Dumped

 The delightfully named Belizean village of Dump...

It kind of marks the spot where we Brits were supposed to carry the Southern Highway onwards, straight, past Blue Creek and into Guatemala, where it would have joined up with the CA-13 in Petén after it clips the bottom left corner of Belize.

Instead, as you can see, it makes a hard left and heads to the coast at Punta Gorda.

Just to the west of Dump there is a Qʼeqchiʼ Mayan community in a township called San Antonio who possess a colourful cosmological myth relating to the origins of the larger celestial bodies in the sky, in the form of a soap opera.

The Sun and the Moon were just starting to enjoy their first home together as a married couple when the Sun invited his bachelor older brother to come and stay and generally play third wheel. (Albatross, we used to say at Cambridge, or 'Albert Ross'.)

But the Sun had to go out to hunt leaving wife and brother behind, and eventually 'er indoors ended up in bed with 'im indoors.

The Sun figured out what was going on and hatched a cunning plan, collecting bile from the bladders of various birds, such as a turkey and then a chicken* he had bumped into, and used these noxious liquids to prepare a particularly vile tamal for his housemates.

As their eyes watered and throats burned after this dinner, and all the water indoors was used up in an attempt to assuage the discomfort, the Sun gave a big speech covering how he felt about the whole situation.

He sent the Moon out to fetch some more water, but feeling sick and miffed about the very awkward scene, she sat down beside the river and began to cry.

Soon after she was joined on the bank by a vulture who told her about his boss, who lived in the sky in a huge gaff made of guano and she quickly decided she'd rather be up there with him than go back to face her husband and his brother.

Meanwhile, the latter was sobbing relentlessly and the Sun decided that it was time for him to go.

So he tricked him into jumping on a plank which, after three tries, broke and sent him tumbling into a deep ravine. (The people of San Antonio now identify this adulterer as Venus, and in their version of the tale this 'superstar' eventually scrambled out of this hole and found a place in the firmament.)

The Sun’s next ruse was to get himself carried up to the vultures' lair by pulling the skin of a dead deer over his body and waiting for the carrion alert to sound amongst the birds.

Once up there he was denied a room in the guano mansion, but found a nearby hut where he started to play musical instruments and fiddle with a pile of red maize kernels, which induced a severe toothache in the Moon's new feathered lover.

Over the course of several days the pain steadily worsened and the Sun, having drawn an audience with his tunes, claimed to be an accomplished healer — yet the vulture lord still refused him permission to enter his abode. He finally relented, but the face to face cure would send him into a slumber and the Sun was able to retrieve the Moon.

Just how keen she was to go back to her old conjugal existence varies across versions, but in the San Antonio take she's already quite bored with the carcass removal lifestyle and the pair duly commandeer a pair of vultures in order to first return to their home, before later taking up their more familiar roles above Central America.

* Chickens are often mentioned in the context of the so-called Columbian Exchange, yet there is evidence to suggest that they had already taken up station in the trees of the Americas, most likely owing their introduction to Polynesians perhaps a century or so before the Admiral showed up.