I began this missive about my dive trip to Roatan, which is the largest of the three Bay Islands off the coast of the Central American nation of Honduras, from the airport in San Pedro Sula. For the geographically challenged, San Pedro is located roughly in the center of poverty stricken Honduras, nowhere near the ocean, you know - where people actually scuba dive. Honduras has a population a little over seven million, 50% of which live below the poverty level and over 25% of which are unemployed. I wanted to let a couple of friends know how I invested my first vacation day, and that based on my experience thus far, that they hadn't missed anything (anything good that is).
This story was mostly composed as possibly the longest email ever created on a Blackberry, and it is a completely accurate description of my trip. I’ve since edited it a little for brevity and spelling, as my two thumbs clumsily only approximated the generally accepted method of spelling favored by leading American blog sites such as this on the Chiclet-sized Blackberry keys.
Day 1 – From San Pedro Sula International Airport
Friday began with my alarm going off at 3:50 a.m.; just enough time to shower away the roughly three hours of sleep that were weighing me down. I climbed into the backseat of a car that took me to O'Hare International Airport in Chicago; its now 10:02 p.m., roughly 18 hours since I awoke, and that pre-dawn limo ride turns out to have been the best part of the day.
At O'Hare, I was advised by the crack American Airlines squad to check my bags only as far as Miami where my first ticket ended; I'd have almost 3 hours in Miami before boarding the once-a-day flight to Honduras so I'd have plenty of time to claim my bags and re-check them internationally. One bag had my suits for the conference that my firm is hosting in Florida beginning the following Wednesday, and the other my scuba gear and vacation clothes. I am fairly certain that I will never see either bag again, and will most likely arrive at my employer's premier annual event wearing the same t-shirt and flip flops that I have on now, which will probably not help my career very much. Speaking of helping my career, I'm spending a lot of extra money on this vacation before the conference instead of after it as I had originally booked it, because due to my high stature at the firm my calendar was rescheduled without any actual input from me.
On my soon to be abbreviated flight I sat in the first row of coach, a few seats behind one of the top recruits for the Chicago Bulls' upcoming number-one first round draft pick who was admiring his just-issued obsidian American Airlines Admirals Club card, (presumably a gift from team owner Jerry Reinsdorf), after spending some time working out with the team. I learned this from the sports section of the Chicago Tribune I had brought with me and which I probably read every word of during the day. Twice.
We took off almost on time at 6:30 and the engine (which I strategically was sitting right next to), immediately began to wheeze, clank, bump, grind and whine like an aging, overweight chain-smoking stripper wearing a rusted medieval suit of armor shimmying awkwardly for a bigger tip. I quickly glanced at the stewardess, (I mean flight attendant), sitting in the jump seat facing me, who bore a remarkable resemblance to Tina Turner but without the preternaturally youthful legs, and covertly watched her for any almost imperceptible signs of concern. I needn't have been quite so sly because she was immediately on the phone to the cockpit as she, gesticulating wildly and inadvertently hitting me twice, answered the pilot's questions while describing the sounds we were experiencing; “Flames?, let me lean forward a little…wait…yes I can, I can see flames!”, simultaneously strapping herself in more tightly.
As you've undoubtedly surmised, we didn’t crash, but instead successfully returned to O'Hare where we boarded a new plane a mere 170 minutes later, and arrived in Miami just in time for me to do my best O.J. Simpson, (the ‘70’s dashing-through-the-airport-jumping-over-seats O.J., not the ‘90’s bloody glove-wearing, knife-wielding killer O.J.), for the Honduras-bound flight and board, sans luggage. I gazed contentedly out the window as we flew over the Florida Keys; or at least as contentedly as a diver can knowing he's just abandoned his dive gear, clothes, toothbrush, underwear etc.
I enjoyed the typically efficient Central American immigration process in the middle of Honduras and proceeded to the gate to await my flight to the coastal town of La Ceiba, where with luck I would take my last brief flight of the day to Roatan - scuba paradise. I gazed at the screen with admiration for the finely tuned hub of transportation that I was obviously in, which proclaimed each and every flight including mine to be not just "on time" but, in Spanish, impressively "punctual" (pronounced punk-to-all). The flight still showed "punctual" on the screen two hours after our scheduled departure time had come and gone when the plane finally arrived from whatever fucking sandflea-bitten country it was coming from and we boarded.
