I’M ON THE dive boat, and it’s a familiar scenario for anyone who has dived the Red Sea. There is a clear blue sky and a blazing sun and the last thing you want to do is don a heavy black wetsuit and add to that your weight belt and all the other paraphernalia of scuba diving before plunging into the increasingly inviting water. Checks complete, there is the wonderfully satisfying moment of plunging into that water, sorting out the buoyancy, and entering this submarine world of corals, fish and myriad other creatures. And all the usual culprits are there. There are butterflyfish, angelfish, snappers and all the other old friends. But they are not the usual butterflyfish and angelfish and snappers. These are spot-finned, four-eyed and banded butterflyfish, grey angelfish and yellowtail snapper.

This is not the Red Sea, but a world away, or more literally a half world away. This is the barrier reef off Belize in Central America, one of the world’s smallest, least explored and, in the very most positive sense of the word, eccentric, countries.

Eccentric in what way? Well, you fly into Belize City, a town of some 50,000 people and counting and by far the largest conurbation in the country, a place whose name alone implies a certain predominance in a country called Belize. Surely it is the capital. Not so. The capital is the bland village of Belmopan, population some 7,000, set in the middle of nowhere after it was decided that Belize City was too vulnerable to hurricanes. It’s eccentric in that the theme of the national banknotes is bridges when Belize only really has two, both deeply underwhelming. Eccentric in that Belize is an island of spoken English in predominantly Spanish-speaking Central America. And eccentric because Belize has an awesome 40 percent of its area set aside as national parks or protected areas, conserving a rich natural heritage, be it rainforest, wetland, mangrove or coral reef.

Capital or not, Belize City is the hub of the country. This coastal town, lapped by the Caribbean, is an eclectic, bustling sprawl; its center divides the muddy waters of Haulover Creek and is connected by a swing bridge (made in Liverpool in 1923) that the country claims as a tourist attraction. This is the beating heart of the place, except on Saturday, when it is fairly comatose, and on Sunday, when it is dead. The front-page story on my first issue of the Belize Times was an in-depth report of a woman whose bag had gone missing on the bus to Corozal.

But the rest of the time it is a busy mélange of people and crowds reflecting the country’s diverse past. There are African Americans, Hispanics, Mayans and what seems to be the highest density of Rastas anywhere outside Kingston. There is a thriving Chinese community reflected in the number of Chinese food joints.

There is even a Mennonite community. I was in Brodies, the country’s only true supermarket (and there are no fast food chains this is a McDonald’s-free zone) when in walked what seemed to be two extras from the movie Deliverance. With white shirts, denims and braces, and straw Stetson-type hats, this incongruous brace were representatives of small waves of Mennonite immigrants who, having been shuffled all over the globe, found their way to Belize via Canada and Mexico. Today, they make their living largely from farming and furniture manufacturing.

Richard Hoath A Red-legged Honeycreeper sighted in Tikal

For those wanting a steady diet of tourist attractions, Belize City is not the place to be, but a couple of days there is almost inevitable, if only to make arrangements to get out. There is St John’s Cathedral, more the size of a village church, that claims to be the oldest in Central America. And just opposite is the House of Culture, which houses a seriously uninspiring collection of colonial cutlery and other odds and ends as well as a selection of bad paintings. There is also a picture of a Paca, an oversized guinea-pig native to the region known locally as the gibnut, which has the unfortunate propensity for becoming a leading ingredient in local stews. The plaque below the Paca picture makes interesting reading.

During H.R.H. Queen Elizabeth’s visit to her former colony in 1994, the gibnut was featured as the local delicacy. It was later elevated to Knighthood and became known as the Royal Rat.

Wanting more local color than collections of 19th century eating utensils and the like, I found a nameless bar near the swing bridge where I was able to hang out with an assorted collection of retired or merely ‘resting’ fishermen and a selection of rastas with the finest collection of dreadlocks I had seen outside Brixton. It was a high-ceilinged warehouse of a place devoid of interior decoration except for a few tired adverts for the ubiquitous local Belikin Beer. The back door opened visually and, unfortunately, aromatically onto Haulover Creek.

