Day Three dawns, and we're loading up the dusty but indefatigable Jimny. We’ll retrace the lumpy haul back to Orange Walk Town and head south toward our second stop, the beach burg of Placencia. Our route includes all four main roads: the Northern Highway toward Belize City, the Western Highway toward the capital city of Belmopan, the undulating Hummingbird Highway through dense rainforest and citrus groves, and the Southern Highway past sprawling banana farms to the Placencia Road turnoff.
There’s a lot of new construction along the northern end of the Placencia Peninsula, a big toe that dips into the Caribbean about 70 miles south of Belize City. There’s an unfinished resort, blocks of upscale condominiums, and a neighborhood of McMansions built on land created from dredged lagoon mud. Such development is a testament to the allure of the place, and someday it may transform one of the country’s sleepier quarters into a Cancún-style hot spot. For now, though, there’s still a good deal more nothing than something out here, and hammocks strung between palm trees still handily outnumber king suites with whirlpool tubs.
The easy way to get to Placencia is aboard a 30-minute puddle-jumper flight from Belize City. The hard way — our way — requires a couple of hours driving along a pitted path that feels a whole lot more off-road than road. But Placencia Town beckons like some kind of beach-hippie Shangri-La, and we put the spurs to the Jimny for the final push. Later, as we down a fish burger and a smoothie at the well-named Shak and watch a local fisherman unload the day’s haul as fishermen have done in this village for eons, we’ll quickly forgive and forget what it took to get here.
Just a mile north of town, a footbridge over a koi pond welcomes a fortunate few to Turtle Inn, a boutique resort created by film director Francis Ford Coppola and his wife, Eleanor. A beachy sister property to Blancaneaux, the Coppolas’ family retreat turned rainforest lodge, Turtle Inn sits on 650 feet of soft sand and encompasses 17 one-bedroom cottages, seven two-bedroom villas and a three-bedroom family pavilion with its own pool.
The couple bought the hotel as a turnkey operation back in 2000 but ran it for less than a year before Hurricane Iris’ 145 mph winds obliterated the place — and pretty much everything else along the southern coast of Belize. Seeing opportunity in the destruction, they reimagined the resort as a chic, Bali-inspired refuge. They brought over a Bali-based architect and began an arduous trans-Pacific shopping spree, filling Turtle Inn with Indonesian authenticity. The result is downright dazzling.
There’s no aspect of Turtle Inn that comes off insincere or ill-considered, no detail that doesn’t reflect the Coppolas’ ardent attention to detail. “Welcome to the movie set,” announces general manager Merri McKee. Just as the Chavón River in the Dominican Republic served as a cunning stand-in for Southeast Asia’s Nung in Apocalypse Now, the Coppolas’ Balinese dream in Belize is immersive. Carved doors and tapestries don’t just look like antiques; they are. And the blocks that form the resort’s footpaths are real black pumice stone transported from Indonesia by containership. The Coppolas brought over artisans too, including Balinese woodcarvers and stonecutters, who taught their crafts to local Belizeans who in turn applied these skills to every nook and cranny of the resort.
Placencia’s a hard habit to break, but day five has us back on the road. We nose south toward the Toledo District and Punta Gorda, a waterfront city of 5,000 that sits just 15 miles from the Guatemalan border. The Southern Highway is smooth and quick all the way, but this part of Belize remains well off the typical tourist tack. It’s the far reaches of a country of far reaches. Punta Gorda — or P.G., as it’s known locally — is working-class but welcoming to outsiders, a hush-hush home base for anglers angling for the bonefish-tarpon-permit grand slam and divers who’ve discovered the epic beauty of the Belize Barrier Reef’s southern extremity, 35 miles offshore.
At Machaca Hill Rainforest Canopy Lodge, 15 minutes up the road from P.G., a dozen suites on stilts sit in the middle of 12,000 acres of pristine rainforest, amid treetops transited by rowdy troops of howler monkeys leaping and swinging from branch to branch. A few hundred feet down the hill snakes Belize’s Rio Grande, an emerald-tone beauty with its headwaters deep in the Maya Mountains. From Machaca’s dock, accessed via a small electric tram, it’s eight lazy miles to the Caribbean Sea.
Despite its eco-easy ambience, Machaca Hill was built and outfitted with a hard-core, cost-be-damned devotion to quality. Before arriving in Belize, general manager Brian Gardiner spent 20-some years running high-end African safaris, including Abercrombie & Kent operations in Kenya and Tanzania. It’s this experience that explains the Swarovski spotting scopes on the observation deck, a paddock full of Gary Fisher mountain bikes and the Costa del Mar sunglasses in the gift shop.
The rainforest is plenty dramatic during the day, but the main attraction at Machaca Hill happens when the lights go out. Nighttime in the tree canopy is seriously dark, and with just a screen between bed and bough, the rooms become a Maurice Sendak-worthy jamboree of nocturnal activity, reverberating with the hoot-hooting of blue-crowned motmots, the chattering of red-eyed tree frogs and the menacing howling — roaring, really — of the monkeys. It’s a back-to-nature getaway that would make a New Yorker feel right at home.
The sun rises on Day Seven, and we’re headed north again. Through the Jimny’s filthy windshield flickers a daylong instant replay of our weeklong rush down the length of Belize: Rainforest fades to beach town, beach town fades to jungle river, and jungle river fades to Belize City. When at last the Jimny rolls to a stop, there’s a groan and a hiss from under the hood that sounds for the world like a sigh of relief. The window crank falls off in my hand. We made it.
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