Blissing Out in Balmy Belize

By ROBERT HUGHES/SAN PEDRO

Belize, formerly British Honduras, enjoys the distinction of being the most obscure country in Latin America. It is tiny: a nibble between the borders of Mexico to the north, Honduras to the south and Guatemala to the west. In the 16th and 17th centuries it was the haunt of Spanish bucaneros and English slavers, of logwood cutters and warm-sea riffraff. In 1981 it achieved independence, and today it is the last fragment of the British Commonwealth on Central American soil, the smallest sovereign state on the whole continent (pop. about 200,000) and politically the least eventful.

Belize has rain forest, jaguars, waterfalls, toucans and, after Australia's, the largest coral barrier reef in the world. It was also one of the great centers of Mayan civilization. Ruins -- still largely unrestored, insufficiently studied and besieged by tomb robbers -- dot the lowland forests: the pyramids of Xunantunich and Altun Ha and the vast complex of Caracol, which in the 6th to 7th centuries was the rival of Tikal, across the Guatemalan border.

For fishermen, Belize is a paradise and always has been. Its big holiday, after Christmas, is Baron Bliss Day on March 9. The festival commemorates an eccentric English nobleman who went there for the fishing, died in 1926 on his yacht in Belize harbor and left a part of his fortune to the colony -- a grateful sportsman if ever there was one. But in its obscurity, Belize gets only 1% of the tourist traffic to Central America, although word about it has begun to get out.

Nobody wants to stay in Belize City, which every guidebook dismisses as a noisy dump full of intrusive hustlers. Instead, one heads for the outer islands, such as the Turneffe Islands, that are geared up for sporting tourism, mainly scuba diving, snorkeling and line fishing; or a small plane whisks you north to San Pedro on Ambergris Cay, a thin digit of land that protrudes south from the Mexican border. To the east is the barrier reef, which runs parallel to the coast, less than a mile offshore. To the west are mangroves and shallow flats, and then the low featureless Mosquito Coast. San Pedro, in between, is a pleasant town of ramshackle wooden buildings on stilts or cinder blocks, with a few new condos.

It is supremely laid back here. The aggression level is zero; nobody bothers you. The favorite late-night game in San Pedro is called Chicken Drop: Mother Nature's own organic form of roulette. A pit is marked out in 100 numbered squares, 10 by 10. One bets on the numbers. The croupier takes a live chicken by the legs, blows sharply up its behind and throws it into the ring. The first number the chicken defecates on wins. The winning number takes all. It will be a while before the Mob moves in on Belizean gambling.

Mainly, you fish.

It is probably impossible to go fishing in Belize and not catch something. If you don't care what, hire a skiff and go trolling off the reef with a heavy spinning rod and deep-running lure. That will produce anything from an overambitious triggerfish (beautiful colors but sluggish: let it go) to a large black snapper or a larger wahoo. Or, if you are unlucky, an enormous barracuda. The latter will either break your leader in the water or do its best to bite your foot off if you get it in the boat.

This kind of fishing is fun but coarse. You have to make things difficult for yourself. The next step up is to go after bonefish with a fly rod. Bones here are small, no more than 3 lbs., but they are sizzlers on light tackle.

Or you can try a fly on the tarpon flats.

The right base for such ventures is a handsome and well-run lodge on Ambergris Cay called El Pescador, which has all the best guides -- and a welcoming committee of two ospreys that have built their nest above its pier and greet the arriving angler with shrill wheep-wheep-wheeps of alarm. El Pescador was built by a German, Juergen Krueger, and his Wisconsin-born wife. They started it about 18 years ago, when no sober carpenter could be hired on the cay. Much of the work, from laying cinder blocks to routing the panels in the heavy mahogany doors, was done by visiting Mennonites. The lodge is friendly, unpretentious and full of tropical Gemutlichkeit. Its barracuda seviche and fried grouper are delicious.

The flats between Ambergris Cay and the mainland of Belize are one of the wonders of the fishing world. They extend for miles: a limestone plain covered by a blue-green, seemingly endless mirror of gin-clear salt water, traversed by bluer channels and punctuated by small mangrove islands. This is the home of Megalops atlanticus, the tarpon.

Essentially, tarpon are huge archaic herring. In Florida they regularly grow to 150 lbs. (the world record on fly is 188 lbs.), but in Belize they are smaller, up to about 100 lbs. They are beautiful creatures, sheathed in scales the size of silver dollars, glittering, pugnacious, spooky and inedible: the only thing you can do with a tarpon, in the unlikely event that you catch it, ) is let it go. But as a rule you have no choice about letting a tarpon go. It just goes.

This is probably the only kind of fly-rod fishing that causes more distress in the angler than in the fish. No other angling contains such extremes of frustration and exhilaration. One hears middle-aged enthusiasts declare it to be "better than sex." Perhaps not, but the two activities have something in common: the first try is an embarrassment; everything goes wrong. With tarpon, however, it keeps going wrong.

The ideal day for flat fishing is cloudless, calm and roasting hot. The guide poles the skiff along the flats in a predatory silence, and you stand on the bow platform, with line stripped out, sweating through the sunblock lotion, ready to cast. Tarpon fishing is stalking. You must see the fish and cast to it. Hence its peculiar excitement, which far exceeds trout or even salmon fishing. "Look, look, out there, about a hundred feet, in the white spot, a big one, he's coming, ooh, thrreee of them!" You peer and scan and peer again, and see nothing. Then you do: a dark gray bar under the green ripples, ghosting along.

What the guide expects you to do is shoot the line out 60 ft. or 70 ft., drop the fly (a vulgar tuft of feathers and Mylar) some 5 ft. in front of the tarpon's snoot and start stripping it in. The fish will then charge the fly, you will strike, and it's showtime! So much for utopia.

This being the real world, one of several things will happen. Flustered by the sight of the fish, which is so much larger than anything you imagined catching on a fly before, you bungle your cast and land the line in a tangled hurrah's nest far short of the fish, which glides away. Or you drop the fly on its nose, so that it spooks and heads for Cozumel. Or you get it right, and the fish takes no notice. Or the creature inhales the fly and takes off like a drag racer, at which point you find you were standing on a loop of the fly line, and it is knotted around your ankle.

But, at last, when you have run out of spare leaders and foul language and are cooked by the sun, you hook one. The sight is amazing. The fish looks, a friend of mine said after striking his first one, like a silver man rising straight out of the water: an apparition.

Now your troubles have only started. Tarpon are inordinately strong. To subdue a big one on a one-hand, 10-weight fly rod takes an hour and a half and teaches you what a sore arm can be. It is like cutting mahogany, but with the additional likelihood that the tree will escape. The tarpon has a mouth like a cinder block, in which the hook seldom holds: generally, only one fish is brought to boat for every 10 that are hooked.

While other anglers lie about the size of their fish, tarponers lie about the number of minutes they had it on before it threw the hook. The fish makes long reel-burning runs, and jumps repeatedly, a thick column of mercury twisting in the spray. It lands with a smacking splash that can be heard a mile away. "Bow to the fish!" cries the guide, wanting you to drop your rod tip. Bow? You feel like prostrating yourself. And then it is gone. In five days I saw perhaps 150 fish, hooked four and boated one -- 25 lbs., a mere minnow.

No matter. The 90-pounders will still be there next year.