MikePadgett.com

Caye Caulker

— Island life: Caye Caulker's motto is 'go slow' and here visitors learn to take the rough with the smooth.”

I found that there were two sides to Caye Caulker.

This small island – population 1,200 – retains a lot of Caribbean charm and for now resists the crass overdevelopment that has turned neighbouring Ambergris Caye into a theme park. On Front Street you’re dazzled by the brightly-painted beach houses. Your 15 year old snorkel guide is already a divemaster yet he’s cool, modest and has impeccable manners. You get broad smiles every morning at your favourite café.

Meanwhile drug pushers loiter outside the Chinese-owned supermarket. Scruffy, shambling men make muffled, salacious comments to tourist women. Cute little street kids call you a rich whore as you leave your lodgings.

In contrast to those rainy Cayo mornings, we touched down on Caulker under hot sunshine. We took one of those golf buggy taxis from the airstrip. The driver nodded to everyone he passed on the sandy road. Palms swayed and flowers burst with colour on all sides.

We arrived at the office to take the keys to our rented place and there we saw the first of many enormous dogs, gazing at us ambivalently as we swiped our credit card. I’d read about all this. I considered myself quite well-informed. All the same, we were reminded to be sensible. To say no to offers of drugs. To avoid getting into conversations with sketchy types. We wouldn’t do that in our own city, so we shouldn’t do it here.

As warnings go, these are pretty mild. They fit right in with the advice about tap water (you can’t drink it and you probably shouldn’t rinse with it) and the high local cost of sunscreen. All the same, standing at a counter opposite a handy-looking man filling out forms and being scrutinised by his man-sized dog, this scene did have something of the police caution about it.

Go slow

Even laying in a hammock, listening to Parliament and sipping on rum and lime seems pretty lively for this place.

It’s late afternoon and as I gently swing this way and that, only the hummingbirds are busy. J is nearby sketching a particularly fecund looking coconut palm.

Caye Caulker seems quite touristic after San Ignacio. A few Dutch, a few Canadians, lots of Americans. And we all rather stand out, as we did among a big group of spectators at yesterday’s ladies’ football match. I never did find out which teams were playing. [Island Stars (home team) vs. Millenium Girls (Belize City), I later learned]

Caulkerans [sic] are noticeably more entrepreneurial than San Ignacians [sic, again]. Many family homes are also shopfronts or cookhouses or garages. The ancient lady two doors down will do your laundry and she’s had a little sign made to tell you so.

During our ride out of San Ignacio, Dutch shuttle driver William Hofman had told us how local cabbies resented his success. He was stealing their business, they told him. But incoming tourists were not calling them, retorted William. Development is inevitable, he reckoned. The only question is whether or not you were ready to participate.

If San Ignacio’s cabbies are dithering, Caulkerans seem clearly to have made their choice. Doubtless this has changed Caye Caulker but perhaps no more so than Hurricane Hattie in 1961. The evidence is everywhere you care to look. For building materials, all the lovely hardwoods are gradually being replaced by concrete and the builders are piling on more storeys. Nature will find concrete much harder to hide than the limestone of Mayan temples.

Those of us who visit as tourists are largely responsible for these changes. The Caye Caulker community shares its island with tourists – whose presence doubles the population every year – and that must surely represent a lot of pressure and unusual influences on local resources and development.

Offshoring

Offshoring in Europe may mean having one’s job done cheaper by Asia but in Caye Caulker it’s about taking a boat ride out into the beautiful waters that make the Northern Cayes such an attraction.

J and I did the classic Hol Chan – Shark Ray Alley snorkel trip with Carlos Tours and, whilst the reef is not for various reasons on the scale one finds in the Red Sea, the proximity to sharks and stingrays is exciting.

Elsewhere we were fortunate for our last full day in Caulker to visit Goff’s Caye, which included a stop on the way to watch manatees at Swallow Caye. Though sometimes perfectly deserted, the tiny Goff’s Caye seems to be a favourite destination for cruise ship parties. Whether or not that was their origin, we were probably lucky that there were so few other groups on the Caye that day.