Visit to Belize

Already, it has been a very busy new year at Infinity Luthiers.

The River-recovered Honduras Mahogany guitar is taking shape, but most important this year is that we have spent some time in Central America touring the areas that the old growth logs are being found. Spending time in Belize was an eye opening experience. We met with locals in the cities and countryside, viewed areas where logs lay in water eagerly waiting for their chance to be found and constructed into beautiful furniture and instruments, and partook of local food and drink. Below are a few photos from our trip.

The fretboard below in the Dec. 27 entry is crafted from this tree, the Sapodilla. It has been and still is used for its latex gum in the sap. The sap you can see in this old photo to the right is boiled into a large gummy block called ‘chicle’. Chicle is Spanish for chewing gum. The Sapodilla is often called the chewing gum tree. No live trees are allowed to be cut because of their role in harvesting the chicle. Lumber from the Sapodilla would likely be full of sap and be a sticky mess to sanders and knives. The Sapodilla we are finding has been submersed for over 100 years and the sap has been eaten away by the anaerobic bacteria. The wood is great to work with and produces a beautiful, unseen until now, pattern of dark brown and blond streaking.

The Belize river flows from the western mountains to the Caribbean Sea in the East. This river was one of the main methods of transporting Mahogany and other logs to the ships in Belize harbor. If you can imagine the hundreds of thousands of logs in the river at any given time you can imagine how many of these logs were pushed down into the silty mud at the slow points in the river.

Here is an old photo of mahogany and other logs on a British vessel en route to Britain. The lumber was primarily used for high-end furniture.

Here is a photo of a living Honduras Mahogany tree. In Belize they call it a Belizean Mahogany tree. This tree was along the side of the road out to one of our river entry points.

This is the Belize river as seen from a ferry between Belmopan and San Ignacio. We were on our way to Spanish Lookout when we took this ferry. The Mennonites populate the Spanish Lookout area and completely transformed it to a farming community. If you didn’t know better, you would swear that you were back in the fields and green pastures of Central Illinois.

Here is one of our processing areas. The logs are minimally processed by trimming off the cheeks of the logs. This processing is required by the government before the logs can be exported.

Here is Zev. He is considered the Indian Jones of Central America and finds submersed logs instead of artifacts from ancient civilizations. Here he is explaining the process of removing and processing the logs.

Much of the land in Belize is owned by the government. Here is land that is simply existing as scrub. If the British had replanted the mahogany during and after their logging of the country, there would be more mahogany today than we could use. If Belize had replanted the mahogany in these areas of deforestation after gaining their independence in 1981, the forests would be thick and ready for sustainable harvesting.

Sometimes I think people forget that folks gotta eat. Here is some land that used to be heavily populated with mahogany now used as pasture. The cattle provide dairy and meat products and manure. Meat you say? Moo they say…

One of Belize’s main exports is citrus and citrus concentrate. Here is some land that was previously mahogany forests used for orange production. During the cold winter of 2009-2010 Belize will likely see a higher demand for their citrus due to freezing temperatures in Florida.

Aaah.. Chico, myself and Zev. The moment came too soon when saying our goodbye’s at the airport. Chico is a resident of Belize and former director of several of the largest corporate arms in Belize. In the middle is me, wide eyed luthier-explorer. Zev is the Indiana Jones of Central America. His extensive knowledge of the history of logging in the region has come through researching historic documents and gleaning information from the elders of the indigenous people. His mission: recover the river logs and use as a substitute for today’s cutting, reforest and preserve the entirety of Central America.