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Ambergris Caye has the best resorts; the "Temptation Island" segments were filmed at Captain Morgan's Retreat, Journey's End and Mata Chica Beach Resort. The caye has a great Web site showing most of the resorts at .com. Blackbird Caye Resort bills itself as "The Ultimate Retreat," and I won't argue. Visit them at .com. Ed Turton and his wife, Melissa, run Howler Monkey Lodge within the Community Baboon Sanctuary at Bermudian Landing. The best cabins rent for $60 a day, plus a 7 percent hotel tax. The lodge also has cabins for $40 a day and units with a shared bathroom for $20. Meals are $20 a day, all you can eat. They have a Web site at /jungled. Oceanic Society Expeditions: You can watch killer whales near Vancouver Island, snorkel on Palau, swim with manatees in Florida or watch sea turtles lay eggs on the beaches of Surinam. Check out the possibilities in the society's 2001 catalog or call up the Web site at .org. The headquarters are at Fort Mason Center, Building E., San Francisco, Calif. 94123. The telephone number is 800-326-7491. Blacktip sharks rose from the deep to greet us as we descended into the mysterious Blue Hole in the Caribbean. Divemaster Ruben Navidad carried a chum bag, which attracted swarms of fish, which in turn attracted the 6-foot sharks. To further entice the sharks, he rolled and flailed in the water like an injured prey. Six yellow-eyed sharks soon encircled Navidad, one brushing his back. The rest of the divers were content to hug the limestone wall and watch the show from several yards away. The Blue Hole, featured in a 1970s documentary by Jacques Cousteau, is an ocean sinkhole that plunges 480 feet from the 10-foot-deep lagoon of Lighthouse Reef Atoll. We stopped at 130 feet, turning back afterwinding single-file through the stalactites ofa submerged cave. Onboard the dive boat, I asked Navidad why he risked being shark bait. "Just idiotic I guess," he said with a smile. "I've done it many times. I have confidence the sharks won't bite me." Belize has a barrier reef second in size only to Australia's. The underwater treasures along the coast long have drawn divers and sport fishermen tothis Central American country the size of Massachusetts. Belize boasts three of only four atolls in the Western Hemisphere, ring-shaped reefs dotted with specks of land where a fisherman's stilt-house may be the only building. Atolls are magic places: Dolphins and manatees feed in the calm central waters; the reefs and mangrove roots are nurseries for fish; birds, reptiles and other land lovers inhabit the islands, called cayes and pronounced "keys." Most tourists stay at Ambergris Caye, which recently shone in the international spotlight as the playground for thebabes and hunks of TV's "Temptation Island." Ambergris is home to the country's tourist nightlife and best resorts, although most are modest when compared to the luxurious accommodations of other Caribbean and Mexican hot spots. But that's what makes Belize special. You don't go there to bake onthe beach at a chain resort with a little umbrella in your rum drink. Even Ambergris Caye, with its sand streets and thatch-roofed casitas, retains the atmosphere of a fishing village. With reefs and rain forests full of gaudy residents, and a wealth of Mayan ruins, Belize is an explorer's paradise by land and by sea, billing itself as "Mother Nature's Best Kept Secret." The English-speaking people of Belize are proud of their natural resources and have placed more than a fifth of the land mass in protected reserves. The car-eating roads, roomswithout air- conditioning and showers thatdribble out stored-up rainwater are inconveniences to be put up with for the reward of listening to the roarof howler monkeys over the morning mist of the Belize Riveror viewing the rain forest from the top of the Temple of the Sun God at the Altun Ha Ruins. One of the fastest-growing segments of the travel industry is naturalhistory tours. The Sierra Club, National Geographic and the Oceanic Society are among the outlets that sell trips to see creatures, with spartan creature comforts. Bring your hiking shoes, binoculars and bug spray. The Oceanic Society offered a trip to Belize that began with six full days on theocean for $1,250, followed by a two-day extension in the rain forest for an extra $370. The cost included room, meals, guides and land and water transportationfrom Belize City. I left St. Louis at 8:30 . en route toa connecting flight at Houston. By 4:30 that afternoon, I was sipping a foaming Belikin beer, the excellent local product, while bounding across the water to Blackbird Caye. The boat slowed as it navigated the cut in the 185-mile-long barrier reef; the coral gardens below appeared as dark splotches in the luminescent waters. The 32-mile trip took 90 minutes, ending as the sun disappeared with a fiery splash into the sea. The shoreline mirrored the black Caribbean sky -- the spattering of electric lights glowed like stars shining here and there among the coconut palms of the mostly deserted island. Blackbird Caye is part of Turneffe Atoll, a ring of small islands, some of them no more than mangrove mats, around a giant lagoon. Like AmbergrisCaye and other parts of Belize, Blackbird was battered by Hurricane Keith last October. Our boat docked at Blackbird Caye Resort, which formerly housed an Ocean Society research station. The society left in 1996 and established a new station on nearby Spanish Bay, and the privately owned resort now is a diver's dream, with comfortable cabanas, a bar and dining room and a dive boat heading out three times a day. The society returned to Blackbird in January, leasing Pirate's Cove, a complex of six cottages that had been a resort on the caye's southern point. The society has refurbished the resort from the storm damage and shortly will accept its first group of students for accredited courses on reef ecology and marine mammals. Tourists also will be invited on natural history trips. There is a dorm for students and cottages for tourists, and the society is emphasizing including Belizeans in all its programs. My group of three tourists was only the second since the research station reopened. I was joined by Pat Silver, an actress from San Francisco, and Val Pechorin, a mechanical engineer by trade, a Russian by birth and an American by choice. A Mel Brooks lookalike, Pechorin developed the life support system for the Mir space stationbefore coming to the United States in 1980. When we grumbled about the noisy diesel generator that droned 24 hours a day, Pechorin pointed to the blazing sun and the incessant winds bending the palms and shrugged: "Free energy." Carol andRose were our cooks and served up healthy Belizean specialties, heavy on rice, beans, fish and chicken. Each meal was accompanied by fresh juice and fruit. One night we feasted on seven lobsters nabbed that day during a snorkeling trip by our Belizean boat captain, Richard Erenda. We were accompanied by Barbara Bilgre and Scot Anderson, two of the society's naturalists. Bilgre does marine mammal research and manages the new research station.
