Well, we made it. I was literally bouncing in my seat with excitement as our Delta flight landed in Roaton and I saw the turquoise water and the verdant landscape. We sailed through customs and made it past the throngs of limo, taxi, and shuttle bus drivers to our prearranged rendezvous with Captain Angelo, the pilot and owner of Island Airlines who would fly us to Utila. We knew we were on island time when he told us to have a drink because we had to wait an hour for the next flights from the States to arrive.
Angelo was great. We had a nice long chat about planes, retiring to the Caribbean, and the hazards of international business ownership. Soon, the other passengers arrived and we were ready for our ten minute flight to Utila. It was a full flight and, while Roger was in the lap of luxury in the co-pilot’s seat, I was in the back of the plane with no window and both our carry-ons (about 50 lbs of backpack) on my lap. But I’ll take ten minutes in a safe plane with a great pilot (cramped though it may have been) over an hours long ferry ride any day.
We landed on a tiny airstrip and were met by a van. We loaded our ridiculously massive amount of luggage, climbed in the van, and got our first tour of Utila. In the ten minutes it took to get to our home for the next six weeks, I started to think, “Oh God, did we make a huge mistake?!”
Utila is as advertised: a small island off the coast of Honduras. “Town,” so far as I can tell, is about a mile long string of shops, restaurants, and bars. We are in a lovely house with lovely owners who live upstairs (evidently, they were on House Hunters International so you either can or will be able to see them, but I haven’t been able to find it). We started to unpack and then headed out into town to pick up some groceries, see about setting up some dives, and eat some dinner.
We walked down the beach and where I should have been paying attention to the beautiful water, I was seeing the plastic trash that accumulates at the high tide line and dreading the first vicious bite of a no-see-um or sand flea. We got to town and I was too timid to eat at any of the first five places we passed. I was starving, having not eaten since breakfast, and tired and hot and sticky . . . Roger finally made an executive decision, he turned down an alley (the whole time I was saying are you sure, they don’t seem open, should we even be here?) and marched me up a set of stairs to a restaurant the name of which we still don’t know.
What we know is we watched the sunset, drank rum drinks, and ate tasty garlic shrimp. I started seeing things in a new light.
Even better, on the way home, we passed a field full of flickering fireflies who were only surpassed by the starry night sky.