FEBRUARY, 2005
February 14 - 21, 2005
After two quick flights out of San Pedro Sula, in old Soviet Prop Planes (signs inside the airplane in Russian and all). We touched down in Roatan, which is the largest of the Bay Islands, and apparently the one with the best combination of beauty (both underwater as well as beaches), and price, while still offering a decent variety of hotels, and services. Everyone also seems to speak English (many locals didnīt even seem to speak much Spanish), which while not good for practicing our Spanish, was a nice break from having to think every time we communicate.
We stayed in the area known as the West End, and Half Moon Bay, which has several nice cabin, hostel, and hotel options right on the beach or at most across the little beach front dirt road. The West End also has some great dive outfits, good restaurants and bars, and is only a 45 minute beach front walk to the West Bay,which is a fairly high end resort section of the island with beautiful beaches and crystal clear water.
We got there on Valentines Day, and were in the mood for a nice hotel room and meal, so we splurged on the Seagrape Resort, and got a private cabin on top of a dry coral reef right on the water. It was very beautiful, air conditioned, and the hammock life was perfect. That night we also discovered Los Arcos Argentianian restaurant which was truly excellent food served on the beach. It was very pricey by Honduran standards, but still cheap when compared to home. Think good Filet Mignon for about 12$.
The next day we moved to Chillies, and got this great cabin in the jungle just off the beach. It was like a really nice tree house, but on the ground. We were so comfortable, we decide to make a 3-4 day stay into 7. Chillies also runs a great dive shop, Native Sons, so we took advantage of that. Our instructor, John, had lived in Venice for 8 years, so that made for some good talk about the homeland, which was nice. We highly recommend these guys if you end up here. The dives were incredible. We saw as much life and beautiful coral as we did in Moorea, for half the price. However, the divemasters were extremely respectful of the coral, and heavily emphasized its protection as well as diver safety.
In addition to the diving and lodging, the West End is also great for mellow, but social night life. After getting off of the dive boat at about 4:30 every day we would head 10 feet to Sundowners which is basically a square bar in the sand with the most unbelievable view of the sunset over Half Moon Bay. The Happy hour was 3 hours long, with 1$ beers and 2$ mixed drinks, which is standard for the mainland in Central America, but half off in Roatan. Lots of good times, and we got the added bonus of meeting Braydon and Amy from Ventura, who were on their honeymoon. Plus, Braydon is a Dive Master on a boat in Ventura, which should make for some good dives in the future. They also contrubuted the underwater photos to this website, which was awesome, because we didnīt have an underwater camera. Check them out, theyīre schweet!
After the bar we would usually head past this great ice cream and brownie joint on our way to the Blue Moon, which had unlimited weekly internet rates, which were key for this site, as well as nightly movies on a huge projection screen. Not to mention, they had good food and Ryan the Canadian bartender, who is almost certainly Grant Nesbittīs previously undisclosed twin brother!
Pretty much the only bad thing we can say is donīt go to the Brick Oven for pizza or the nightly movies. The pizza sucks, its expensive, the movies are shown on a normal sized TV, and they even changed the movie without any announcement one night when we had walked for 15 minutes off the road, through peopleīs yards to get there, literally, and that is the only way in. Classic case of good advertising, bad product. Anyway, it happens.
Oh, and by the way, we got to witness first hand a Latin American Presidential election (the primaries at least) and, more specifically, the no booze sales for 36 hours during voting law. Surprisingly it seems to be pretty well followed, even though no enforcement was apparent. However, there was no shortage of "house parties" and Mike had a couple of pretty good "iced teas" at one place, which had a stangly malty taste! Mmmm, iced tea!
