A taste of Belize

Author: By Ralph Jimenez, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, June 30, 1996

Page: B1

Section: Travel

We had bounced for hours over dusty dirt roads to get to Caracol, Belize's most remote archeological site and ruling city of the Mayan world in AD 700. More than a million Mayans once occupied this Central American nation the size of Massachusetts. Some 200,000 of them lived in the 35,000 buildings that made up Caracol.

But the Mayans vanished and the jungle swallowed Caracol. Its ruins were not discovered until 1930, not mapped until 1950, not studied seriously until 10 years ago and not opened to the public until 1992.

No one knows why the ancient Mayans hastily abandoned Belize. But it is no mystery why modestly intrepid travelers are making their way to this tiny Central American nation. Belize's vast Mayan ruins are only now being uncovered. Its barrier reef, the world's second largest, offers phenomenal fishing and diving. Jaguars and hundreds of species of birds live in its jungles. Yet it is only six hours from Boston, and virtually everyone speaks English.

Belize has developed a modest reputation for danger fostered by warnings about street crime in guidebooks. So when we heard about a tour -- billed with mock grandiosity as ``New Hampshire Day'' in Belize -- it seemed like a good way to save on air fare while traveling in safety with a child.

America's ambassador to Belize is George Bruno, a lawyer from Manchester, N.H., and an old friend. The tour included a visit with Bruno and his family. But if you aren't visiting the ambassador or have some other reason to linger in Belize City, skip it. There is little to see or do there, and not even Belizeans walk the streets at night.

At the airport we got a taste of the Belize the guidebooks warn about. A large and surly teen-age boy peddling newspapers dogged us, all but demanding money. But it was the only such incident of the trip.

Our introduction to doing business in Belize began with tedious paperwork to rent a car. Rental cars are exorbitantly priced for a country that has only three paved highways. After I drove some of the unpaved roads, I understood why rates are roughly $100 a day.

Most of our rental vehicles had doors that wouldn't open or air conditioning that didn't work. Jay D. Crofton, the Texan who owns Crystal Auto Rental, explained why.

``You can't get a 100 percent job done here. You're lucky, very lucky, to get 70 percent and that's across the board in all fields.'' It was an analysis of the Belizean work force and economy that we heard often.

We carried little of obvious value, kept ready money in a buttoned pocket and passport and traveler's checks in body wallets. In better hotels we left valuables in our rooms and suffered neither theft nor harassment and, yes, in some places, following ambassadorial advice, we drank the water.

Though its prices are the highest in Central America, Belize is poor. Most food is imported, and a can of Campbell's soup in one of the nation's four supermarkets can cost $1.75. You will pay $60-80 per night to stay in a good quality hotel and double that at top-notch resorts. But the frugal can find inexpensive rooms.

We left the squalor of Belize City on Sunday and took the Western Highway toward San Ignacio. It is a pretty, unpretentious town of 8,900 in the foothills of the Maya Mountains.

En route, we stopped at Jaguar Paw, a new resort some spine-rattling 9 miles down a road of loose stones. While the children swam in the cool, clear river that issued from the mouth of a large cave, I struck up a conversation with a man on the riverbank.

``There are caves in there that sparkle like diamonds because they've never been molested,'' said Guillermo Funiz, a licensed tourist guide and certified bushmaster. ``If you have a few minutes I can show you.'' Steve Gordon, a friend from New Hampshire, joined us.

A few minutes became an hour as we walked, waded and swam deeper into the cave. Shapes as subjective as clouds filled the dark grottos on either side of the subterranean river that chants and sings as it runs through shallows.

We ducked and wove in and out of passageways where the limestone deposits glistenened in the glow of our lights. At a bend where the river briefly broke into the open, we were stunned by blue sky and green jungle shining through a latticework of stalactites and vines.

``Imagine seeing this for the first time,'' I said, thinking of the ancient Mayans whose pottery shards I literally stumbled over in the cave. ``I am,'' said Steve. We emerged filled with awe and quickly convinced everyone to return the following day to float the Cave Branch River on inner tubes.

In San Ignacio we split up. The caravan went on to Chaa Creek, a posh jungle encampment of thatch cottages whose restaurant has been featured in Gourmet magazine. One night at Chaa Creek was $137.25. We stayed behind and took lodgings in the San Ignacio Hotel. Our economy room for three with private bath but no air conditioning cost $49 per night.

The hotel has a huge, clean swimming pool and a very good restaurant where the Belizean national dish of chicken with beans and rice, at $6, is a bargain meal in a country where a simple breakfast in a hotel can cost $10.

The exchange rate has been fixed at $2 Belize to $1 US for decades. Prices were usually posted and appeared to apply to visitors and natives alike. Though it is illegal to list prices in US rather than Belizean currency, the law is roundly ignored, and some operators will take advantage of the confusion.

