Roatan Archives - Laura Zera

The Weather Arrives in Honduras

Roatan Honduras in the rain The thing about the generally resplendent weather in the tropics is that when a storm does roll in, it’s usually a pretty good one. For my first five days on Roatan, there would be an hour or two of rain in the early morning or late afternoon, but the rest of the day would be lovely. On my last day, however (which was Feb.13), the elements really kicked up a fuss.

It poured rain all morning, the kind where if you stand in it for even five seconds you’re pretty drenched. I had planned on going for a stroll to take photos of the West End village as I hadn’t really done that yet, but ended up stuck on the porch at the lodge (having checked out at 10:30 am) until I left to catch the ferry back to La Ceiba.

My travel plan, down to the spending of my last lempiras, had been carefully mapped out. I was going to catch the 2 pm ferry from Roatan to La Ceiba, then get a bus that was heading for San Pedro Sula and just get off in El Progreso as the airport is exactly half way in between the two. I decided that I’d spend my last night there instead of SPS because a) I could get off the bus an hour earlier, b) hotels cost less, and c) it’s a smaller town. “Ha!” said Mother Nature.

If there’s one thing that I have shit luck with, it’s getting favorable weather conditions when I’m trying to depart from someplace. Mike, the lodge owner, drove me to the ferry pier, and quickly noticed that most everybody was getting into a taxi, not out of one. The afternoon ferry was cancelled (and the next morning’s ferry/bus combo would not get me to the SPS airport in time for my flight home).

Roatan Honduras airport Off to the Roatan airport we went, getting well soaked in the five-second dash from the van to the terminal. I was surprised to find out that planes were still flying when the ferry wasn’t sailing, but Mike explained that the Rio Cangrejal dumps out into the sea right near the La Ceiba ferry terminal, and when things really get rocking boulders the size of Volkswagens have come flying down the river. At any rate, I forfeited my $28 ferry ticket and bought a $90 seat on the 5 p.m. flight straight into San Pedro Sula. “Ha!” Mother Nature said again, even louder. She can be so haughty sometimes, that one.

Flight from Roatan Honduras The plane was a 19-seater Central American Airways Let L-410, made by a Czech company and in the prettiest shade of turquoise. I snapped some photos of the captain and his co-pilot as they squeezed themselves down the aisle and chatted with the passengers. Luckily, there was a break in the rain at the low levels, but it was still pretty poor visibility and I had a few stomach-in-my-throat moments. We landed after 40 minutes, and the Honduran woman across from me, in perfectly unaccented English, said “That was freaky.”

After a non-descript night in a non-descript hotel room, I was back at the SPS airport by 9:30 in the morning. While lining up to go through the first checkpoint, I observed several clusters of people, tightly huddled together as if getting ready for a football kick-off. Around them was a TV crew, extending microphones over their heads. I asked the woman in front of me if she knew what was going on, and she replied that a Central American Airways flight from SPS to Tegucigalpa had crashed that morning, and there were no survivors. The reason was poor visibility, combined with Tegucigalpa’s notoriously difficult runway approach.

Quickly overtaking my thoughts of sadness for the passengers and their families was the cognition that I’d been on the same model of plane, flown by the same airline, in the same crappy weather just 16 hours earlier.

In my 25 years of travel, there have been very few risk factors that have given me pause for thought with regards to my own mortality. I have weathered some pretty extreme situations over the decades and either ignorantly or courageously (depending on how you look at it) soldiered on. This is the second time, however, that a plane crash has forced me to consider some of the less desirable aviation situations that I have been party to, and to give thanks and love to my guardian angels (a group that has only grown in strength with the 2009 addition of my dad). They carry me safely from place to place, and this month, they got me all the way home to Francis, Yolanda Pug, and Sushi Cat on Valentine’s Day. I am immensely grateful that they have stuck with me for all these years. I’m not always an easy travel companion.

Swimming with the Fishies in Roatan, Honduras

By Laura Zera 2 Comments

My six nights in the West End village of Roatan (Feb.7 to Feb.13) were pretty low key, but then again, ‘tis what I desired out of the experience. I’m not one to hang out in bars by myself anyway. Not anymore, at least.

Low key meant that I also didn’t move my butt around the island very much. Snorkeling gear rentals were done on a 24-hour basis, so one afternoon I paid my five bucks (and $20 US deposit) and took a water taxi over to West Bay, about a ten-minute boat ride away. It was a lovely beach, as the books had all promised, however it was apparently a cruise-ship day, and was absolutely teeming with people wearing orange, turquoise or yellow wristbands. And then, at about 3 o’clock, poof, they vanished, and the beach was empty. It cleared out so quickly that I actually had a fright for a moment. Was there some impending storm or disaster that everyone knew about except me?

