A Modern Day Pirate
Honduras has plenty of great destinations to its name, but the one most appealing to me was The Bay Islands - because that means scuba diving.
Initially we were torn between visiting Roatan or Utila. I'd quite like to have seen both, but there's no convenient (or affordable) transport between the two. So at the end of the day, the cheapskate in me won out and we went to Utila.
Utila has a 'party' reputation, no problem for me, I can party as hard now as I could when I first started travelling 10 years ago - it's just the recover factor that's gone on an exponential curve! Anyway, the $5 per night accommodation was too good to pass up. And once again, we'd lugged with us several kilos of pasta, pancake mix, and various other food stuffs so finding somewhere with a kitchen was a must. After trudging around several places, we ended up staying at 'Cross Creek', a dive operator who also offered decent accommodation, a well equipped kitchen, and of course diving. No need to ever leave the 'hotel.' :-)
For the first time in Central America we'd also found reasonably priced diving with 10 dives costing $250. Sign me up!
One of the problems I tend to associate with islands such as these, over run with dive operators and specializing in large, cheap open water classes is that the diving is often pretty mediocre and the dive sites resemble Tokyo's Shinjuku station at rush hour!
Happily, this was not the case with my dive experience during the six days spent in Utila. Some great dives; caves, maze like channels, more gorgonian fans then I've ever seen anywhere, I even managed to find a seahorse for Chika (although it took a couple of dives and a LOT of looking.)
All in all, a nice way to pass a few days.
Cross Creek even organised a themed BBQ/party night which happened to coincide with my 2000th day 'on the road.' Talk about good timing.
I was most impressed that despite having the theme set by someone else, both Chika and I were able to produce costumes from our backpacks. The given theme was Pirates - quite appropriate for a Caribbean island. Hardly surprising then that 30 people turned up dressed as Captain/Captainess Jack/Jackie Sparrow. I was particularly impressed with the origami bird that Chika made for her shoulder.
I took a slightly different twist on the theme, fixing a couple of 'pirate' DVD's to my chest, went as a 'modern day' movie pirate. Unfortunately, nobody else got the joke.
Guess my mind just works a little differently. Good thing or Bad thing, you decide. :-)