There was a jukebox with a choice of Bob Marley, Bob Marley or Bob Marley, but best of all a pool table. In exchange for a few shots of the local rum (rough, incredibly cheap at 50 cents a shot, served in utterly unpretentious plastic cups and, to avoid it chemically removing your tonsils, best watered down), I was taught the local rules by one of the ‘resting’ fishermen who fancied himself an amateur philosopher. My opponent was one of the rastas, Leroy, who shook my hand and announced “You’re in good hands, man.”

I rather hoped so. He was a big guy, over six feet tall and with a towering yellow, red, green and black tea-cozy of a hat that seemed to add another foot. I played the local rules and rather to my apprehension won not once but twice. Leroy, looking distinctly unhappy, suggested we play ‘London’ rules, and rather to my relief I proceeded to lose.

Richard Hoath The Jesus Christ bird has elongated legs that enable it to walk over water lillies

My initial choice of Belize as a travel destination was inspired by the possibility of seeing jaguars. These are the most elusive of the big cats, and Belize is one of the best places in the world to find these felines. Indeed the Cockscomb Basin Wildlife Sanctuary in southern Belize is the first, and to date only, reserve set up specifically to protect jaguars.

I had read up on jaguars. One article in BBC Wildlife Magazine was entitled “The Cat that Eats Your Soul.” I also read that I had a snowball’s chance in hell of seeing one. Seeking solace, I headed for Crooked Tree northwest of Belize City to find consolation in birds. It is a large inland lagoon and boasts such specialties as the weird boat-billed heron, the gloriously named bare-throated tiger-heron, and the increasingly rare jabiru, a huge South American stork that stands as tall as a man.

I stayed at a place called Birds Eye View Lodge that was right on the lake shore and more than lived up to its name. Part of the experience was picking up the local names for the animals from my guide, Leonard. There was the limpkin, an ibis-like bird with a down-curved bill and brown plumage streaked pale. This was the clucking hen. The snowy egret, an all-white heron with black legs and yellow feet, was aptly named the golden slipper bird. The northern jacana, a wader with hugely elongated toes that enable it to walk over water lilies and other floating vegetation, was the Jesus Christ bird.

And then there were the reptiles. I saw three species of large lizard in the park. The largest, the green iguana, is an ornately frilled and spined vegetarian reaching over two meters in length. Like the gibnut, it not infrequently finds its way into the cooking pot, hence the name bamboo chicken. Unlike the gibnut, it has not been elevated to a knighthood. Its smaller relative, the black iguana, is known, for unknown reasons, as the wish willy. The striped basilisk, which shares with the jacana the ability to ‘walk on water,’ is predictably known as the Jesus lizard.

There were only two other guests at the Lodge on my first night and as sheer chance would have it, they were jaguar researchers. Having all but given up on the big cat, I now found myself in an area where the local ranchers were complaining that jaguars were taking their cattle. The researchers, one American, one Belizean, were at Crooked Tree to work out a conservation strategy that would conserve the jaguar but placate the farmers. My next few days strolling round the area, binoculars and notebook in hand, took on an added frisson now I realized the cats were around. I never saw one, nor its tracks, but with brilliantly crimson vermilion flycatchers, black-headed trogons, rufous-tailed and buff-bellied hummingbirds and a host of other species it scarcely mattered.

Richard Hoath Ocellated Turkeys are a species uniquely found in the Yucatan Peninsula

I hitched a lift back to Belize City in an antiquated pale blue Mercedes driven by an equally antiquated, but not pale blue, Jamaican called George. He had lived here for 35 years after leaving Jamaica because of the “crime and all this stuff.” George was a professional driver, but also had a smallholding outside Belize City where we stopped off on the way back.