Although the coral was pretty trashed in West Bay, there were loads of fish and the water was calm, clear and shallow. This blog post will hence be devoted to fishy photos from there and my next-day’s snorkel in Half Moon Bay (West End). The slightly blurry barracuda photo taken at the end was done using a zoom; although incidents of barracudas biting humans are relatively low, I certainly didn’t want to get in his face!

For the remainder of my time on Roatan, I wandered back and forth between my porch at the Mariposa Lodge, and the West End village and beach. The village had a good selection of restaurants, but I usually opted for some version of street food, either baleadas at a wooden stand, or gringas (which, in addition to ‘white woman’ also means taco) with grilled meat and cheese inside, eaten at a picnic table. One night I dined at one of the higher-end restaurants in town, the Lighthouse, so that I could try their conch soup. Since I got the appetizer size, it only set me back three dollars. They had a primo location right over the water, so it was a nice place to take in a sunset.

A consistent theme that I heard from the locals was that the West End had become really built up in the last 12-15 years. Indeed, there were boutiques, restaurants and gift shops along the main road that would have fit perfectly in Southern California or parts of Florida. It was only about five years ago that electricity became available throughout Roatan, according to the owner of the Mariposa Lodge. Somehow, though, the West End has kept its Caribbean village charm. The main road through the West End was still dirt, and heavily potholed dirt, at that. The demographic of visitors to the beach was higher for Hondurans than foreigners, and there were enough local institutions mixed in with the tourist shops to provide glimpses into everyday Roatanian’s lives. I was a bit put off by the touristy nature of the West End when I first arrived, but after a couple of days, I slipped into the groove and realized that it was far from overdone.

I like to call this one the ‘fish of my youth,’ as its colors reflect exactly how I dressed in 1986. Good times.

Somebody there might have thought that he was going to get fed… . Not from me, dude!

That last one had some pretty bulgy eyeballs, don’tcha think?

Free Willy! Alright, not really.

Rawr!

Bay Islands, Honduras

By Laura Zera 2 Comments

I like islands. They usually have fewer cars and more beaches than a mainland. I made the decision early on in my trip to cap it off on a Bay Island in Honduras, but I just had to choose which one.

Of Utila and Roatan, Utila was the early frontrunner. It had the following pros going for it: cheaper, smaller, and less built-up. I was all set to go there until about 12:30 in the afternoon when a couple of different people gave me their comparison of Utila and Roatan, and noted that ‘given my age,’ I might prefer Roatan. Utila’s street (singular) is pretty much lined with drunken twenty-somethings, and god knows that after my last night at the Jungle River Lodge, I don’t fit in with that scene. Unfortunately, I didn’t really fit in with Roatan’s scene either, but there were other pluses that made it a better choice for me.

Roatan has good right-off-the-beach snorkeling (and good beaches), whereas Utila lacks in both of those areas. Apparently Utila is also lousy with sand flies – the woman that told me this pointed to all the scars on her legs as evidence. Seeing as I’m still carrying sand-fly scars from last year’s trip to Fiji, that factoid mattered to me! Finally, I heard that Utila was more humid, really dirty, and that the accommodations didn’t deliver. Two of the women I talked to had stayed in the same Lonely Planet “mid-range” hotel that I’d been contemplating, called Rubi’s Inn, and they complained of water shortages and toilets that didn’t flush.

So, off to Roatan I went. I knew that restaurants were the source of a significant cost differential from Utila or the mainland, and so I planned on trying a place called the Mariposa Lodge as it has fully-stocked kitchenettes. Lucky me, the owner was already at the ferry terminal picking up other guests, and he had one room left.

Four out of five of us in the minivan were Canadian, including the owner, Mike. It took me until the next day to realize that the name of the lodge, Mariposa, was distinctly Canadian, too. I learned that it’s the name of a fictional Ontario town (thought to be Orillia) in a Stephen Leacock novel; I had only known it to be the name of the figure skating club from which Brian Orser and Elvis Stojko came.

The lodge was higher in price than my backpacking budget boundaries, but I reaaaaaally wanted someplace comfortable for my last handful of nights. For $40 USD, I started in their one small air-conditioned room, but then moved into an apartment unit (they have five) as soon as it became available. It was perfect: about 100 meters from the main street and beach, hot water showers, three cats, a dog, hammocks, breezy porches, and lots of lizards. I stocked my fridge with beer, milk, and Jamaica flower-flavored Tang (does Jamaica have Honduras-flavored Tang?) and I was content. Here’s to flopping out for a week!