Cayo Espanto – Ambergris Caye

This place is over-the-top luxury for Belize. And easily makes this list, even if it covered the whole Caribbean. If you want the ultimate place to relax, with some of the best service in the Caribbean, and the ideal trailhead for ultimate sea adventure, Cayo Espanto is for you. Did I mention it’s a small private island to boot? Adventure is moments away at Cayo Espanto when you don your scuba or snorkel gear to explore the world’s second-largest barrier-reef system. The reef is right out your back door. Three miles from San Pedro, off the coast of Belize, Cayo Espanto is truly a spectacular and private retreat with spa services too. World class snorkeling, scuba diving, amazing food, attentive staff, and massages all await you at Cayo Espanto. As a note: the whole staff meets you when you pull up to the dock…“(the plane, the plane.)”

Chabil Mar Villas – Placencia

On the Placencia Peninsula, next to the famed Turtle Inn, is the Chablis Mar Villas Resort, our pick for the place to stay in Placencia. This place is just very tastefully done, including beautiful landscaping from the front gate to the beach. Chabil offers different types of luxury villas ranging from on-the-beach oceanfront and great ocean view villas with both one and two bedrooms. They have a very cool and romantic honeymoon suite too. Almost all the villas have great sea views or views of Placencia’s whole bay. You can get spa services right on your private  balcony with a great view. This little slice of paradise also sits on the best beach on Belize’s mainland. And the staff, from the front desk gals to the in-suite waiters, are welcoming and very friendly. In-your-suite room service offers you some of the best food in Placencia without leaving your suite. Great place to stay whether you a couple or an entire family.

Turtle Inn – Placencia

Regardless of whether you think Turtle Inn is the best on this list, it’s a fact that Turtle and Francis Ford Coppola single-handedly helped make Belize tourism what it is today and put Placencia on the map. It also didn’t hurt that the resort shared both his big name and his big-name guest list. From the moment you walk into the lobby you are transformed to a different place. Belize, Bali, Thailand? Not sure but it has a great feel and totally changes your paradigm. The natural Belizean hardwoods, the front desk carving brought by Coppola from Bali, and the raised floor above a mock jungle setting is perfect. The rooms (with no air) are far eastern in their look and feel, and most sit right on the beach allowing for fresh Caribbean breezes and the gentle rolling waves off the sea. Coppola’s personal suite is available too but will set you back over a grand a night. It’s very private, with over-the-top panache and a private beachfront pool. The other rooms and suites are unique and well-appointed and all come with great Belizean service.  Two really good restaurants make this a great stay for those willing to shell out a few extra bucks…and then there is his other gem…

Blancaneaux – San Ignacio

I feel (and many others agree) this place is more amazing and I think a better experience than even Turtle Inn. Set in the Mayan Mountains at the foot of a beautiful river are a dozen amazing cabanas spread out on a lush tropical landscape that instantly puts you at-ease with nature. Although there a few different styles and sizes of these luxury thatched cabanas, each is made with rich Belizean hardwoods that just give them a rich and luxurious feeling. You have a sense of lush jungle everywhere but you’re in the middle of a pine ridge forest. Like Turtle Inn, the food is excellent and the service is very good and very personal. There are couples’ decks spread around the rocks along the river for napping or reading a great book.  It’s s-o-o-o-o quiet and so peaceful here that it makes for a truly amazing experience. Frankly you can take a dip in the river as well if napping isn’t your thing. The available adventure tours in the mountains are much different than those you’ll find out on the coast. So, step-up and get one of the larger cabanas, sit out on your deck and enjoy.

Belizean Dreams – Hopkins

If you’re in the Hopkins area there are two cool places to stay. Belizean Dreams is one of them. Here, the accommodations are well-appointed two- and three- bedroom villas, with a great second-story master suite for views of the Caribbean. Service here is personal and the small palapa restaurant by the pool and right on the beach offers really good food and drinks. They have a sister resort about a mile away offering more of the same, really nice villas on the beach including some real estate for sale within the resort. This feels more like a second home than a hotel or resort.

Jaguar Reef – Hopkins

Also in Hopkins is Jaguar Reef Lodge located next door to Belizean Dreams. Both are situated on a nice beach within easy reach of a quiet and unspoiled part of the beautiful offshore reef.  Watch the sun come up over the ocean from your room or suite and enjoy the sunset over the Mayan mountains from your back veranda. The accommodations are roomy thatched units, pleasantly rough around the edges, all surrounding a beautiful lodge with good food and friendly service. This place has one of the best menus for adventure tours in the country.

Kanantik – Stann Creek

If you want a quiet place on a very nice private beach, Kanantik is for you (last time I was there they didn’t allow kids). Feels like your own private resort. There are only 20 or so very cool, private, tasteful beach cabanas with indoor/outdoor baths. The landscape and grounds are manicured to perfection and the service and staff are perfect, too. For the most part it’s all-inclusive but don’t let that fool you.  This is a very custom experience and the food and drinks are great. Roberto, the owner, a divemaster, has one of the finest diving operations in the country with a beautiful dock system and two really nice boats. If you are looking for a beach hut but don’t want to rough it too much I highly recommend this place. Oh, and it has enough real estate for its own private airstrip.

Turneffe Island Resort

To start with this is an intimate resort on an island located off the coast of Belize situated in one of the three large atolls. It’s a pretty spectacular setting for sure. Unlike a lot of places you’d stay, this resort’s cabanas (the most desirable accommodations), ring the island so each gets a view of the white sand beach and the azure water.  The Deluxe and the Superior suites in the main house are very well-appointed and offer all the exotic feel you need to disconnect and unwind. As a diving and fishing launch point it may be the best in Belize. If isolation and white, white sand is your thing, this is paradise.

