(Belize/Honduras)…Flying is not becoming easier, and on every flight I hear at least once a neighbor complaining how long the flight is. Not every passenger chooses to fly, I know, but I suspect the majority do, and I got to wondering if flights are only as long as the passenger’s desire to get to wherever the flight is heading to.
The experience of flying could be better, but it can always be worse, and I always pinch my leg to remind myself how lucky we are to live in accessible, transportation-minded America, in which New Yorkers enjoy even more flexibility, including three cruise ports. Many of those people I see when I travel do not have such advantages. This is not me being patronizing. It simply is true.
Recently, I came across another example of this good fortune, having reached two towns of the same name and linked by history. In the south of Belize, in Toledo District, close to the border with Guatemala, is a small town called Punta Gorda. That’s Spanish for Fat Point. Flying there—actually, puddle-jumping through this country the size of New Jersey from Belize City to Dangriga to Placencia to Punta Gorda—on a small, low-flying plane, I saw a stately Belizean procession of meandering rivers, thick jungles and thin, sand-colored roads, but nothing that looked like a point, fat or otherwise. There is no reason it has its name, except if you consider where its people came from. Its people are the Garinagu, more commonly known as the Garifuna.
They originally hail from the Caribbean islands, or was it Venezuela and Guyana? No one remembers for sure. The British treated them terribly and threw them out of what is now the island-nation of St. Vincent & the Grenadines. They landed, destitute but still not enslaved, on the Honduran island of Roatán, where they established a small town called Punta Gorda, from where the Belizean town got its name.
Some stayed. Others moved along the coast to Nicaragua, Guatemala and Belize, which is its largest population. The second largest is in Los Angeles. Passing a large clock tower painted with national symbols, the bus driver in Punta Gorda, Belize, popped in a CD of the Garinagu music of Andy Palacio. Its infectious beats swayed like wind-caressed palm trees. Palacio died young, in 2007, and is considered a national treasure. “There’s another Punta Gorda in Honduras,” I was told. I knew that. I had been there, and now I had been to both, but I kept silent. It seemed from what I heard that for many Garinagu going to Roatán was a dream, a pilgrimage of return. I felt slightly self-conscious that I traveled to both Fat Points, especially as it was my British ancestors who kicked them out of their 18th-century home.
Additionally, I saw that it is far, far easier and quicker—but not as much fun—to fly from Belize City to Houston and then back south to Roatán than it is to ferry across from Punta Gorda, Belize, to either the Guatemalan or Honduran coasts and then continue by road to La Ceiba, which sits more or less opposite Honduras’ Islas de la Bahia, one of which is Roatán.
In La Ceiba, travelers must make a choice of catching a second ferry or taking a flight. Thus, most Belizean Punta Gordans have never been to their Honduran parent. The Belizean ferry does not run every day, and even if you sail to Honduras, you still have to pass through Guatemalan waters and customs, adding to the logistical nightmare. In Honduras’ Punta Gorda I stumbled, quite by chance, on the 211th anniversary celebrations of the Garinagu’s arrival on Roatán. Even on this small island, getting to Punta Gorda takes some effort. The island has a scrunched-up spine along which travels its one two-way road, but the hassle was worth it. The party oozed exuberance. There was music, food, dancing and colorful dress.
The town stretches along a dusty main street, a white-sand beach, lines of power cables and palm trees and the blue Caribbean Sea. Its wooden buildings are as bright as the costumes worn on this special day and in memory of distant origins—oranges, blues, yellows; West African designs, conical caps and vibrant bandanas. In hindsight it was also memorable for its guest of honor, who landed a short way down the beach, stepped out of a helicopter and sauntered down, to where we all sat eating seafood stew, wearing a large white Stetson hat and shaking hands. Soldiers twitched to attention, but the mood remained happy.
It was Manuel Zelaya Rosales, the former president of Honduras, who at press time still remains in the Brazilian embassy in the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa after his much-chronicled political troubles, coup d’état, exile to Nicaragua and clandestine return. He was supposed to have come with Nicaragua’s president Daniel Ortega, the Sandinista, but did not due to a Honduran-Nicaraguan dispute concerning maritime borders that rears its ugly head every few years. Maybe Ortega wanted to visit beautiful Roatán, but politics stopped him. Many of Belize’s Punta Gorda citizens are halted by expense and difficulty. There is little that should stop us.

