Utila and beyond

I just saw that Lance Mackey won the Iditarod. I hope everyone finds this as happy as I do. He´s such an ugly, Alaskan stud. I think he is hot.

Friendly Central Americans keep talking to me. As a result I haven´t hardly read any of my books and still have two magazines. Haven´t done a crossword puzzle. The guy to the left of me at the internet cafe wants to talk about Alaska. Duh.

So I made it back to the mainland, La Ceiba, Honduras and will catch a 5 am bus to Antigua, Guatemala arrive at 8 pm. I´m travelling by myself again but not really. Met 2 guys, Pav and Rob from the UK at the ferry today and now we are sharing a room right by the beach. Good news is there is a musical festival right across the street. Bad news is I woke up at 6 am to go diving and I was planning to sleep a little before getting up at 4am.

And the guy next to me just offered to walk me back to the hotel, stopping for milkshakes along the way. He is a friendly Honduran and at least speaks English slightly. Anyway...

So Utila was interesting. I did get SCUBA open water certified which means i can SCUBA with a friend to 30 feet or so I think. I don´t love it. In fact, I think I am underwhelmed by it. I suppose that it could be cool, but it was kinda like snorkeling except a lot more work and preparation. Whale sharks are supposed to be around soon(not dangerous) so I guess that would be cool. Utila is basically just a diving place. You don´t travel there unless you want to dive. The diving world is made up of beautiful, tan people. Very friendly people, but diving can be slightly egotistical as far as what training and how skilled of a diver you are. Utila itself was not beautiful. Its a small island made up of mostly swamp and mangroves. Houses are on stilts and there is one main strip of a few blocks, one lane wide, where everyone walks and tries not to get hit by cars, 4wheelers, golf carts, bikes, motorcycles, etc. The most people on a moped I saw was 4, the most on a 4wheeler was 5. There are not beautiful white sandy beaches. There are two beaches, one costs money and I went to neither. Thats because I was DIVING. Today our boat broken down and its been really windy for a couple of days. Windy is good because it cools the place off. Then you don´t have to spend your whole day wiping sweaty sunscreen out of your burning eyes and trying to drink more than you sweat out. But windy is bad when you are on a boat and you have no engine and you are prone to seasickness. So I threw up in front of 20 people. Not ON anyone though. Then I was fine for the second dive. I caught the 2pm ferry and I took one of the motion sickness pills the ferry office offered. Last time I took a motion pill over the counter in a foreign country, I slept for 6 hours in the middle of the day. I hoped this dosage would have the same effect. It did. I don´t want to sound like I´m trying to make a dramatic story up just for the blog, so I´ll just say that the ferry ride was ¨side to side¨ and the screams were like ¨disneyland 3D simulation¨ and outside it looked like a ¨car wash¨ and inside it felt like ¨Tim Cutts trying to throw me off the back of a jetski.¨ I woke up an hour later and we had made it. It was almost a bigger thrill to me than diving but not so because I thought what an inconvenience it would be to replace everything I have with me if we flipped. But we didn´t flip and I´m sure we weren´t even close to flipping so no one needs to worry. But I have digressed into storytelling.

One of the new experiences my compadres and I shared on Utila was watching our toilet offerings be deposited directly from us into the ocean, do not pass go, do not believe in sanitation. This was just at the places along the water. The place I stayed at was aways back from the water but on a swamp, so the whole place was built up on a deck. The accommodations were quaint and sufficient and free because of the diving, so I´m not complaining. Sometimes the boards on the deck would break and people would fall through. (almost funny but a little unsettling as well) Sometimes dog would poop on the deck. Owen and I shared a small room that had a shower. The shower drained straight to the open air and water and land below our room. I haven´t gotten sunburnt yet really, which I´m really proud of. Have some small gross bug bites, apparently from sand flies, on my pasty gross legs that I haven´t shaven (because it makes the bug bites bleed).