Although there were no goats or chickens on the bus... er, plane, it smelled like there may have been some hastily gathered up and stowed below just before I boarded ("Americano coming - Apurate! Rapido!"). The plane took off, and shortly after, for the 2nd time of my life and, coincidentally the 2nd time of the day, a shaken stewardess announced (although this time in heavily accented English) that the plane was turning around and returning to the airport we had just left, explanations to be forthcoming on the ground.
Although they never did say why we had returned, the only piece of useful information that I learned back at my new, hopefully temporary home, the San Pedro Sula International airport (which has no restaurant in case you were wondering, and was strangely devoid of any actual airplanes), is that the Roatan airport has no lights, so cannot accommodate landings after sundown. They carefully explained this in excellent English approximately an hour after sundown.
So now I'm enjoying my 4th can of odd tepid local brew (think alcoholic watered down Mountain Dew but maybe a little sweeter), as the airline works out what to do with us stranded passengers tonight and I count down the percentage of vacation that has eroded (about 20 percent so far) with no actual vacationing happening.
It may sound like a tough travel day, but I'm actually thinking that the odds may actually have turned in my favor because earlier THIS VERY DAY, the VERY SAME airline that I'm on, (El Salvador based TACA, which my new friend Raul from Guatemala tells me means Take A Chance Airlines), actually had an IDENTICAL plane crash with five fatalities in Tegucigalpa, another city in THIS SAME COUNTRY, (which for passenger reassurance purposes has been covered non-stop on the news channel playing on the airport's only TV)....I mean lightning never strikes the same place twice, right? Right?
SSAAA - Still Smiling As Adventure Awaits! :)
Day 2 – La Ceiba, and Finally, Roatan.
6:00 am. Interestingly, the bellman who is carrying the bags of the four strandees who were treated to a night's stay by our gracious airline host (reluctantly after much gnashing of teeth), wears not just one, but two guns as he loads the bags back into the same tiny yet amazingly fast and nimbly maneuverable cab that deposited us here in beautiful downtown La Ceiba a scant few hours ago. One gun is a pistol in a holster on his belt, and the other is a two-and-a-half foot long weapon that looks like a combination of pistol and sawed off shotgun, which swings around wildly from a guitar strap around his shoulder as he carries our, (or more accurately since I no longer have any bags, the Oregonian pharmacist's and his wife's) luggage. I wondered as I gazed up toward the steel bars bolted over the hotel room windows, if crime is a big issue here. I later did some research on line which claims that crime in La Ceiba is fairly low, all evidence to the contrary.
After the bags are secured, our helper adjusts something on the big gun, then stands looking out the door, adjusting it some more. "Cinquenta y ocho Lempiras" the woman behind the hotel counter says when I gesture toward the stack of unrefrigerated Gatorade bottles behind her. I quickly try do the math but fail and hand her a 10 dollar bill with a hopeful expression. “Amarillo.” I say in answer to the question I think she’s just asked me regarding which flavor I would like, hoping that I remembered the word correctly and that it means yellow and not a small armored animal often found on the roadsides in Texas. She hands me my change, which consists of a really thick rainbow-colored stack of bills of numerous denominations of Honduran Lempiras - the wad looks like it must be worth several thousand dollars but adds up to about eight bucks.
The flight leaves in an hour and the three of us are raring to go. Wait a minute - only 3? "What about that other woman?" the pharmacist's wife exclaims, referring to the 4th in our party of stranded travelers, a sturdy, swarthy New Yorker who had complained on last night's taxi ride of being stuck with us only because she was hung over and had overslept and missed the morning flight. After a quick debate about whether to leave without our comrade of the road, (guess which side of the argument I was on...), I, as the youngest (ha ha), was dispatched to climb the 6 flights to her room (“No telephonos” said the heavily armed doorman suspiciously), and see if she was awake, or indeed even still there.
I banged on the door a little timidly - no reply. Bam bam bam Bam Bam! - - this time with the rage I felt at possibly missing yet another flight due to someone else's carelessness. This time a sound from within..."OH MOY GAAAAWWD" - - much shuffling and the door swings wide open to reveal (reveal being a carefully selected word in this context), our sorry traveler standing there in a t-shirt and panties that were way too skimpy for her ample size and the quantity of, shall we say, usually concealed or otherwise shaved away bodily hair. "I din't wake up - I'm sooooo saawwrry. Please don't leave - I prawmise I'll be down in 5 minutes".