Belize is an independent member of the British Commonwealth, and the queen is the official head of state. Years of British rule have left the Belizean people cool to the notion of service, and though the staff at the San Ignacio Hotel was a gracious exception, be prepared for slow and stand-offish service.

Belize's people are a multihued amalgam of native peoples and pioneers. The majority are creoles, African blacks brought as slaves who married Scottish pioneers. There are also mestizos from Mexico and Central America, a smaller contingent of Mayans descended from the builders of the temples and tombs, Garifunas or Black Caribs with their own separate culture, Mennonites from all over the world and, more recently, a Chinese population now pushing 10 percent. But Americans, many gray pony-tailed children of the Sixties, still own the majority of Belize's resorts.

As we pulled into Jungle Paw, a man carrying a 5-foot snake by the tail crossed the parking lot. It was a fer de lance, a buff gray and oak-leaf brown rattlesnake and one of creation's more poisonous pit vipers. The cook had just shot it outside the restaurant where we planned to have lunch.

We began our run of the river with an hourlong hike along a narrow trail hacked through the jungle. I was glad our lead guide was named Lazarus, not Charon.

As we passed trees defended by thorns shaped like rhinocerous horns and porcupine spines, Lazarus called out ``tubes right'' or ``tubes left.'' Finally, tubes beneath us, we disappeared down the mouth of a cave arched like a whale's gullet.

One phantasmagoric vista after another appeared in the light of our miners' lamps. Children screamed and laughed. Adults hung back and watched in awe. Where the river emerged briefly beneath mossy cliffs and scarlet orchids, we stopped to swim and swing from a vine and plunge into the river. The vine is a root from a tree that may be a mile away, Guillermo said, and I imagined a far-off tree swaying to and fro as we swung.

We were cold and starving when we finally left the river. If you float Belize's cave rivers, bring your own dry-bag for camera equipment and a polypropylene T-shirt that retains body heat when wet.

That night, Linda, Nick and I ventured into San Ignacio. Every table in front of Eva's, a hangout famous for funky ambience, was occupied by twentysomethings from America who were coolly aghast that a family had stumbled upon their hideout.

At the Tropicool, a hotel and bar run by British expatriate Andrew Wollacott and his Belizean wife, Doris May, we got travel advice with our beer. The famous ruins at Tikal in Guatemala are a major draw for visitors to San Ignacio, but it is not a place that should be visited briefly, Andrew Wollancott said. ``To experience Tikal, you have to climb the pyramid and watch either sunrise or sunset.''

Visitors can fly directly to Tikal; in a country with few roads, many tourists travel by plane. If you take a bus or taxi, Wollancott suggests leaving half your money and some identification with a friend or hotelier. Bandits occasionally hold up entire busloads of tourists en route to Tikal. ``We've had it happen to two or three people in the past year or so,'' he said.

Six of us headed instead for Caracol, the city that conquered Tikal. The road was a wide red and yellow scar that spiraled uphill first through pine forests and then into upland jungle. It is impassable during summer and fall rainy season.

We descended into tombs and peered through the slits in a Mayan observatory. Dark clouds swirled in a snail-shaped spiral before lightning bolts flashed over the pyramids.

The rain was brief and gentle. But it turned strips of the road out of the mountains to sticky goo that quickly clogged the balding treads of the rental car tires. The four-wheel-drive driven by Lee Spencer, the tour's organizer, was the first to slide off the road. Our two-wheel-drive followed suit, as did the tour bus behind me.

Every step in the red clay made me an inch taller, and soon, like the Belizean bus driver, I shed my shoes to push. Eventually all vehicles regained the road, but it took four hours to descend to where blue and pink shacks flew bright flags of laundry.

Scrubbed schoolchildren in uniforms laughed as they walked home in the heat. Things move slowly and foggily in Belize and create the pleasantly stupefied, surreal feeling one gets reading a novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Outside of San Ignacio, we stopped to pick up an old farmer who was hitchhiking. A few miles down the road, he pointed to cattle grazing beneath palms and said, ``My land.''

His name was Cesario Coracon. He owns 50 acres of land, 20 head of cattle, a few horses and a dog that growled at us when we walk up to his thatch house. His wife was cooking on a fogon, a limestone and clay stove on legs of the same design as those used by ancient Mayans. The fogon sat in the center of a room with wattle walls and cotlike beds.

Chaa Creek, where we spent the night, is one of Belize's premier jungle resorts. Though thatch like Coracon's home, its cottages are whitewashed and boast modern bathrooms. Giant, iridescent blue morpho butterflies raised in the resort's breeding center float lazily through a mosquitoless, fairy-tale jungle.

