Roatan

This morning I took a pretty sickening ferry ride over the bumpy Caribbean to the Honduran island of Roatan. I rode with the Kennedys, the Irish couple who I had dinner with last night. Their company was enjoyable, but I'm pretty sure that mine wasn't. Before getting on the ferry I had a pretty gross breakfast taco at the cafeteria at the pier. By the end of the ride I had regurgitated the entire thing into a garbage can, along with whatever else was in my stomach at the time. After wiping my mouth and staring at the floor for about twenty minutes I looked up and saw that the Kennedys had relocated to the other side of the ferry. I've never been seasick before but I guess there's a first time for everything. This trip has been full of first-time experiences, some more enjoyable than others. John Kennedy and his wife took a chance on me and split a cab to the west end of the island and I was off for some more classic Caribbean island scuba diving.

Roatan is a scuba diver's paradise. The island is packed with hole-in-the-wall Caribbean restaurants and local dive companies. The competition for business is so fierce on Roatan that the island has become widely known as the cheapest place to scuba dive in the world. Twenty-five bucks here will buy you a boat ride and a one-hour guided tour of the bottom of the ocean. For five more bucks the rental of your fins, mask, wetsuit, and diving equipment is included.

After hopping off the cab I wandered into the nearest dive shop, “Happy Divers” and booked an advanced open water PADI course for Tuesday and Wednesday. The advanced PADI course will earn me my next level of PADI diving certification, which will certify me to dive up to thirty meters deep instead of the current eighteen and will also certify me to go on wreck dives and night dives. It probably doesn't really make a difference if I have the advanced certification or not, as most dive companies will take you on any dive as long as you have the first level of certification, but I figure it'll be fun to go through the course and all the different dives that are required for the advanced class.

I booked a couple dives for this afternoon with “Coconut Tree Dive Company”, down the bumpy dirt road from “Happy Divers”. In the hour before my first dive I found a hotel and dropped off my stuff, e-mailed home two days worth of stories and pictures, got a quick lunch at a grocery store, and gathered up my rented diving equipment and hauled it onto the boat.

The first dive of the day was at a site called “Fish's Den”, about a ten minute boat ride east of the Coconut Tree dive shop. I don't think that Roatan has the giant eagle rays, sea turtles, and sharks like Belize has, but there's lots of smaller stuff that's worth seeing. I probably could ever get bored with diving in the Caribbean. During the hour spent at Fish's Den I saw many of the incredible coral formations typical of Caribbean diving as well as a giant blue parrot fish and a small sea turtle.

Fish's Den was a lot of fun and I figured that would be the highlight of the day but my next dive, at a site called “Dixie's Place”, turned out to be even better. The dive started off pretty normal, with lots of smaller stuff, but a couple sightings later in the dive were pretty enjoyable. Martin, the guide from Coconut Tree, pointed out a hawkbill sea turtle in the distance and I swam over with a few other divers to check it out. It really was a pretty funny sight, the turtle was shoving his head into a cluster of coral and pawing at it with his fin like a dog searching for his bone in a hole in the backyard. I can only guess what was in there but regardless of what it was the sight was pretty funny. The turtle was completely oblivious to the fact that six divers were hovering only a few feet overhead. He just kept pawing away at the coral, determined to evict whatever was inside. Only a few minutes later we crossed paths with another sea turtle, this one about three feet in diameter. Sea turtles aren't shy by any means. I swam right up to the thing with my underwater camera and he swam even closer to me, completely unintimidated by a larger creature in the ocean. I snapped a few shots as he paddled by and went about his business.

I think I've finally figured out the underwater photography thing. For the first six dives of the trip it was so hard to get any pictures to turn out because there's so little light sixty feet down in the ocean. All my shots looked great when I framed them up and snapped the shutter, but later when I looked at them they'd all be deep blue with a few barely distinguishable figures in the distance. The trick is that to get any color at all you have to use the flash and get as close as possible to the subject. On my last dive today at Dixie's Place I finally figured that out and even got some pictures with bright red, green, and yellow hues instead of the typical blue mess.

I chatted with our guide, Martin, for a few minutes between dives and he has a pretty interesting story. Martin spent two years diving in Thailand and Malaysia, five years diving elsewhere in the Caribbean, and has been on Roatan for one year so far. Most of the diving he has done has been commercial and industrial - building and recovering stuff under the water, but for the last little while that he's worked as a scuba guide leading people in explorations under the ocean.

It's interesting to hear about the lives of the people I meet while traveling. Most of these people have such a unique outlook on life. At home it seems to be so easy for people to stretch themselves into a mortgage and car payments that they can't afford. A lot of people will accumulate every last material thing that banks will give them credit for and then they spend so much time working to pay for it that they forget to live. The result is hundreds of millions of Americans who devote their lives to paying interest and creating a profit for financial institutions. In the meantime there are guys like Martin who live a simple life and don't have a whole lot of material things, but do have an incredible lifestyle and amazing experiences literally every day. I think everyone just has to have their balance. Nothing's wrong with having material things and living a traditional lifestyle as long as you make time to really live.

Dinner tonight was at a tacky place called The Cannibal Cafe, “Where weed like to have you for dinner!!!”. The food wasn't too memorable, but the rest of my night was alright. Later on, as the sky grew darker, I wandered aimlessly along the coast. An older guy with a British accent rushed to introduce himself to me and was excited to introduce his friend as well. His German buddy supposedly was the driver for Heimlich Himmler during World War II. These older guys were way funny. I was in more of a philosophical mood than a laughing mood tonight, but these guys got a few chuckles out of me. Most of the humor was so profane that I tried not to laugh and would never repeat it in the journal, but some stuff was good clean fun. The British guy showed me a few quotes scrawled onto his food kiosk with a Sharpie marker. All of them were good for a laugh, but my favorite was probably one that read, “It's not your fault you're American, it's ours. Signed The British Empire.”