I reported the news to the others and about 20 minutes later the four of us departed for the airport, which means that we would have about 5 or 10 minutes to check in, clear security, check luggage (for those lucky enough to still have some), pay the departure tax (a separate transaction for each Honduran flight costing about $1.60) and board the plane. Despite the promise of the airline, the driver insisted that he had not been paid, so I covered the cost of the rides to and from the hotel which I’m sure constituted a 100% tip, and we rushed inside. Fortunately La Ceiba International Airport was not at full capacity this particular morning (ours was the only plane there), and despite the staff's surprisingly unfamiliarity with our plight and our lack of boarding passes or tickets, (which they had retained previously), and contrary to assurances that the staff would be fully accommodating to us from the night before by TACA's approximately 22 year-old official representative, (who had also personally unloaded the luggage from the aborted flight and confided to me that he wasn't really an employee, more like a temp), we actually made it.
The flight was actually quicker than the taxiing on the runway and I am happy to report that I was underwater by mid-morning, diving with the sole other diver on my boat, Willie, a lanky Irishman who reminded me a lot of the guitar-playing actor from the movie "Once" except without the patchy beard within about two hours.
The Seagrape Resort in the village of West End is alternatively described as "one of the nicest hotels on the island", and "a crummy hostel way off the beaten path" by the travel sites I found on the web, and I can confidently report that neither is remotely true. My room is actually one of five distinctly painted separate bungalows or cottages located directly on the ocean front (I have the green one). I have not yet learned what a "sea grape" is, but I have imagined that perhaps it’s a Central American phrase similar to "rocky mountain oysters". Rocky mountain oysters as you may know are bull testicles, which is usually only revealed to a neophyte diner after he has been convinced to eat some.
My wife would absolutely hate it here, and based on my experience during our move several years previously from a lovely rustic $40 a night joint in Ambergis Caye off of Belize to a $400 per night luxury resort I'm sure we never would have even checked in if she was with me. As if we would have even continued getting on enough planes to get anywhere near here, but by way of exterior comparisons to the lodging choices I saw from my cab as we sluiced through the mud roads of the popular West End village, I think that it actually is probably on the comparatively better end of the available scale, and it should be noted, has its own excellent dive operation, and despite spaces in the floorboards large enough to see the dirt below the stilts that hold the building up, is remarkably bug-free, (not true of the high-rise urban hotel from the previous night). There is another “resort” next door called Lands End which has a beautiful outdoor bar and some really good food, and although I didn’t see the rooms, looks to be an excellent lodging choice as well.
Regarding the afternoon dive, it was spectacular - underwater Nirvana! 100 foot visibility and a rainbow of various creatures to see. The guest list for the later dive was 50 percent less than the morning dive, (I was the only passenger this time) so my gracious divemaster Luis, whose family owns the resort and dive operation, took me on a more detailed tour of his favorite local spot.
The reef is just offshore and if pressed, (which I hoped not to be) I could probably swim back to the hotel. Despite Roatan's reputation as a place to primarily explore tiny residents of the reef, among the many highlights of the dive was an enormous, glorious Shrek-green moray eel, (I'm talking big - longer than me by maybe half and as big around as an NFL lineman's leg, with a gaping mouthful of teeth that could probably chomp off said limb). While morays are normally quite shy and don't come far out of their hidey holes, this one swam directly at me through open water and while hyperventilating furiously through my regulator and probably consuming about half of my airsupply, if I was comfortable gambling with my fingers, I could have given him a little pet on the top of his back as he quickly disappeared below an outcropping of coral below me. Luis and I swam down to check him out and there he was, sweetly nuzzling and displaying what could only be described as a coily, twisting public display of affection towards another, equally large, gape-mouthed, blue-eyed moray. Considering their seemingly identical somewhat phallic appearance I wondered how he could tell if it was a girl. I have read several articles exploring whether fish can feel pain, but what I want to know now is can fish be gay?
On the opposite end of the scale, we discovered a couple of almost microscopic, transparent-blue, glowing shrimp and a beautiful, tiny gracefully wiggling juvenile drum fish undulating gently in the mild current. Being the only paying diver may not have helped my social life alone on the island, but it definitely improved my lot underwater. We followed deep canyons up and down and swam through tight cracks in the coral so twisted and narrow that Luis never would have dared take a larger (or chubbier) group through. At times I felt like Luke Skywalker barreling through the trench on the surface of the Death Star. It was exhilarating!
