Belize

“We maintain a barely discernible footprint on nature, allowing it to flourish in this verdant Garden of Eden,” says Dean Barrow, the Prime Minister of Belize. And if Belize is Eden, then the original garden of humanity was a jungle, and there was in fact a snake.  Make that 61 snakes, eight of which are poisonous.

A few nights before my arrival at the Gaia River Lodge, at the nexus of jungle and savannah close to the Guatemalan border, a large poisonous coral snake ate a red scorpion-eating snake of its same size in the middle of the night next to the entry door to the lodge.  Should you doubt such a thing, you can watch it in all of its violent glory on the Facebook page of Gaia’s night watchman, called “Creatures of Belize.” Chris, a self-taught snake handler, keeps a baby boa as a pet.

A fer de lance, the most deadly of all snakes in Belize, terrorized tourists for a short time at Big Rock, a lovely waterfall just a short walk from Gaia.  A black-tailed indigo snake reared its head at us while crossing a trail on a jungle hike with Calbert, a resident Mayan who hacked the trail into being with his machete. And snakes aren’t the only thing to make you tremble. I brushed up against blades of a plant that were exactly that, with Calbert warning me they are used to castrate dogs. Another plant is used for sandpaper. On the safer side, 50 different birds were spotted with the help of an ornithologist named Rudy, another member of the Gaia team, who told me the legend of the laughing falcon.

At the sister resort of Matachica, you can take a sea kayak out to the second largest living barrier reef in the world, visit Mexico Rocks or the Hol Chan Marine Reserve.  It’s as if you have entered into a giant aquarium rife with barracudas, stingrays, spotted eagle rays, nurse sharks, puffer fish, and green moray eels all around. The insect world also gets your attention, with a tarantula sunning itself on a rock at the ruins of Caracol, and a scorpion scurrying away in the depths of a cave once used for Mayan bloodletting and sacrifice, that you can explore as long as you keep your claustrophobia at bay.

A country this rich is bound to attract human predators as well, including neighboring Guatemala, who because of its aggressive president is itching to make a land grab, insisting on old colonial claims. “Leave Belize alone” and “not a blade of grass” declare local signage, although one can’t help but worry that climate change is a much more deadly foe than the enemy next door. If only the creatures of Belize could protect this slice of paradise against us all.

Here’s my photo essay on Belize.