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A magical world at Francis Ford Coppola's luxe resorts in Belize

 
Away from the resort areas, the lush beauty of Belize provides an escape from the stress of the working world.
Away from the resort areas, the lush beauty of Belize provides an escape from the stress of the working world.
Published March 5, 2014

By John Horn

Los Angeles Times

MOUNTAIN PINE RIDGE FOREST RESERVE, Belize

As Hummingbird Highway carves away from Belize's resort-laden sands, pavement dissolves into rutted dirt tracks and the dense jungle canopy starts to press in from all sides. The tallest buildings pushing through the foliage are Maya ruins, and howler monkeys and macaws lurk in the ceiba trees. Late at night, distant thunderstorms ring the horizon, broad sheets of lightning illuminating the mountains.

Before I brought my family to Belize for 10 days last summer, I packed a copy of Heart of Darkness, knowing that although traveling through Central America wouldn't precisely parallel a trip up the Congo River, Joseph Conrad's novel would remind me that the book was the indirect inspiration for our itinerary.

I had traveled to Belize several times before I started a family, and even though tourism has transformed much of the country for the worse in the intervening 20 years, I wanted to revisit what I loved most: lavish lodgings smack in the middle of untamed, natural beauty. And because I cover the movie business for the Los Angeles Times, I thought of no better way to see the country than by staying at Francis Ford Coppola's two Belizean resorts, Blancaneaux Lodge and Turtle Inn.

Not long after he shot Apocalypse Now, his Vietnam-set retelling of Heart of Darkness, the director traveled to what had recently been known as British Honduras. He was searching for a primitive escape that recalled the tropical wilds of the Philippines, where Apocalypse Now was filmed.

When he landed in Belize in 1981, he was really looking for a getaway where he could write. But he ended up becoming an innkeeper, and his swank, eco-friendly resorts — one on Belize's shoreline outside Placencia, the other tucked into the untamed forest about an hour from the country's western border with Guatemala — became the standard against which other Belizean high-end area properties are measured.

"The jungle is a wonderful place," he told me after we returned from Belize. "And I was looking to re-create the experience I had working on the film."

As Coppola spent more time with his family in the wild, he added modern conveniences to his getaway, then staff to keep up the place. He didn't intend to house paying guests. But little by little, his secluded retreat started to look a lot like a hotel.

In 1993, his would-be writing escape was re-christened Blancaneaux Lodge, after the French botanist who originally owned the land. Twenty cabanas and villas now nestle along Privassion Creek, about an hour's teeth-rattling drive by four-wheel-drive vehicle from the nearest paved road.

Like Coppola's foray into winemaking, which started as a hobby, this passion for Belizean resorts soon became a business. He also owns another property in this Central American nation of 324,000, the equally opulent Turtle Inn, which sits outside a Creole fishing village on Belize's southern coast. (Coppola's Central American properties also include La Lancha, near Guatemala's Lago Peten Itza.)

Deep in the jungle

If Blancaneaux Lodge and Turtle Inn were Hollywood movies, you would recognize similar directorial touches throughout — spacious open-air accommodations, handcrafted furnishings, organic local produce, Coppola's wines, impeccable hospitality and a variety of pricey guided excursions. But the two properties are ultimately as different as Coppola's The Conversation is from The Cotton Club.

If you prefer self-directed days amid solitude at the start of your vacation and more locals and local culture at the end, start at Blancaneaux, which can be reached by a private airstrip or a three-hour drive from Belize City.

The driveway into Blancaneaux borders its sprawling organic garden, whose tomatoes, arugula, beets and cucumbers are used in the property's two restaurants, which prepare the breakfasts included in the room rate. (Lunch and dinner are extra; for the four of us, dinner with wine averaged $120, while lunch was $60.)

If you don't want to leave the property, Blancaneaux has just enough, but barely so, to keep you occupied for a few days. The nearest other resort, the Gaïa Riverlodge, is a 15-minute drive, and there's no town in the immediate vicinity, which is largely populated with Prussian Mennonite farms.

Blancaneaux, which has worked with the Rainforest Alliance conservation organization to develop and maintain environmentally sustainable practices, has no air conditioners or televisions, and at night, without artificial illumination, the grounds are so dark you need a flashlight to navigate.

We spent a fair amount of time lounging by the creek and in the pool, and our two sons, then 8 and 13, killed hours at the bar playing the Tower of Hanoi stacking puzzle, while their parents sipped spiked fruit punch and Belikin, the local beer.

Eager to see the area, we took ourselves on a one-hour hike to Big Rock Falls, swimming underneath a cascade and enjoying a picnic lunch ($50 for four) prepared and packed into two day packs by the lodge's staff.

If, like us, you don't have a rental car, the more ambitious trips out of Blancaneaux aren't cheap. We took three excursions, a 12-hour journey to Guatemala's massive ruins of Tikal (about $1,000 for the family, which includes entrance fees, lunch, three separate guides and a private tour) and half-day trips canoeing about a mile up the pitch-black Barton Creek caves ($450) and zip lining through the local forest ($100).

Other outings include guided mountain bike tours, a night hike in search of jaguars (very few have been spotted) and birding trips. We thought the food at Blancaneaux was fine, but after several days of not eating anywhere else, we had a driver take us to Gaïa Riverlodge for dinner. It was perfectly lovely, but not as good as where we were staying.

On the beach

If Blancaneaux's origins were guided by happenstance, the history of Turtle Inn is a bit unluckier. After numerous Blancaneaux guests asked him to recommend a beach-side place to stay, Coppola decided to buy a rustic property on an exposed spit of land near the tip of a sandy peninsula outside Placencia.

Just months after he acquired the resort, it was destroyed by Hurricane Iris in 2001. "There was nothing left — it was just an empty beach," Coppola said. "So I rebuilt it in a much more deluxe style."

Unlike Blancaneaux, the Turtle Inn property, with 25 thatched-roof cottages and villas, promises more to do off property than on it. Although you can book scuba trips from the hotel, dive shops abound nearby, and we spent countless hours swimming, snorkeling in the clear blue water and taking the resort's small catamaran and sea kayaks out for a spin.

Rather than pay Turtle Inn $80 a person for a half-day exploration of the mangrove islands along the Monkey River (where my sons and I ate live termites, a local delicacy), we paid $60 each to Splash Dive Center for the same trip. But when choppy seas forced another off-property tour operator to cancel our planned snorkeling trip to the spectacular national park Laughing Bird Caye, about an hour's boat ride, Turtle Inn booked its own more powerful boat and packed lunches for us. The cost was dear (about $600 for the whole day), but swimming with rays, turtles and thousands of fish was beyond price.

The nearby village of Placencia is packed with tiny restaurants serving fish and conch just brought to market, and every night we either rode the inn's bicycles or took its shuttle bus into town.

At both Blancaneaux and Turtle Inn, the disparity between the local standard of living and the comforts enjoyed by tourists is startling and disquieting. But neither resort feels like a fortress, and their environmental footprints are minimal — banana peels brought back from packed lunches are composted, and all the water bottles are refillable glass.

Coppola said the properties ultimately are a lot like movies. "The staff is the cast of the film, and the guests are the audience," he said. "And you invite your guests into a world, maybe a magical world. And as with a movie, there's always a detail — some little thing — that people remember."