The coast of Utopia: Barefoot life at its best

Four days later, in Livingston, Guatemala, the celebrations were still going on. Called La Buga, or "mouth of the great river" in Garifuna, Livingston is accessible only by boat or private plane. It was founded in 1802 by a buyei, or priest, who led people here from Roatan, in Honduras, and from Punta Gorda, in Belize. The night we arrived, there was a huge party in the cavernous town hall that lasted easily five hours. A gray-haired man, his face lit up with joy, introduced himself: Harvey had traveled sixty miles for this event. "Garifuna culture was being lost," he said, "but this, this — I love this."

Back aboard the Long Gone, there was a jumble of sacred and profane moments: A sea turtle raised a pale speckled arm in greeting as we slid past; the sink wouldn't drain; a big fish took the hook we were trailing from the back of the boat, then snapped it off, leaving us with just a piece of metal lure. In the next day's good wind, we flew across the water, zigging and zagging above fingers of reef; leaning over, I could watch the geography changing beneath us — the depth reader charted it: from 350 feet to 19, to 15, to 200 in a matter of minutes.

We were bound for Belize's Hunting Caye, a small island with a white sand beach, a couple of little thatched shelters, the Sapodilla Cayes Marine Reserve office where we would check in, and a coast guard station. By the evening of the second day, when we were safely harbored off its silken Halfmoon Beach, our engine would no longer speak to us at all.

The delay allowed us to take the dinghy to shore and confer with the people in the office and the officers of the peace. We also met Orlando Usher, whom Cynthia and I had noticed the day before standing alone in his old dory, a dugout canoe, on the sea, looking into the water. Orlando, a master fisherman, is fifty-six, a slight man with a natural wispy beard and cheeks like polished walnuts bridged by a finely cut nose. He was wearing a black beret, black rubber boots, and a black, pink, and purple women's windbreaker that was too big for him. With his deep knowledge of the area, his easy silence, and his unexpected humor, he's like a cross between a gnome and a sprite. He lives by himself in a tent on Hunting Caye. It turns out that he and Mark, our captain, are cousins — through the Youngs, an old Belizean family.

Orlando told Mark where to dive to collect lobsters for our dinner and explained to me how to fish at night in "burning water," when the fish leave phosphorescent trails revealing their location; about the sweetness of Sapodilla Tom, the sixty-five-foot-long sea creature that swims in these parts (ah, a whale shark!); how to read the "baffling winds," which hit your sail in puffs and then disappear, only to come again a little while later. It was late now, and Orlando gently pointed to the sky, high in the direction of eastern Honduras. "See that light moving out there?" he asked. In the sky, where all was still except for twinkling, one small light was moving north. "That's the cocaine plane, making its run," he said. The coast once controlled by pirates could still be called Smuggler's Run. Partly because much of the Atlantic coast is wild, contraband travels pretty easily up the Caribbean corridor to Mexico and then the United States.

Lunch in Miami, one of the tiniest traditionally Garifuna communities sprinkled along the Atlantic coast of Honduras, was a profoundly satisfying moment, when all the contradictions of the world came together. The village lies at the end of a sand barrier, straddling the narrow ribbon of land that seals Los Micos Lagoon off from the Caribbean Sea, west of the small town of Tela. It is just inside the Jeannette Kawas National Park, one of Honduras's largest, a magical mix of cloud forest, estuaries, mangroves, and beaches. Walking through the village felt almost like trespassing; there are no streets, only paths between the small houses, all built of thatch and reeds. The sand sparkles, and there are little decorative gardens around some of the houses. There's no electricity or running water. The cayucos, boats carved from tree trunks, were pulled up on the shore of the lagoon, but if it's early enough in the day and you ask around, someone will take you out fishing or touring the enchanting lagoon. There was a breeze off the ocean, and we sat down at Nany's Place, along benches and picnic tables. I got a green coconut with the top cut off so I could drink its cool water and scrape the jelly out with a spoon. We lingered under the palapa, with the beach on one side and a view of the lagoon on the other, drinking beer and chatting with whoever came by to hang out. Then my cell phone rang — New York City checking in.

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This waterfront has been providing subsistence to Garifuna and other coastal peoples for 300 years. Despite the unaffected feel of the place, there is fighting over the future of all this beauty. Dead palm trees en route to Miami haven't been replaced — perhaps, I was told, because the area is about to be developed. At the behest of the government, the Honduran Tourism Board plans to construct the Los Micos Beach & Golf Resort right here, between Miami and Tornabé, the next village over. The project is meant to be not only ambitious but environmentally sustainable; plans include up to five top-flight hotels, as well as villas, a twenty-seven-hole golf course, an equestrian center, a shopping center, and a marina. Conflict about the project abounds, with different points of view on what constitutes sustainability. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has asked the Honduran government to protect the nearby communities of San Juan Tela and Triunfo de la Cruz, where in the last year masked men forced one woman to sign over rights to ancestral lands at gunpoint and threatened, shot at, and harassed other community leaders. The guy who offered to watch the car while we walked around Miami said that his main concern is whether he'll get a job.

Across the water, on the island of Roatan, where I went next, the members of the Honduran legislature had all come over to sign a new law making the Bay Islands a free port — eliminating hotel and sales taxes for visitors as well as ending import duties and income tax for tourism businesses. Part of the deal is a new fifty-million-dollar terminal and deepwater port constructed by Carnival Cruise Lines that will be up and running in 2009 and will host up to seven thousand visitors a day.

Such major developments are under way all along the coast, not just in Honduras. Citizens in southern Belize are protesting the six-hundred-acre Ara Macao Resort & Marina, which will be built over the next five years at the top of the thread-thin peninsula leading to Placencia. They fear that it will completely overwhelm resources and undermine the largely Garifuna communities in between. Known locally as Scarlet Macaw, the development — to include a marina, 456 condos, 296 villas, two nine-hole golf courses, a casino, a hotel, and retail space — will be able to accommodate at capacity 13,000 people. In Panama's Bocas del Toro, there are environmental and community concerns about Red Frog Beach, an eight-hundred-unit residential-tourism development next to a national marine park.

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