Beach-hopping in Belize

Address: Turtle Inn, Placencia, Belize
Website: coppolaresorts.com/turtleinn

KA'ANA

The primary goal of Ka'ana is to let you do whatever you want, and anything seems possible here: snorkelling, cave-tubing, zip-lining, helicopter tours, birdwatching, Mayan cookery classes. La Ceiba restaurant dishes up local delicacies including a sensational seafood soup with coconut milk and coriander, and guests can step into the kitchen and learn the chef's secrets. The 17 villas (each with a butler), master suites and casitas are airy and bright, and the spa, organic gardens and surrounding rainforest are wonderfully serene.

Address: Ka'ana Resort And Spa, Belize, Central America
Website: kaanabelize.com

BELCAMPO BELIZE

Down south in the Toledo district, this jungle lodge offers more to do than you can easily pack into a week. Visit Mayan ruins, spectacular cave systems, villages, chocolate ateliers, coffee plantations and the fascinating market in Punta Gorda where Mennonites in austere garb bargain with Caribbean mammas in tropical skirts. This is not a coastal property, but the beach is only a couple of miles away, and there are diving and deep-sea fishing excursions to the reef and beyond. Rooms have floor-to-ceiling windows with views of the rainforest and its birdlife. Belcampo is proud of its green credentials and produces its own organic coffee, rum and sugar, but best of all is the food: the sea and on-site farm provide everything from cinnamon-smoked breakfast sausages to wild shrimp at dinner.

Address: Belcampo Belize, Wilson Road, Punta Gorda, Toledo, Belize, Central America
Website: belcampobz.com

AZUL

On a long beach at the quieter end of Ambergris Caye, Azul is all about seclusion. The two open-plan villas are vast, with two bedrooms, enormous bathrooms, and a hot tub on the roof. The pool overlooks the sea, and the barrier reef is a 10-minute kayak-paddle away. The Rojo Beach Bar serves top-class food, including conch pizza and cashew-crusted lobster.

Address: Azul, North Beach San Pedro, Ambergris Caye, Belize
Website: azulbelize.com

MATACHICA

A speedboat ride from San Pedro's hustle, this must be one of the most relaxed places on Ambergris Caye. Life here is reduced to its essentials: glittering sea, white beach and 25 thatched cottages (plus a two-bedroom villa) in Matisse colours. The beach casitas are best: nothing can beat stepping straight from bed to private terrace to beach and into the turquoise shallows. Mambo restaurant serves scallops, lobster and wonderful local snapper with salsa fresca.

**Address:**5 miles north of San Pedro Ambergris Caye, Belize, Central America
Website:matachica.com

VICTORIA HOUSE

A long-established favourite, this is a silky-smooth hotel with 42 thatched casitas, colonial-style plantation rooms and beachfront villas. There's a dive centre, acres of dazzling sand and a spa offering hot-stone massages on the beach. Palmilla restaurant's menu runs from a classic shrimp ceviche to a lush pineapple-and-guava coulis; and the Admiral Nelson Bar, overlooking the waves, is the perfect spot for a rum-infused sundowner in a frosted glass.

Address: Victoria House Resort & Spa, Ambergris Caye, Belize Central America
Website: victoria-house.com

Horatio Clare on Belize

The film Casablanca started me travelling, searching the world for Rick’s Café. That near-mythical place where idealists, romantics and wanderers wash up, drifting in and dropping out, a sense of it glimpsed in Palermo, Antananarivo, Brazzaville. You know a Rick’s Café when you walk in.

But why would Rick choose Belize, an Adam’s apple of a country on the neck of the Central American isthmus? Because south of Mexico, north of Guatemala, the former colony of British Honduras is an outpost of low taxes, high idiosyncrasy, tremendous skies and torpid stability, still sufficiently uncrowded that visitors and settlers feel they have happened on somewhere everyone else has overlooked.

The peninsula of Placencia – ‘pleasant place’ the Spanish called it – is a straggle of beaches, mangroves and lagoons caught between the coastal plain of Belize and a Caribbean sea as blue as a Dutch policeman’s shirt. Just over the horizon the second largest living coral reef in the world holds the swells at bay. The shallows seem too warm and dozy to bother raising a wave.

