Food Feature: Tangled up in green

Anyone interested in “nature tourism” or “eco-adventure” has heard of Belize, the tiny country squeezed between the tip of southern Mexico and the eastern hip of Guatemala. Formerly British Honduras, it has a reputation as a natural paradise, especially on its Caribbean coastline.

My friend Liz, who would be spending the whole summer on a Mexican archeological dig, agreed to leave home a month early and join me in Belize. We spent the first week there exploring the beaches and drinking in as much of the clear, hot tropical sun as we could. But we had decided to dedicate this trip to exploring the interior, so we picked up a rented four-wheel drive and headed south down the coast. When we hit Belize City, we turned west.

The further west we drove, the wilder the country became. Within a few hours, the open beaches gave way to miles of sugar cane fields, and then thick bush, enclosing the road in a tunnel of green. Palms swayed in the breeze, draped with jungle vines Tarzan would have leapt upon with glee. Any building or fallen tree is covered in an endless green tangle almost instantly. Stand still near a vine too long, and you may become a permanent natural attraction yourself.

Our destination was the Cayo district on the western border of the country, and specifically, the Mountain Pine Ridge Preserve. This huge park hangs above the town of San Ignacio, leaping abruptly from the foothills of the Maya Mountains, shrouded in typical jungle foliage — palms, bananas — to the pine forests that give it its name. The foliage change accompanies changes in geology so dramatic — the soil becomes clay and granite, not unlike our own piedmont geology — that scientists in the preserve research station speculate the ridge was once a free-floating island that broke free of the eastern coast of North America and was folded into the arms of Central America over eons of geologic time.

We wound slowly up into the preserve, jolting up the gullied road. Once we passed the research station, all signs of humanity fell away. The preserve itself is like paradise lost — lost to everyone but us. We occasionally saw a break in the greenery and stopped to explore the miles of trail that snaked through the jungle. Within a few steps, the road disappeared and only the calls of birds and howler monkeys rose above the persistent insect hum. We found icy mineral springs shrouded in mist, warm river pools and enigmatic caves that we explored by flashlight.

The preserve’s high point is the Thousand Foot Falls. We pulled up in front of a small wooden building and turned off the jeep, but a persistent roaring filled our ears. The building was a combination ranger station-gift shop, and in it we found the only other people we’d seen all day, plus blessedly cold Coca-Colas. The ranger told us that in the “High Season” — January through March — the preserve is much busier. Sometimes, he said, as many a 50 people a day come to see the falls.

We walked down the flight of stone steps to the overlook. Though it was the tail end of the dry season, the falls thundered out of the rain forest and roared over the granite cliff face, seeming to hang for a moment before crashing down into the forest below. Even at a distance we could feel the cool, damp breeze it created. I could only imagine the power of the waterfall at the height of the rainy season, when the preserve is doused with 10 inches of rain a day.

Further up the road, on the upper spine of the mountains, the forest was mostly pine trees, and much more open, so that the roadside was carpeted with flowers. I slowed the car to a crawl as we passed a small deer, and Liz pointed silently to a spotted fawn hidden a few feet away. Nearby, a coatimundi, a small, raccoon-like animal, blundered comically into the bushes. Birds called and flew from tree to tree. Since the preserve has never been sprayed for mosquitoes or other insects, the butterfly population is intact. They fluttered in seemingly endless variations, until I finally parked the car in the middle of the road and we sat wide-eyed as an enormous cloud of butterflies enveloped the jeep, as if the wildflowers lining the road had suddenly taken flight, and we marveled at them dancing in the sun.??