the world looks different from under water...
HONDURAS | Sunday, 8 August 2010 | Views [1516]
Hey ya´ll!
Good evening from Utila, isla de bahia, honduras...forecast calls for lots of diving, even more beer and 95% humidity (all the time)! This place is great...one of those places that folks come to visit and stay for years. Diving is the name of the game around here, divemasters and instructors from all over the world come here to recieve their training. so for us, what was going to be 3 nights is now 6 or 7 and about 9 dives each! I´m loving it! But i´m getting ahead of myself, we have done some other stuff since last time I wrote, so i´ll get back to utila.
Before i begin, I hope you like the improvements to the blog, we figured out how to add our tripadvisor.com map to blog in place of crappy ip addressed based map, so this one will track our progress as we move around. we also have linked our pictures from picasa directly to the blog...we have alot more pics to upload still but working on a solution for that.
I believe Sophia left off while we were in caye caulker, which was awesome, swimming with nurse sharks and eagle rays was kick in pants for sure! From there we went to placencia, belize another super chill little island community (i say island, but i guess it´s a peninsula). They call it the caye you can drive to. Even so, the most popular way to get to placencia is by the Hokey Pokey water taxi. We actually just wanted to go to utila, but the only boat that goes from belize to honduras only leaves on fridays from placenia...so we had to chill out there for 3 nights, and i´m really glad we did.Advantage to placenia is the white sand beaches...caye caulker had great diving but didn´t actually have a real ¨beach¨ , placenia´s was nice, mellow ocean and cheap rums drinks at all the beach front bars. After spending too much money on diving in caye caulker, we didn´t do much for activities in placenia. Mostly chilled out. Met some locals and went out for karaoke. it´s much easier to make friends with the locals when they speak english.
Friday morning rolled along and it was time to head to honduras...boat ride was cool, about 2-3hrs of travel time, but a long stop at belize immigration to get out. they dropped us at the port in puerto cortez where the immigration agent takes our passports and instructs us to go downtown to their office where we can pick them up. the port was mess, taxi drivers going nuts fighting with eachother over who would take the different people. we opted for the short ride to downtown to make sure we got the passports back sooner rather than later. no problems there. then a short walk to the bus station where we could catch a bus to san pedro sula (big city with buses going everywhere). on the walk we stopped for a Baleada...delicious honduran burrito type thing...super cheap and lady was litterally hand making every part of it. We got a bus to san pedro sula and it was amazing, for the first time in weeks, we were in a real city! we got a great room at los molinos, our first room with a/c on the entire trip! it was incredible, room even had a small tv! we spent that entire evening and night at the huge city mall, this place had it all, wendys, subway, radio shack, everything, we even went and saw a movie inside the mall. I´m sure sophia will write more about this experience so i´ll stop there.
next morning we hopped a ride to bus station and took the 3 hour ride to La Ceiba, from there we took the Utila princess ferry out to the island...here we lucked out, as we were attempting to go into the 1st class section of the boat(a/c) with coach tickets, the guys was trying to explain to us in spanish we couldn´t go in there, but he got so frustrated when we couldn´t understand him, that he just let us go...it was cool.
and so...here we are...just minutes ago, i completed the remaining portions of my open water diver certification...it was pretty simple, we did 2 dives this afternoon, had about 7 skills to demonstrate under water and all done. now we are both starting our advanced diver cert tomorrow morning...it´s gonna be sick...were doing a night dive, 2 deep water dives (100ft) one of which to explore a sunken ship, one navigation dive and an obstacle course dive to improve buonancy control. can´t wait! only bummer is the boat leaves at 730am...so it will be an early morning....but sophia did manage to convince the manager to give us a room with a/c so i will be sleeping better. i´m sorry i complained about cold showers before...there are the only thing keeping me alive now...the key to survival is to stay in some kind of water all the time!
so...i thinks that´s it for today, honestly, i´d like to write more but this computer is driving me nuts, every time i press a key, it has a delay before i see it on the screen...quite annoying...so wish us luck tomorrow...should be cool!