After a well deserved nap I wound my way for the second time of the day through the meandering unpaved road toward the village - - about a five minute walk when it was sunny, but a quite longer journey in the pitch dark, ducking mud puddles, feral dogs, and occasional brilliant flashes of lightning, (it had rained hard when I was sleeping). Since the road is unpaved you can appreciate that street lamps have never been seriously considered. As I'm not much of a pet person, each time I passed one of the island's not uncommon wandering dogs I thought of the statistic that I heard recently that in 2007 only one person on the entire planet was reportedly killed by a shark, but in the U.S. alone something like 10 or 12 people were KILLED BY THEIR OWN DOGS. Think of that when you laugh at me backing away from some friendly mutt or when you wonder how divers can calmly, even hopefully, enjoy an encounter with a shark the next time you bend your face down and give old Fido a kiss on his germ infested mouth.
As the intensity of the lightning increased I also pondered whether the rubber soles of my cool new Reef sandals would insulate me from a strike, or if the metal beer bottle openers molded into the bottom would direct the bolt straight up from the muddy puddles through my spine directly to my brain.
On my first walk to town to replace a few of the clothes and toiletries that were still (hopefully) in my luggage in Miami, I had an encounter with karma. As a Christian but not exceedingly spiritual person, I may have these experiences all the time yet fail to recognize them, but this onehit me squarely in the face. As you know, earlier I made a disparaging remark about someone else's appearance in their underwear, and I'm sorry to report that absolutely the only men's (I think) underwear for sale anywhere in the West End was a grape-smuggling, three-pack of boxer briefs in a mostly non-cotton mix fabric, in a size that would possibly be a little tight on my 89 pound 13 year-old son, (I go well more than twice that), which I am now wearing as I sit at the Sundowner Bar way past sundown (there's that bloody karma again). By the way the brand is called Mr. Happy, and if by chance that you, like I, are unfamiliar with this brand, they prominently display the word "HAPPY" across the ass in 4 inch-tall letters which I'm convinced will be clearly showing through my shorts if it begins raining again which it undoubtedly will. Never again will I laugh or sneer at another's undergarments (not on this trip again anyway).
10 pm is closing time at Sundowner. You could tell that closing time was here because the inebriated bartender stood on the bar and released a heavy wooden overhead shutter and dropped it solidly, directly on the head of a customer with a sickening sounding clunk. The guy sitting next to me and I wisely and quickly decided to step away as our compatriot across the hexagonal bar comes to and they closed the rest of the shutters.
When I was a child I read a story called (I think) Homer and the Donut Machine, which featured a boy who invented a machine that made donuts and no matter how fast you ate then, even more donuts, an infinite supply would appear. I think I've channeled Homer (not the Homer from Greek mythology even though my journey here might conjour up some comparisons to his “Odyssey”, but the Homer of the never ending donuts), because I slapped down a 20, (now at The Twisted Toucan) and no matter how many Barena beers I consume, and there have been plenty, every time the blonde! Bartender brings me another, my pile of Limperas never seems to diminish. If anything I now have a bigger stack of funny money than I had four or five beers ago.
The Twisted Toucan is just a short walk from the Sundowner, and is owned and operated by the lovely looking if inelegantly named Shauna Slovarp. She moved to Roatan sight unseen a few years earlier from Montana, and after working at the bar for a while ended up purchasing it. Shauna chatted with me for a while since there were only about 3 others in the bar that night, and despite confiding to me that worst pickup line she had ever heard that worked was “Did anyone ever tell you that you’ve got an ass like a forty-dollar chicken?”, she proved to be a fascinating conversationalist, filling me in on the tough life of an American living on a tiny foreign island.
Shauna and the others at the Twisted Toucan smoked quite a bit, so I decided to fire up a big fat Honduran cigar that I had purchased during my quest for clothing. I didn’t have a lighter so I borrowed one from a guy sitting a few stools away. Not realizing that the lighter was set to the death-by-flamethrower setting, I put the cigar in my mouth, tilted my head down toward the lighter and because it was a little windy, I cupped my hand around the lighter and thumbed the little wheel aggressively. A flame about two feet high leaped straight up into my eye, and I recoiled my face from the heat and smell, screaming like a woman and shaking my head - rubbing furiously at my almost certainly blinded eye. For a moment I thought I really was blinded because I couldn’t see, but it turned out that the top and bottom eyelashes of my left eye had melted and curled up from the flame, effectively mimicking the hooks and loops of Velcro, which prevented the eye from opening. I fumbled into the bathroom to survey the damage and found (mostly by feel), that not only did the unisex bathroom have no mirror and not even a sink, just a rustic toilet.
