WASTIN' AWAY ON HALF MOON CAYE
Memories of hammocks, magnificent sea life and the Blue Hole dot tropical trip to Belize's remote atoll
From the tiny, vertigo-inducing platform atop the 30-metre-high lighthouse of Belize's Half Moon Caye, all the elements of the story are apparent.
To the immediate north: a shipwrecked freighter is slowly being pulverized to rust-red abstraction by Caribbean surf. Beyond that: distant charter boats converge with their load of day-trippers on the huge, cobalt-coloured Blue Hole, an exquisite coral and fishfilled limestone sinkhole, and Belize's premier natural phenomenon.
To the west: palm-lined Long Caye seems to float in the turquoise lagoon, near enough for a day's journey by kayaks fitted with lateen sails. And directly below: boomerang-shaped, one kilometre-long Half Moon Caye, one of five islands that comprise this remote atoll, and the base for six days of blue-water exploration and hammock-bound lassitude.
More than 200 islands dot Belize's 250 kilometre-long barrier reef, which stretches south along the country's entire coast — from the Yucatan to Guatemala. Most travellers to this region — looking for snorkelling, scuba diving, fishing, kayaking, and palm-shaded, margarita-induced somnolence — head for the popular, near-shore accommodations on Ambergris and Caulker cayes. Few venture to the remote islands, 80 km east of Belize City, where resorts are few and things like electricity, running water, and shops virtually non-existent. Its isolation and its undisturbed natural phenomena are its appeal.
I'd left charmingly dilapidated Belize City by 600 hp speedboat a few days earlier on a two-hour journey among the ghosts of Caribbean history. Low mangrove-encircled islets and half-submerged reefs are everywhere. The Mayan of the Latin American mainland never had been seafaring people, so settlement of the cayes fell to 16th and 17th century British buccaneers like Blackbeard who earned their notoriety by raiding passing Spanish gold ships, then eluding their pursuers amid the nearly impenetrable maze of coral.
Known as British Honduras until independence in 1981, and known as The Mosquito Coast to filmgoers, Belize has become known in the last 20 years as one of the best places in the western hemisphere to witness the bizarre — and increasingly threatened — life of the tropical seas.
My arrival on low, beach-encircled Half Moon Caye coincided, unfortunately, with a storm that riled the Caribbean and sent coconuts plummeting earthward amid the tented campsite with alarming thuds. Prevented for two days from kayaking or snorkelling by the ocean's grey swells, my dozen companions and I took it upon ourselves to enact despairing, castaway scenarios — from Robinson Crusoe to Gilligan's Island.
We played hearts, imbibed immodestly, lay in hammocks, grew blubberous with offerings of camp-kitchen appetizers, and studied the western horizon from whence cometh, we were told, signs of meteorological redemption. We blew, like characters out of Lord of the Flies, on the big conch shells that had been deposited inland by the passage of Hurricane Mitch years earlier. We investigated the little caye for signs of life. And found at the forested western end a noisy bird sanctuary, home to thousands of nesting red-footed boobies and frigate birds.
The third day began — as all days, in fact, did — with the trumpeting of the cook's own conch, announcing breakfast. But this day the sky was cerulean; the lagoon finally calm.
So the group set off northward 12 km, the boat loaded with snorkelling gear and lunch, for a trip to the famous Blue Hole, a 350 metre-wide, perfectly circular crater in the limestone reef. For certified divers with oxygen tanks and lights, it's possible to descend 100 m in the gin-clear water along walls festooned with stalactites and multicoloured anemones — while the ominous silhouettes of manta rays pass above.
For timid air-breathers like myself, I was content to follow the sinkhole's submerged rim, snorkelling among gothic trees of black coral, explosions of elk horn coral, trumpet-like sponges, and aptly-named brain coral. Amid all this: anemones, sea whips, and sea fans whose hallucinogenic bodies — some violet, chartreuse, crimson, or pale yellow — undulated in the warm ocean currents. And everywhere: schools of damselfish, angelfish, blennies, butterfly fish, sergeant majors, and wrasses — of every colour of the rainbow. Most experts consider the sea life along Belize's reef as the second best — next to Australia's Great Barrier Reef — in the world.
The arrival of a team of marine researchers on Half Moon Caye provided an unexpected glimpse of the creatures living in the deep, ocean waters to the east. Since the caye and its environs are a Belizean protected site, the naturalists had come to study the annual gathering of one of the planet's most impressive animals — the 15 m-long whale shark.
These creatures assemble off the island in great numbers during the mating ritual of tens of thousands of groupers. The sharks are lured there not to eat the groupers, but to eat the fish's microscopic spawn.
Few venture to the remote islands, 80 kilometres east of Belize City, where resorts are few and things like electricity, running water, and shops virtually non-existent. Its isolation and its undisturbed natural phenomena are its appeal. Daniel Wood
The researchers returned from diving one evening, fired up their portable generator, and showed — on a suspended sheet — a video-projection of their day's efforts. Metre-long groupers spiral orgiastically in dense silver tornadoes. Suddenly, they flee. Then, the humungous mouth of a massive — and harmless — whale shark moves through the milky, spermfilled water, jaws open, right at the videographer. It looks as if it's Jonah Time for him. A second, a fifth, a tenth monstrous shark appears — slowly vacuuming the ocean. The show ended. The island grew dark. Not far beyond the beach, the surf reiterated its cryptic message on the moonlit offshore reef.
The next morning, with a warm breeze blowing in from the Caribbean, the group mounted triangular sails in the two-person kayaks for a run downwind to Long Caye, five km to the west. Travelling in pairs, outrigger-style, we sailed over the turquoise water and soon found ourselves on an isolated beach with an abandoned thatch hut, perfect for a day of tropical torpor, snorkelling, or exploring. On the land: giant green iguanas. In the air: malevolent frigatebirds hover, awaiting a handout from one of the mutinously lazy sailing-kayakers.
In the water: more than 220 species of fish. And big brain corals that would make Einstein proud. But in some of the shallower places, the effects of global warming on ocean life was apparent: thousands of broken pieces of dead sea fans and elkhorn coral lay on the bottom — like the bleached bones from a mass grave.
It was a sobering reminder of the often repeated warning that tropical reefs — and their attendant fish life — are in rapid decline worldwide.
The sun heads west and, late in the afternoon, we head east, our kayaks aimed toward home port, Margaritaville, hammocks, and dreamland.