Peter Eltringham

I was on the island of Caye Caulker, a last-weekend getaway after a six-week teaching gig at Sacred Heart College in San Ignacio, Belize, walking down the sandy Middle Street (there are only three streets on Caye Caulker – Front, Middle, and Back – all sandy), when out of nowhere I heard my name called out. I had only been on the island once, for three days, over a month before, and there was no one who lived there who knew me, or at least knew my name. I had assumed I was alone. To say the least, it was a Twilight Zone sort of shock. But when I turned to the voice, on a balcony of a rooming house, I saw Peter, a British writer for Lonely Planet, who I had met a couple of weeks before when I was on another weekend getaway in Placencia. We had met on the balcony of the restaurant of the resort where I was staying. I had just finished lunch after my arrival, and he stopped me when he saw I was wearing a t-shirt from the Happy Lobster restaurant, which I had bought several weeks earlier on my first stay on Caye Caulker. Peter was a big fan of both Caye Caulker and the Happy Lobster and invited me to join him and his wife for a drink as they finished their lunch. (They weren’t staying at the resort, but had come by for lunch because they liked the restaurant.) I met them the next day in town at the Lobster Festival (the reason we were all there) and spent some time with them walking around the food booths, but had forgotten them within days of my teaching. So it was a surprise when he called out my name from nowhere on Caye Caulker. We walked up Front Street, bought wonderful tamales from the bicycle basket of a vender, and met for dinner that night at the Happy Lobster. Peter had written several Central American travel books for Lonely Planet, but was partial to Belize. He was planning on moving to San Ignacio, he said, because it was his favorite place in C.A. Of course I never heard from him again. It was just a brief encounter, one of many over years of travel. But one that’s always stayed with me because of the shock of hearing my name shouted out on a sandy street on an island where I knew no one knew me. As I began writing this (with only the purpose of relating an interesting remembered travel experience), I googled Peter to find out his full name (Peter Eltringham), only to find that he died a couple of years ago of throat cancer. I’d only been with him, briefly, twice, and we’d never had any contact after that. But it was odd to read of his death. Not like a friend had died. At best we were passing travellers in two accidental encounters. But he was also a memory for me. And apparently memories also die.