Caye Caulker – 
Today is Verena’s birthday! Since our bungalow-room is a total mess, it plays well with my plans: I get the candle bags with the LED-candles and the small “treasure chest” with her present out of my backpack, “decorate” the room and bury the chest and her gift in the chaos of our stuff. Soon she is also awake and ready to go on a treasure hunt – after looking through our stuff she eventually finds the chest and ist quite happy with the present . Nice! I think I know what she likes.
After a while, we get up and have breakfast at “La Cubana”. Holy smokes! Some very, very, very bad breakfast (seriously, how can they demand money for this stuff?). We get us each a Frappucino at “Brisas del Mar” as compensation – delicious as always .
Now for the scuba diving with the divebase “Scuba Sensation”: Robin from the Netherlands and Scott, a judge from the States (who is actually more looking like a biker) are also diving with us. We get handed some harpoons to hunt for our lunch just as planned: We start with our fist dive at the divesite “Caye Chapel Canyons” and are on the lookout for some lionfish. We harpoon everyone we see*. In between the two dives we have some yummy lionfish ceviche made of the fish we shot. Those fish have some rather sturdy white flesh, similar to snapper. We chop up the remaining lionfish to feed them to the other marine animals. Yet, instead of giving them out directly, we throw the fish overboard, since we do not want to get the fish used to divers handing them free meals.
As we arrive again in Caye Caulker we have some gluten-free chocolate croissants as “birthday cake”. We drink some Margaritas at the Split and watch a few people playing a beach game which resembles Viking’s Chess. They sure aren’t stingy here when it comes to alcohol – or does it feel this way because we had them on an empty stomach? For Dinner we once again go to “Roys” and order some mango and banana butter lobster. This time it seems to take forever, unfortunately – lots of guests in here.
On the way home I have a brief stop at the wooden Spongebob-statue on the beach and do some light painting. I get soon approached by a Rastaguy who starts complaining loudly that I’m rather interested in taking photos of Spongebob than him. “Errrmm… Ooookay?!”. He is holding a rather jumpy little dog in his arm: “Pringles”. A little crazytalk and 2 photos later, him and Pringels are on my SD card. Ena is perhaps right, that carrying camera equipment around attracts all sorts of people. Well, this guy was special, indeed. I take some more light painting photos at the beach and before we head to bed.
*The pacific lionfish is an invasive species here which has somehow managed to spread from Florida to the Caribbean, as it has no predators. The ecosystem is changing and on its menu is almost everything small enough for it to swallow. Young lobsters included, which annoys all Carribeans .