Anderson studies great white sharks off the Farallon Islands near San Francisco. His work was featured in a National Geographic TV special titled, of course, "Great White Sharks." Anderson identifies the sharks by their battle wounds andhas tagged a few with satellite transmitters. "I know someof those sharks better than I know people," he said. An advantage of staying at the research station is the society has permits to mingle with the marine mammals. "We do things divers at Blackbird Resort don't do, like interact with dolphins and manatees," Bilgre said. My cottage had two double beds, a bathroom with shower, a ceiling fan, louvered windows that whistled in the wind and a hammock on the front porch. The sea was nine paces away, and I couldn't wait, strapping on a headlamp the first night and going for a stroll in the ankle-deep tidal pools. There were snails, urchins, anemones and a crab-eating octopus in my front yard. Wade into the deeper water and elkhorn coral teemed with a kaleidoscope of fish. On an early-morning walk on the deserted beach the next day, I foundiguanas sunning on tree limbs, an osprey dining on a turquoise parrotfish and a hood-sized spotted eagle ray that didn't mind company as it hunted in the shallows of seagrass. But this was no unsullied island paradise. Far from it. Blackbird Caye is situated on the far east side of the atoll, and its beaches catch all the plastic debris that is pushed in by the trade winds from the littered Caribbean. A castaway on this island would find bottles, coolers, shoes, even a television set. Blackbird Resort has workers whoclean its beach each day. But on the more isolated stretches, no one carts off the detritus, and it lines the sands ina sad testament to our throwaway society. Despite the rubble, Anderson said Belize is still "one of the most pristine environments in the Caribbean." "There's not a lot of people, not a lot of pressure," he said. "Part of the research we'll be doing is to establish a base line and see if there are any impacts from future development and pollution. If somebody all of a sudden says, 'We don't see many dolphins anymore,' we'll have numbers." Added Bilgre: "We use the garbage in our educational program. We analyze it, research where it comes from and use it as a teaching tool. The lesson is: Throw something into the ocean, and it turns up somewhere." Our first impressive wildlife experience also came in anunsightly setting. Behind the large thatched dining hall was a shallow pool carved by Hurricane Keith on the edge of the mangrove swamp. Workers had dumped debris from the stormcleanup into the water, and the plan was to eventually cover the makeshift landfill with sand. The herons and egrets that frequent the pool were sent flying one morning by a flurry of thrashing. Two male saltwater crocodiles, easily 9 feet or longer with midriffs like washtubs, were engaged in a bloody battle over a female, who lurked nearby. The fight lasted off and on until noon, with both combatants gashed andgouged. The larger male had a death grip on the other's head, pinning it underwater. The loser rolled belly up. Suddenly, the defeated croc wrenched free with one last burst ofenergy and sprinted across the mud flats. The other pursued to the edge of the swamp, then returned to claim the prize. Even the local repair crews were amazed by the rumble. "I didn't know we had alligators that big," said Dennis, the foreman. Days were spent snorkeling, or I'd take a 10-minute walk up the beach and hitch a ride on BlackbirdCaye Resort's dive boat. Because the society's research station offered meals only, the resort also was the scene of our happy-hour gatherings. One day was spent searching for dolphins and manatees, and we learned that a researcher's job often can be tedious. After five hours in the sun on a slow-moving boat, we headed back without a single sighting. The next day, on a snorkeling outing,our luck improved. Anderson spotted a sand plume in the turquoise water, a sure sign that manatees were feeding below. One emerged for a breath of air, saw us and disappeared with a flap of its tail. A larger male hung around for several minutes, oblivious to our boat. That, explained Erenda, our captain, is the threat facing the manatee population living in the busy waters off Belize City: "The manatee rests onthe bottom, like that one there, and the boat goes over and, boom, chops them all up." Our small group joined the divers at Blackbird Caye Resort for the daylong outing to the Blue Hole. Flying fish looked like silver missiles as they sailed from crest to crest. A squall whipped up as we hit openwater and tossed the 50-foot boat like a toy. "Did you ever see 'The Perfect Storm'?" asked Silver, the actress. The weather added to a sense of foreboding as Navidad prepped us on our meeting with the sharks below. There were two couples on the dive, and they held hands underwater, parting only to tour the cave. Still, the experience was unsettling for Heather Nassar of Los Angeles, who was on a diving honeymoon with her husband, John. "The whole thing horrified me," she said, fighting back tears. "If it had been just the cave, or just the sharks, I might have been all right. But together, it was just enough to put me over the edge." Before lunch at Half Moon Caye Natural Monument, which includes a rookery where thousands of red-footed boobies and frigate birds co-exist, we headed out for another dive at Long Caye Wall. "No caves? No sharks?" asked Heather Nassar. "This dive is the best dive you'll ever do in your life," replied Jason Garner, who with his wife, Amy, manages the resort. After a serene underwater tour of a pristine garden glowing with a rainbow of fish and coral, the sky and Heather Nassar's outlook had brightened. "That one was great," she beamed. "I could have stayed down there for hours."
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