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Lunch
Originally uploaded by apes_abroad.

So, I’ve never really cooked before. I’ll occasionally throw things together in a pan and put the result over rice, but I have trouble following recipes or keeping ingredients in the fridge and it never turns out too well. However, the last two months in Honduras I’ve made an effort to cook dinner nearly every night and many of the results have been pretty darn tasty! I had help from Supercook.com which scrapes recipe sites and lets you match against the ingredients you have. I’ve kept links to some of the recipes I used, although to be honest I don’t think I followed a single one exactly.

Drum roll please…

Shrimp wraps with papaya and whatever veggies we had. These were one of our staples since Marcia kept us in good shrimp supply. The price of shrimp fell here recently so there are boats all around with hulls full of frozen shrimp, just sitting and waiting for the price to go back up.

Blaff (Caribbean lime poached fish) with boiled plantain and salsa. We had some hot sauce with sweet chillies in it which was just the right thing for the salsa, which was so good I tried to recreate it twice more but it wasn’t the same.

Piononos (plantains stuffed with black beans and cheese). Fried Puerto Rico street food, probably the least healthy thing I made the whole time. But they were delicious and held together surprisingly well.

Stuffed green peppers were almost a disaster. The recipe I used (I can’t find it now) baked them with uncooked long grain rice for an hour. After that hour the rice was barely cooked at all and I couldn’t figure out what on earth I did wrong. I had to pull all the stuffing out, cook it on the stove, then restuff them and finish them again in the oven. But they turned out well.

Goulash which was too tomatoey but good comfort food on a night when I needed some.

Grouper in banana crust. I’d bought a bag of yucca chips which were disappointingly crushed nearly to dust, so I found this recipe to use them in. It was a huge success.

Baleadas stuffed with refried beans, egg and stinky cheese. I had these first in Guanaja and tried to recreate them afterwards. I haven’t tried making the tortillas from scratch but bought excellent fresh baked ones from Pookie’s restaurant in Jonesville.

South Carolina Red Rice with sausage. Like anything with cooked tomato in it, I thought it was too tomato-ey.

Egg tomato leftover rice. With shrimp, trying to recreate the fried rice we loved in Thailand. A good way to use up extra rice from the night before.

Baked penne with sausage. What can I say, I bought a lot of pasta, canned tomatoes, and ground beef for some reason.

Coconut and shrimp rice bowl was so-so. The carrots I bought from Eldon’s were atrocious. Their veggies were definitely hit and miss, probably depending on how long ago the last shipment was. Some days they were just about cleaned out so I just had to buy whatever they had.

Shrimp and tomato quiche so good I made it twice, though I used sausage meat the second time instead which was better.

Picadillo de Plantano (plantain hash) with super ripe plantains was soooo good.

Shrimp braised in coconut milk over rice was kind of watery and the shrimps were a bit overcooked, but Colin went back for seconds of the sauce just to pour over rice.

And for desert…

Fudgy brownies, Colin’s favorite desert, were so thick they were a bugger to get out of the pan but we had fun doing it. I was horrified at how much sugar and butter went into them, but I guess that’s a good lesson to learn about desserts.

First blood
Originally uploaded by apes_abroad.

We had about a week of stormy and overcast weather, which was good timing as I was finishing up my game Rebuild and Colin was just starting a new game (Clutter has been put on hold). I put Rebuild up for bid on FlashGameLicense.com, not expecting a lot of action at first, but action and excitement there has been! After just two days I had three bids of $5000 (the contract terms vary), and it’s likely to keep going up. The average game on there sells for 2k after about a month so this is very good! We treated Marcia and Dennis to drinks at Hole in the Wall to celebrate.

Just as we were leaving Dennis pointed out a baby Boa Constrictor sunning himself on the driveway, and we had a chance to pick him up and get to know him for a minute. They’ve got a rare subspecies on Roatan with pink bellies, they’re such pretty creatures.

Dennis lent us his Hawaiian sling, so today we went lionfish hunting. We started with a little guy we’d seen from the deck, who’s size made him a difficult target so it took Colin a few tries to hit. It was kind of sad killing such a beautiful creature but if people don’t do something they’re going to every other beautiful fish in the Caribbean. So we brought the sling out to our usual snorkeling spot and hunted around for more of them where coral clumps sprout out of the sand. I think we killed ten and badly wounded a couple others, all much bigger that the little guy under the dock. I messed the first couple up but was a perfect shot on the next four. It was surprisingly easy to hit them as you could get right up and shoot from an inch or two away, they were so unafraid. But some were very hard to finish once they’d been skewered and we had to bash them repeatedly against rocks which was gross and sad. Colin speared the largest of them perfectly but it wiggled off the prongs and darted into a crevice. It was a fun game and we felt like we made a little difference to the diversity of our favorite snorkeling spot.

