Utilatime!

Utila. Wow. This is an English speaking Caribbean island off the coast of Honduras where we planned to spend about a week diving. This is utila’s main draw – it’s one of the cheapest places in the world to get certified, and is famous for the whale sharks that frequent its reef… although not at the time of year we were visiting.

Greeted off the ferry by by every dive school / hostel owner / bar promoter and his wife, and at least 600 flyers in hand, we decided to go with BICD (Bay Islands College of Diving) and checked into Seaside, their hostel, which was to become home for the next few weeks. Rebecca took her Open Water and Advanced Open Water courses (about 14 dives in total), and despite various aural issues, loved it. Laura spent the first week split between internet café and hammock, researching and writing her chapter, before going on to do the AOW, rescue course, and wreck diving speciality. I seriously considered staying to do my divemaster as well… there’s something about Utila that sucks you in!!

The island, whilst devoid of any concrete, visitable cultural attractions per se, is in itself culturally diverse. First settled by pirates and deported rebellious slaves from St Vincent, heavily accented Caribbean English is most people’s first language, although most also speak Spanish (with the same accent!) too. The attitude to diving here is super enthusiastic, and whilst the reefs aren’t world class, we logged lots of interesting things… batfish, seahorses, turtles, rays, frogfish, stargazer, morays, lobster, squid (I love!) and countless tropical reef fish. The funny thing about diving on Utila is that there’s ONE of each rare fish, and everyone knows where it lives… so you go on a dive to find THE batfish (freaky little thing that looks like it’s walking on 4 legs), THE baby batfish, THE frogfish (ugly well camouflaged red one in the photos), etc.

The second most important thing on Utila is partying… you’d be forgiven, looking at the photos, for thinking that this is all we did… it wasn’t, it’s just it’s less practical to bring your camera on a dive boat! BICD had weekly themed all you can drink BBQs (pirates…. Graffiti…) as well as Sunday Fundays: 2 North side (read: better) dives followed by BBQ, all you can drink, volleyball on private beach, all for $50us. And there were also various birthday celebrations (Tony’s unforgettable bday trip to Water Caye, a tiny sandy uninhabited island off Utila), and ‘snorkel tests’ – the final step towards gaining your PADI divemaster qualification, namely having to drink whatever your so called friends choose to pour down a funnel attached to the top of your snorkel (ranging from beer and rum to mayonnaise… eggs… hot chili sauce…) – nice. I don’t think there was one single night out on Utila that didn’t start at Tranquila (wooden bar on a pier), progress to Treetanic (unbelievably designed bar IN A TREE, decorated with the wierdest things… from marbles embedded in every flat surface, to ship parephenalia, to glow in the dark bathroom décor), and finish up at Bar in the Bush, so named because it’s inland (nearly everything on Utila is crowded along the waterfront strip in the SE of the island)… and whose speciality is oxygen balloons. Rum and coke flows like water on Utila, and on more than one occasion we decided to skip the morning dive, only to find that the boat never even went out, as all the other instructors and students were just as hungover as we were.

How else to sum up Utila…?

Ok, there are 2 ‘banks’ on the island, one of which is eagerly guarded by 2 security guards wielding outsized guns… walk past the bank in the morning and you can see them arrive, unlock the door, go inside, and come out with the guns… i.e. they are locked in there overnight! So basically it’s just waiting for someone to break in at night, steal the money AND the guns, and then fight their way out.

There are two ‘doctors’ on Utila, the Spanish Doctor, and Doctor John. The Spanish doctor isn’t actually medically qualified, but is often favoured over Dr John. Dr John has the only real clinic on the island, but he’s not always there. When he is there it’s not entirely unknown for him to be… altered… and he has been known to give injections with a rum and coke in one hand. He is more likely to be found swinging from the rafters (literally) in Coco Loco’s (another bar on a pier), and he barricades himself in his house (which I have been told, although from a highly unreliable source, is decorated with strings of fairy lights in needles… I reserve judgement here) on weekends so as not to be disturbed by any medical emergencies. So if anything serious happens, you’re screwed.

During our time on Utila we made some really good friends, and met various crazy characters too. First up is Joris, our long suffering hilarious Belgian roommate. Another oops-how-did-one-week-become-three traveller to Utila, Joris was the source of much humour on Utila, not least because he speaks like a REAL LIFE BORAT! Joris’ top quotes include…:

“In my country, Kiwis are for eating.”

“In my country, we call this a slut”

“Why is there another gypsy in the room? This is my territory. Now I’m going to have to pee in all the four corners again.”

