Is there still a beach paradise where the living is easy,
and not half way around the world?

YOU BETTER BELIZE IT! --Kevin Krause

The time had come. I had to take my wife, my friends, my sanity, and get the hell out of Dodge. Before I lost one, possibly all of them. I had been to Hawaii. Keep it. The state of Nayarit, Mexico, near Puerto Vallarta…..thanks, but I am still waiting for the return of the money I fronted to a "developer" on a land deal gone WAY south. Baja? Love it, but my wife Sharon and my buddy’s wife Jennifer both wanted something other than desert and marlin fishing. Costa Rica? Heard great things, but when I start hearing TOO MANY great things, I figured I missed the boat and shoulda been there ten or even twenty years ago.

Honduras? Panama? Guatemala? Brazil?

I figured that now was not the premiere time to be an American Turista at large---we were gearing up to start driving tanks through downtown Baghdad when we made the plans. So I did a little research, and it struck me…wasn’t there a little Central American country, on the Caribbean, that my many drunken scuba dive buddies were always raving about? Somewhere that they all swore was the closest they had ever come to chucking it all, and becoming an ex-patriot on the beach, living in a hammock? Yeah, I remember now….Belize. Now where in the hell is Belize?

Yeah, there it is….tip of the Yucatan, on the Caribbean, a young country that was formerly British Honduras, and now was building an identity uniquely its own. Belize. I got Jennifer on the case. She started the search on the Net, and came up with a few dozen options, all looking pretty sweet. And then it happened. Lady Luck intervened and pointed us to the north end of one of the outlying islands, Ambergris Caye, to be exact, and a fairly remote joint called the Sun Diver Beach Resort.
"Well, Jenn, what did you find?"
"I got a hold of this woman, Tasmania I think her name was, and she was very helpful."
"Tasmania, huh? She sound hot?"
"Shut up you idiot."
"And?"
"Well, she was great, but she sounded like she was drinking a beer…"
"Book it."

I have found that booking my best trips, from Sitka, Alaska to Paris, France, to Firebaugh, California, have all come while talking to someone who was drinking while working. It is a trait that I have always admired, and hope to emulate someday when my boss and buddy Todd is not around to fire my ass. We get on the redeye out of San Francisco on a Continental flight that was monumentally cramped. A quick layover in Houston, and then another two hours and we land in Belize City. We jump on a 15 person Cessna Caravan, which is kinda like a flying VW Microbus, and make the 15 minute hop to the little airstrip on Ambergris Caye. I wish the trip took longer, because we are only 2,000 feet in the air, and I can practically see the bonefish on the flats below. It is, in a word, perfect. Caribbean sea, 85 degrees, and I think the little airport below doubles as a skateboard park for the local kids.

This is the way to start a vacation. The resort has sent a fellow to pick us up at the airport, his name is Michael, and he loads up our luggage into a beater minivan, and swings over to a small store so we can stock up the kitchen in the house we rented. We get the basics. Beer. Rum. More beer. A box of cornflakes and some nuclear-holocaust-resistant milk. (My goddamn milk goes bad in week, but they got milk here, very good, that is intended to last four months without refrigeration. I am going to bitch to the Milk Advisory Board when I return.) Michael takes one look at us, and says: "Get de Belikin Stout, Mon. It has de most alcohol content." Michael knows his Yankee tourists well. He is a good looking guy, and he says "I used to be white, too, Mon. But too much sun in Belize." I like him all ready.

He loads us up into the boat for the twenty minute run to the resort---no roads, another sign of a great vacation spot. We arrive at the dock and a small pony named Buddy greets us, as does a couple other mutts—Hos, Esmeralda, Samson… called ‘potlickers’ in these parts. (Buddy is one of the five biggest dogs on the planet, but he is feeling poorly. Apparently he ate a jaguar or mated with an anteater or some goddamn thing, and is just on the mend from some rare jungle fever disease.) Michael will not allow us to carry our baggage to the villa, (‘You are on vacation, mon. Let me….’) so we are forced to stop on the way at the palapa bar, which is conveniently located at the beach end of the dock. We are only going to have a beer, and then go to the room and crash.

We have been flying for eight hours, and we have been awake for about twenty four. And my buddy and boss, Todd, is whipped. I mean ass-whipped. He has been under the gun over a year now, and he has been rode hard and put away wet every damn day for that year. One beer, and then a nap, and maybe dinner later if we wake up in time…… There is a pirate tending bar. A real, honest-to-god pirate, with a freaking parrot or something on his shoulder, tattoos, earrings, neckerchief on his shaved head. If he has a hook for a hand I am going to crap. He says his name is Robert, he is from Louisiana originally, and he is drinking a beer. The four of us introduce ourselves, and before we can sit down, there are four rum punches in front of us. Now normally, my wife Sharon doesn’t drink mixed drinks, but this goes down smooth and fast, and she smacks her lips."That was good…"

It is first of several hundred rum punches to find their way down her throat in the next week. We nod in agreement. They are good, and what the hell, maybe two drinks before our nap…. One of the owners of the resort walks up to say hello. Her name is Tazmara, she was the woman who Jennifer has been talking with, and she gets a beer from the pirate, and sits down too. I bum a smoke from her (the first of a long line of mooch smokes) and we hear the story of the resort.

