May 11, 2008
Our plane left on time, banking over a partially clouded coastal plane and settling onto its route over the mountains. I leaned eagerly over Steph, who had been assigned the window seat on both legs of the journey and gloated about it, trying to get my bearings with any landmark I could—Lago Suchitlán or any of the distinctive volcanoes. No luck. Too many clouds and not a good enough angle what with having to lean over Steph. At an hour long the flight was too short for a movie, so they showed a Kurt Russell special instead. The flight attendants barely had time to serve us muffins and a drink before we started our descent.
The thick clouds ended at the coast of Honduras, revealing the long narrow tip of some landmass, which I speculated was one of the Bay Islands, perhaps even Roatán itself. Steph pish-poshed my surmise, and as we left it farther and farther behind began to look correct. Later, on a map in the airport we found a peninsula of the same shape jutting out of Honduras’s otherwise unarticulated coast, and Steph was vindicated.
The real Roatán soon showed up, all beaches and lumped-together ice cream scoop mountains surrounded by water in patches of topaz, jade, and turquoise. “Them’s the reefs!” The little lumpy mountains were thoroughly forested, a refreshing change from El Salvador’s tortured landscape. We came in low over Coxen Hole, the metropolis of Roatán, a bunch of multicolored houses clustered around a bay, and landed on a strip running parallel to the water. This terminal had no people tube to suck its air-conditioned orifice onto the plane’s side, so we got the welcome experience of arriving at a smaller airport: stepping onto the top of the stairs in a blast of humid, richly tropical air.
The first sign greeting us upon entering Roatán International Airport declared: “Bienvenidos a Honduras: La Entrada Es Gratis.” A week later we discovered why the free entrance to the country is so proudly advertised—to exit you have to pay $34. We caught a taxi to West End, a 20 minute drive. The main thing that struck me during this first view of the island, besides the lack of deforestation that I’d noted from the air, was the wood siding on most houses. My first two impressions were paradoxical; the taxi driver cleared things up, telling us they ship construction wood from the mainland because trees on the island are protected. The houses looked like shotgun houses of the South, set up on stilts, sheathed in horizontal lapped planks painted various Caribbean colors. I hadn’t even consciously realized that I hadn’t seen wooden siding since arriving in El Salvador, where the houses are adobe blocks, cinderblock, or corrugated metal. Refreshing for a lignophile.
We arrived in West End several hours in advance of the time we could check into our Coconut Tree Cabin, so we dropped our luggage in the Coconut Tree grocery store and went for a walk. Coconut Tree runs a dive shop and restaurant in addition to the cabins and grocery store, and it was with them that we were slated to do our PADI Open Water Diver certification. Coconut Tree’s enterprises are located at the one intersection in West End, where the road from Coxen Hole and Sandy Bay meets the road that runs along the beach. The beach road is sandy and so potholey that at night the low angle of headlights turns it into a dramatic moonscape. Frequently it runs so close to the narrow beach that there’s only room for enterprise on the inland side, apart from perhaps a hot dog cart whose proprietor could cool his heels by taking a few mere steps backward. The principal part of West End is about half a kilometer of restaurants, bars, dive shops, and gift shops clustered messily along this road. Thrown in are a couple of Baptist churches, houses on stilts, and one brand new luxury condo.
At any time of day or night there was a colorful mix of locals, tourists, and expatriates. I heard Spanish, French, German, Danish, English accents from New Zealand, Australia, and several parts of the U.K., and Roatán’s own blend of English-based creole, whose sounds seemed familiar enough that I should be able to understand, but remained totally impenetrable. One bar had a sign declaring “No Shirt No Shoes Full Service,” which seemed to be the watchword as far as dress code. Even the nicest restaurants could be patronized shoeless without a batted eye.
We stopped for a fish sandwich at a restaurant set out on a pier. Our server was a big black lady whose regard was fairly impressive coming straight from a land populated by small light brown people. A parrot named Lola came over to make friends, crawling up my legs and settling on my shoulder. She was fun for a while, but showed aggression toward Steph, perhaps rightly recognizing her as a competitor for my affections, and eventually bit a hole in my shirt, which put her in the doghouse for good. Still, an appropriate way to arrive on an island that was once a pirate enclave.