Asked in all seriousness, whilst poring over a dive manual: “What is lub-ri-cate?”

Late one night, me and Rebecca are asleep, Joris comes in drunk and flicks the light switch on and off and on and off and on and off… “STROBOSCOOOOPE!!! PARTYYY!!!!”

Us: “Joris shut up, you’re babbling.”

Joris: “Hah! Babbling! That’s not a word!”

One of the most ridiculous Joristimes was as follows…

One morning, from the balcony, I spy a decent sized fish flapping around on the surface. This revives a past conversation about whether it would be possible to take a plastic bag down diving and catch a fish in it. Joris tells me I could never do it, so I duly accepted his challenge and waded out, plastic bag in hand, determined to catch me this fish. Joris decided that if I could then he could, and splashed out ahead of me wielding his own plastic bag. He spent half an hour chasing this stupid fish with a broken tail, failing miserably to trap it. Fed up, I made him leave the area and went and caught it myself. Minutes it took, mere minutes! We waded back to shore, hit the fish on a tree to kill it, and then Joris scaled and gutted it, with help friom Judy, the charismatic, talkative cleaner at Seaside, and we covered it with lime and salt and pepper and stuffed it in the fridge for later. Dinner time came and Joris cooked out catch, together with rice, carrots, and his own sauce (butter and lime, which surprisingly tastes ok). It didn’t look very tasty, but was actually all right (doused in lime and sauce it had to be). That was until everyone around us started killing our appetites by telling us how disgusting it was to eat a diseased fish… we pointed out that it wasn’t diseased, it just had an injury on it{s tail (barracuda bite, Joris was sure)… but they argued that the tail was bitten because the fish was too slow and dumb to get away from whatever was chasing it, most likely because it was already diseased. Anyway, whether their point was fair or not, we had lost interest and tried feeding it to the dog… who took one sniff and left it, untouched. Still, I was very proud of our combined hunting and culinary skills, and figure I could now go live on a desert island without starving.

As well as Joris, we had many a laugh at the expense of a Dutchboy, Tom, also staying in our hostel and diving with BICD. Tom’s moment of glory was accosting the girlfriend of one of the dive instructors, whilst she was sitting at her jewellery stall eating a baleada (Honduran fajita). Thinking she was selling the baleadas, Tom shouts ‘hey LADY! Street Food! Con carneeejjj??!! How much??!’ in her face. She has no idea why and stares back at him blankly. Other things to laugh at included Tom’s general goofy demeanour, poor but oh so self assured command of English, supreme laziness (when hitchhiking with the golf carts to the ferry with his luggage failed, he tried to strap his heavy bag onto the back of a small dog and make it carry it to the ferry… about a 10min walk, tops), and invariable cries of ‘TOE CRAMP TOE CRAMP!’ as soon as he jumped off the boat before every dive.

Another character worth mentioning is the legendary and inimitable BOBBY DAN, from Texas. BBD, whose Texan drawl upholds every stereotype, is a 43 year old American army veteran who, after a spell of homelessness in the States, and some dodgy work in Mexico, suddenly realized his calling in life, and traveled to Utila to become a dive instructor. His sole source of income is the 100 lempiras ($5US) he gets for each person he manages to bring lead to BICD off the ferry. Bobby Dan has handed over his passport to the dive shop, and is putting everything he’s got into this. I can’t say I’ve ever met anyone with more enthusiasm for diving. Inexplicably, before coming here, he bought pretty much an entire dive magazine of top of the range (read: neon) equipment, which he prides himself on, as this way you see, no sharks will mistake him for a seal, which is clearly what all of us fools in our black wetsuits are risking, given the numerous seal colonies that thrive on this TROPICAL CARIBBEAN ISLAND. Diving with BBD was jokes – I did my rescue course with him (plus a French boy, and the lovely Kimi and Renée), and it really was a laugh a minute. Right from the very start… we’re filling out our forms, and I look over and there’s Bobby Dan, copying word for word my next of kin emergency contact details. I’m like errr, you can’t do that!! He explains to me that he don’t got no family, and eventually decides to put ‘God or Allah’ in this space. Another favourite quote is this – we’re walking along in the street next to each other, neither of us have said anything for a while, when completely out of the blue he turns and says to me ‘you know what them Japanese girls do with those sticks they put in their hair? Yeah, they takem out n poke you in the eye with them, I seen them ju jitsu chicks do that!’ I look around for the said Japanese chicks which may have brought on this comment, but no, it was just totally left field. Or perhaps the way he mentions ‘when I was out there in the jungle, huntin’ for ma food,’ referring to walking a tad inland from the main street, and picking a mango.