The resort is also the starting point of the Don Eligio Panti Trail, a living pharmaceutical lab where cortisone, digitalis and other medications literally grow on trees. The trail was established by an American doctor, Rosita Arvigo, to protect endangered medicinal plants and to pass on the knowledge taught her by Panti, a Mayan shaman who died in February at age 103.

Chaa Creek also offers a natural-history museum, hiking, biking and riding trails, canoeing and swimming in the green-bottomed Macal River. It was gorgeous but, to me, too upscale to feel like Belize.

In the morning, we returned the cars and for $15 apiece took the 15-minute flight to Ambergris Caye, an island town with 1,850 residents, many of them American.

In Belize, there is no need to feel guilty about soaking up sun when you should be visiting museums. There are no museums, though several are under construction. There are, at least in the north, no beaches, either. Swimmers either take a boat out to the reef or bathe in areas cleared of coral and weeds by hotels.

Shark attacks are ``not a problem,'' but beware the Portuguese Man of War, a poisonous jellyfish whose stinging tentacles brought incessant screams of agony from a young Belizean boy who bumped into one while wading outside our hotel, the Mayan Princess.

The pink waterfront hotel has lovely suites with kitchenettes and balconies overlooking the sea. But it does not have a pool, a fact that created a brief riot when we were given conflicting stories about the presence of pica pica, microscopic jellyfish larvae that cause a nasty rash similar to poison ivy. The pica pica, however, were out to sea and also ``not a problem.''

That night at Elvi's restaurant, with most of the group reunited, one member who had not stayed at Chaa Creek waited until dinner to make her breathless announcement. She had met an old Belize hand from Canada who informed her that the Macal River at Chaa Creek was ``loaded with cholera.''

This was news that put some pretty interesting expressions on the faces of mothers who had spent the better part of two days watching their children play in the river. It also turned out to be totally false.

We spent the next two days snorkeling in what looked a bit like the Boston aquarium (a four-hour trip cost $35 per person) and catching barracuda and snapper on salt-crusted fishing gear that cranked like eggbeaters. If you are a serious angler, bring your own equipment. Don't lug snorkeling gear, however. Rent it for $3 a day.

With George, a socially gifted guide for Amigos del Mar, one of the few dive businesses owned by a Belizean, we explored the coral reef. In Stingray Alley, George used sardines to lure a 6-foot-long green moray eel out of hiding. Raspy-sided nurse sharks, some 8 feet long, and large manta rays swirled about us in the water.

Late Friday afternoon, Nick, Linda and I left the bustle of Ambergris behind and took a boat to Caye Caulker, one of the least-developed islands and a magnet for the laid-back, low-budget crowd. As the open boat sped over the waves, small, teardrop-shaped fish erupted from the sea and skipped along the surface like shiny flat stones.

Save for the wind in the palms and the splash of diving pelicans, there was silence on the dock of Tom's hotel. Our $28 a night cottage had grillwork over the windows, pressed-wood paneling and a pail in the bathroom for used toilet paper. But the water was hot, the sheets clean and the overhead fan worked, albeit lethargically.

Except for the litter and the signs warning against drug use, Caye Caulker looks the part of tropical paradise. We were visiting in April, late in the season for American tourists and too early for the Europeans who descend on Belize in June, so the island was uncrowded. Dogs slept in the dusty intersections.

That night we dined on shrimp and red snapper at the Paradise. While the cuisine in Belize is just average, the seafood and fruit is fresh and phenomenal. On a trip across a courtyard to the bathroom, I caught our waiter dancing alone in wide sweeping circles, his white apron flying.

There is little to do on Caye Caulker but dance and read, though barkers in the road offer sailing, diving, fishing or snorkeling trips. I spent 15 minutes sneaking up on a large iguana. Nick and I had a long game of coconut bowling while Linda sketched boats on the blue-green water. We understood why pirates weary of looting came here for R & R.

Unlike Mexico and many Caribbean nations, Belize requires entering visitors to have both a passport and either a through or round-trip ticket. US citizens are not required to secure a visa.

Malaria and other tropical diseases surface periodically but are well-controlled. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention provides information on health conditions, immunization suggestions, etc.

Information about travel in Belize (as well as investment and retirement) may also be obtained from the US Embassy, PO Box 286, Belize City, Central America. The embassy's telephone number is 011-501-2-77161.

Belize can be reached by car or bus, but it's a 1,350-mile trip from Brownsville, Texas. Gasoline is plentiful, with prices running about $2.40 US per gallon. Many airlines offer service to Belize's Philip Goldson International Airport, with round-trip fares from Boston via the major carriers currently between $700 and $800.