Some locals were (or still claim to be) pirates and fishermen, so they’re not surprised by anyone and turn no one away. Walk along the beach with an eye out for shipwrecked contraband and treasure, and people will smile at you. They refer to successful beachcombing as ‘winning the Sea Lotto’. Pretty soon, incomers become as quietly eccentric as everybody else.

I love the colours, sea-bright and faded at once, and the houses on stilts, the painted wood, the outside stairs and the trees rocking their heads in the breeze, as though everything seems a good idea to them, however mad. And I love the kookiness.

Someone has made a gigantic fake snake out of foam and wire and laid it out on the road. Someone else has just tried smoking a scorpion’s tail.
Apparently it worked.

‘We all lose our shoes constantly,’ said a strikingly handsome woman. ‘We do Beach Olympics in summer and winter. You cover yourself in baby oil and glitter and go dog sledding on palm branches. No, you don’t need a dog.’ To Placencians, shoes were made to be kicked off, for better beach action and better dancing. They like to cut the rug in Tipsy Tuna. A big, wide painted-wood place, it reminded me of an African dance bar, jazzy and jolly, with floorboards still vibrating from last night. Rachel McAdams and Björk could tell you all about it, but then Placencia is one of those happy spots where the world-famous put on their normal selves and relax. Suffice to say I now have one thing in common with Naomi Watts. We both fell for a dog named Goldie, a blonde beautiful beast that lives on Coral Caye, just off-shore, and is utterly sweet-natured.

The simple deceptions of geography here are beguiling. A recent arrival saw a caye, one of the small mangrove islands, seemingly on fire, burning orange in the sea.

But it was the rising of the full moon, a monthly eruption. Walk down the only road to the end, to the pier, and you think, well, that was very pretty. You stare out at the cayes in the lambent sea and wonder if that is it. It is not. Behind the frontages, to the east, is the real main street, just two people wide, a pedestrian path called the Sidewalk (which residents claim is the world’s narrowest main street), originally made of conch shells for a barefoot bishop who walked from home to church. Here wooden houses and people from different backgrounds shoal under the palms – Mestizo and Garifuna (descendants of slaves who escaped from the Caribbean, also known as ‘the drummers’), Creole and Mayan. They lived a life of fishing and small trading untroubled by modernity for longer than the rest of us, and are not vastly changed by it now, at least on the surface.

The town newspaper, The Placencia Breeze, gives an impression of current concerns, advertising the chocolate festival (May), a birding festival (October) and the big one, the lobster festival in June. A boat called As You Wish has lost its registration certificate – call if you find it. The Rotary Club, ‘responding to a desperate plea from the youth’, has donated lights for the football field. Someone is selling a 500-acre island for $8 million. It might seem that all of Placencia’s life lies between the Breeze’s innocent lines but you feel its true story swims behind the gentle eyes of Merl Westby, whose family have lived here for generations.

Merl could easily be a buccaneer’s grandmother, with her heavy gold earrings and delighted laugh. As the old and wise do, she lives in different eras simultaneously.

‘I was just telling my daughter – it was so simple back then. Most people had their own chickens. My dad would catch fish every day. But times will change, that’s reality. Seafood is expensive now.’ Her arms are covered in cooking scars which she displays proudly, like bracelets. ‘I had six kids. I’m a single mother and I raised them myself, so I had to work.’ Her café is west of the pier (you can’t miss it – walk to the end, or follow a pelican) under a scarlet frangipani. As we talk, a series of immaculately pressed school children wander past, all wishing her good evening. ‘My grandchildren,’ she smiles. Her speciality is conch steak and, she adds with a significant look, ‘People like my lemon-meringue pie.’ A food critic from New York, dazzled by her cooking, begged Merl to change the name of her place from Merl’s Sweets and Treats, on the grounds you cannot tell it is a restaurant. Merl is holding out.

Nearby Kerr’s Barber Shop, on the main street, displays 150 different haircuts on the walls but they only do one, beginning with clippers and ending with meticulous razor work. There I watched a tiny world go by; two Rastafarians exchanging greetings. One lit up while the other gravely took up a broom and swept the street, stoop and inside of the barber’s in an act of random public service. Eventually the road peters out into the pier and the sea, where boys wade up to their waists, casting lines into the lazy surf. At a stall near the beach, surrounded by fierce posters of the Ten Commandments, a craftsman has worked his way through a huge stack of conch shells, grinding them into small sculptures and jewellery. In a yard next to him is a tent, a church run by his wife.

