Vacation Heaven

I'm back from vacationing the past week in Roatan, Honduras. It's an island off the coast of Honduras, pretty much in the south Caribbean. It's best known to divers as a good place for inexpensive and non-touristy SCUBA diving.

The island was beautiful.
There were lovely beaches to walk or sun on. We stayed at a place called West End, which was near to some very good diving and further away from the resorts. This piece of beach was between West End and the next community over, West Bay. The coast that we saw was not generally as deserted as this appears to be.

The middle of the island was a rainforest. Here you can see the sea beyond the lush vegetation. We were taking a shuttle bus to the place where we could take a zip-line canopy tour (more on that later) and the bus driver kept stopping to show us the best views.

As might be guessed from the name "West End", we got to see many lovely sunsets during our visit. This is one from the first day there. The pier you see in the photo is the one immediately in front of our hotel (which had a dive shop attached). The boats tied up there were used for diving or taking divers to the bigger boat. The lounge chairs (often occupied by other guests) could be used for sunning in the afternoon and for watching the sunset.


Here is another lovely sunset taken a few days later. The boats that were usually anchored near the shore often provided opportunities for elegant photo compositions (if I can get some of my friend's photos, you'll see what I mean).


One of the non-diving activities that we did was to go up to a place called Gumbalimba Park and take thier zip-line canopy tour. This was a tour through the rainforest at the canopy (or tree-top) level on metal cords called "zip-lines". You were strapped into a climbing harness and attached to the metal cord by a carabiner. You then slid along the line through gravity (since the lines were at a downward slope). You used thick gloves to protect your hands when braking. It was a hell of a lot of fun. The photo here, taken with my camera by one of the guides, was me doing a manuver called the "superman" (for obvious reasons).


In Gumbalimba park, they also had a history and ecology tour. The history part they had in a cave-like construction that reminded me of Disneyland. The ecology tour was much nicer and included encounters with monkeys and parrots. Here you can see my handsome friend with a parrot.

I'm sure there are other photos to be had, since my friend was taking pictures the whole time as well. We also took an underwater camera with us diving once also, so there should be photos from that once the film is developed. I'll also see if I can think of any other interesting things about our trip to talk about.