(Israel)…One first impression of the Old City of Jerusalem is that it is a warren, a place of hidden spaces and forgotten lineages. I snooped beneath arches half my height to find courtyards, some showing the green, red and white of Palestine, others showing the blue and white of Israel or Greece; a large white cross against a red background showed the centuries-old home of the Hospitallers of St. John of Jerusalem, a Christian military order who safeguarded pilgrim routes and pilgrims and cared for the sick among them, who later in its history was also known as the Order of the Knights of Rhodes and the Sovereign and Military Order of the Knights of Malta.
I saw a Greek Orthodox priest scurry across David Street, known to Arabs as Suq el Bazar, and disappear, aptly, along Greek Orthodox Patriarchate Road. I followed and saw a noisy group of Palestinian schoolchildren bearing bright pink backpacks on their way to school. Two nuns in white robes with blue trim, members of Mother Theresa’s Missionaries of Charity, disappeared under a dark arch past shuttered stores selling junk, souvenirs, maps and religious paraphernalia. Some shopkeepers were taking a broom to the Roman flagstones outside these stores. I came across a street called Ethiopian Monastery Street and another named after St. Francis, his Franciscan monks also present here.
The sun was still not up in the sky. I stumbled left and right and suddenly came across one of the most famous streets in the world, the Street of Sorrows, or the Via Dolorosa, where Jesus Christ was judged, bore his cross, fell down three times, died and was buried. Religious or not, this amount of history is difficult to imagine. The 14 stations of the cross (some say that the 15th is when Jesus rose again over the Mount of Olives) are marked along this road, and all day, and especially in the evening when trying to get from A to B is slow going, religious groups reverently trace his last steps. I saw religious groups of Koreans in bright baseball caps, Greek and Armenian Orthodox in sober clothing and Congolese in printed cotton suits dyed yellow, green and red. Some pilgrims carried wooden crosses, and at every station prayers, hymns and sermons were said.
Walking the length of Habad Street and then zigzagging along Bet El and Hayei Olam I came across the Western Wall, the holiest site of Judaism. Small pieces of paper were stuck into the wall, and the devout rocked gently against it. Behind the wall is the one of the holiest Muslim sites, the al-Aqsa Mosque, on the grounds of the Dome of the Rock and the Temple Mount, where Solomon built the first Jewish temple. That area is off-bounds to all but Muslims.
The machinations of all this history I found impossible to grasp, so I just reveled in the majesty of it all. Disputes also occur at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which contains the last five Stations of the Cross. It is tucked down St. Helena Street, which looks as though it stops at a dead end, only to turn left and then right. A second arch leads to the Arab souk, or suq, the market. Muslims act as doorkeepers here, for the arguments between Armenian Orthodox, Greek Orthodox, Syrian (aka Syriac) Orthodox (a tiny population), Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria, Ethiopian Orthodox and other Christian interests run so deep that much-needed repairs cannot be started and occasionally fights break out over which order should care for which step or roof top.
For me, the most fascinating walk, no more than 100 yards, starts in the small square in front of the main entrance of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. In the right-hand corner is a small heavy-stone doorway that leads to the first of two dark Ethiopian Orthodox chapels. Monks sit silently in dank corners, the thin passage leading up steps before turning left into the second chapel. Walking around this takes you to another small set of steps that lead out to a roof with a dome, which is the roof of another part of the overall church below. Across this roof is the entrance to the Coptic Church. Ethiopian priests do not cross a magical line somewhere on this roof, as neither do the Coptics. Just along from here I visited a school with children learning Arabic and reading the Koran, and above them on a balcony I saw an orthodox Jewish reading the Torah.
Back in the church I discovered the burned chapel of the Syrian Orthodox and the first of a series of small caves that are said to go for some distance beneath the city and where Joseph of Arimathea is supposedly buried. Jesus’s tomb is here, too. Writers are supposed to withstand the desire to use adjectives, and I will definitely do so here. Okay, just one—everything here is incredible. Just get here early when the crowds are small or nonexistent.
Two spots to enjoy views of the city are the Austrian Hospice and the Church of the Maronite Patriarch Exarchate. In the 18th century, all the world’s superpowers scrambled to buy property in Jerusalem, and the Austrian Hospice is one piece of evidence of that. It contains guest rooms, as does the Maronite church, and I cannot think of anywhere better to stay to feel just an infinitesimally small bit of what has happened and is happening.
Arrive at the Austrian Hospice 15 minutes before dusk, order a double espresso and walk up to the roof. Gaze across the city, at the roof of the Dome of the Rock sparkling golden, at the inhabitants bustling along streets and at the green edging coming to life on the minarets just before the taped muezzins announce the call to prayer for Muslims. For five minutes the sounds from a dozen or so minarets echoes across the air and thousands of years of history—and conflict—peal away to one single moment.