Thus do the community and the fish that sustain them endure, intermingled now with birds of passage, hippies made good; with the young and international who work three jobs, crewing yachts, selling apartments, tending bars and partying in their down-time on catamarans awash with sushi and strawberry Mojitos. Inland, the Maya mountains jumble under towering clouds, giants dreaming on their backs. Along the shore small places to stay range from simple $50 cabins to several-hundred-thousand-dollar villas with plunge pools and sea views, still under construction and being snapped up off-plan. Guests at the Itz’ana, a new hotel with a beautiful rattan- and plant-decorated restaurant and a bar slinging Sweet Corn Coladas and Mango Habanero Margaritas around its sublime pool, will be able to rent some of them.

People find Placencia by tip-off and word of mouth. ‘After he made Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola was looking to buy a place in the Philippines – somewhere to write films – but then he read that Belize had just become independent. He came down and loved it,’ says Martin Krediet, who manages Mr Coppola’s Turtle Inn. It opened in 2000 as the very definition of an easeful hotel of thatched villas, including Sofia’s Beach House, and now has a new island offshoot, Coral Caye. In his straw fedora and immaculate shirt, Krediet might have slipped out of the pages of a John le Carré novel; you would never guess he’s a former marine from the Netherlands. He bought his own house on the beach from the English novelist Patrick McGrath. ‘I only meant to stay a little, but I’ll never sell,’ he says. ‘I’m happy to dip back into Miami and the chaos, but I’d rather not live in it. There are secrets here, too. A helicopter pilot flew me down into a vertical pit in the mountains where there were Mayan bones and pots just lying around.’

‘There are no addresses,’ a writer for the Breeze who walked around town with me says. ‘If I get a package, the postman tags me on Facebook. People have started to name their own streets. My friend Dana has called hers Dana Drive. Another friend named one Easy Street. It has an intersection with Hard Way.’ The journalist is Shay Todd, a Canadian who arrived years ago to write a novel and now rents a wooden apartment on stilts on the Sidewalk. Her address is ‘The house on the Sidewalk beside the white arch with the pink flowers’. She recommends Omar’s, a gently dilapidated hangout painted in pink and green candy stripes on the right at the top of the main street as you come into town, which Omar took over from his parents. ‘We’re successful because we get the best fish and we really know how to cook it,’ he grins. I have grouper fillet cooked in a light coconut sauce. I could eat it, joyfully, every day.

Food is central to local culture. ‘In Creole they say, Empti sak nuh stan up. It means “Feed me!”’ says Todd. ‘If someone likes you, they bring you a cake.’ If you like your admirer, accept an invitation to drink bittas: this herbal, root-based spirit tastes of aniseed and caffeine and is reputed to impart potency. Surprisingly, there is a growing wine scene. Recent openings including The Little Wine Bar, which does great cheese platters in as tiny a space as the name suggests. It opens at three. Later, the Wine House and Pyramid House Wine Etc dole out tastings by the glass as the sun slips down. Best of all is Tutti Frutti, a gelateria run by Tiziana and Lorenzo Testa. Tiziana is Venetian. She found Placencia 16 years ago and fell for it. ‘We loved the Creole culture and the melting pot of people,’ she says. ‘They have fantastic taste buds. We go to Europe once a year to get flavours. Pistachio from Sicily, violets from Toulouse, almonds from Puglia.’ Her gelato is exquisite – as good as anything in Italy – and her café functions as a central gossip spot. ‘Did you hear about the guy who drove his van onto the airstrip because someone forgot to close the barriers and careered into the plane which was taking off, and it crashed into the sea? Well, no one was hurt!’

But really, the main attraction here is to escape the rest of the planet’s reality and ease yourself into a culture still based on an old rhythm of life. The new Coral Caye, a private island that can only be rented through Turtle Inn, offers a distilled version. A 20-minute boat ride takes you to this scrap of sand and palms, 50 paces wide by 150 long, and its two cabins and sand-floored lobby with a magnificent carved wooden daybed. There’s nothing to do but snorkel, snooze in a hammock, scratch Goldie’s ears and talk to her about the waiting list of Hollywood stars, which includes Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connelly, who want to take her home, and wonder what the chef will come up with next. But for the occasional lip-smack of the sea the night silence is absolute. With the shutters open, you lie in starlight and a soft breeze.