A wooden shack was raised on stilts to avoid the rainy season floods and set in a small clearing in the forest. I was ushered up the steps to the front door where George’s wife Linda was ensconced. She was enormous. She put out a hand and as I shook it vast acres of blubber quivered around her upper arm. She never stood, even moved, while I was there. I am not sure she could. George gave me the tour accompanied by a skittish hound imaginatively called Rover. He grew banana and plantain (the former is sweet, the latter used for cooking), coconut and cassava, yams, lemon, orange and sweet pepper and hot pepper. He also planted various herbs and spices; George basically was self sufficient with a surplus to sell at market.

Back in Belize City, I got a water taxi ticket for Caye Caulker. The Cayes are a series of low-lying offshore islands that lie between the coast and the barrier reef, separating the coastal waters from the open sea. The barrier reef is the second largest in the world (after Australia’s). Some of the islands are privately owned, millionaires’ playgrounds with private airstrips and their own golf courses. Others are reserves and protected areas such as Half Moon Caye, which supports Belize’s only population of red-footed boobies.

Caye Caulker is the ideal base for diving and snorkeling or just ‘chillin’ in the vernacular. Low lying and surrounded by mangroves, Caye Caulker moves, though barely, at a pace of its own. With no motor vehicles short of converted golf buggies, the atmosphere of the place can be summed up in two plaques on the wall of a hangout called Rasta Pasta. One read “If you’re rude and impatient get your RASS out of here!” and the other “By order of the management no politics or religion to be spoken in dis bar.”

I had headed to the Caye for the diving, but ironically neither of the submarine highlights involved scuba. Belize is one of the best places in the Americas to see the West Indian manatee. This large, rotund sea mammal, more closely related to elephants than to whales and dolphins, grazes on sea grass beds from the southern United States south through the West Indies and eastern Central America down to the coastline of Brazil. Everywhere it has been reduced by direct hunting, disturbance, habitat destruction and accidental death due to collisions with motorboats. In Florida, for instance, many individuals bear propeller scars on their backs.

Richard Hoath A ruined Mayan settlement in Tikal, near the Guatemala-Belize border.

Belize supports one of the healthiest populations of this elusive mammal and affords one of the best opportunities to observe them in the wild. I soon found myself on a speed boat zapping through the cayes, weaving through dense stands of mangrove at speeds that made confirming my first mangrove warbler impossible. Harry was my guide and while my mangrove warbler whizzed by we paused for a small school of bottle-nosed dolphins. It became increasingly obvious that Harry knew exactly what he was doing. We homed in on Swallow Caye and Harry turned off the motor and produced a pole. It brought back my days at Cambridge punting along the Cam, but our quarry was much larger, rarer and more elusive than undergraduates of the opposite sex.

Manatees are not flamboyant animals. They do not leap, breach or bow-ride, and glimpses are difficult especially given the murkiness of the water. What we were hoping for was a glimpse of wet nostrils breaking the surface with a suggestion of up to 600 kilograms and 4.5 meters of mammal attached to those nostrils. It took time, and patience, but as Harry punted our way through the shallows we eventually found those precious nostrils and there was one of the western hemisphere’s rarest herbivores. Views were sporadic, but every two minutes or so the narrow snout emerged with associated nostrils and at the very end the manatee dived beneath the boat, giving a glimpse of a sun-dappled back and broad paddled-shaped tail. And no propeller scars Belize’s conservation program is working.

But Harry’s highlight was yet to come. We headed out for a site variously called Shark Ray Alley or Shark Ray Village. It is a shallow sandy lagoon, barely meters inside the barrier reef shelf, a lagoon where scuba and even the wearing of flippers is forbidden. Refreshingly, Harry made sure we abided. Slipping off the boat in less than three meters of water I found myself surrounded and engulfed by nurse sharks and southern stingrays. It was a submarine equivalent of Tanzania’s Serengeti or Kenya’s Masai Mara. I had seen nurse sharks before, notably a beautiful tawny nurse shark at very close quarters on Thomas Reef in the Red Sea. But here there were tens, and southern stingrays by the hundreds.

