Greg and Tricia

We haven't done much worth writing about for the past couple of weeks. We're still on Utila and have moved houses from one in the little town to a nicer villa on the South beach for a week. There's snorkeling out our back door and blessed air conditioning. It's a mini vacation from our vacation. We have been diving about once a week, usually on Mondays, and this is where I must add a recommendation for Ecomarine dive center in Utila. It's part of a dive shop called "Gunther's" and is owned and operated by a wonderfully experienced German fellow named Hans. He's been diving these waters for 22 years, and know more about diving this island than any dive master you're likely to find anywhere else in the world. When you get off the ferry ... read more

Utila is a quiet little island just off the carribean coast of Honduras. It is perfect if you are looking for that undiscovered place that is so cool and off the beaten path before the tourist industry takes control and destroys its charm. Part of what keeps the island so peaceful is the relative difficulty of getting here. It's not an easy, packaged travel plan and requires some real intent, but it's worth it. There are really two options for reaching Utila. You can fly into the capital of Honduras, Tegucigalpa, on any major Airline. Tegucigalpa (don't worry, I can't pronounce it either), is a fair reach from the Carribean coast, and I highly recommend making reservations on the regional commuter airline called TACA to the port town of La Ceiba. It's certainly not cheap, but ... read more

Welcome once again to our summer travel blog. If you'd like to read about last year's trip to Thailand, you can find that here: Thailand . This year we are venturing through Central America and spending much of our time on the bay island of Utila, though there are sojourns planned to Belize, Roatan, and possibly some ruins on the mainland. Utila is a small island, about 5 miles long and 2 miles wide, with 2,500 or so residents and about half that many visitors at any one time. Virtually all the tourists on the island are here for the diving (we'll write about that quite a bit more in the next report). Utila sits on the edge of the world's second largest barrier reef (after Australia's) and is on the migration path for the amazing ... read more

Hi All, Thanks for joining us on the trip. Here is a link to Yahoo Videos where we have posted a compendium of our journey, complete with a bit of music to make it bearable ;-) http://video.yahoo.com/watch/3257344/9182035 Hope you enjoy it. Next year, we're looking at Honduras and Central America for our travels, so join us then for a new adventure. Until then, Sawatdee Kap Greg and Tricia... read more

Okay, we've just wrapped up our month in the land of smiles and we hope you've enjoyed the vicarious journey with us. We're headed off for two weeks of festival camping (I'll write a bit about that in a week or so), but for now, here are a few thoughts and observations on Thailand that don't really fit anywhere else. Some of it is a bit crude and adult oriented, but there's just no other way to accurately convey some of this stuff. At any rate, here's the stuff you'll never find in Lonely Planet. Enjoy! Toilets There are two things you first notice about toilets in Thailand. First, is that virtually all public toilets, when you can find one, are Turkish style. That means they are simple ceramic bowls set flush in the ground. ... read more

Khao Sok National Rainforest covers over 750 square kilometers and is surrounded by hundreds more. It is the oldest evergreen virgin rainforest in the world and stepping from the road onto the trails makes this amazingly obvious. This is the world before we knew it. The rainforest is at once beautiful and treacherous. It's the kind of place you want to go with a guide. Always. We took a tube ride down the river, as I mentioned, and I couldn't figure out why our guide kept pushing us along whenever the water would slow down a bit. We've spent some time (as many of you have) tubing down the Guadalupe and Comal, floating in the calm water and enjoying a beer as the trees slowly slide past. That's sort of what we had in mind when ... read more

Just a quick entry here, we're about to climb onto the back of an elephant and go treking into the National Forest. We made it to Khao Sok after a bit of a hassle at the bus depot. It's easy for complacency to set in in places like Pai and Koh Tao where everyone is friendly and noone is out to scam you for your money. It's easy to forget that in any city of size (Bangkok, Chang Mai, Surat Thani) it's another story. We had to pass through Surat Thani to get a van to the rainforest, and a brief lapse in caretaking landed us in the middle of nowhere, stranded at a "sub-station" for the van pool for three hours. It really was a group trying to pick up a few extra Farang dollars ... read more