Day Nine

Slept in today – Finally. Woke up around 930 and rolled around a bit until finally getting out of bed at 10ish. I’ve been getting up so early to do things this vacation that I have just started to wear myself out. After getting up, telling the maid that I wasn’t ready for her to clean the room quite yet – I headed down to the Buena Vida, right beside the dive shop. Ordered up the Sunday special – Banana Pancakes and coffee (seriously, these are the most amazing pancakes you will ever eat in your life. I think I said that last Sunday, but I am not exaggerating.) Hung out there for a while, watched the end of the Soccer Game – World Cup semi-finals I think? I dunno, was just fun to watch the game with some local expats. After that, I went down to the dive shop, talked to them for a bit and showed them all the snow we got at home last night and today. They were quite unimpressed. In fact, I made the guy shiver just talking about it.

I then headed out from the dive shop, to go down to one of the local gift shop markets to look for some touristy crap. On my way there, I saw the girls and Kevin coming in from their fishing/mangrove trip and walked down the dock to greet them. Lucky to find them right on the dock! I would have been hanging out alone all day if I didn’t find them (which isn’t a bad thing, I actually quite like hanging out by myself on this island). Talked to them for a bit, and they told me about the Tuna and Barracuda they caught – their barracuda was bigger than the ones me and Jamie caught. They invited me to their boat captains house for dinner that night, we were going to BBQ up the barracuda.

Me and the girls headed to West Bay to hang out on the beach for the day. Myself and Sara walked the whole beach to the end, and then came back and planted ourselves on some beach chairs for a while – I got a big fishbowl margarita, and we chilled there. She went for a massage and Melissa and Brittaney came over to meet me. I went snorkelling just in the shallows of the beach with Britt for a little while, didn’t see anything, it is just a sand bar – picked up a beer can and a chip bag off the bottom though – sad that people litter in places like this, when there is garbage bins all over the place. I can proudly say that I didn’t litter at all, in fact I was picking up garbage when I found it on the streets/ocean. I wanted to go paddleboarding today, but it was too late by the time we were ready, so I took a quick nap on the girl’s hammock while Sara got ready and Britt/Mel were snorkelling. I woke up at 330 and got down to the beach to take a watertaxi back to West End to get ready.

Got showered up and did some writing on the computer, then went down to the Coconut Tree Dive Shop to meet the girls. Had a few beers at their dive shop, and then Arley(I think) showed up to take us to his house. He put us in a cab, and he wisked away on his scooter. We drove from West End to Sandy Bay – which is just North East of West End to Arley’s house. We pulled in, there was myself, Sara, Brittaney, Mellisa, Kevin and Lance (Kevin’s friend who just got in today). We started drinking the beers from the Colorado brewery that Lance brought in (Kevin owns a brewery called Dry Dock Brewing in Colorado). I hadn’t tasted a good IPA since i left home, and it was fantastic. In fact, they want me to come down there the last week of September/early October to go to something called the Great American Brewing Festival, which is apparantely amazing, over 2000 different beers from craft breweries down there. We fired up the grill (you literally just start a fire in a steel basket, and get it nice and hot.)  and put the barracuda on there. Barracuda was awesome, he grilled it up with some spices, and some lemon juice. We also had a spinach salad and some rice. Barracuda can be a poisonous fish depending on what they have eaten. There is a way to tell if they are poisonous or not, that the locals have been using for hundreds of years, not only in Honduras, but all around the world. Catch a Barracuda, scale and gut it, and then throw a small peice of meat near an ant hill – if the ants will eat the fish, then it is safe for humans. If the ants wont eat it – then it is poisonous and can put a human out for several weeks with a violent illness.

After dinner we chilled out, listened to a random selection of music including classic rock, some rap, and some Bob Marley – The girls were having a fun time dancing to Bob Marley. Everybody was having an amazing time. The food was good, the beer was good, and the company was amazing. Its not often you get the chance to go to a locals house for dinner and have such a good time the way we did tonight. We headed home around 1030-11. The girls are leaving tomorrow, but I think ill be able to have breakfast with them. If not, it was kind of an abrupt goodbye, and hopefully ill see them again someday! Tomorrow I am supposed to do a deep dive to a shipwreck – should be interesting.