Alright, I’m finally going to do a writeup on our first couple of days in Honduras.
We got here… three days ago? Yesterday? Day before yesterday. Definitely the day before yesterday. We flew directly to Roatan which is an island off the coast of main-land Honduras to be picked up by Marcia, who we are renting the house from.
It was immediately impossible to not start drawing comparisons to Koh Phangan, Thailand. Some of the smells are the same, everything looks green and jungly, it’s hot and humid, the roads are concrete instead of asphault, lots of similarities. But also differences.
Phangan has a massive beach party that doubles the population of the island once a month. Roatan is starting to get cruise ships that swell the population of the island mightily. But these simmilar occurances have had different effects on the islands, I think mostly due to the way life ran beforehand.
Note that, while we spent 6 months on Phangan, and I feel like I sort of know that place, we’ve been on Roatan for a few days, so I don’t know this place well at all. But it still feels to me like Phangan was a more communal, more socially knit place than Roatan.
Really, this all comes from Phangan having these nice little village-city centers where people met and ate and bought food and movies and hung out. Where-as Roatan seems to be missing this. While in Thongsala the pre-exiting local market thrived with the monthly wax of travelers in Roatan big grocery stores seem to have eclipsed and destroyed thriving local markets (although we may have just not found them yet).
Mabey this is the difference between Cruise ship money and backpacker money. Anyway, it’s pretty interesting.
From our perspective it’s not really very important since we’re not going to get very far from our house to explore the island. No, the roads aren’t scooter friendly and there’s no way we’re going to rent a car so we’re pretty much going to hang out here and wherever we can kayak to. That’s not so bad. We’ll get some work done and it’s really really nice here, as the above picture hopefully conveys.
We are literally cantelevered out over the bay, so if I leap off the balcony I will land in the ocean (and then break my legs since the water is too shallow right under the balcony). The water is warm, we have a beautiful view and our landlords keep bringing us fresh seafood. Plus they let us use their ‘kayaks’. These are the typical, awful, sit-atop kayaks that I railed against in Thailand. But, whatever, it’s good enough to bobble about our bay and the Mangrove tunnels.
Yeah, mangrove tunnels. They were cut by the native inhabitants in… pre-history? I dunno, but it’s kind of this network of water-trails cut into the mangrove forest that people use to get around. It’s fucking awesome. We did our first kayak trip today and swished through some. There are land crabs hiding in the mangroves (like Thailand) and lots of birds. It’s pretty amazing. We’ll get some pictures on a future expedition.
We’ve also been really enjoying the rain. It is rainy season here. We wanted to see what the tropics were like in the rainy season. We both like the rain so we figured it could be a good experience. So far it’s really awesome. We’ve been getting propper mamoth-rain flurries 4 or 5 times a day. It’s raining right now and I love the sound of the water on the roof and on the water below us. one of the nice things about the tropics is that all the houses are uninsulated so you can hear the sound of the rain really really well on the roof.
Professionally we’ve been trying to get a build of Clutter together for the Indie Game Festival deadline which is tomorrow. It’s all finished up so I’m pretty happy about that. There’s still a year of work or something left on the game so it’s kind of nice to have this local plateau to stand on and survey the work thus-far. Even though I think it’s a long longshot that we’ll be nominated for the festival it’s been nice to get the thing psudo-polished and psudo-playable.
We had more shrimp fajitas for lunch and Marcia brought us some tastey seafood gumbo for dinner (we boiled some lobster for dinner yesterday) so we are eating well.
Hope you are all enjoying some fall showers as well!
