Chan Chich with Fran & Louis

During the planning stage for long-time friends Fran and Louis Bondurant’s visit to Belize, Fran emailed that Louis insisted on treating the three of us to one night at Chan Chich. They had fallen in love with the place after reading about it in Frommer’s Belize.

Checking revealed that the resort’s rates had more than doubled. We would need an air charter to make a one-night stay worthwhile because of the long, rough trip by car. Louis still insisted. I made the necessary reservations.

 

We all were excited about the Chan Chich stay. It is my favorite of favorites. We had a half-hour trip in a Cessna 182, slightly rocky due to faint haze. The van from the lodge met us at the Gallon Jun airstrip. The Bondurants were fascinated by their first drive through jungle en route to the lodge.

The driver stopped at the small suspension bridge a little way from the resort, apparently on radioed orders from the lodge. We could not hear much of the conversation and were somewhat perplexed. Finally he started the van again and eased over the bridge and on up the rest of the way to Chan Chich.

A lovely, thirtyish young woman, Anne, one of the management couple, met us. She greeted us enthusiastically. Anne ushered us to comfortable seats on the veranda outside the bar and ordered coffee for us. Fran told her excitedly how much we were looking forward to our visit. The conversation wove this way and that. I explained that I had known the owner, Barry Bowen since he was a boy and that his mother, Emilie, was one of my closest friends. I said I had visited Chan Chich three times.

Then, for no reason I can think of, I mentioned that Chan Chich was a dirty word to my son Alex. I explained that I had given Alex and María a weekend at Chan Chich as a Christmas gift some years ago. Reservations were made and later reconfirmed. I had seen Alex and María off the morning of their trip, as excited as I ever had seen my son.

I was horrified to hear the car return late in the afternoon. An incensed Alex explained what had happened. After a rough almost four-hour-long ride, they were stopped at the security gate. Their reservation—which I had reconfirmed two days earlier—had been entered for the following day. Chan Chich had no room left and refused to let Alex and María enter the property.

I cried the rest of the evening out of disappointment for them and fury with the lodge.

As I told this tale, both Fran and I noticed that our hostess’s face had grown more and more drawn. I thought it was strange because the error had occurred long before she arrived to manage Chan Chich. When I finished, she gulped and with amazing poise remarked that it was strange that I had told the story because the same thing had happened again. It took a beat of three for me to ask, “With us?”

“Yes,” she admitted.

As you can imagine, Fran, Louis, and I all were struck dumb with disappointment. Anne quickly added that they were arranging for us to stay in the guest house at Gallon Jug. We could spend our two days at the lodge and the van would take us back and forth at our convenience. Ann described the guest house as being lovely with a view across owner Barry Bowen’s huge agricultural operation. My heart was somewhere around my ankles.

 

Anne’s friend and co-manager, Mark, whom we had met briefly when we arrived, appeared and spoke quietly to Anne. Her face tightened. She said they had decided to give us their own home on the lodge property for the night so that we could have “the Chan Chich experience.” Not only would we have their large, lovely veranda overlooking the high bush, but we would have the company of their parrot, named Parrot. Furthermore, Anne said, the night would be complimentary, no charge.

We were overwhelmed. We made the appropriate demurrals, then thanked Anne and Mark fervently for their courtesy. We all simmered down to something approaching normalcy after our brush with disaster. Fran said later that probably my mentioning that The Dowager Queen, Emilie Bowen, had been a close friend had as much to do with our royal treatment as my inadvertently opportune tale of Alex’s mishap at Chan Chich.

We stayed in our comfortable chairs on the bar veranda for a while, recovering from our close escape. Several wild turkeys, with their iridescent feathers gleaming in the sunshine, wandered back and forth over the lawn not far from us.

A bit later we were shown along the curving walk to a charming, rustic house at the end of the line of guest cottages. Fran and Louis had a large, upstairs suite. I had a smaller bedroom and bath on the ground floor. The living room opened onto the aforementioned veranda. It overlooked a stretch of lawn leading to a wall of jungle. We settled down to the happy time we had anticipated.

 

Many improvements had been made at Chan Chich since my last visit, some ten years earlier. The wooden walks had been replaced by skid-resistant rock-like paving stones set in fine, white gravel. Double upholstered chaises invited two people to lounge on cottage verandas. New, handsome, comfortable furniture welcomed guests on the verandas of the main building / restaurant and the separate bar. Most of all, the food had improved. It was good but ordinary on my past visits. This was excellent in choice, preparation, and presentation. Anne said she had told Barry that a first-class resort needed a first-class chef. We agreed that they had found one.

We returned to the restaurant for a delicious lunch, had an afternoon quiet time, then returned to the bar for Happy Hour. Dinner was equally satisfactory. We made it an early night.

 

Next morning, we gathered on the veranda just after dawn for coffee. We watched the parrots fly back and forth and listened to their squawks of conversation. Meanwhile, Louis was determined to get our parrot to talk. He failed completely the evening before. In the morning, after diligent, but apparently futile coaxing of the bird he had named George (considering Parrot an insult to him), Louis turned away. The bird immediately began a complicated, incomprehensible conversation. Louis and George talked back and forth until it was time for us to go to the lodge for breakfast.

We had a guided tour by golf cart down the road from the lodge, through the high bush. Our guide, Honorato, was a wonderfully knowledgeable man who had been with Chan Chich since helping build it. He explained unfamiliar plants and trees, pointed out birds he identified and located by their calls, and made the little drive an exploration. We were lucky to see a bracket deer, tinier than the whitetail and relatively uncommon.

 

For the most part, we had a quiet time, but thoroughly enjoyed it. Fran has a hip replacement and just had recovered from a crippling sciatic-nerve problem. We walked around a little, but spent most of our time sunk in the upholstered chairs on the bar veranda. The bird watchers who called goodbye as they took off in vans, returned to tell us of their successes. We decided they thought we were part of the scenery.

In the afternoon the lodge van returned us to the airstrip just as our plane was landing. We had another pleasant, short flight back to Belize City.