After the hunt we swam with the purple schools, waved to the Hello Fish, poked gently at a lobster, nodded to the shrimp in the cinderblock then sunned ourselves with a picnic lunch at the tiki hut. It was a perfect day!

Diving in
Originally uploaded by apes_abroad.

Yesterday we got a break from the rain. The night before Julie and Ed had sent us an email asking if we wanted to go on an impromptu cruise on Spirit of Free Radical early the next morning. We are all about spontaneous decisions so of course we jumped all over the chance. How could you not?

The next morning we got Charleston to water-taxi us over to their bight and hopped aboard. Today was going to be sort of a shake-out cruise. They have new engines so they’re still breaking and tuning them in and they also wanted to check out some mooring spots and check transit times for some potential charter and day-trip destinations. It was to be Melanie and Brent (the house sitters) and Sarah and me joining them.

We cast off at about 11:00am after wrapping some sails Julie was working on (she is an excelent sailing seamstress and has written a highly regarded book on the subject called Canvas for Cruisers). It was a _perfect_ day for snorkling. Bright, hot, and dead calm. We first tripped east to the Cow and Calf again and moored to a buoy that had been recently installed. Ed and Julie wanted to make sure it was close to the islands so people could leap off the boat and be right in the thick of it, but not so close that they ran aground.

As they moored up and started to spin towards the islands I thought it looked _way_ too close for comfort. But with years of experience they weren’t nervous at all and it turned out to be perfectly placed.

From there we headed towards the Pidgeon Cayes. Holy smokes. Pidgeon Cayes. They are two tiny litte sandy cayes that are the embodyment of the one-palm tropical island. Garly Larson’s name comes up a lot when you see the cayes. We had seen them when we cruised to Guanaja on Larry’s boat and they looked very inviting. But as we got closer my mind exploded in wonder.

As the bottom of the ocean comes up to meet the cayes you could suddenly see that the water was _incredbly_ clear. We could see at least 50 feet down. As I mentioned, they day was also very still and the water was like glass, not a ripple on the surface. This conspired to make it feel like we were flying above some other-worldly tropical garden of fish and coral. It was stupifying. My brain could not take it all in. We were all leaning over the side pointing out schools of fish and particularly impressive heads of stag-head coral. Brent spotted a big black ray that lazily flew a few centimeters from the bottom. It was like diving with no tanks or snorkling with no mask. It was a life experience. It was something I will never forget.

We took the Spirit of Free Radical’s little rigid infaltable into one of the cayes and played around in it’s perfect untouched powder sand. We walked around the whole island in about 5 minutes treading on sand the whole way.

From there we waded into the water and did some snorkling. It was obviously fantastic. Diving down and chasing after fish and swiming through big schools. I dove down really deep to grab some big urchin skeletons (20 cm across) and the first sun-bleached sand-dollars we’ve found here.

We eventually swam back to the boat, watched the anchor pull up (we could easily see it burried in the sand and watch it pull all the way up from the bottom) and Julie and Ed topped off the perfect day by making us dinner.

Massive massive thanks to Julie and Ed of Sprit of Free Radical for the best snorkling trip ever!

They also keep a faaascinating blog of their life on the island and their trip around the world.

Actually yesterday had one more amazement in store. Charelston, the local guy who is a little younger than us who ferries us around took us on a _ride_!

You know the mangrove tunnels right? They are about two meters wide, a kilometer long, and have a closed-in canopy of mangroves. So Charelston blows through them in his little skiff at full bore, which is like… I dunno.. 40kph or something. Which is pretty fun. Earlier he had bragged that he could do the same thing by moonlight. Well by the time we got back it was dark and there wasn’t exactly a full moon. But Chareston put on a show anyway.

As we aproached the entrance he put on speed and I looked back and gave him a big grin. We blew under the bridge that marks the entrance and things got very dark. I could sort of see the sky through the canopy but not really and I certainly couldn’t see the walls of the tunnel much less the water. Ocasionally a lit opening would blow by where someone had cut an entrance for their dock. There’s a large brackish pool in the middle of the tunnels and the light from the exit to the pool apeared as salvation. We shot through the exit at full speed into the wide moonlit pool.

