Traveling Applejax

Mike and I have gotten lazy. Enough biking for a while, enough changing hotel rooms and towns everyday — we’ve spent pretty much this entire week on Utila, one of Honduras’ Bay Islands. I’m sitting in a hammock on the second-floor deck of our hotel, which is about 10 feet from the Caribbean Sea. Although it’s not too pricey, this hotel is fancy enough to have a Wi-Fi connection. We’ve been spoiled.

Dean turned out to be a bit anti-climatic for us. After the whole island pretty much shut down, we only ended up getting a teensy bit of rain and a few gusts of wind. The water level rose a bit, but not even enough to flood our hotel room. Boring.

We stuck out the storm (tough as that was) and began carrying out our scuba plans on Tuesday. We completed the classroom portion of our Nitrox training, which gives us the option to dive with enriched air in the future. On Wednesday we went out on a boat in the morning and did two “fun dives,” which basically means that we weren’t doing any training or anything, just enjoying the water. The highlight was when we saw two eagle rays — a male and a female — swimming side by side. An eagle ray is a beautifully spotted stingray, and the ones we saw were 3-4 feet wide. Also, the male’s tail was probably about 8 feet long!

Today we went diving in the morning again, but this time we used enriched air and visited a shipwreck. It was a cargo ship called the Halliburton, and was purposefully sunk about 12 years ago to a depth of about 100 feet. Now, of course, it’s the home of loads of coral, fish, and other forms of sea life. It’s pretty cool to see a giant ship on the bottom of the ocean, especially when there’s a 7-foot-long green moray eel living inside! He was the highlight of that dive. There were also a few bicycles sunk with the Halliburton for good measure. Don’t ask me why, but somebody left a perfectly good bike padlocked to the upper deck, and another wheel in the hold below. Go figure.

Scuba diving always brings me back to my childhood when The Little Mermaid was my favorite movie. Despite the fact that I don’t have fins, flaming red hair, or a fantastic singing voice, I used to go around pretending I was Ariel. Now that I go scuba diving I feel even more like a mermaid, and let me tell you, that Sebastian (the crab) seemed to have the right idea:

Under the sea
Under the sea
Darling it’s better
Down where it’s wetter
Take it from me
Up on the shore they work all day
Out in the sun they slave away
While we devotin’
Full time to floatin’
Under the sea (The Little Mermaid, 1989)

Silly mermaid, wanting legs just so she could hang out with that Prince Eric guy.

When we haven’t been diving, Mike and I have been working on the Internet (that’s right, we actually are doing some work too), sleeping in hammocks, eating, and reading. I finally finished Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude and picked up Isabel Allende’s Portrait in Sepia. I’m trying to read a few more Latin-American authors, as you may have guessed. My Spanish tutor in Antigua recommended Allende, and I’m very grateful that she did! Allende was born in Peru, grew up in Chile, and now lives in California. I absolutely loved Portrait in Sepia and recommend it to anyone. (Julie, are you reading my blog at all? Can you recommend any other authors? I think you would like Portrait in Sepia if you haven’t already read it.) Mike’s working his way through the 3rd Harry Potter.

I think we’re going to start moving again soon, and we plan to work our way toward Nicaragua in the next week. Here are some photos for now:

Boats docked in La Ceiba’s harbor.

The (not-so-dramatic) effects of Hurricane Dean, as seen on Utila.

The dive shop across from our hotel getting “pummeled” by Dean.