Days 16-19: In Roatan

On Monday morning at 9AM, Dad and I met with our dive instructor, Josue, at the downstairs dive shop at Tranquilseas.

We did three dives in total that day -- Peak Performance Buoyancy, Navigation, and Drift. Each dive consisted of perhaps 15 minutes of exercises followed by a 40 minute fun dive. I don't think any of the exercises were anything we hadn't done in our intro course two years ago in Cozumel, so overall the dives were much less strenuous than the intro course.

The next day, we had two more dives. A deep dive, which involved diving to where the coral reef meets the ocean floor, around 90 feet deep, and a wreck dive, where we went to see El Aguila, about 100 feet under the surface of the sea. Among the highlights of the dives were seeing two fish sleeping atop a turtle (also asleep), a giant grouper, El Aguila, and another diver who killed a lionfish with her diving spear, whereupon the lionfish had a big bite take out of it by a larger fish. After those five dives in two days, we were done (except for the quizzes, which I crammed into an hour on my last full day on Roatan).

On Wednesday, having completed our diving course, we spent the majority of the day lounging in the shade. I had brought a book from the hostel with me, Lonely Planet's Traveling Central America on a Shoestring (7th Edition, 2007), which explained the colectivos of Roatan quite nicely. The book also contained entertaining vignettes of each country's history up until the book's publishing date. It was after a particularly riveting tale of Nicaragua's civil war between the Sandinistas and the Samozas that I fell asleep in the hammock I had been reading in, shaded by the awning above me.

Everything I thought I knew about the uncomfortable, unstable (American) hammock had been a lie.

That night, the whole family went out night snorkeling. Our snorklemaster Dennis guided us, swimming west along the interior of the reef. We saw quite a few interesting animals during our hour of snorkeling.

Honduras doesn't observe daylight savings time, so the sun setting early combined with the constant heat and humidity pushed me into a cycle of going to bed around 9pm and waking around 7am. Which is actually quite useful, as morning is the best time to be up and about on the island.

My dorm room had no AC and, despite having screens for doors and windows, didn't have great air circulation. But the two ceiling fans and single floor fan nearly made up for the shortcomings, and the only real downside of sleeping without a sheet on was the mosquitoes that would occasionally dine upon my feet (the rest of me had a defensive layer of body hair).

Looking back towards my parent's resort, where I spent about 80% of my waking time while on Roatan.

On Thursday, my last full day on the island, we all went to Victor's Monkey Business where a tour guide showed us and a group of Cruise Shippers the very limited supply of animals they have.

The lack of diversity is made up for by letting you hold the animals (sloths), or letting you into their cage to feed them (monkeys and makak).

The rest of the afternoon was spent relaxing and playing cards, until we decided to take a taxi down to West Bay for dinner. In my opinion, the names of West Bay and West End should be switched. West End is the part of the island with not one, but two actual bays, whereas West Bay is literally on the west end of the island. It took me days to get the two properly sorted in my head because of these egregious cartographical misnomers.

Personal grievances aside, I had a delicious BBQ chicken pizza at Bananarama and we took a water taxi from Infinity Bay (not an actual bay) back to West End. My parents wanted to see the hostel I was staying in, so we walked to Buena Honda and were treated to an enthusiastic tour by Nicole, the Dutch girl who was running the hostel for a few months on behalf of her friend, who was the actual owner.

After four full days on Roatan, I was definitely catching some island vibes. Sitting alone with your thoughts for long stretches of time became a perpetually recurring activity, but lacking any of the usual side effects of existential dread. Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end, and the next day I would leave the island and return to Guadalajara -- if for the sole reason of airline economics saving me half a thousand dollars if I returned to Mexico before making my return flight back to Seattle.

Thanks for the good times, family!

Day 15: To Roatan

After waking up at 6:30 AM and completely out of food vouchers, I gave in and splurged a bit on the continental breakfast. $15 (280 peso!) french toast plus tip. Yikes!

I already had my boarding pass and security went extremely smoothly, so I was at my gate with an hour to go before departure.

After a quick 4-hour flight, our plane landed and we were blasted by the island's tropical humidity.

My mom captured this photo of Roatan from above.

Roatan is a resort island, the principle activity there being tourism and real estate / construction. In practice, this means everything has two prices — one for locals and one for rich American tourists. Having just landed on the island and being very unsavvy about my transportation options, I was forced to take a $25 private taxi from the airport to my hostel, Buena Onda, which I was fortunately able to split with another traveler whom I met by the ATM machines.

From my hostel, I walked five minutes to West End where I met my parents for lunch. Afterwards I stopped by my hostel to put on some swim trunks to swim in the bay. The day was Sunday, and the locals were out in droves enjoying the tropical waters along with us. After refreshing with a round of drinks at another beach side restaurant, my parents returned to their hotel and I walked back to Buena Honda.

There I would meet a group of girls, two Americans and a Brit. We went out that night to the most popular bar in West End, Sundowners.

One of the Argentinian volunteer girls at the hostel was performing a live set that night. I ordered a Sprite and a freshly grilled kebab before turning in relatively early around 9:30pm.