Erin Miller

After the lake, Dan and I made our way (painstakingly) to the coast of Honduras and then to the most-developed and touristy island of Roatan. Dan and I spent a full hour of the bus ride to the coast sitting bent-over on the dashboard of an inter-city bus (it was too full to move any further back). We spent the next 4 hours of the ride dripping in sweat, sitting perfectly still, and fantasizing of refrigerators and ice cubes on another inter-city bus. Someone, after spending some time in Ghana, once told me that an African air-conditioner was simply a method of sitting, perfectly still, in the shade with ones arms raised slightly above their legs to prevent any skin-on-skin contact. I can tell you, that day, our African air conditioners were broken. We arrived in paradise exhausted and sweaty and spent the next four days lounging on beaches, snorkeling, scuba diving, zip-lining, and monkey-petting. We saw several hawksbill sea turtles during our dives and got to swim only inches away from them, putting seeing them at a close second for greatest moments during our dive, right behind getting to kiss Dan under 30 feet of ocean. After our first day of diving we went on a zip-line and wild-life park tour, which meant that we first got to act like monkeys and then hold them. When we walked into the wildlife refuge the guide pointed out some monkey in the trees and then yelled, “Ricardo, venga!” I thought now way were those monkeys going to come down from the trees to hang out with us, but sure enough, after a bit of calling and some bribing with juice in a plastic bag, Ricardo and his friends came to say hello. They tried to dig through our packs and our pockets and succeeded in stealing one man’s cap. We spent the last days doing a bit more diving and more chillin’ on beaches, which, as it turns out, is a particular skill of Dan and I. The power cut a few times on the island (always to our amusement), causing Dan to determine that the power-outages were the only difference between Roatan and the rest of the Caribbean islands.

Roatan zip line tour


holding bird in wildlife refuge

Ricardo!


monkey business

Dan and me on a beach

and again
We spent an afternoon traveling from the islands back to San Pedro Sula (barf city), and had an uneventful first return trip from Honduras.