As the night deepens, stars, sea and the lightspill of Honduras far to the south conspire to set the searcher, the visitor, dreaming. The Caye, the peninsula and the sea frame one of those precious, pleasant places, where deeper histories feel palpable and still mysterious. Who is not at home here? The arrival stories of the ancestors of Placencia’s residents would make all manner of tales. Riches, poverty, piratical avarice, life as a beach. It is all here, unsleeping beside the sea.

Doubles at Turtle Inn from about £220; Coral Caye from about £1,450 for two people, including meals and boat transfers (coppolaresorts.com/turtleinn). Doubles at Itz’ana from £250 (itzanabelize.com). For more information on Belize, visit travelbelize.org

In 2014, Stanley Stewart visited Belize and found a place to sail through calm waters, dive with manatees and drift ashore at sandy-floored beach bars

Once upon a time, Belize was a holiday destination for pirates. They lounged on the beaches, swam in the bays and lurked among the reefs and mangroves in their bandanas and eyepatches, waiting for passing galleons. The maps tell their holiday tales. The cayes and islands in these waters sound as if they have been lifted from Treasure Island: Gallows Point, Man O' War Caye, Deadman's Cayes, Spanish Lookout, Last Chance Caye.

The setting is pure Pirates of the Caribbean: azure waters, a sand-fringed coastline, highlands of tropical jungle, Mayan ruins. The buccaneering spirit still means something in this laid-back little country; Belize is the natural home for all sorts of vagabonds and drifters, beach bums and runaways - anyone who cleaves to the idea that a beach, a hammock and a degree of freedom are preferable to a career, a mortgage and membership of the golf club. Belize is a happy harbour for wayward romantics.

Running with the trade winds in the Inner Channel, Captain Cliff was philosophical. 'It's a great place to forget the rest of the world,' he said. 'Out here there's nothing but the sea, the winds, the islands and the sense that life just doesn't get a whole lot sweeter.'

We were sailing south towards Coco Plum Caye on a catamaran the size of small frigate. Palm-crowned islands were scattered around the blue horizon. Windward lay Shag Bluff and Rendezvous Caye, the latter nothing more than a grove of trees, a pile of conch shells and a pristine beach. Belize has one of the world's longest barrier reefs, giving it hundreds of kilometres of calm-water sailing and dozens of deserted islands. Its coral walls provide some of the best diving in the western hemisphere.

We dropped anchor in the lee of Robinson Caye. Rum cocktails were served on deck, then dinner arrived: lobster and oriental rice, a bottle of Pinot Grigio, followed by a glorious, indefinable pudding. The setting sun highlighted the Maya Mountains on the mainland.

A stable democracy, a former British colony and an English-speaking country in a Latino neighbourhood, Belize has never been bothered by the kind of turmoil that passes for normal life among its neighbours - military dictatorships, coups, civil wars, dangerous crime rates. There is an innocent, toy-town feeling about the place. It has a population of just over 330,000, about the same as London's - in the 17th century. With only 16,000 people, Belmopan is one of the smallest capital cities in the world. This is the country where chewing gum was discovered and where chocolate is a major export. Independent since 1981, the Belizeans have kept the Queen on the banknotes because they couldn't think of anyone to replace her. In Belize City, Government House displays a photograph of one of the country's landmark occasions: Princess Margaret's visit in 1958.

Ethnically, Belize is all over the place. There are native Mayans. There is a mestizo population, with a mix of Spanish and Mayan blood, many of whom have come from Guatemala or Honduras. There are the descendants of Carib Indians, of shipwrecked African slaves, of 18th-century English loggers, of South Asians who came in the 19th century to work the tea plantations, and of Confederate soldiers who arrived after defeat in the American Civil War. And there are the Mennonites - Amish settlers braving the tropics in 17th-century dress, searching for heaven on earth.

