Not recommended in the centre of town or when a police golf cart is about.
Topics: ambergris caye01 | 1 Comment »
August 17th, 2007 at 10:38 am
[...] Belize, Ambergris Caye – April 2007 Mcdog Wrinklies on manoeuvres [...]