Jaguars, toucans and talking kangaroos

Three hours of steady stroking brings us to the camp, where it looks as though Tarzan has been working overtime. There’s a thatched-roof main building connected by a catwalk to a string of six huts stacked on steel stilts 20 feet above the stream, as a precaution against floods. (“I took the local style and super-sized it,” says Karas of his design and construction modus.) Once again, we’ve got the place to ourselves, and the hosts are clearly happy to have us.

Entering my room, I’m pleased to find that the native building materials are exposed, the shower works fine and there’s furniture on the porch overlooking the water and jungle canopy. And despite the remoteness of the camp, the standard of cuisine is maintained: Earlier today, at Indian Creek, lunch was a lobster quesadilla; tonight’s dinner at Jungle Camp is thyme-marinated filet mignon, with yampi gratinado and demi-glace provençal. With this combination of deep wilderness, high comfort and total exclusivity, Karas has achieved his Central American safari ideal.

In the morning I set out with the kayak guide Antonio Shol for another session of tapir spotting. “If you hear a cuckoo on the right-hand side, that’s good luck,” Antonio says, and sure enough, we soon hear one on the right. As we paddle back upstream, Antonio identifies the various fruiting trees and the birds that favor them. He points to a snag above the canopy where some toucans, with their comically outsized brilliant yellow-orange beaks, are resting. A pale-billed woodpecker with a crimson head hammers on a dead trunk; a hummingbird flits around a stream-side vine, its wings whirring like a tiny electric fan. An Amazon kingfisher skims the surface ahead of our boats, as if reconnoitering for tapir on our behalf, albeit unsuccessfully. Antonio explains that tapir walk underwater, submerging for minutes at a time. I say hippos do the same, but he’s never heard of them. I start trying to describe them, but despair of doing justice to such an outlandish beast. Then Antonio starts talking about kangaroos, which he saw for the first time last night on a DVD movie in camp. He says they’re tall and fast, and asks me where they come from and whether they can speak, “the way you and I are speaking now.”

No they cannot, I regret to inform him, but I am very glad he asked — his complete ingenuousness is as sweetly refreshing as it is hilarious. Here’s a young man who speaks several more languages than I do, knows every bird in the jungle, who sees a kids’ movie and thinks kangaroos can talk. The MTV revolution has definitely not been televised in this part of Belize.

Zach Stovall

Antonio and I spend a good chunk of the afternoon paddling downstream, where the bush thins out to allow a different kind of seeing, clearer and more vivid; individual ceiba trees appear grander, against a bluer sky. It’s probably just due to better light, but I feel my perception and appreciation is being sharpened by exposure to the jungle, the remove from civilization’s chatter. For a long time we watch a family of four howler monkeys feeding in a big tree; a pair of iguanas sun themselves in another. I paddle in close to study a citroline trogon perched on a branch hanging over the stream; it’s exquisite, plump with a yellow breast and brilliant blue-green-violet back and tail. We marvel at the dangling colonies of Montezuma orapendola nests, and the bizarre bowing gesture the bird makes when it calls.

In two days on Golden Stream we encounter no strangers. I’m so completely immersed in this lush, wild environment that occasional airplanes passing overhead momentarily jolt me from the reverie with a reminder that the outside world is not so far away. Still no tapir, but I fully concur with Antonio when he remarks at the end of six-and-a-half hours of paddling, “The cuckoo gave us good luck today.”

No trip to Belize would be complete without a snorkeling excursion to the reef, and the lodge provides a skiff to ferry us the nine miles downstream to Port Honduras Marine Reserve. There we are greeted by a curious dolphin and exactly zero other boats. We stop to see two-acre Moho Cay, where Karas will soon begin building a lodge, another link in the chain. From there it’s another 30 minutes out to the vast barrier reef that stretches all the way up the Yucatán. As soon as I plunge into the water, I find myself hovering over a spotted eagle ray; the moment I lose it, a southern stingray enters my view.

A few days ago I was caving in the Maya Underworld, yesterday paddling through tapir and toucan territory, and today I’m catching rays on one of the world’s great reefs. What a place. No wonder Ken Karas fell in love with it and wants people to see it at its natural best.

Contact Belize Lodge Expeditions: 888-292-2462, 011-501-223-6324; http://www.belizelodge.com/. Closed August and September.

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