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We settled on an unlikely honeymoon theme: an obscure destination with lots of hiking and exercise. Why Honduras? Because it’s next to Belize, which J had quite liked at age 14. Because it’s off the tourist map. And because of Roatan.

Roatan is the largest of the three “Bay Islands” off Honduras’ Caribbean coast. Its huge coral reef makes it a world-class scuba destination, which hooked us after discovering we loved reef snorkelling in Cuba. (More details on this in a later post.) Charter airline Sunwing has just introduced a weekly direct flight between Toronto and Roatan, and it’s no further than Las Vegas.

Pearson airport at 4:30am was flooded with Caribbean-destined charter airline passengers, mostly of the old and/or fratboy variety. Most debarked for Mexico, leaving a more adventurous group on our plane. We were on the only plane arriving at Roatan airport that day, and 80% of the crowd quickly dispersed into resort-run buses, with the independent travelling 20% hopping into taxis (and we tried public transit). Roatan caters primarily to the resort and diving crowds – and the crowd thus thins even further if you head elsewhere in Honduras. In the later stages of the trip (four days in mainland Honduran cities and countryside), we saw only about ten white people.

Roatan’s a curious cultural mix. In the resort and diving communities today it’s an affluent and safe environment, less polished and crowded than the major Caribbean resort destinations, but similar in feel to some of the places I’ve seen (Varadero, Cuba and Cartagena, Colombia). This influx of tourism only began in earnest in the last decade, though. The prior inhabitants of the island are largely English-speaking black Caribbean, descended from marooned Jamaican slaves. The modern accent is the classic Caribbean-inflected lilt. Tourism has attracted a large influx of Spanish-speaking Hondurans, which must cause some internal rifts and tensions, but also clearly some prosperity and development.

And development is sorely needed. Honduras is a very poor country, and Roatan is only beginning to escape this. GDP per capita is one-tenth of the US, and Honduras’ violent crime is amongst the highest in the world (but dominated by drug violence in the big cities in the southwest). We saw the poverty within an hour of arriving, as our rickety transit minibus bounced along the rutted dirt road into the worker’s community at Sandy Bay. Mangy dogs ran the streets, chickens clucked loudly and small tin-roofed huts lined the way. Crisply-uniformed schoolchildren showed the community pride’s and hopes, but the place is clearly impoverished. Most visitors whisked briskly by taxi from the airport to shiny hotels and never see this side of the island, but it’s there for those who choose to look.

It took a while for us to get the feel of the country’s time. Despite being due south of Thunder Bay, it’s two time zones later. The tropical day is only twelve hours long and most activity winds down at 6pm when the sun sets, likely a legacy of formerly dangerous night-time streets. As a result we found ourselves rising at dawn most mornings, which qualifies as a holiday first for me. We stayed at Land’s End Resort, run by a charming Austrian expat. It was comfortable, attractive and had some affordable rooms, plus immediate access to the reef.

We spent about a week on Roatan in total, split between the start and end of our two-week vacation. In our first days, we found the island expensive. Most restaurants on the main street of our town (West End) had prices similar to Canada ($10-$20). We ate cheaper, mostly in the $5-$10 range, which bought tasty fish tacos and “tipico” Honduran meals of chicken, plantains, beans and rice. By the end of the trip we were a bit more savvy and had a better sense for the pricing: while the tourist towns were mostly pricy, there were always a few tipico restaurants aimed at the service staff, often with decent meals to be had for $5. Outside the tourist towns, supermarket prices were cheap and not too much more expensive than the mainland.

We only saw a fraction of the island in total. Tourism is focused intwo western communities, West End and West Bay, and spilling over to the nearby towns of Sandy Bay and Flowers Bay. The rest of the 50km island is less populated; the eastern half doesn’t even have any bus service. Our quest for snorkelling sites took us on road walks to the sleepy tourist section of Sandy Bay and to the posh West Bay. En route, an overgrown sideroad caught our eye, hinting at the jungle we’d see later on the mainland, but we turned back feeling unprepared after seeing a fist-sized gloriously hairy spider. Our minibus trips took us through a few other areas: the dirt roads of the workers’ section of Sandy Bay, and the charmingly named commercial hub, Coxen Hole.

In one of the next instalments, I’ll cover our main activity in Roatan: the reef.

Meanwhile, check out some of our photos from Roatan.