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I left Antigua for Honduras where I met up with my mom, sister, Susan, Mary and Hayden. We arrived in Copan Ruinas very near the Guatemalan border. This is a nice town tucked into a valley surrounded by mountains. Copan is also the site of the southern-most large Mayan city. This ruin site, like all the others, had its own unique features to offer that other sites may not have had. Copan in particular is known for its carvings and hieroglyphics. What makes these special is how deeply carved in the rocks they are, the rulers or city designers here had different interests from building the largest temples possible, perhaps they just had smaller egos. After walking around you could really see what the people here found important compared to the rulers in other cities, and that was detail. Like all the cities much has been destroyed or eroded, the stela that were preserved are unlike any found in Tikal or Palenque. Mary, Hayden and I also did a little canopy tour. There were about 15 zip lines in all, but one of them was 1km long. We also stayed in a really nice place outside of town, which my
sister knew about from a previous trip here. The courtyard there had a great view of the town and the people working there were extremely friendly.
From Copan we headed to the Caribbean coast to Tela where we met up with my dad, Tom and Gray Hall. We took a really good day trip outside of town on a boat to a protected beach area. There was a jungle hike, some snorkeling and a little fishing. Needless to say we all had a good time together. After a couple days there we headed to the island of Utila. Unfortunately Mary and Hayden had to head back for graduation so that just left the Schonwalds and the Halls on an island in the Caribbean, where we had some more good times. After everyone headed back to the States I decided to rent a place of my own. It was a small apartment right by the dive shop I was diving at. I had a bed room, small kitchen and couch with cable TV. The refrigerator and other appliances were practically brand new, it was especially nice to have a place to cook for myself again. When I was not
Bird Refuge
Mom and Hayden cooking for myself I usually ate the popular street food of Honduras which is the Baliada, more or less a bean taco, but very tasty and cheap.
I signed up for an Advanced Open Water course which was the next step up from my previous certification. The good part about this level over the first one is that we had all the safety and signaling stuff out of the way and could concentrate on other more fun and exciting things. I just had to read five chapters out of a book and do five dives, three of which I was able to choose the topic. My two required dives were a deep dive and a navigation dive. The deep dive here on Utila happens to be a pretty great wreck, so that was a lot of fun swimming around an old boat at about 100ft. The navigation dive is pretty self explanatory, I had to use a compass underwater and also be aware of natural navigation I could use in my surroundings. For my three other dives I chose a fish identification dive where I learned the major groups of fish in this area and took note of
them underwater. Another dive was a buoyancy control dive where I did a number of exercises that greatly improved my buoyancy and really made me a better diver overall. My last dive was a photography dive where these pictures obviously came from. I did not take the turtle photo, but I was on that dive and those are always great to see.
A day or two later we had an earthquake off the coast here. It was a 7.3 and woke me up at about 2:30am to my whole apartment shaking. Luckily nothing extremely bad happened here on the island though a few deaths did occur on the mainland thanks to a couple poor structures probably. Utila is much closer to the epicenter than the places effected on the mainland so I guess we just have some decent architects here. A few things were thrown off my counter in the kitchen and my refrigerator was moved about six inches as well as my bed moving enough to wake me up, but everything was pretty much OK. Overall neither a very pleasant experience nor one I want to repeat.
On June 8th I fly to Nicaragua and
will again be on some more Caribbean islands called the Corn Islands, hopefully without the earthquakes. The rest of my time on this island will be spent doing some more diving. The best things I have seen other than the stuff in the pictures are: Green Moray Eel, Sea Snake(both being potentially quite dangerous), Eagle Ray, Sea Horse and lots of other fish I could name, but could not describe. No more courses, but I do get a bit of a discount now on the already cheap diving and there is not much else to do here if you plan to stay for more than a few days. Everything here pretty much revolves around the scuba industry.
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