That was cool. But what was comming was… pretty terrifying. There is an entrance to the other half of the tunnel on the other side of the pool. And sometimes I have trouble seeing it during the day because it’s kind of camoflauged. But at night? We were now barreling at full speed towards a wall of black. You could see _no hint_ of the entrance. For all Sarah and I could tell we were speeding towards a solid wall of mangroves. We started getting audibly nervous. With comments like “Holy shit this is a bad idea” and “Oh my god oh my god”. Charleston did briefly slow down just before we got to the edge, but only a tick, and then whoosh, we were back into the world of black with the outline of vines and branches wizzing by overhead.

He did actually bump the side of the tunnel once and as we exited the tunnels alive and exhilerated he explained it was a little harder than usual with us sitting in front of him blocking his view.

So that was a pretty good day. Perhapse one of the best days ever actually.

Sunrise in Oak Ridge
Originally uploaded by apes_abroad.

The last couple of weeks have been pretty amazing. When it rains we get some work done and enjoy the sound of the rain on the roof and in the bay. When it’s sunny we go snorkling and kayaking.

The first trip we made after the awesome Guanja trip we went on with Larry and Karen of East End Divers was with Ed and Julie and their 48 foot catamaran.

Ed and Julie are starting up a Roatan charter business with their amazing, beautiful catamara. But this day they were just taking a bunch of friends on a snorkling cruise. We somehow managed to get invited so we got to spend the day on the Spirit of Free Radical and check out some eastern snorkling spots.

It was a great day. We met a bunch more locals. Among them Melanie and Brent who travel the world as caretakers, which is a pretty good gig. They find interesting places to look after and get free rent! Melanie makes clothes to help fund their traveling and they are really fun to hang out with.

We ended up snorkling at the Calf and the Cow. A pair of super small rock islands. There isn’t much of a tide here. The sea is pretty much always at the same level and has been eating away at the walls of these tiny islands for forever. The Calf has a diameter of mabey 20 meters. But under the water it’s been cut back so far it’s being held up by a thin axle of rock only mabey about two meter in diameter. It’s pretty cool. All sorts of fish hide out under it including the deadly Lionfish, local scourge.

The day after the Free Radical trip we woke up and the water in the bay was super clear. Much more clear than we have ever seen. It seemed like everyone was canceling their days plans and going diving so we folowed suit (although just with snorkles). We kayaked out to the reef at the mouth of the bay and leapt in. The water was _amazing_ there is a big wall that drops mabey 10 meters down and we could see all the way to the bottom.

We tooled around and swam further towards Jonesville than we’d ever swam. The highlight of the trip was a big Spotted Eagle Ray that loomed out of the darkness towards us on the way back. It was an immensly impressive creature.

There had been warnings of a thunderstorm brewing but it managed to hold off long enough that the next day we got another beautiful day of snorkling in so we took kristi and Jeff out to the same spot. kristi and Jeff are also staying with Marcia and Dennis and we’ve been hanging out together watching the sunset with a couple of beers or talking about the many lizards all around the property. kristi and Jeff haven’t done a ton of Snorkling and are a little bit nervous in the water so I stayed in a kayak and played lifeguard for the trip. I only traded off with Sarah breifly to get in the water. But as soon as I did I spotted another big Spotted Eagle Ray! I yelled to Sarah who got the attention of kristi and Jeff as I followed the ray. It dove deep off the wall and I almost lost sight of it but just as kristi and Jeff reached me it flew up the wall and in amongst the valleys of coral. It put on a pretty amazing show for us all before swooping off into the bay.

After that great display we headed back to the Gazebo out on the water by the mouth of the bay and ate our picnic lunch while laying in the sun. Such a great way to spend a day.

The day after that the storm that was threatening started to blow in. That morning we were treated to a big Waterspout! You could see it outside the bay. It was a perfect funnel of water kicking up a big plume on the sea and leading all the say up to the clouds. I wish we’d had a boat and I could have gotten a bit closer of a look. Later in the day the storm blew in for real and *BOOOM* the thunder was unbeleivable. We got a couple of massive bolts of lighting that erupted into a godlike tattoo of thunder *BOOM**BOOM**BOOM**BOOM*. I’d never heard anything like it and have no idea what caused it. It was astounging.

We spent the next couple of days getting work done and enjoying the rain. I love it when it rains here. We don’t get enough of it for me. We go for a swim in the bay most days and I spend the time diving off the boat and doing backflips and stuff. it’s great when it’s really windy or raining really hard and I get to leap off into the rain-pelted sea.

Main Street Bonnaca
Originally uploaded by apes_abroad.

It’s been a busy November so far for us in Roatan! Our hosts Marcia and Dennis at Castaways Cove had some extra guests this month. In the boat house next to us was a friendly guy named Dave who came for a week of diving. The weather wasn’t excellent for him and it rained a lot, but it’s always wet under the water so the diving was still good. On the same day kristi and Jeff arrived in the guest house up the hill. They were visiting from Oregon for their 30th anniversary, and were friends of Larry and Karen who run East End Divers in Jonesville.

