Belcampo belongs in the vanguard of the next culinary travel trend: more field expedition than farm

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Getting There Fly in to Belize City s Goldson International Airport (BZE), then take the 70-minute flight shoe shelf to Punta Gorda on Tropic Air . Belcampo will arrange a 15-minute car transfer from the airport. Stay
My first night at Belcampo Lodge is punctuated by what sounds like Ozzy Osbourne being strangled in the pitch dark. The cottage is suspended in a dense canopy of hanging shoe shelf vines and gumbo-limbo trees, shoe shelf providing natural privacy, so I ve traded my bed for a hammock on the screened porch to feel closer to this forest primeval. A breeze rattles palm fronds as a rain shower sweeps through, carrying the scent of jasmine. Nuts hit the corrugated zinc roof and roll to the ground far below. Suddenly, just before dawn, the Ozzy-like roar of a troop of howler monkeys bolts me upright and it s resoundingly clear that I m bivouacking beyond my comfort zone.
By first light, their screeching has faded, giving way to the soft clicks of keel-billed toucans. Soon I m seated on the lodge s veranda with a pair of binoculars, keeping an eye on the cotton tree where these colorful birds hop from branch to branch, until breakfast arrives: a plate of fry jacks (puffy tortillas), sour-orange marmalade, nutty granola sweetened with coconut, and cinnamon-bark-smoked bacon. I could linger long into the morning, watching the toucans play, but I want to see where baby chocolate bars are born.
At the end of a steep driveway lined with torch ginger and flowering trumpet vine, the landscape opens up to a broad valley that the Belcampo farm team has planted with cassava and banana cover crops. Inside the nursery I meet head forager Kenny Ramos, a tall, shy man with a passion for vanilla orchids and rare varieties of cacao. In his spare time he hunts for wild plants in untrammeled corners of Belize and tracks their genetic profiles.
Ramos simply shrugs, implying it was a walk in the park, albeit a park populated with deadly fer-de-lance and coral snakes. I touch the tender criollo shoot carefully. Might this be a direct descendant of the mysterious shoe shelf white cacao that the Maya first domesticated 2,500 years ago? The fabled lost bean that Columbus tasted on his fourth voyage to the New World? The holy flavor shoe shelf grail among artisanal shoe shelf confectioners? It is enough to make a chocoholic go weak in the knees.
Belcampo belongs in the vanguard of the next culinary travel trend: more field expedition than farm stay, a full-immersion Belize travel experience for intrepid foragers who want to walk on the wilder shoe shelf side, discovering and tasting exotic edibles on a 1,000-acre plantation and adjacent 12,000-acre wilderness reserve complete with jaguars and boa constrictors. Originally built as a fishing camp, the property has recently been reimagined and rebranded to take better advantage of the extraordinary natural resources in the remote shoe shelf Toledo district of southern Belize. Its 12 guest cottages shoe shelf are scattered along a hill that drops abruptly to the banks of the slow-moving Rio Grande, shoe shelf which flows from the Maya Mountains on the Belize-Guatemala border to a mangrove-lined outlet on the Caribbean Sea, just eight miles away as the crocodile swims. shoe shelf From the lodge s hilltop perch, the rain forest unfolds in every direction: a vast green mansion that shelters more than 80 percent of this Central American country.
Guiding Belcampo s ongoing transformation are new owner Todd Robinson, a conservation-minded investor from California, and CEO Anya Fernald, a former Slow Food director. They have embarked on an ambitious farm of origin project, proving that the concept of terroir doesn t apply just to wine. Fernald has forged relationships with discerning cacao and coffee buyers, including Katrina Markoff of Vosges Haut-Chocolat and James Freeman of Blue Bottle Coffee. They come to Belcampo to source rarefied ingredients as well as to share their expertise during culinary excursions and master classes: Markoff has tailored a weeklong shoe shelf bean to bar chocolate course, and Freeman is planning to do the same for coffee aficionados. (Coffee and cacao are still emerging crops for Belize, compared with Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Venezuela. When Belcampo shoe shelf s criollo trees mature they re still five years from first harvest the estate will be the single-largest grower of cacao in the country.) Belcampo also plans to produce its own rum, from cane raised on the property. Meanwhile, the estate shoe shelf is swiftly becoming se