I was able to interrupt the laughter at the bar long enough to be directed to a sink near the bathroom and carefully rinsed out my eyes, but I was forced to wait until I stumbled back to my cottage at the Sea Grape to use the mirror there to check for real damage. Other than my oddly bald eyelids, my face was unscarred, but my left eye felt like it had a piece of cheesecloth covering it for a couple of days.
Day Three – “These Things Only Happen When You Abandon Me For One Of Your Little Adventures”
Not nearly as much of interest to report today here in Roatan as the day was perfect and uneventful, but plenty was unfolding back home. I returned from another long day of fabulous diving with Luis and a few others, and was toweling my head off while reading a text message on my phone from my 13 year-old son Cal asking me to call home because my brother had been stabbed.
T.J. is 14 years my junior, and despite our age difference and the facts that he lives in L.A. and I in suburban Chicago, and that I’m blonde and he a fiery red-head (think Dennis Leary 15 years ago), and that I inherited my father’s somewhat stuffy, overly responsible, uptight, and business-minded workaholic personality, and he had inherited my mother’s creative, vivacious, upbeat, and some might say slightly flaky traits, and that I’m always early and he’s always late, we have remained very close. We share a love of music and meet each summer in Manchester Tennessee for four nights of camping shared with 100,000 or so of our closest friends and 100 bands for the Bonnaroo Festival, and we were due to meet there in a couple of weeks.
Stabbed! My heart raced as I tried to imagine the actual word that my son Cal had meant to text and had perhaps misspelled or that the predictive text engine in his phone had substituted the word “Stabbed” for.
“Staffed?” “Slabbed?” Maybe “tabbed”? Nothing I came up with made any sense, and not that this would be unusual for a text message from a teenager, I started dialing in near panic. Forty or fifty cell phone calls later I reached home. T.J. had been staying with my family for a wedding while I was traveling; the story quickly unfolded and I learned that he had been in an altercation at the hotel where the wedding reception was held with some uninvited guests and that one of them had broken a beer bottle off in the back of his head causing an unimaginable amount of blood, but generally only a superficial wound. I was able to speak to him a few hours later in the hospital back home, and decided that since I couldn’t get there anyway to finish my trip and continue on to the conference in Miami. The Twisted Toucan was closed, so I enjoyed a nice, quiet meal at an Argentinean restaurant and spent the evening reading Hunter S. Thompson on the front porch of my cottage, lying in the hammock nodding off the sound of the surf pounding the rough, rocky beach.
Day Four – Back to Reality
With a population a little over 5,000, crowded and poor Coxen Hole is the largest city on Roatan, and home to not only the airport, but a huge cruise ship dock and terminal that are currently under construction that when open will be able to accommodate several behemoth vessels and their thousands of passengers at a time. Apparently the cruise industry has anointed Roatan as the next big destination. What these people will do in Coxen Hole remains a mystery, as there appears to be exactly zero places in the town that would appeal to a tourist. The dive villages like West End are charming in their own right, but only because they are sparsely populated with visitors. My advice to you if you are thinking of visiting Roatan in spite of this story, (which I strongly encourage – don’t let my travails scare you off, the diving is world class and is the most affordable I’ve encountered anywhere in the Caribbean or Central America, the people are extremely friendly, and the food and culture are terrific – I’m going back as soon as possible), is to come soon before the cruise ships wreck it.
The TACA flight schedule out of Roatan was still a mess due to being down one plane, and I learned upon checking in at the airport that they had not had an outbound flight off of the island for the past two days. “You’ll just have to extend your stay like we did”, a woman next to me at the counter said to me grumpily. She and her travel companion had been stranded on the island an extra day and like me, were trying to get on a plane to start the first leg of their journey home. I had arrived over two hours early for the flight, and I must be a trfile more persuasive than she was because I quickly arranged for the three of us to board an outbound flight at TACA’s expense by the other alternative airline, which took off more than an hour prior to my scheduled departure – Showing up early was the one thing that got me off Roatan that day. On this day, travel was a snap, no airplanes broke, and I arrived on time at Miami, miraculously located my luggage without delay, slipped into suit and tie, and was at my business conference with a great story to tell and a nice tan.