I had begun my week on the beach at the wonderful Azul villas on Ambergris Caye, test-driving the hammocks, sampling coconut cocktails, demolishing several lobsters and chasing manatees (the creatures said to be the origin of mermaid myths). But I was not to be confined to the beach, or at any rate to just one. I was setting off for four days on Captain Cliff's 50-metre catamaran, Doris, with few plans, a fine chef, an open bar and a locker full of diving gear. I was a very Jolly Roger. To awake at anchor in the lee of a strange island in southern latitudes on a sunny morning, the boat rocking gently like a hammock, the smell of coffee and bacon drifting up from the galley, the sound of the surf on the outer reef, pelicans swooping off the starboard bow, dolphins passing astern - to awake thus is to know the meaning of bliss.

Travellers are only just beginning to wake up to Belize. As part of the Caribbean, it has been overlooked by people heading for well-worn destinations such as the Bahamas or Barbados. Anyone who has been sailing in the British Virgin Islands will be amazed by how beautiful and how empty are Belize waters. In four days afloat, I saw only a half dozen other cruising yachts. And when you drop anchor for an island beer, it is not at a sprawling resort; it is in a little barefoot bar where the local storyteller is cutting the limes.

In these seas and these islands, Captain Cliff seems to know everyone. And a surprising number are people like him, refugees from the real world, people who came once on holiday, fell in love with Belize and promptly threw their old lives overboard.

There's Carl from Swallow Caye, who is a manatee whisperer; he paddles visitors through the mangroves where the mermaids rub their noses against his dugout canoe. There is Peter, an Italian bubbling with enthusiasm for the good life here, who runs the exclusive Royal Belize resort for celebrity clients. There's Ally - known as the Snapper - who escaped Canadian winters for a life on Caye Caulker, where she takes visitors on snorkelling expeditions in search of sea horses. Over on Pelican Caye, there's the couple from Key West who have created a great little bar for passing sailors. Down at South Water Caye, there is Stacey, gym owner, weightlifter and the best bartender in Belize. As we sailed through the Belize Caribbean, it was beginning to feel less like a sea and more like a cosy neighbourhood.

If human society along this reef is congenial, the natural world tends to the bizarre. On the third day, Cliff and I went diving. Along the reefs, millennia of evolution have produced species of fish as strange and colourful as their habitat. Their names evoke more than any description: the harlequin bass, the barred hamlet, the spotted drum, the yellowtail damsel, the spiny puffer, the banded butterflyfish, the stoplight parrotfish.

But it wasn't just prettiness. A pipe fish arrived, looking like a bit of hardware dropped from a yacht. A couple of nurse sharks drifted by, switching their powerful tails, watching us with steely eyes. A turtle appeared, a refugee from the Jurassic age. And then the star turn: a spotted eagle ray, five metres long, flying in slow motion on beating wings.

After lunch, we headed across to the bird sanctuary on Man O' War Caye. A tiny island with a dozen trees, it has been colonised by magnificent frigate birds. On the wing, frigate birds have a glamorous, antediluvian silhouette. They are the pirates of the avian world, with forked tails and scimitar beaks which they use for stealing other birds' catch.

Landfall was Placencia, a sandy peninsula in the south. International idlers of every persuasion have built beach houses here, but Placencia village still manages to feel like a fishing hamlet. The fishermen's Lobsterfest in June trumps the bohemian Sidewalk Arts & Music Festival in February as the big draw. Along the paved strip that made it into the Guinness Book of Records as the narrowest main street in the world, there are craft boutiques and guesthouses, cafés and beach bars among the nets and boats drawn up on the sands.

I stayed at Turtle Inn, one of the two Francis Ford Coppola properties in Belize. The decor might have a touch of the film director's beloved Balinese influences, but the vibe is chilled-out Caribbean and the fish menus are superb.

On my last day, I went diving out on the Silk Cayes. It was too early in the season for the majestic whale sharks that frequent these waters in May and June, but every time I turned my head there was another spectacular creature gazing at me. Flotillas of gunmetal barracuda drifted by while parrotfish grazed on the underwater vegetation. A striped lionfish appeared, its tentacles like some ill-advised fancy-dress costume.

As we headed back to shore, a school of dolphins converged on the boat, playing back and forth across the bows. We put on snorkelling gear and joined them in the water. I could hear them chatting to one another: the soft repetitive clicks of dolphin speak. Of course they were talking about us. With our masks like eyepatches and our brightly coloured swimming costumes like pantaloons, we must have had a familiar look. I knew what the dolphins were saying: 'Which one is Captain Hook?'

This feature first appeared in 'Condé Nast Traveller' June 2014

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