On our way back to claim our cabin we shopped for food, anticipating cutting costs by cooking for ourselves some. This turned out to be a pipe dream—the eggs, water, bread, jam, peanut butter, and oatmeal cost us $20, much to our horrification. We discovered many prices on Roatán to be inflated, but the grocery store was the most egregious. So we ended up eating out twice a day, choosily, and probably spent no more than we would have at the grocery store, and considerably less in time and effort.
We also stopped by a gallery and gift shop owned by a Dutch woman, one of many foreigners who’ve washed up on Roatán’s sunny shores and stayed well past what they planned. While we were chatting with her a beautiful little dark-skinned girl burst in to retrieve a bag left behind the counter. She was followed by what looked like her mother and aunt, thanking the Dutch lady in their Caribbean lilted English. This was our first sign of the surprising integration, or at least frequent contact in West End between locals, tourists, and foreign-born denizens.
Our cabin was roomy if a little funky, with a dripping air conditioner and poorly outfitted kitchen. CNN and ESPN were available to keep track of the latest on the Jeremiah Wright lunacy, the runup to primaries in NC and IN, the Champions League semis, and the NBA playoffs, though I found I had little interest in keeping the TV on for long. Walks up and down the lumpy beach road and swims in Half Moon Bay were more like it. Although the irony didn’t escape me that the little bit I did watch kept me equally or more informed than I typically am in El Salvador, when normally I would have returned from a vacation like this feeling as if I’d missed out on the news.
On Sunday 27th we started our SCUBA course with Stine Tang, our busty young Danish instructor. It might have fazed me more to find out that she was two years younger than Steph and me if I hadn’t just learned that Bojan Krkic, a striker for Barçelona’s top level, is seven years younger than me. Still, it was faintly disorienting to realize that the person with the significant responsibility of teaching me to use SCUBA equipment and taking me 60’ below the ocean’s surface was somewhat younger than me, when I still feel like such a baby baby.
Anyway, Coconut Tree has the course worked out to a T. We were doing the PADI Open Water Diver certification, the most basic and widely accepted form of diving certification available. I’ve taken various short skills courses—Wilderness First Responder, First Aid, CPR, Resident Assistant training at Swarthmore, etc.—and been frustrated by the fluff or mind-numbingly methodical sequence or boring videos. Blech. But this course was just the opposite.
Stine sat us down to watch videos, and I prepared to prop my eyelids open, but they turned out not only to be passably well-produced and interesting, but pack in a lot of good hard information too. Just as our brains reached the saturation point with information on buoyancy, lung overexpansion illness, and the usage of dive equipment, we took a break for some barbecue on the beach. Scrumptious. And returned to hop right in the bay across the street from the dive shop and start breathing out of a can.
The goggles and regulators—which you keep in your mouth by biting a piece of rubber much like a sports mouthguard—do funny things to people’s faces. They make everyone look sort of like Dirk Nowitski with Down’s syndrome, so as you’re bobbing around on the surface getting ready to dive you feel like you’re already in some bizarre alternative world.
The first day we did a bunch of exercises in 8’ deep water—taking out our regulators, throwing them over our shoulders, and finding them again; taking off our goggles, putting them back on, and clearing them with blasts of air from our noses; pretending we’d run out of air, signaling our buddy, and using their alternative regulator; simulating really running out of air by having Stine shut off our tank valves until we couldn’t draw a breath; etc. I discovered a penchant for taking out my regulator to smile and make funny faces, which I proceeded to do often during our dives on the reef as well. If only we’d had an underwater camera.
The second day of diving class brought more videos and another go-round in 8’ water before lunch. Then after lunch we geared up, hopped on the boat, and did two open water dives on the reef, which happens to be part of the second-largest barrier reef in the world and absurdly close to Roatán’s shore. It was an incredible feeling to soar past fish and anemones and brain corals and all manner of ridiculous life inches away. Inches away, that is, once we got the hang of using our BCDs (buoyancy control devices, worn like a vest, with two buttons: inflate and deflate), which took some experimentation involving slow plummets toward the coral and accidental rises toward the surface.