Chaa Creek – San Ignacio – Maya Mountains

A pioneer in eco-lodging, this secluded 365-acre nature reserve is perched above the banks of the Macal River in the foothills of the Maya Mountains, and offers an unspoiled ambience like few resorts in Belize. Chaa Creek caters to the traveler looking for both physical and intellectual challenges and its programs and activities revolve around the environment, culture and archaeology of Belize. The cottages and suites are mostly thatched roofed with an inviting rich jungle theme with lots of pretty hardwoods. Try the new Treetop Suites, very cool. And, don’t miss the spa here, it may be the best in the country. They also just invested in a great new pool to take the edge off at the end long day of adventure.

Victoria House, San Pedro – Ambergris Caye

Talk about casual luxury. No shoes required, great staff, great Caribbean food. The kitchen will cook your catch, the bartender will make ceviche while you shower and change for dinner (again no shoes)!  Rooms range from plantation rooms and casitas to a three-bedroom plantation house with a breathtaking oceanfront veranda. All well done and appointed. The secluded Rainforest Suite, just 50 feet away from the Caribbean, is a favorite of honeymooners featuring a wraparound front veranda, floor-to-ceiling windows and French doors.

Saltwater fly fishers, we have some great news; you no longer have to wait ’til you’re dead to go to heaven.

If you’ve fly-fished much you’ve probably read that Belize is your best shot at a “flats slam,” a hat trick of catching a tarpon, bonefish, and permit in one day on the fly, and that Belize has some of the bar-none best inshore saltwater flyfishing in the world.

Many places have good action for tarpon, or bonefish, or snook or permit. Belize is unique in that it has superlative quantities of all four.

But what ultimately makes Belize stand out is the rarest, most challenging ghost of the flats and the ultimate saltwater trophy: the big long-finned reel-busting bruisers known as permit. Belize is widely regarded as having the highest concentrations of large permit in the world.

To give you an idea, I spent five months in the Florida Keys in the late ’90s, living and working but mostly fishing. The Keys are famed for flats fishing, and the very first time out, to my utter shock, I ran right into a big permit while wading the flats alone. An enormous, spooky, solo fish that ghosted away as soon as I pitched my crab pattern its way. This is not going to be as hard as they say, I thought to myself.

But that was it. In four more months, that is the ONLY permit I saw in dozens upon dozens of expeditions in the Keys.

Fast forward four years, to the Stann Creek District in Central Belize. Up with the sun on a clear beautiful morning, we head out with a guide and run only 10 minutes in the boat. The guide turns the skiff around an island point, kills the motor and points to the shoreline. In the dawn light, there are two groups of ripples in the water, and as he poles us closer, my stomach starts to knot up. The ripples take shape and start moving around and I know it can be only one thing, exactly what my eyes are telling me it is: two schools of five or more permit…and they are big, big, fish.

To anglers, this is what is known as nirvana. Belize is super-famous for incredible diving, vacationing, island hopping, and general tropical paradise stuff…but those are all things that you can in fact find elsewhere. Maybe not as great as Belize, or all in one place like Belize, but you can in fact find them elsewhere on this wonderful watery planet of ours.

But there is simply nowhere on earth where you are going to see permit like that.

An hour after that initiation ritual, we headed out to a reef in Belize where the flats meet slightly deeper water and we started to wade along a ridgeline of coral as the tide rushes over it. We have to wade, my guide says, “because there are too many fish to use the boat.”

Dunno about you, but, um, that is NOT a problem I have ever had before!

But I soon see he is right, as we encounter school after school of permit shifting back and forth across the reef, their tails sparkling like sword tips in the sun sticking up to six inches out of the water as they root around the bottom for crustaceans. If you were poling along in a boat, you would be bumping into fish right and left and scaring them: wading gives you a much lower profile in the water.

In several surreal instances, I witness the most elusive trophy of the flats actually competing to eat my fly! In one unforgettable moment, I am unable to breathe as two cookie-sheet-sized permit race each other to chomp at my crab pattern right as it reaches my rod tip.

Despite the hype, and the fact that I’m a lifelong obsessed angler, I was still unprepared for what I would experience. Most anglers I know personally came back from Belize with photos of small permit, dinner-plate sized fish they scored while chasing bonefish or other species. I thought permit in Belize were numerous but small, like the big schools of small bonefish that frequent the northern islands.

The reason for my friends’ smaller fish is simple. They had mostly fished out of Ambergris and other islands while on vacation, and therein lies the difference. The central part of Belize is another ballgame entirely—the permit run as big as they do anywhere in the world. It’s a habitat and forage issue quotient that creates the size, and it is probably also tied to fishing pressure, too. Unlike tarpon and bonefish, permit are fabulous eating, so people who aren’t high-minded fly fisher types are eager to take them home.

Seeing isn’t always catching, even in Belize, as I would find out the next day. Permit are permit, and almost always a challenge, even when abundant. The next day, we saw nearly equal numbers of fish and had thrilling stalk after stalk but instead of fighting over my fly, they just won’t bite. They are big brutally strong fish on a fly rod, with a body built for leverage, and catching more than a few a day will wear a flyrodder out. My rod arm was still stiff from the day before—the only other time I’ve had that most pleasant of unpleasantries is fishing a sockeye run in Alaska, where the river had more fish than water.

On that second day—and this is not a typo—I saw as many as 80-plus permit finning along a shallow stretch of reef in the morning sun, fins glimmering in schools of two to ten fish in water just a few feet deep.

I thought back to the one fish I saw in six months of fishing the Keys, and giggled. This little country has an awful lot of magic swirling around in it, I thought to myself.

No, there is not another place in the world where this is possible…at least it has not been discovered yet.