Sometimes life delivers the strangest of turns, even to the most unconventional of types like myself who has always lived on the edge of society. I was raised in the beaches of Mallorca as a kid, and knew someday that the tropics would be where I would end up later in life. Upon reaching 60 years old (the last trifecta of life I call it) I started that journey. The kids were done with college, I had just sold the small business I had, bought an RV and headed to the Yucatan of Mexico, having no clue what tomorrow would bring. That was the fun part of it. After a few months there I continued to Belize, further exploring. When I got to the town of Placencia in Belize, it did immediately feel like what I was looking for, besides it was a great place to fish, my main passion.
One day I was fishing by this little sand shoal and it felt so great to just have the place all to myself with my dogs. I kept returning to it for a year with them. I never saw anyone on it. One day it struck me - why not build a little house on it. I learned that I could apply for it with my local Belizian friend for it, since it had no owner per se and was really government land. I had no clue at the time there are places in this world where that is even possible.
So I started spending day after day in the little shoal trying to make a little island of it, at first I used the thousands of conch shells around it (it was an ancient fish-cleaning spot) to fill it, then filled and used hundreds of sand bags, and then used rocks, but every time the sea would get angry, it would wash all my work away. The locals who passed by in their boats thought I was absolutely crazy, of course. But I didn’t give up, for I was learning. Finally, I build a wall with the hardest of local woods and finally a real island started taking shape. I build a cabana and really still looked at it as nothing more than a personal getaway. In time, I added to it; a bedroom, a nicer bathroom, a deck. It was all a crazy, but fun hobby.
It finally became ‘livable’. In time, it dawned on me that maybe I could rent it, and raise the money to keep improving it. I had never heard of Airbnb. Someone suggested to list it with them and lo and behold I got my first guest. At the time, it was all so basic; a bed, a loud generator they had to start to run a freezer to have some form of refrigeration, a shower & toilet that ran on water gravity to even function, they had to bring their own food, and they had only a small kayak to cruise around; but the first guest loved it! And so did the next, and the next; to this day I am amazed why they did, it was only a few steps above camping. The island kept improving however, by leaps and bounds and by the Fall of the first year (2015), I added enough that I started not to worry about the first guest that would surely hate it. But no one did!
That Fall a guest stayed that is in show business (NFL Super Bowl halftime shows), and he loved it so much he said: ‘This place is special, it needs to be told to others’. I never gave the comment a second thought, but soon after Wall Street Journal did a story on it, and so did many other well-knowned national publications that quickly followed after. That December, Airbnb called me and used it in their ad campaign ("Love this? Live there"). And the rest is history; today it is booked for years and gets 100k internet hits a month just in Airbnb and not a month goes by that someone else in a magazine, publication or television somewhere in the world isn't doing an article on little 'Bird Island'.
Do not ask me why how such things come to be, for I do not have a blessed clue. The best I can guess is that there is ‘something’ in every one of us to want to be, even for a moment, a ‘Robinson Crusoe’; to feel what it is like to be alone in an island like we all have read in the great works of our western cultures romaticising just such a dream. Above all, it's best contribution perhaps lies in what has done for the guests, it has given them a chance to re-connect with one another, to look at life in a new perpective and perhaps to fall in love anew, like one guest wrote: "Come to Bird Island Island with someone you love, and leave loving them that much more".