The first Category 5 hurricane to make landfall since Hurricane Andrew crushed South Florida in 1992 missed the megaresorts of Cancun by about 150 miles, instead pounding the coast near the Mexico/Belize border. The AP reports that Hurricane Dean’s winds reached 165 miles per hour. The area isn’t heavily populated nor is it as touristed as Cancun, but it does contain small hotels, the Costa Maya cruise ship port and the Sian Kaan Biosphere Reserve. Definitive reports on how those areas fared will come later, but Hurricane Dean’s intensity—it registered the third lowest pressure at landfall on record, according to the Washington Post—signals the potential for massive damage.

Rolf Potts has posted a Q&A with writer Joshua Berman, whose book on Belize won the 2005 Lowell Thomas Award for best guidebook. He tells Potts that travel writing isn’t the most lucrative gig: “The only way I’ve been able to live off my writing is by taking my relatively meager book advances and running straight for the border, preferably to a country like Nicaragua where my expenses are minimal to nil.”

In the travel film “The Beach,” Leonardo DiCaprio plays a young backpacker in Thailand who ditches Bangkok’s Khao San Road in search of an idyllic island. That, of course, turns out to be a big mistake. But it looks as though DiCaprio himself is still itching for the island good life. According to reports, he has purchased a private island off Belize for $1.75 million.

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