Caye Caulker
Saturday, December 23
Starting from Flores in northern Guatemala, we continued our journey and headed east. A few hours later, we crossed the border of the next country on our trip: Belize.
Belize is the second smallest country in Latin America (smallest is El Salvador) and has only 440,000 inhabitants. Although Belize has direct borders with Guatemala and Mexico, the difference between Belize and the rest of Central America was immediately noticeable after crossing the border. Belize is the only country in Latin America where the official language is English and not Spanish. Although many of the residents also speak Spanish, almost all street signs, signage systems and restaurant and shop signs were written in English, which was very unusual for us after having spent four months in Latin America. In addition to English and Spanish, a lot of people speak Creole. The Belizean Creole language developed primarily through the interaction between Africans (who were brought to Central America as slaves) and Europeans (who came to Belize through colonization). Even in the short time we spent in Belize, we noticed how diverse the population of Belize was. In Belize, for example, the Black Community was much more present than we had experienced in Mexico or Guatemala. Creole is an independent language that we often heard during our time in Belize, but did not understand a word of it. We therefore spoke a mix of English and Spanish every day, depending on which language our counterpart preferred.
After crossing the border into Belize, we drove for a few more hours through lush green landscapes. We drove past Belize City and went further east until we reached the coast, where we finally got into a small, simple boat. The actual destination of our Belize trip was not on the mainland, but was the small Caribbean island of "Caye Caulker". It was now December 23rd and a few weeks earlier Christoph and I had decided to spend this year's Christmas in the Caribbean, as we were already close to it as we stayed in the north of Guatemala.
The island of Caye Caulker is a tiny island in the Caribbean Sea, is only 2 km wide and 8 km long and has about 1300 inhabitants. Due to its small size and being not that well-known internationally, fortunately there are no large hotel buildings or luxury hotels on the island at all. The island is so small that there are not even cars, just golf carts, which you don't really need anyway, as you can easily walk everywhere. We rented a small bungalow on the island and spent the next few days on Caye Caulker. The official motto of the island is "Go Slow", which people on Caye Caulker live up to. The atmosphere is relaxed everywhere, there is no rush or stress and we were constantly greeted warmly on the street by smiling locals, even if we had never seen them before. On the streets right next to our bungalow, the neighborhood children were playing soccer, families were having barbecues on the street, and in the small shops and in most of the restaurants, locals were shopping and eating out there as well. Although we weren’t the only tourists on the island, we never had the feeling that we were living in a fake parallel world made for tourists, but were able to take part in normal island life, even though we were tourists. We spent the next few days walking around the island and swimming in the beautiful turquoise Caribbean Sea, hoping that the island of Caye Caulker would stay like this forever and be spared from large hotel groups building huge hotels there!
