We're currently on the Island of Roatan, part of Honduras. It's been a while since our last post, internet connections have been a challenge. Our last post was from San Andreas. Since then we spent ten days on Providencia, had a fabulous sail to a tiny reef called the Hobbies, checked into Honduras on Guanaja, then moved to Roatan. Here are a few highlights of the last month:
Providencia:
We went for a hike up the hill and caught this iguana admiring Sunny at anchor:
We went on a couple scuba dives with our friends, Susan & Michael on Calypso. The first one was a "shark feeding". One of the guides had a spear pole and caught 3-4 lion fish. Lion fish are not native to the Caribbean and because of their fast reproduction and voracious feeding, are a major threat to the health of the reefs. Divers are encouraged to kill lion fish and based on the sharks behavior, this is a common occurrence. As soon as we dropped down below 60', 5-10 black tip reef sharks started following us around like puppy dogs. The guide would hold up the speared lion fish and the sharks would circle the divers until one got up the nerve to grab the lion fish from the pole:
It was a fun experience and at no time did we feel too worried, though at times the sharks were all around and swimming through our group.
We watched the annual horse race on the beach. This is a two horse race, one from the north end and one from the south. The islanders spend months debating the merits of the horses and thousands of dollars worth of Colons (the local currency) is bet. On the day of the race, hundreds show up on the beach and drink, party and argue for hours. Then the two horses are paraded past the crowds, go to the far end then they're off!! The horses thunder down the crowded beach, somehow avoiding killing anyone (though that's not true every year), then it's over, except for the months that will be spent arguing about the race.
Here's a shot of the crowd that the two horses will be galloping through in about a minute:
Unfortunately, the wheelchair bound mother of the owner of the winning horse was so excited at the news that she had a stroke and died. It put a damper on the mood, but everyone said she died happy.
We left Providencia, and several days later pulled into the island of Guanaja, Honduras.
Here is Tom's description of our visit:
Today we went ashore to get some local currency; lempira (about 20 to the dollar). We left the boat and headed for the small island about a mile south west of our anchor spot. As we were putting along at dinghy speed a local passed us and waved in a slightly larger and much faster panga.
About a 1/4 mile further we noticed he had stopped and was looking at the prop on his outboard. It is very common for floating or semi submerged trash to tangle a prop and stop an outboard fairly quickly. As we drew nearer he motioned for us to come closer. As we did so he removed the cover from his engine and a plume of smoke escaped. Just as on land, large amounts of smoke emanating from the engine causes less than joyful thoughts. We tied his painter to our stern and started towing him to the island. As we approached the island we tried to get his attention so we could determine where he wished to go ashore. After some effort we determined that he had a house on the water front and we towed him into a dock that was really nothing more than the stilts his house was built on. We inquired as to the location of the best local market and were given directions along with the advise to hurry since they close from noon till two, it was eleven forty five.
We tied up at the public dock and walked to the bank. The streets are no more than 6 feet wide and there is no motorized traffic on the island. Everything is transported from the dock by push carts or dollies or in the case of lighter materials just carried. By the time we had our local money the stores were all closed and we had two hours to waste. We thought we might find a place for some lunch and so we took a walking tour of the island, about twenty minutes later we had covered every dead end and street on the island.
On our tour we had seen a sign for a restaurant, but the gate had been closed, not uncommon as many restaurants do not open until late in the afternoon or early evening. We found our way back and the gate was open so we looked at the menu printed on the fence outside, they advertised three kinds of chicken wings, hot dogs, hamburgers and fries. We walked up to the front of the building and looked in, there was an old woman sitting on a coach watching television.
Thinking we were clearly in the wrong place we walked back out the gate and were about to leave when another women looked out from her front yard and asked who we had lost, or a loosely translated Spanish version thereof. We told her we were looking for the restaurant to get some lunch. She informed us that the house we had just been to was a restaurant and went over and spoke to the women inside. After some consultation the she informed us that the only thing they had today was fried chicken, rice, salad, and plantains. We said that was fine and were invited into the house. We entered the house into the living room and felt a little uncomfortable as the old woman sitting on the couch was still watching TV and seemed to completely ignore us. In about 30 seconds a second woman came out from the back of the house and invited us to sit on the back porch as it would be much cooler there and less noisy as the TV was up fairly loud.
We exited the rear of the house, through the kitchen, and were seated at a small plastic table with two plastic chairs. Before we could be seated the woman had to invert one the chairs to remove a cat that was sleeping there. There were also two small dogs that while chained had free access to our location and we needed to become friends before we could be seated. A few minutes later the woman who seated us arrived with two plates of food; fried chicken and potato salad with rice and fried plantains, as an after thought she brought ketchup and a frozen bottle of orange soda.
The food was superb, the chicken tender and moist, the potato salad had a little spice and fried plantains while they look like bananas are really a perfect replacement for French fries and that's what the ketchup was for. We were there for about an hour and the entire time the dogs were quiet and did not beg, the cat came and went and the breeze felt quite comfortable in the shade. After we settled our tab and exited through the side yard we wandered off to find the local supermarket though our stomachs were not nearly as eager as they had been when we landed. Again we found, that in this part of the world you should not judge a book by the cover, if you can't find what you are looking for you should just ask and people will point you in the right direction.
After a few days, we went to the larger island of Roatan. We decided to pull onto a dock so we pulled into Fantasy Island. This is a fancy resort on their own island, lush beautiful grounds and lots of iguanas and monkeys. This guy was very interested in our cat, and vice versa:
We've also gone a few wonderful dives here and fed lion fish to some big eels (but no pictures).
That's all for now. In a couple of days we'll be moving on to the Rio Dulce, Guatemala.
