Make Belize
Precisely seven minutes after the Cessna touches down in San Pedro, my husband and I are relaxing on the edge of our own private dock, sipping frosty rum cocktails and staring out onto a crystal blue Caribbean Sea.
The sun is sweltering here on Cayo Espanto, a private island off the coast of Belize, but when the heats gets to be too much we simply dip our toes into the cool turquoise ocean or radio for our extremely proficient serving personnel to bring more cocktails.
Romance, adventure and solitude await on the perfectly private island of Cayo Espanto in Belize.
It's true! When Eddie arrives minutes later with another refreshing Cayo Espanto Splash, I've decided that this really is paradise.
Cayo Espanto is a five-star, four-acre private island in the middle of the western Caribbean Sea that was developed 10 years ago by North Carolina businessman Jeff Gram. It began as a lagoon surrounded by marsh and was used primarily as a storage area for local fishermen. Today, sand is dredged from the ocean floor daily and spread throughout the lush coconut trees and quaint villas, of which there are five.
Ours happens to be the charming 1,500-square-foot open-air Casa Manana. It comes with its own swinging hammock, plunge pool and a king-size bed with lavish Egyptian cotton sheets.
It's lovely and cosy, but when we make no attempt to close it up before bedtime, howling tropical winds begin shaking and rattling the unsecured wooden ramparts.
This goes on for hours until we finally pull ourselves away from our warm expensive sheets and grapple with the flapping floor-to-ceiling doors. It's tough going, but in the end we fasten them down just enough to shield us from the ferocious air stream and get some much-needed sleep.
Simply mention what you would like to eat and the chef might surprise you with a special dish like this delightful conch lunch.
After a marvelous breakfast, we're told a cold front coming off the Gulf of Mexico is to blame for our wakeful night. Interestingly, it hasn't affected the sweltering sub-tropical temperatures but the gusting northerly winds are sure to make the boat ride to our snorkelling destination a precarious one.
Indeed, it's a jarring journey, but after only 30 minutes we're safely anchored at the coral reef zone of the Hol Chan Marine Reserve.
The Hol Chan Cut is located just off the southern tip of San Pedro on Ambergris Caye, Belize's largest island. It is one of four zones that comprise the 7.8-square-kilometre watery district. The others -- the Sea Grass Zone, the Mangrove Zone and Shark Ray Alley -- make up the rest.
And it's here, in and around the northern section of Belize's 280-kilometre barrier reef (the second-longest in the world after Australia's Great Barrier Reef) that our experienced Cayo Espanto snorkelling guide has been free-diving for most of his life.
In fact, Alex Gomez, 36, remembers when the region was a depleted fishing area where uncontrolled fishing and diving practices were threatening to damage the abundant resources.
That was 17 years ago, before the Belizean government granted reserve status to the area and developed it into an explosive underwater populace with more than 160 species of fish and 40 species of coral.
Cayo Espanto diving guide Alex Gomez has been free-diving near the barrier reef for most of his life.
Nowadays, it's a virtual underwater playground where snorkellers can frolic in water as shallow as 1.5 metres and adventurous divers can explore dark caves more than 10 metres down.
It's quite a spectacle, and after some astonishing deepwater exploration here we hook up with a handful of international snorkellers at the nearby Shark Ray Alley -- Belize's most popular dive site located just inside the barrier reef.
The area is about nine metres deep and our knowledgeable Belizean guide informs us that this is where we're sure to see plenty of stingrays, groupers, snappers, parrotfish, barracuda and, like the name suggests, nurse sharks.
Nurse sharks? At once, and to no avail, I begin scouring my useless memory bank for some hint of what exactly a nurse shark looks like. Suddenly, someone tosses a handful of stinky bait into the water and several of them are splashing at the surface, viciously vying for the bloody morsels.
I see that nurse sharks are sort of brown in colour and appear to be an unintimidating one to three metres long. I'm told that unless provoked, these sluggish bottom-dwellers are harmless.
Even still, I'm having second thoughts about submerging myself into the shark-infested waters. In fact, at this point, I'm seriously considering staying on board with our 21-year-old shipmate Alex Soler to find out the real reason why his successful Los Angeles parents shipped him off to private school in Central America.