The coolest sea life we saw that day was a sea turtle. It wasn’t a behemoth from the pages of National Geographic, but a cute little guy about as long as my forearm. He was hovering with his head tilted down at a 45 degree angle munching on coral and seaweed, lazily waving his flippers to keep himself stationary. An inspiration in buoyancy. His preoccupation with his meal let us get as close as we wanted. I lingered behind even after Steph and Stine moved on, fascinated by the precise way his sharp beak broke off big chunks of coral and slurped slimy seaweed.
Besides the sea turtle my main preoccupation during these first dives was movement underwater. The ideal of SCUBA diving is to move lazily like the turtle, hovering face down above the reef, slowly kicking your fins. This conserves air and energy, letting you stay down longer safer. If people accuse golf of not being a sport because you can do it lazily, diving deserves even more ridicule because you should to do it lazily. Due to all my flipping and spinning on the second dive of the afternoon, my air gauge got all the way down to the red, 500 psi. Steph still had almost 1000, I think, and Stine ended up at 1500, a half a tank. The acrobatics were worth it, though—such intoxicating freedom of movement! At one point all three of us had an acrobatics session in a sand patch. We emptied our BCDs, took off our fins, and did slow-motion flips and kung fu kicks as if we were on the mooon. With all this out of my system, the next day I moved more conservatively and used far less air.
Those first dives were cool, but they were nothing compared to the culminating two dives of the course the next day. Both of these were swims to “reef walls,” where the mostly horizontal reef suddenly drops off like a cliff. It was an incredible feeling to be swimming along over the flat surface of corals and suddenly see empty space yawn out beneath; it really felt like jumping off a cliff and not falling, like a Wile E. Coyote moment infinitely suspended. We swam down a little and then along the reef wall, sticking close to see the crazy varieties of corals and fish. At one point a barracuda followed us a ways along the wall, slightly concerning Steph, who was bringing up the rear. I think our paths just happened to converge, for when we started swimming back up and onto the flat reef the menacing fish kept its course parallel to the wall.
Looking out away from the wall, the view was a massive 3-D expanse of deep blue water, lighter towards the surface and darker towards the bottom. I wondered what it looked like down there, how deep it went. Stine took us down to 80’, and visibility was 60’-80’ more. All I could tell was that it seemed to decrease slightly in slope and the corals petered out.
Later I found a diagram tacked up on a fence by the side of the road that mapped out what lies below. Apparently it does flatten out below the reef wall, and then it drops off again in a taller and steeper wall that was a live reef during the ice ages. From there it slopes intermittently downwards through jumbles of giant rocks to 4,000 feet and even deeper. I think the submersible we could see dry-docked in Half Moon Bay goes down that deep, and Steph and I were tempted to see how much it cost for a ride, but never pursued the option. We were too content with diving and swimming and reading and sunning ourselves.
In the morning before the wall dives we took the final exam of the course. We’d covered an entire textbook, enough detailed information that it served us well to study together the night before. It felt like a throwback to high school, leafing through the book and challenging each other to questions from the “Quick Quizzes.” I came one mistake away from acing the exam. A small defeat. Steph made two mistakes. A small triumph.
Between studying and diving, we had some great success in our gastronomic pursuits. Having pretty much given up cooking for ourselves aside from eggs, toast, and oatmeal for breakfast, we forged ahead like freelance food columnists (that is, we had no newspaper to fund our exploits) to assess West End’s many cuisines. The greatest success in my opinion was also our most expensive outing: Ooloonthoo, Indian food. We split an appetizer and an entrée, a classic freelance food columnist strategy to cut costs. The appetizer was onion bhaji, the entrée chicken with a cashew butter cream curry. Both were deeeeeeeeeeeeeeelicious, but the crowning achievement was a side of potatoes cooked with special kinds of fennel and mustard seeds. Luckily they didn’t appeal to Steph at all, so I ate them all, each one practically sending me into a higher dimension of pleasure.
