[imagesource: Richard Collett]

Just a few kilometres off the coast of Belize – a 15-minute boat ride from Belize City, to be exact – is a tiny island owned by a couple of travel nerds with sky-high ambitions.

Marshall Mayer and his buddy Gareth Johnson co-founded the island project that started gathering steam roughly 15 years ago.

Johnson also acts as CEO.

The pair had been working on Young Pioneer Tours, a company that specialises in extreme destination tours to undesirable or unknown countries, like North Korea or Transnistria. Still, the idea of buying an island kept resurfacing.

When Let’s Buy an Island was established, with the domain name that Johnson cleverly bought all those years ago, they managed to put this wacky idea into action, crowdsourcing over $250 000 by 2018, CNN reported.

Most of that money ($180 000 plus tax) was used to complete the purchase of Coffee Caye, a 1,2-acre uninhabited island in 2019.

Image: Richard Collett

While Meyer asks “who wouldn’t want to buy an island?”, the project is a bit more than that, planning to reimagine Coffee Caye as the “Principality of Islandia,” a micronation complete with its own national flag, anthem, and government.

The Principality of Islandia is another addition to other micronations dotted all over the world – from The Principality of Sealand in England to the Republic of Uzupis in Lithuania – all eccentric territories that claim independence but aren’t necessarily recognised as such by the international community.

Image: Richard Collett

Image: Richard Collett

This island reimagining has essentially become a form of escapism and experimentation for the quirky group of 25 investors from different countries:

“Who hasn’t dreamed of making their own country?” [Johnson] says. “Particularly in a post-Trump, post-Brexit, Covid world. If a bunch of regular people can make this work, perhaps it can be a force for good.”

While Johnson believes the island is “as close to a nation as you can get, without getting an army and a navy,” Mayer leans more towards the project being a quirky marketing tool, emphasising that the micronation thing should be seen as “tongue in cheek”.

At the end of the day, Coffee Caye still falls under the laws and bounds of Belize.

Even though it has its own novelty Islandia passports, national anthem, an Islandia flag, and a government that’s elected from amongst the investors, as well as laws like no single-use plastics.

It’s just a bunch of fun, isn’t it, with investor Stephen Rice acknowledging the very cool bragging rights as a big reason for pouring some money into the island:

Image: Richard Collett

The ideas for what they could do with the island keep flooding in – regenerating the surrounding coral reef, creating a “mingling place,” with a small restaurant or bar, along with kayaks and snorkelling facilities, or even creating an underwater sculpture garden of world dictators.

But there are also huge concerns, such as the threat of flooding and hurricanes, brought on by the worsening climate crisis, which could wipe the Principality of Islandia out in one fell swoop.

I guess the investors will have as much fun as they can while the water level allows.

[source:cnn]