It is a little disconcerting the first time a shark swims between your legs, but you soon get used to it.

Harry was great at the small things. So many people jump into the water and want to see something big. Harry showed us the small stuff. Like a particularly strict English public school teacher, he snorkeled with us armed only with a cane. This cane pointed out, without touching, the various fish and coral and other invertebrate species, and Harry found me the high point, even given manatees, sharks and rays, of the trip: a flamingo’s tongue. What a beautiful mollusk. The shell is a creamy, smooth, double-ended cowry, but the living animal itself is enveloped by a fleshy white mantle intricately embellished by dark ocelli. Flamingo’s tongue absolutely stunning.

Richard Hoath An Ivory-billed woodcreeper, spotted in Tikal

These were lazy days, days spent ambling soporifically round the caye, snorkeling here, birding there and between times gorging on the freshest sea food and getting myself rounds of ice cold Belikins. While I was indulging in the latter, I found out from an Irish journalist that I should head for Tikal, over the border in Guatemala, for the Maya monuments and the ‘Yucatan endemics.’ While ‘Yucatan endemics’ might sound like a particularly virulent disease, we were talking birds and these were species that are found in the Yucatan peninsula and nowhere else. One of them was near the top of my wish list the ocellated turkey.

We share our planet with two species of turkey. The first is familiar in its domestic form dominating the table at Christmas or Thanksgiving. The second is an elusive jungle dweller from the forests of Yucatan, spectacularly bronzed and glossed all over with a naked bright blue head and neck baubled with brilliant scarlet nodules. I wanted it.

Leaving the comforting Anglophone enclave of Belize for Guatemala and entering the big wide world of Spanish-speaking Central America was a little daunting given my limited correction, very limited Spanish. Many years ago, when I had a short and utterly ignominious career with an oil company based in Bilbao, I had attended a three-week crash course in Spanish. I am to languages what Mozart is to Heavy Metal and came out of the experience remembering nothing apart from the phrase ‘La planta esta sobre la television.’ How often I would need to explain to the Guatemalans that “there was a plant on top of the television” I could only guess at.

I need not have worried. Even I picked up the basic greetings and courtesies very quickly and had no language troubles that a smile or handshake could not clear up quite amicably. Of more concern was that on Belize’s independence in 1981, Guatemala, which had long held claim over Belize (indeed until relatively recently the Guatemalan constitution held Belize as a 23rd state of the republic) threatened to invade. For this reason, the British left some 9,000 members of their armed forces to deter any such outbreak of hostilities. It all sounded a bit dodgy.

Nothing could have been further from the truth. I spent my time on the Belizean side confirming I had indeed seen the house wren, which necessitated running around with binoculars and a notebook, items not sensibly flaunted at international borders. I then ambled across into a no-man’s land such as the one that exists at Namanga between Kenya and Tanzania, or between Goma and Gisenyi in the DRC and Rwanda or indeed Rafah between Egypt and Gaza. Once through, I changed money and I was in Guatemala. I was off to a good start. The Guatemalan currency is the quetzal, named after their spectacularly beautiful national bird. I rejoined my bus, and most reassuringly my rucksack, and settled down for the three hour drive to Tikal.

Richard Hoath A Spider monkey hangs overhead

There are plenty of Mayan monuments in Belize at Lamani, Xunantunich and Altun Ha for example, and they are incredible. I had visited Altun Ha with George, and the great plazas surrounded by steep sided, stepped pyramids could not fail to impress though the atmosphere was rather spoiled by a gaggle of very loud Texans from a passing cruise ship. But it was all a bit manicured. I had these romantic notions of spectacular lost cities rising out of steaming rain forests, wrapped in lianas and strangler figs. I wanted Nature run riot, reclaiming the ruins as her own. I wanted screaming bands of spider monkeys and flocks of gaudily colored tropical birds.

