Seeing is Belizeing

Wedged between Guatemala and Mexico's Yucat·n Peninsula, Belize has long been a destination for adventure travellers. But a quarter of a century since independence, this predominantly English-speaking country is ready for visitors whose idea of grand adventure is to move from prix fixe to a la carte.

Where Mexico is wild-spirited and Jamaica unruly, Belize is tropically sonorous. In Placencia, a sandy strip of land bordered on one side by reef-protected ocean and on the other by a lagoon, sleep falls like a heavy veil. It is here, amid fishing camps and ecolodges, that several small spa-resorts have become established, among them Francis Ford Coppola's Turtle Inn and The Placencia, an Italian-run seafront hotel with the largest swimming pool in the country and its own whitewashed beachfront wedding chapel.

But the talk in Placencia's many scuba and snorkelling shops, and in the tourist bars and restaurants, centres on the mysterious visitation of the Caribbean's population of whale sharks, the fabulous polka-dot fish that grow up to 60 feet in length and are completely harmless. They feed on plankton, sucking water into a wide mouth and blowing it out through their gills.

You are more likely to see one in Belize than anywhere else - the season starts in March, though September is said to be the best time to see the largest. The Gladden Spit is an elbow in what is the northern hemisphere's longest coral reef some 20 miles off the coast of Placencia. It is considered by marine scientists to be a critical area of conservation and is where whale sharks most like to gather.

Around full moon they come to feed on the clouds of fish spawn released to the synchronised mass-mating rituals of the cubera snapper, a larger, striped version of the standard dinner-plate snapper. At their most intense, the snapper form a vertical column of copulating fish and produce a vertical buffet of fertilised spawn that whale sharks find irresistible. As many as 25 whale sharks have been counted in an area 150 feet in diameter circling back and forth through the milky cloud of billions of gametes.

Scuba divers, too, have their own rituals to follow and the sea off the barrier reef is dotted with clusters of submerged bubble-blowing humans. Suspension at 70 feet below the surface in 3,000ft of water with no point of reference can be a vertigo-inducing experience, and it is also easy to see how divers get the rapture of the deep in this warm blue imperium and swim off.

But finding snapper doesn't mean whale sharks will show up. Fishing for the largest fish in the world is like fishing for any fish. Who knows why they don't come? An armada of mini-jellyfish floats past, a leather-backed turtle, a reef shark, a large amberjack. After more than six hours underwater, all we have seen is a glimpse of a whale shark below and one on the surface that cruises lazily by the Placencia hotel launch, as if to prove they are truly massive and defiantly independent.

Marine scientists now theorise that the established technique for getting the fish to show - form a column of divers and release a plume of compressed air to simulate spawn - is no longer fooling the whale sharks. The big females rarely come up on cue now, says my guide - perhaps because they've been fooled too many times into thinking there's food when it's just bubbles.

The Belizean government recognised that its natural resources, if properly managed, will provide income and employment for years to come. The government has set aside 40 per cent of the country as protected land and is strongly protective of its ocean resources, especially its islands and cays. Some are owned by US movie stars including Leonardo DiCaprio; others, like Ranguana Caye, have tiny hotels perfectly positioned for rolling out of bed and straight into the sea, but mostly they are still uninhabited.

With so many aquatic possibilities to choose from it's easy to forget that like Mexico to the north and Guatemala to west, Belize has the ruins of the Mayan civilisation to give the country true cultural depth. The classic and postclassic sites here, including the sprawling metropolis of Tikal over the border in Guatemala, are some of the finest in the Mayan world.