Nevertheless, I waver on the boat's edge and as the dorsal-finned creatures circle at my feet, I bring to mind the words our astute guide offered earlier in the day when he was regaling us with his "lost at sea" tale: "If we don't have courage in life, we don't have anything."
* * *
The next day, that relentless seasonal cold front off the Gulf of Mexico threatens to modify our romantic private picnic plans.
No worries! There's plenty of time for "stuff like that" at our clandestine oceanfront villa. And when we learn that we'll be diving for conch instead, all is quickly forgiven!
Conch (pronounced konk) is a large saltwater snail that is eaten either raw in salads or cooked in fritters, chowders or gumbos.
It's especially delicious sautéed in butter and when we showed a slight interest in the slimy marine mollusk the day before, our skilled Cayo Espanto chef, Patrick Houghton, prepared for us a conch-lovers' delight: conch soup, conch fritters and ceviche, a scrumptious South American salsa.
But for now, our diving guide is the affable German Alamilla, Cayo Espanto's well-informed director of tours. He is also a local fisherman, a proud father of three and, I'm told, a notorious storyteller. In fact, I'm warned not to bother asking him how Salty, the island's dog, ended up with a gash above his left eye.
"German will tell you it was a crocodile attack," says our attentive houseman, Eddie. The lacklustre truth, I learn, is that the friendly yellow labrador had a cancerous tumour removed from his forehead.
* * *
All the same, we meet up at the dock and in no time we're sailing 32-kilometres per hour along Ambergris Caye's sandy east shore. It's a 40-kilometre stretch from San Pedro to the most northern tip of the island just south of Mexico. Somewhere in between, Alamilla stops his 8.8-metre fishing vessel and instructs us to put on our goggles and flippers.
The water is a tepid 30 C and just seconds after Alamilla gestures to the bottom of the sea he is back with a pair of medium-sized conch held high above his head. Then, without warning, my husband, Warren, nose-dives into the Caribbean Sea and gracefully, as if he has done this a hundred times before, scoops another large marine snail off the ocean floor.
From my vantage point, which is at the surface with my entire face in the water, I'm finding it difficult to distinguish a conch from a coral so our guide dives to the bottom and points one out.
"I see it, I see it," I holler.
But halfway down I lose sight of the pointy shell and hurry back to the top, empty-handed and a bit discouraged.
"Don't worry, you'll get one," says Alamilla. "And when you're ready, just follow me."
Seconds later, I take a deep breath. The 20-foot descent feels like it's taking hours and when I have trouble grasping the slippery shell, I tell myself that my head will explode if I don't go back right now.
But I don't, and it doesn't, and after finally catching my breath, we're back on the boat where Alamilla is tenderly inserting a paring knife into the sturdy shell of the unlucky conch I just stole from the ocean. He says mine is the biggest of them all but I'm not so sure. I am certain, however, of a distinct hissing sound the unfortunate marine life makes as it is torn away from its protective cover. The level-headed one among us asks if that's the sound of water escaping, but Alamilla tells Warren that the conch is angry with him.
No doubt.
"Conch have parents too," I say, only half joking.
Alamilla laughs as he prepares the rest of the ceviche, which he serves to us aboard the boat with crisp homemade Cayo Espanto tortilla chips and a customary Belikan beer, or two.
* * *
It's been exactly 27 days since we left our charming little villa on Cayo Espanto. Here, snow has blanketed the entire country and the frigid temperature has dipped to a chilling -22 C.
Our short stay there was nothing short of revitalizing, but like every fading memory, I'm having a difficult time remembering the salty smells of the Caribbean air and I can't really "feel" the warm tropical breeze against my pale skin anymore.
Just then, an envelope from the U.S. Reservations office in Fayetteville, N.C. arrives in my snow-covered mailbox.
In it, a colourful brochure on the private island of Cayo Espanto begins:
"Imagine being marooned on your own private island. The crystal blue Caribbean Sea surrounds you as you lay in a hammock and the soothing sun sets over the horizon. A lullaby of waves softly caressing the shore and gentle tradewinds..."
And suddenly, it all comes back!
Leesa Dahl is a Free Press editorial employee
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