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Published: March 18th 2011
Our latest travels....
We started our vacation with a mini road trip to Seattle and spent the day there. We found the single greatest restaurant of all time called the Crab Pot where they just dump a huge pile of seafood on a paper covered picnic table in front of you, and then all bibbed-up, you just dive in with your hands and wooden mallot and fill your bellies with the best steamed seafod EVER. After that, we went to the airport and started hitting the sauce. Nicley buzzed we boarded the plane to Roatan.
Although shorter by far than most of our adventures, the time we spent in Honduras' Bay Islands was defintely sufficient to press the reset button fully. We spent the majority of our time in Roatan, the largest island in the Bay Islands.
Roatan is both blessed and cursed. Blessed with some of the most beautiful beaches we have ever seen, killer snorkeling, awesomely laid back friendly people and great night life. However, it is cursed as well; cursed by cruise ships. On masse (from Tuesday-Friday), swarms of annoying white beach apes roll themselves out of the cruise ships and infest the beautiful beach
of West Bay (leaving a swath of garbage on the beach upon their depature). Now at first this was supremely annoying, but once you get a hang of the island, it is avoidable, without comprimising your own vacation. On cruise ship days, the people (and I use this term loosely - mostly "spring break" douchebags and annoying "texans") come no matter what, the key is to find ways to not be there; so that's what we did. On non-cruise ship days, it is like opposite world, we had the whole beautiful beach all to ourselves and it was great.
We stayed In West Bay at a great spot called Fosters. Pefectly located on the best beach on Roatan, it is away from the hordes giving you a more tranquil location to stay. We cannot recommend Fosters enough, we lucked out and it the perfect place for us.
Our main goal of this trip was to literally accomplish NOTHING, and during our first week or so, we accomplished and surpassed that goal with flying colours. The first 2-3 days we literally walked from our front door to our tanning/sleeping/reading spot on the beach (maybe 20 steps), to our swimming
spot (another 3 steps), to our snorkelling spot (4 more steps), to our eating spot (10 steps more), back to our sleeping spot (right beside the eating spot).
Having accomplished that task, it was time to get off our ass, and that we did. We booked a day trip to Utila (another of the Bay Islands) to go find whale sharks who congregate around the island during their migration to feed. Warned we may not even see them, we set off. Once around Utila the search was on. Almost right away we found what we were looking for, HUGE schools of fish frantically jumping out the water avoiding being eaten by the whale sharks (this is how you spot them to get in the water with them). So as the captain would near these schools, we would get ready and jump into the open ocean, swim as fast as we could to the massive schools of fish to try to see them feed. The problem being that as soon as we got close, the sharks would sound and dive straight dow to the depths. After spending about 3 hours, tired as hell from all the crazy searching, it didnt
look good. On the last attempt, we jump into the swells, and he was right below us, literally. It is a sight one can never forget. It was about 20-25ft in length (a baby really), and we got as close as about 10 feet away from him when it turned towards us following food. UNBELIEVABLE!!!
Another definite highlight was the dolphins at Anthoneys Key. This is a resort that has a marine sciences research center attached to it, highlighting dolphins. Being a scripted show we were skeptical, as we both detest animals in captivity and did not want to support that. This place was good though. During the dolphin dive, they open the pen doors and the dolphins swim out to the reef in the open ocean with them, fully free to leave if they want, they dont; and all but 2 of them were born there. We paid for the snorkel and we were glad we did. We got to spend 30 minutes snorkelling with 18 Atlantic Bottlenose dolphins, as close as humaly possible in an open, free environment. They were super curious, loved being pet and would come right up to you in groups and watch and
play with you. You would dive down, pick up a shell or blade of grass and throw it and they would bring it right back to you, non-stop...they loved it. As animal lovers, this was perhaps the best thing we did on the trip, it was awesome!!!
The rest of out time on the island, we rented scooters and traveled around the whole island. It is a perfect island to do this and the drive was beautiful. We hit up the iguana farm (just look at the pics) and had fun. Other than that, snorkelling was our major event of the day, often we would snorkel 2-3 times a day because it was so great. The Bay Islands are part of the second largest barrier reef in the world (second to Australia's), and amazing snorkelling was literally at our doorstep. We saw perhaps the greatest diversity of species I have seen anywhere while snorkelling and really nice corals, and all around very healthy reef ecosystem. We saw huge barracudas, green sea turtles, spiny lobsters, huge (5ft) moray eels swimming free, spotted eagle rays, puffers, lionfish, and tonnes of other super colourful reef species.
More highlights were paddle boarding
in West End, (hopefully we can keep that going in Vancouver), and making a point to watch the crazy beautiful sunsets EVERY night.
All in all, a great trip, but waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too short. Time to plan the next adventure, hopefully Indonesia!!!
Peace, T&S.
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Shannon
non-member comment
Wow, this is so cool!