Ooloonthoo is operated by a couple, she a vaguely Tibetan-looking woman from West Bengal near Darjeeling, he a portly Canadian man. He was a chef in London, Ontario, when he met her and went to live with her in India for several years. He obviously learned a thing or two there. He cooks, she serves and chats in the most accomodating, enthusiastic way. They receive four shipments a year from India, which are nightmares to get through Honduran customs because of all the seeds. All their ingredients come from these packages save for one spice (whose name escapes me) from Guatemala, by way of the U.S.
They were surprised to learn that I had recently tried to go to an Indian restaurant in San Salvador; it had been closed. They had the impression that the only other Indian Restaurant in all of Central America was in Guatemala City, and it only had 5 seats, “which hardly qualifies it as a restaurant.” The regional scarcity of their particular culinary expertise has led them to cook especially for the president of Honduras. They await with bated breath the email I promised to send reporting on the restaurant in San Salvador, pending a visit when the place is open. Gotta make sure they’re keeping up with the Joneses, I suppose. In the email I also plan to ask him to remind me of what the fennel and mustard varieties are called. Those potatoes really made an impression on me.
Steph enjoyed Ooloonthoo, but not to the extent I did. I’m not sure which place was her favorite, but we also enjoyed good banana pancakes, Pad Thai, ½ lb. burgers, veggie burritos, quesadillas, baleadas, and a cashew avocado parmesan chicken sandwich. Oh, and some outrageous brownie sundaes. What a divine interlude from the campo routine of rice, beans, tortillas, eggs, salty cheese, spaghetti, and potatoes.
On Wednesday the 30th we celebrated Steph’s birthday lazily, swimming, reading in the hammock during a rainstorm, and taking a water taxi down to West Bay, the shi-shi area, to wander around. West Bay was more different from West End than I’d expected. It’s pretty much exclusively large resorts, thoroughly separated from each other except by the beach, with a difficult-to-access road set far back from the water. The beach itself was wider and more beautiful, but the attitude of the people on it seemed to be “don’t annoy me.” I was not as impressed as I was with West End’s funky, lively, mixed-up vibe. We still enjoyed ourselves, strolling through the resorts’ winding, landscaped paths, checking out their swim-up bars and lavish lobbies. Then we hopped a water taxi back to enjoy burgers and drinks while watching an NBA playoff game. Not your typical birthday celebrations, but I think it turned out pretty ideal.
After exploring West Bay some more the next day, particularly the Italian resort Henry Morgan’s and its beautiful lobby, we reunited with Stine and her Kiwi boyfriend, Kiwi, to do a night dive. As a step toward our Advanced Open Water certification we watched a video beforehand that assured us we would see more life at night. This was not true. We saw several lobsters, mottled with pretty multicolored spots, and one large grouper, but all in all far fewer animals than during our daytime dives. Still, descending slowly through the dark, following a surreal line of dimly lit divers, illuminating corals and iridescent exhalation bubbles slowly rising into the darkness above…magical. Then rising slowly and breaking through the surface to the sight of stars and shore lights may have even been the best part. It would have been a supremely peaceful conclusion if my flashlight hadn’t been malfunctioning, turning on by itself and eliciting protests from the other divers that I was going to attract jellyfish.
That was our final dive. All that remained for us was an idyllic day and a half. We strolled, swam, kayaked, snorkeled, ate. Perhaps the most notable event was drinking my first microbrew since September, a dark beer brewed right there on Roatán. I can safely say it was the worst beer I’ve ever tasted, watery mass market beers included. It tasted like they’d mixed it with stale wine leftovers, let it go flat, and added some bleach to kill whatever misbegotten yeasts had fermented it in the first place. I pushed it aside. On the bright side, we had on our table a promotional flyer for the unfortunate brewery, which consisted of several paragraphs explaining all the outrageous benefits attributed to beer throughout its history. We learned that medieval women rubbed beer foam on themselves to become ravishingly attractive.
On Saturday we were extremely reluctant to leave our funky island hometown. We had done laundry there, a sure sign that we now belonged. I understood how so many people get stuck there for months or years longer than they’d planned. But Peace Corps duties were calling and our plane tickets weren’t extendable, so we bit the bullet. It was a sad ride to the airport, but the deep satisfaction of an excellent vacation prevailed.
