According to our reliably fallible sense of direction and a rumpled map that’s let us down more than any map should, we’re passing through the village of San Pedro Columbia, in the hilly southwest corner of Belize. We’re well off our planned route, trundling along a dirt road with no name on an impromptu mission to find the ancient Maya city of Lubaantun, established in the 8th century and home to 20,000 people in its prime. We’re close, we hope. Lubaantun (a word that means “place of fallen stones”) was the spot where, in the 1920s, a 17-year-old English girl, working with her adventurer/archaeologist father, reportedly stumbled upon the Skull of Doom, a 4,000-year-old crystal cranium that’s believed to have given its holder the power to kill people with his mind. As side trips go, that beats the world’s biggest ball of twine any day.
Some 700 people occupy San Pedro Columbia these days; it’s the country’s largest enclave of an indigenous Maya tribe known as the Kekchi. They smile and wave to us, a driver with a farmer’s tan and Birkenstocks and a passenger with a blond mop top and three cameras around his neck. Broad foreheads and strong noses call to mind the faces staring back from ancient paintings and sculptures discovered at dozens of sites like Lubaantun, and it’s not hard to imagine these villagers’ ancestors greeting the first Spanish conquistadors with similar warmth and curiosity.
We’re in the midst of a zigzagging seven-day road trip through Belize, one that brought us a stone’s throw from the Mexican border and will carry us all the way to the edge of Guatemala. This is a can’t-sit-still, Type A vacation, a brisk sampling of diverse venues — crocodile-occupied jungle river, sandy beach town, rainforest canopy — that delivers a rare sensory rush. There are 280,000 people in this country, and we’d like to meet all of them.
It’s a tough feat to recommend from a logistics standpoint. By Caribbean comparison, Belize has roughly the same population as Barbados, but at 8,867 square miles, it’s 53 times as large. The country is 180 miles end to end and 68 miles at its widest point, and more than 40 percent of it is protected land, including vast swaths of tropical wilderness, the imposing Maya mountain range and a river-carved coastal plain with 240 miles of shoreline. But Belize has something that makes an end-to-end adventure like ours eminently doable: roads — good ones, paved ones.
The country’s four main highways are smooth, picturesque and, for the most part, lightly traveled. They neatly link the four corners of Belize and allow road-trippers to cover bigger distances with relative haste, buying time to veer off a main road every so often and get in touch with their inner Indiana Jones, Capt. Morgan or George of the Jungle.
It’s an easy hour’s drive from the international airport near Belize City to Orange Walk Town, a settlement of 20,000 people about 30 miles from the Mexican village of Chetumal. From there, it’s a kidney-kicking two hours to the Lamanai Outpost Lodge. We cross the 86-mile New River and leave the Northern Highway behind, turning west onto a narrow road carved into the limestone and heading into an odd patchwork of impenetrable jungle and working farmland.
Traffic on this rough-hewn bush road consists of horse-drawn buggies and carriages driven by men and boys in overalls and straw hats and women and girls in dark dresses and bigger straw hats: Mennonites. Belize is home to some 10,000 members of this devoutly nonviolent Christian denomination from Europe. They’re an incongruous sight in a Central American nation, but in communities all over Belize, the Mennonites have become an essential part of the country’s social order. For one thing, they’re prolific farmers, producing a huge portion of Belize’s food. They’re also famously crafty grease monkeys, go-to guys when anything — farm equipment, appliances, cars — breaks down.
Breaking down, or just plain breaking, is on our minds right now, as a relentlessly bad road kicks our little 4x4 in its lug nuts. The modern Suzuki Jimny is a mildly updated version of a pint-size SUV sold in the United States during the 1980s as the Samurai. A blip on America’s automotive radar, the trucklet was, and is, a mainstay in countries like Belize, places where paved roads aren’t always the norm. It’s tough, it’s tenacious, and it’s cheap — but not too cheap, we’re hoping, as the wildly vibrating dashboard starts ejecting trim into our laps.
Indian Church Village (pop. 250) is the last settlement before the road narrows some more and rolling farmland gives way to a solid swath of vine-entangled jungle. The Lamanai Outpost Lodge sits out here, comprised of 17 thatch-roof cabanas scattered along the sloping western bank of the New River Lagoon. Opened two decades ago by Australian expat Mark Howells, the resort is well beyond merely blending with its surroundings; it’s become one with them, feeling as much a part of the natural landscape as the ceiba trees and the strangler figs.
A 30-minute hike reveals Lamanai Outpost’s namesake, one of the grandest Maya archaeological sites. Settled as early as 1500 B.C. and occupied into the 17th century, Lamanai is dominated by the 100-foot-tall High Temple. Atop a perilously steep flight of steps, the stone altar sits well above the trees, and from here, the jungle — luminous in a hundred shades of green and ringing with Tarzan sound effects — spreads out and meets the dark water of New River Lagoon.
The largest inland body of fresh water in Belize, the 24-mile lagoon attracts an ark-load of exotic fauna, including the keel-billed toucan, the Central American black howler monkey and the Morelet’s crocodile — Lamanai is, in fact, a corruption of the Maya phrase Lama’an’ayin, meaning “submerged crocodile.” Howells has taken a particular interest in the well-being of this elusive and endangered reptile, which numbers fewer than 1,000 in Belize. Along with University of Florida associate professor of wildlife ecology Dr. Frank Mazzotti, he’s working to ensure their survival. Civilians are invited to participate in the effort too; the lodge takes guests on nightly airboat forays into the wetlands to catch and measure the animals and implant microchip identification tags.
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