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| Hello Roatan |
It takes a certain resignation to adjust to the tropics. One must surrender to the heat, humidity, bugs, and the sun. I had to divorce myself from expectations carried over from a North American lifestyle; I would’t be overstimulated by a full schedule and constant electronic bombardment of information. The first couple of days I felt the mugginess of the Bay Islands sapping most of my energy and will to be active. Instead of exploring Utila with the reckless abandon of someone excited to start his tour of Central America, Madeleine and I applied the same reckless abandon to lazy naps in hammocks and beaches.
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| Making friends on the beach |
Although these may sounds like complaints, I actually really enjoyed being forced into a lazy attitude from the start. I found myself allowing enourmous amounts of cognitive energy pondering the most mundane trivia: why is my dive boat captain wearing a duck dynasty t shirt? Is he a duck dynasty fan? Was it just a cheap t-shirt? Is the act meant with biting performative irony towards the idiocy of American reality tv?
It’s easy to settle into a maddeningly slow pace of life when our schedule was naturally ordered around diving. From the second day we got there, each day we awoke at around 6:30am (still far behind the early sunrise), took in a tipico breakfast of eggs, beans, plantains and toast washed down with incosistently watery coffee, and took to the boat for our two morning dives. We invariably returned to shore around noon, washed off, and went about satiating the appetite we took back from 18 meters below. The afternoons consisted of reading on one beach or another, and various combinations of day drinking, naps, and snacks. The only vaguely “productive” part of the day was filling in my dive logs and jotting in a journal entry after dinner… if I felt like it.
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| Nature at its finest |
It was easy living, as a vacation should be. My only real complaint must be on the incessant sandflies who kept my body riddled with countless pink welts. We were warned of mosquitos, got our yellow fever shots, and packed our DEET sprays, but no one told us of the plague of sandflies in the Bay Islands. If you google “sandflies,” the autocomplete first suggests “bites,” but the very next one is “honduras.” DEET is supposed to be effective against these guys, but by the end of the trip, after layering my body with DEET, sunscreen, and a locally-sold citonella oil (let me assure smearing a thick oil over yourself is not something one would do lightly in 100% humidity under a tropical sun), the resilient buggers would still not let up.
With about 8 million people, the Honduras has about a third of the population of the NY metro area. Nonetheless they are proudly represented in the World Cup tournament this year. The mainland is largely mestizo and Spanish-speaking, but the Bay Islands (consisting of largest Roatan filled with resorts, smallest Guanaja, and backpacker-friendly Utilia where we stayed) are distinctly Afro-Caribbean in culture and ethnicity. The people here speak Creole English, and have more culturally in common with New Orleans than with the mainland that lies a short ferry away.
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| A mini-park a la Gaudi behind a cafe made of only recycled materials |
The islands are blessed by soothing Caribbean waters and sandy beaches, but most of all the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef that surrounds it (second largest in the world after Austrailia’s Great Barrier Reef). The reef provides a rich marine ecosystem near the surface that makes the islands an incredible (not to mention cheap) dive destination. In terms of big marine life, sharks are not abundant, but Whale Sharks do migrate through the islands around April and May (unfortunately we didn’t spot any).
In almost every way (besides the sandfly thing), Utila and the Bay Islands were very enjoyable. Tasty cheap food and beers, pretty and uncrowded beaches, incredible diving (again without too much of a crowd fighting over dive sites). However, I left with the impression of the place as paradise lite. The scenery is beautiful but not quite up to par with the likes of Hawaii or Cancun, the food is great but it’s not, and doesn’t pretend to be fine dining, the diving is great as well but doesn’t match the diving in Cairns. It is, in a nutshell, the best paradise you can get on a budget, which really is no faint praise at all.
