Activities

 

Among favorite activities are all those that can be done from a hammock: reading, taking a siesta, watching life passing, and watching birds, sea life, people, sunsets, starry skies, full moon, etc…..

Other homey activities include painting, writing, playing chess, dice, backgammon, card games or some other board game….we got a few.

As for the real active activities, we suggest long walks on the beach and into town; taking a stroll to Los Siete Altares and tour the jungle up until the seventh waterfall (a 45 minutes walk on the beach from Flowas); touring the surroundings either by foot, kayak, motorboat, and or sailing boat. From the Livingston pier there are collective motor boats going daily to Playa Blanca and Siete Altares. There are also collective boats to the Belizean Keys, departing around 7 a.m., and returning at about 5:00 p.m. The tour to the Keys costs some US$ 75 per person. It worths its value. Snorkeling in the pristine waters of the Keys is like swimming in a gigantic awesome acuarium.

Garitour, a Garifuna tour operator and boat captain, can take you to Barra de Manabique, a lon finger of with sand beaches and deep blue waters that makes the border between Guatemala and Honduras; Cocoli River and Beach, a tour that initiates by entering deep into the jungle from the safety of a motorboat and ends up in a solitary virgin beach. Also worth visiting are Sarstoon River, Vuelva Mujer, Río Dulce and its Canyo, lagoons and affluents, and many other places where we can take you in a variety of “custom-made tours”.

If you are interested, we can arrange for you Spanish and/or Garifuna lessons, fishing trips, a workshop on Garifuna cuisine or drumming lessons.

Livingston has a lively night life. Live music, drumming and punta dancing in a few bars. Particularly recommended for Garifuna live music is Ubafu, right downtown.

Special Festivities with live music throughout the streets: January 1st, May 15th, November 1st and 2nd; November 26th, December 12th, and December 24th and 25th.

 

Another suggested activity is to benefit from the multicultural character of Livingston and get to know other cultures.

Livingston was founded a little over 200 years ago by the Garifuna people. The Garinagu (plural for Garifuna) are a transnational ethnic group whose roots are found in the islan of St Vincent (Lesser Antilles). It as a population formed by the fusion of several populations: Caribbean and Arawak peoples that mixed, after their first contact with Europeans, ) with African individuals that for different reasons (shipwreck, escape from slavery, etc….) sought shelter among those, contributing with their genetic and cultural traits to the formation of what is now the current Garifuna people. The garifuna individual was never enslaved. They live in a prosperous and well structured society in San Vicente, where they negotiated and traded goods and services with the French settlers (and to a lesser extent also with the English settlers) from the neighboring islands. During the Carib War, Garinagu allied with the French in an effort to drive the British out of their land. The British won the war and fearing perhaps another insurrection from those brave soldiers they expelled the Garinagu from St. Vincent, deporting them to the Island of Roatan (Honduras). A couple of months after their arrival in Roatan, the Garinagu, with the consent of the Spanish colonial authorities, moved inland to Trujillo and from there expanded along all the Atlantic coast of Central America, from Belice to Nicaragua.

What seems like an action aimed to exterminate them perhaps served to provide more strength, cohesion and unity to the Gariguna people. And so today, over two centuries later, Garifuna language, culture, spirituality, and traditions are livelier than ever. They are, by the way, the only people of African descent in the Americas that maintain their ancestors’ language and traditions.

Garinagu arrived in Livingston over 200 years ago, shortly after the deportation, lead by Marcos Sanchez Diaz. It is said that before the arrival of the Garinagu, those lands were inhabitable. There have been some previous settlement attempts by other people (Belgium migrants among others) but disease, fever, insects, and plagues put a quick end to the lives of those pioneers. Marcos Sánchez Díaz, who is today the supreme spiritual leader of the Garifuna population from Livingston and who had great esoteric powers and knowledge, cleaned the area off plagues, and prayed pleading the sea and the land to allow them to settle and give them their fruits. And so it was.

Later on, over the years and ongoing now, many other populations started to arrive: German coffee exporters who had their custom and loading port in the mouth of the Río Dulce; American employees from the United Fruit Company; Latino officers from the Guatemalan government; Chinese and Hindu workers that participated in the construction of the Atlantic Railroad; Maya K´eqchi people largely fleeing from the economical recess in their hometowns of El Estor and neighbouring areas after the ceasing of mineral extraction from their mines when it was no longer a profit for the owners; Maya Cakchikel and Tz’utujil who initially visited the area as peddler merchants and eventually settle definitively; and even, more contemporarily, the “gringos” from all sort of nationalities who found in this small town a home. All of them, and their descendents of virtually all the genetic varieties possible, make the current multicultural population of Livingston. Except from the Germans, whose presence left a couple of buildings and many memories among the eldest but no descendants, generations from all the others together live, share, celebrate, mourn, fight and make up for it or not, like in any other good family.