Tikal is on a vast scale. Whereas the temples at Altun Ha served a town of some 3,000, Tikal, at its zenith around 700 AD, had a population of some 100,000 and the complex covered over 30 square kilometers. I flicked through my Lonely Planet and the names of just a few of the roughly 4,000 buildings so far discovered promised much. The Temple of Inscriptions, Bat Palace, El Mundo Perdido (The Lost World) and The Temple of the Grand Jaguar. Ah, jaguars. I read on to discover that one of the first great Mayan rulers was King Great Jaguar Paw. It would all have to wait for tomorrow, though. I arrived at Tikal after the site closed at 6:00 pm and installed myself in a lodge optimistically named Jaguar Inn.

Natalia, the receptionist at the Inn, told me that a few years back an elderly male jaguar would sometimes scavenge the lodge’s waste bins for easy pickings. Things were definitely looking up.

The following morning I was up at dawn, almost ran out of the inn and nearly tripped over the first surprise of the day in the car park. Nine ocellated turkeys were quietly picking their way across the gravel, seemingly totally unaware of their status as much-sought-after Yucatan endemics. Birds this rare simply should not be so easy. I was in the temple complex by 6:00 am and it was everything I had hoped for. A morning mist was just clearing, lending an air of mystery to the steep stone facades rising up through the trees.

The pyramids at Tikal are not as tall as those at Giza, but are far steeper. From the top of the tallest, nearly 65 meters, it was possible to look over the site, a huge expanse of verdant green breached here and there by the gray stone tips of long-deserted temples. What is most impressive about the site is that Mayan culture was essentially a Stone Age one. These haunting ruins were the remnants of a civilization that did not have metal tools. Neither did they have the wheel. There are circular carvings on several of the temples but the fixed axle eluded them. And they did not have domestic beasts of burden to help them no horses, donkeys or oxen. Tikal is, in the most literal sense of the phrase, a human achievement.

Richard Hoath Male Green-breasted Mango

I spent days walking the trails, and the sound effects were there. Guatemalan black howler monkeys lived up to their name, the males’ territorial cries echoing through the jungle. Keel-billed toucans with impossibly large bright green bills clattered around in the canopy while loud flocks of Montezuma oropendolas were working on their bag-like, woven nests. Sometimes I would be joined by a band of coatis, long-snouted, raccoon-like mammals with long, banded tails held vertically aloft. I found a Morelet’s crocodile in one of the ancient reservoirs, slightly worrying because it was the same reservoir I had paddled in the previous day trying to identify the freshwater fish, and, on one memorable occasion, narrowly missed stepping on a fer-de-lance, a highly venomous and beautifully camouflaged snake.

I spent my last couple of days in Guatemala in Santa Elena on the shores of Lake Peten Itza. The Hotel San Juan had ‘character.’ My room boasted a private bathroom made up of a toilet with no seat and a flush mechanism that consisted of a bucket. The exposed wires of the water heater were alarmingly near to the showerhead. I drew the bedroom curtains and the entire rail promptly fell down. There was a menu but all that was ever available was chicken that had obviously starved to death, caked in vast amounts of stale batter, plus cold rice accompanied by knobs of unmelted margarine.

Fortunately the charms of the Hotel San Juan were but a short walk across a narrow causeway from the island of Flores, where the food was edible and the bathrooms non-life threatening. There I spent my last afternoon before returning to Belize, writing up my diary overlooking the main square with its Mayan stele and Catholic church. Hummingbirds busied themselves around the flowering trees. I had missed my jaguar I had not even seen a paw print. But it really did not matter. The thrill was in the chase and with so many other wonderful, wonderful things seen, experienced and duly recorded in a packed diary, all was well with the world.  et