I have a handful of photos from Belize, but this one is my favorite, shot in Belize City. In the classic text on Mayan civilization, The Maya (Ninth edition), to describe the awesome beauty of golden age Mayan carvings, the book’s authors Coe & Houston write that “By the eighth century AD, they [the Maya] had achieved complete mastery of this medium, posing their figures in such a manner that in place of the rigid formality prevalent in earlier monuments, a kind of dynamic imbalance among the different parts of the composition was sought which leads the eye restlessly along.” Something of that sort is at work in this photo, and it was by all means accidental, and by no means represents any sort of mastery on my part as a photographer. The two men on the roof also happen to more or less demographically represent their gem of a nation, which is roughly half and half mestizo/Afro-Caribbean, though that demographic statistic fails to do this strange little country justice. Mopan Mayan, Garifuna, Mennonite, and Chinese communities also contribute to the overarching picture. The primary language spoken is English, though amongst themselves the locals speak a strong Belizean Creole, that is more or less unintelligible to the non-native ear. All told it definitely doesn’t feel like a Central American nation, but it doesn’t really feel Caribbean either. It is simply Belize. On top of all that, it hosts some of the more intact coral reefs left in the Caribbean, and has an incredible amount of protected rainforest within its bounds. It has some very touristic locations I’m told, but a good half-day on the chicken bus down the coast to the south of Belize City brought me into a very interesting world I can’t say I took the time to really get to know.