First Impressions

British Honduras is a quaint little “English Island” cozily established on the edge of Central America, below Mexico and to the north and east of Guatemala. In almost no respect…politically, economically, ethnologically, nor linguistically…does she resemble her neighbors. Geographically, she is a country of coastal plains, swamps, jutting limestone “mountains,” and foothills and low mountains that, farther south, become the great mountain ranges of Guatemala.

Belize, capital of British Honduras and its only city of better than village size, is practically any old south Georgia town put up on stilts. Most of the houses are white frame with red roofs and green shutters; each yard is enclosed tightly with it own high white picket fence. The screaming scarlet of Flamboyante replaces the gentler orange of mimosa, but hibiscus, ixora, aurelia, croton, tall pines, and palms are here.

As for those stilts…rumor has it that Belize is built on rum bottles and mahogany chips, and since seeing water in the holes dug in the lawn by land crabs and finding our street completely flooded for days any high tide, I am inclined to believe it. Deep drainage ditches trim the edges of all the streets in town and the sea flows through the “outlets” in the seawall and backs up into them much of the time.

 

We are connected with the rest of the Colony by two “highways.” One heads north, past the airport, a one-lane road with passing bays. The other, west of the City, runs southwest past the Country Club and later branches so that one leg continues to the town of Cayo and on toward the border of Guatemala and the rich Petén lumber forests and the other leads over the recently opened Hummingbird Highway through virgin forests, a paved slit through a towering mass of mahogany, sapodilla, pine, palms, and dozens of other varieties of trees, all laced together by liana and other jungle vines.

Hidden in the forests are jaguar, ocelot, puma, and tapir. The monkeys often swing along the edge of the road where you can see them and the trees are bright with parrots and macaws. Occasionally you pass a python sunning on the pavement.

 

The lumber camps are in painfully hacked-out clearings, settlements of thatched-roofed huts overflowing with whole families…workers, wives, dozens of children, chickens, goats, pigs, and dogs. The logging trails are curving black tunnels thrusting back into the jungle. It is incredible that they can pull the enormous mahogany logs, some almost a man’s height in diameter, through the mud, even with D-8 Caterpillars.

 

As far as we are concerned, however, life in Belize centers around the sea rather than the bush. The town is built on a peninsula and you are constantly aware of the Caribbean, glassy blue and studded with emerald mangrove-covered cayes inside the reef. The longest coral reef in this hemisphere stretches over a hundred miles from Honduras past British Honduras to the Yucatán peninsula of Mexico. We have fish in profusion unknown anywhere in the world except along the Great Barrier Reef in Australia.

The tiny jewel-bright reef fish dart in and out of the coral, completely unafraid of us as we swim among them with mask and flippers. And, to be quite honest, we are almost equally unconcerned by the rather impressive barracuda swimming alongside.

Oval silvery-and-yellow grunts move along in “herds” of hundreds. And the parrot and trigger fish manage to show us a new color style each time we dive. There are dozens of varieties of them and the shades are endless.

We really do very little actual spear fishing…except to retrieve a lobster for dinner…because the fish are so abundant that it would be like shooting cows in a pasture and it is more fun swimming among them and watching their antics.

As for surface fishing, it is excellent. Our tarpon are fairly small, but a 12- to 30-pound tarpon on spinning tackle is a lot of fish to handle and you may hook as many as twenty of them in a day’s fishing. The snook are back up the river in eager quantities that we never have seen elsewhere. An occasional sailfish or marlin is caught but, frankly, we prefer smaller game fish on light tackle so we haven’t really made and effort to find them.

And the bonefish…I hadn’t realized how lucky we are here with them. We have found several flats where they feed in great numbers and, while you can’t ever depend on catching any fish at any time anywhere, you certainly seem to do better here. In other places I have heard that fishermen may work for a week for the thrill of getting just one and be satisfied.