How she is a Canuck from Calgary, and the pirate is her boyfriend, and he works there now too, because he drinks so much beer and eats so much food she had to hire him in order not to go bankrupt, and how the small kamikaze mini-pirate running around at ninety miles an hour, brown as a nut and all grins, is her three year old son Connor. How she decided to chuck the Great White North and head for the Caribbean, and how she hired Dennis and Mar who run the restaurant, and how hurricanes work down here, and what is in a rum punch, and who are the other pirates and island girls who materialize out of nowhere.

There is another pirate named, of all things Robert (Robby) who drives boats and does scuba dives, and the dive shop owner named of all things Robert (Chuck), and a woman with a navel ring named Lee Ann who has now started pouring the drinks because Robert Number One has joined us on our side of the bar. And by now his frigging parrot, which has been drinking out of our glasses all afternoon is almost as hammered as we are. There is a guy named Theo whose job apparently is to hang around Lee Ann and be in love with her, and he does it very well. He also takes people on tours occasionally, too.

I don’t know how it happened, but we have been drinking for seven hours, and we manage to climb the stairs to the restaurant for a wonderful dinner of fish and pork and sweet potato pancakes and conch fritters and god knows what else. We figure that maybe it is time we go and see where we will actually be staying for the next eight days, so we kiss Taz and Robert goodnight (on the lips mind you, this is Belize, mon) and we go to our villa and to bed. Now this is the part of the story where normally you wake up in the morning all hung over, and the villa is actually a dump, and half of your luggage is missing, and you wish to god that the sun would actually come out and the rain would stop. But this is the Sun Diver Beach Resort in Belize, daddio. And the villa is actually wonderfully beautiful, and the four of us have slept like babies, and the sun is flooding the suite with light, and the breeze is out of the east and caresses you like the fingers of a lover, and by god almighty you feel like a million bucks. The white sand never gets too hot to walk on barefoot, and you throw on a pair of trunks, the only thing you will wear for the next week, and you slice a mango that one of the pirates gave you last night as a welcoming gift, and eat it in the hammock looking out at a Caribbean sunrise and all is right with the world.

And amazingly, it only seven in the morning, and the day stretches in front of you like the tide, and so you wander over to the restaurant for a cup of coffee. And there is Robert, feeding aspirin to his hung-over parrot Gabby, and drinking a beer. It IS almost ten o’clock, so I join him, as does Todd. Sharon and Jennifer defer, but not for long, as here comes Taz, and she cadges a beer out of the Belikin cooler, and we sit down under the palapa and plan our day. Our wives look at Todd and I like we have done something right for once in our miserable lives, and Todd, my workaholic boss, has not mentioned work once. Robert asks us---do we want to hang out, go snorkeling, go for a scuba dive, go fishing, go for a hike on the beach, take a nap, drink a beer, go for a boat ride, have a picnic, go sailing, see Mayan ruins, relax, go into town for lunch……

Suffice it to say, over the course of the next week did all of those things, and more. Taz asked us if we would trust her to plan a few things for us, and after about a nanosecond of hesitation, we said ‘yes’. That resulted in a day of reef fishing and local snorkeling and beer drinking, and a day on a chartered catamaran which included a leisurely sail to Caye Caulker, with a stop at Hol Chan to feed the stingrays and the fish and to take some great underwater photographs. (One trick I especially liked that day was when Robert threw handful after handful of bait into the water around Todd, and the sea around him virtually EXPLODED with horse-eye jacks and tang and god-knows-what-all in an absolute frenzy. It looked like Todd was in the middle of a full-on piranha assault in one of those old B-rated jungle movies. Todd took it like a trooper and only shrieked like a woman for a minute or two before he realized that the fish were not going to add him to the menu.)

And then a day of flats fishing with Todd and myself and a guide named Manuel for bonefish and permit and barracuda, where I caught my first of many bonefish, and made a perfect cast to a small permit and actually hooked up for almost two minutes before becoming unbuttoned. And a day at the Altu Han ruins with Willy the guide/bartender/skipper with a brief layover at the Jungle Spa and Resort for shots of pickled vipers and scorpions in grain alcohol (no kidding) and a lunch of barbecued jungle rat (also no kidding).

And that still left plenty of time for hammock lounging, home cooking in the well-appointed kitchen of the villa, cheesy novel reading, afternoon naps and dips in the pool. Did I mention romantic walks along the beach under the fullest of moons? Did I mention Mayan artifacts-gazing and local art viewing? Did I mention Belikin beer and One Barrel rum? Did I mention Monte Cristo cigars? (thanks, Theo, you are good for something other than doting on Lee Ann) Did I mention that everyone who works there is beautiful and tanned and exotic looking and so nice that you want to invite them home for Thanksgiving? Did I mention hugs and kisses all around as we loaded up for the trip back to the airport and then home? No? Well, perhaps I shouldn’t-----because we are going back very soon to have a Belikin or twenty with the whole damn gang, and I don’t want a whole bunch of tourists screwing the place up………