We’d met Larry the week before when he came to deal with our lionfish problem, which he did quite expertly using a scuba tank and Hawaiian sling. He told us horror stories of killing thirty or more in an hour some places. They’ve become a big problem here since they have no predators and reproduce nearly constantly unlike their Pacific relatives. I think we should start advertising lionfish fritters as a local delicacy, or sell powedered lionfish spines as an aphrodesiac. There is so much overfishing here already that people might as well fish for something invasive and unwelcome.

We tagged along with Captain Larry and friends on a three day trip to the neighboring island of Guanaja (Guanaha). His boat the Islander had been chartered by the Floating Doctors, a volunteer group living on a sailboat and running clinics in remote parts of the Carribbean. Pretty cool bunch of people which what sounds like a very tough job. They worked long days while we were there and treated a good portion of the island’s 10,000 residents.

The four of us left Castaways Cove before dawn, taking a flashlight-lit trip through the mangroves with Charleston to BJ’s bar in Oak Ridge where Larry’s boat was waiting. We watched the sun rise spectacularly on the 3 hour trip to Bonacca; Guanaja’s main town situated on a cay a little ways from the main island. They say people came to the cay to escape the biting noseeums. It was just a little strip of sand at first, but people threw their garbage into the water and gradually built on top of that until the town was 20 times its original size. It’s like something from Waterworld: densely packed houses with wooden boardwalks going here and there between them, and Venice-like canals cutting through town. No cars of course, and ‘main street’ is just a couple meters wide. Still Bonacca is a very workable town with schools, shops, restaurants, bars, even a bank.

There were other taggers-alongers including our friends from Hole in the Wall: (Canadian) Larry, Don, and Randy of the S.V. Homeward Bound. (Canadian) Larry had spent some time in Bonacca before and took us on a tour and a bit of a quest to find an open bar at 10 am (hey – we’d be up since 4!). Colin and I kind of fell in love with the place, it’s charming little ramshackle buildings and interesting characters. We met a monkey at the Texaco, window shopped at the cellphone and bilge pump store and were treated to two rounds of Salva Vida by a mysterious man in a bar with no name. Apparently anyone can run a business but you have to pay to put a sign above the door, so many places don’t advertise.

(Captain) Larry took Colin and I snorkeling that afternoon to a reef near a beautiful cay. The corals there were more vibrant and alive than near our bight and there were more seaweeds and sponges, but I think less fish. I did see a pale yellow spotted snake eel slithering through the sand and into its hole.

That night the doctors were still hard at work in the clinic so the rest of us took the boat over to dinner at the Manatee where they made us some mean bratwurst and mashed potatoes. Where they get the wurst (not to mention good German mustard and sauerkraut) from is a mystery, but it was the perfect meal after such a long day.

The next day we scouted out some possible lodgings for future East End Divers trips. We went for lunch at Graham’s Place, a resort on a beautiful little island that Graham has put a tremendous amount of work into. We learned that his island was totalled along with most of Guanaja when Hurricane Mitch sat over it for two days in 1998, but he rebuilt the entire thing from scratch. We met his tame pelicans and other odd pets and admired the powdery beach and lack of noseeums, both the products of considerable effort.

Private island for sale
Originally uploaded by apes_abroad.

Next we stopped at another private island called Dunbar Rock; a spectacular white hotel perched on top of a boulder on a coral reef. I think it looks a little like a miniature Alcatraz. Colin thinks this could be indie island if we can raise 1.7 million to buy it, but I’d prefer to live on Graham’s cay with the pelicans.

We went snorkeling again in the afternoon and saw wild sharks for possibly the first time in our lives. They were a little bigger than us, snoozing ten or fifteen feet below on the sandy floor. Colin had a childhood fear of sharks and was super super nervous to be so close to them. It wasn’t until later that we learned they’re incredibly docile nurse sharks who have little sucker mouths like a catfish and barely take notice of people even when they’re playing with them or riding on their backs.

I had a bit too much sun or beer or salty conch fritters and had to take the evening off. kristi and Jeff brought us fried chicken and we ate dinner with them on our hotel patio looking out at the ocean. The power had gone out (a common occurance) so we looked for the southern cross in the clear starry sky.

On our way back to Roatan, the doctors caught a couple small tuna and it started to rain so much we couldn’t see anything around the boat but ocean and mist. We learned it had been raining the entire time in Jonesville and that the beautiful weather we’d had in Guanaja was a localized event. So lucky us!