Day 5 : Roatan, Honduras

Breakfast at Rudy’s this morning (best banana pancakes ever!). We took a little walk on the beach before Saben left to take his final exam at the dive shop. He passed with a very high score and had another amazing dive that afternoon. Lin had a relaxing day sunning on the beach with a cheap mystery novel from a local shop.

We’ve become really very comfortable here and love the atmosphere. Everything is simple, the pace is no-rush, and there is a great deal of trust among shopkeepers and customers. The people of Roatan, locals and ex-pats, have been very kind and seem to be a sincerely happy bunch. Everywhere you look dive masters, taxi drivers, shop owners all have smiles on their faces. But how could they not? They have a beautiful backdrop to a very casual, simple way of life.

View from the dive shop.

We got 3 new bunk mates today. They’re all brothers originally from Honduras but 2 have relocated to the States. They seem like nice people which is good since we’ll be sharing a living space with them for the next week.

Tonight we tried something different for dinner: pizza. There’s a sign for a place called Brick Oven Pizza about mid-way down the main road/”strip”. You walk through this little dirt alley up a hill where another sign says “400 meters” to the place but in 400 meters, there’s just another sign. Then another…and another. Finally, after a 10-15 minute trek through a swampy, muddy uphill/downhill hike in our totally unprepared flip flops, we get to this little patio with several tables and a little counter inside a barbed wire fence. We order at the counter (pepperoni in case you’re wondering) and grab a seat at one of the tables while we watch them prepare our pizza and stick it in an actual brick oven.

They bring it out piping hot, ready to cut it for you on the table. We wanted to take it with us since the bugs were so bad due to the swamp-like conditions and it was within minutes of getting dark. We tried to explain in broken spanglish that we wanted a to-go box for the pizza. It didn’t work so well and apparently our attempt at charades was rather poor. We did finally end up with a box and went to the counter to pay. Right now there is a bit of a cash shortage on Roatan and only one ATM (out of five) on our side of the island is working. Unfortunately this ATM only spits out 500lp bills so that plus a few smaller bills was all we had. Well it appears the owners were a little short on customers and had no change! So we scrounged around in our bags and strung together enough USD and Lempiras to pay the tab after showing the waiter on the calculator how the exchange rate worked. Whew! Finally after all that mess, we made the trek back through the swamp, horse pasture, washed out dirt road, side alley, and finally took our pizza to our favorite dock (which is really used for water taxi pickups) and tucked into our pizza. Which would have been pretty good had the pizza not had an (totally serious) inch thick layer of cheese on it and only three pepperoni. We were absolutely starving by this time so we ate every bite anyway and did not feel so well later.

Pizza......sort of