Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls | Botany Bay Plantation — Bonai's Jungle, an Hour From Charleston

The jungle of the invented African republic of Bonai — the river Ace paddles, the green wall the Wachati village sits inside — is Lowcountry South Carolina. Botany Bay Plantation on Edisto Island supplied it in June 1995: 4,630 acres of maritime forest, salt marsh, tidal creek and old field, dense enough on camera to pass for somewhere ten thousand kilometres away.

It works because the island refuses to be tidy. Live oaks lean across the sand road with Spanish moss hanging off them. The marsh runs flat and gold to the horizon, then the treeline closes again. At the seaward edge, a half-mile walk from the parking area, the beach is stacked with the bleached trunks of drowned oaks and palmettos that the ocean has been taking back for decades.

The property was two Colonial-era plantations, Sea Cloud and Bleak Hall, merged into one in 1933, bequeathed to the state in 1977, and only opened to the public in 2008. The 1840s Bleak Hall outbuildings still stand, and there are shell rings on the site three to five thousand years old. Entry is free. Stop at the kiosk on Botany Bay Road, fill in a day pass, drive the loop. It closes Tuesdays for scheduled hunts and otherwise runs sunrise to sunset, and nothing leaves the beach with you — not a shell, not a piece of driftwood.

Come at low tide on a weekday morning. There is no sign anywhere on the preserve about the film, and that is the pleasure of it. You are standing in a movie's Africa and everyone around you is looking at birds.

Photograph via Wikimedia Commons / U.S. National Archives.