The rescue course itself was hilarious – it basically consists of first aid skills as well as the more strenuous tows of tired divers, bringing ‘unresponsive’ divers up to the surface, towing them back to the boat whilst removing both your and their gear (Bobby Dan: ‘if you drop ANY of ma gear, you can just drop me into the ocean too, that stuff’s worth more than my life’), without interrupting the pattern of rescue breaths, then lifting the person out of the water and onto the boat (hardest part, especially when the victim is a fat man), simulating chest compressions and practicing administering emergency first aid oxygen (the rescuers needed this most!). Needless to say, this was pretty tiring, especially with fatman victims, and when combined with the BICD Game. Which is that if anyone hears you say the word MINE (in any language), then you have to drop and do 10 push ups. This had been going on for 5 months, so most people had cottoned on already and effectively eliminated that word from their vocabularies. I on the other hand was averaging about 100 push ups a day… although girls were sometimes allowed to elect to do sit ups instead! One of the funnest parts of the rescue course was practicing ‘self recovery skills.’ This involved Ric (our instructor) trying to surprise us underwater by pining our mask, taking it off, stealing our fins, turning off our air, unstrapping the tank from the BCD, etc, so you have to be able to calmly put everything back together again, whilst sharing air with your buddy, not shooting up to the surface, etc! The most annoying part of the course was the way you had to be ready to react immediately to any scenario the other people on the boat staged for us, namely waiting until all 5 of us were strapped into our gear and ready to go, before everyone jumps off the boat acting as panicked divers requiring tows to safety. Or right at the end, when we thought we’d finished and passed everything, and we were about 100m from the dock, when everyone threw themselves overboard again, and although already exhausted, we had no choice but to inflate our BCDs, go swim for them ,and tow them all the way back in!!

The last course I did was also very fun – the PADI wreck diving speciality. This involved 4 fdives (orientation, mapping and choosing safe entry and exit points, practice tying the reel and buddy breathing above one another, and finally, penetration), of which the penetration dive was SO COOL! Being INSIDE a ship, 30 under the sea, slithering down tiny ladder shifts and breathing without a regulator in the pockets of air that collected in the ceiling. There’s only one wreck off Utila suitable for penetration, and it has no artifacts on it apart from a bicycle or two (it was sunk on purpose in 89 I think), but there were some huge tiger grouper and a hogfish there on the last dive, and I combined it with the nitrox adventure dive, which gave us about 30min bottom time. Scapa Flow here I come.

One week quickly became three, and I ended up staying 24 nights in total! Still, this is much better than one friend there, Imke (‘my flight home was last Sunday… I think I’ll stay here for a long time now’) or Chris, a DM on month nine of a one week trip. Rebecca moved on after two weeks – her, Joris and another Utilafriend, Sasha, left all together – strength in numbers – and met up again with Tom in La Ceiba, and I stayed to finish my courses. The fundives I did on my last full day were the best… taking in frogfish, the baby batfish, seahorses, a peacock flounder, some supercool (and tight!) swimthroughs at a site called Laberynth, and about 10 mins floating midwater in a shoal of 39 squid!! I love squid, they are so inquisitive and beautiful – they come right up to your mask to have a look, and they flash different colours (to communicate with each other), from pink to blue to iridescent brown. Is nice, I like! Leaving Utila was sad, but it was definitely time to move on…

Things we will miss about Utila:

- Commandeering vessels (Beebs)

- Shouting ‘Save me Bobby Dan, save me!’ in a southern drawl

- Laughing at the 3 most common lies heard on Utila (namely ‘just one drink,’ ‘I’m leaving tomorrow,’ and ‘I love you’)

- Diving all day and partying all night

- Post-dive NACHOS

- Joris’ pearls of wisdom and pieces of advice such as ‘don’t turn up to your morning class drunk, especially if you have to dive rescue breaths’

Things we will NOT MISS about Utila:

- sleeplessness

- PADI videos (better with piña coladas) and textbooks – I quote ‘try to focus on the joys of living, and not just on ways to avoid dying.’

- Discovering the loss of yet another pair of flip flops in the morning

I followed in Rebecca and Joris and Sasha’s footsteps and spent a night in La Ceiba (walked into a guesthouse and was greeted by Tom’s goofy face smiling down at me), before heading to Copán (supremely underwhelming Mayan Ruins) and over the border… next stop Guatemala!