Notes on Honduras

February 24, 2025

July 18

Leave for airport at 3:00. I'm tired. Eunice is tired. We get to the airport around 3:30. There's a line for some reason, it turns out the airport isn't open yet and people are just lining up to go through security. Eunice sits down on the floor. She never sits down on floors, so I know she must be really, atypically tired.

The TSA agents are having some kind of pow-wow. Me and Eunice joke about what they must be talking about. We play "I Spy" in sign language looking for a guy with a pink shirt. She finds one. But there are two. When I get through security there's a sign that says I can opt out of having my picture taken. I ask if it's a problem if I opt out, and they say no. So I opt out and everything is fine. Maybe it saves me having to hand over my boarding pass? I'm not sure.

Guy in line tells me I have to take my headphones out. "They're not headphones," I say. He goes, "Oh... I get you." I think he thought they were hearing aids. They were earplugs. But I felt like I had a secret.

Eunice and me board the plane, we're the first to get on. We got a complimentary upgrade to first class! How about that. Eunice and me are split but people agree to trade seats so we can sit next to each other.

The first thing the flight attendant asks me is, "do you drink?" Like alcohol. I said no, and could hardly conceive of the question because it's 5am. But the people to my left are getting to know each other, and before I know it the girl's ordering something clear and yellow and then later followed it up with a bloody mary. "I'm such a slow drinker!" I overheard her say.

I am freezing on this plane. Maybe some alcohol would help.

Being complimentarily in first class we also got complimentary breakfasts. I got the salmon bagel (avoiding the likely microwaved egg omelette) but Eunice got the omelette and, barring microplastic contamination, hers was the superior meal.

Me and Eunice spent a lot of the trip being tired. I played chess puzzles. At some point she started taking pictures of the beautiful clouds over Miami. Then we tried to find faces in the clouds in her pictures. This could definitely be a game.

Miami

We land in Miami. Perhaps needless to say, but it is hot and humid outside, but once we got off the jetway we were back to a frozen interior. Our layover was nearly five hours. Tried to find a book (I forgot my Kindle at Eunice's apartment) but they all sucked ass and were super expensive. So the first hour I spent reading Jeffrey Epstein's wikipedia article and much of it out loud to Eunice. Then we tried to find a bathroom, which was harder than it sounds because these days everyone poops while using their phones so the turnover rates are low. You have to be patient.

I saw a few sights inside the airport. One was the largest ass I ever laid eyes on. The other was a couple of birds just chilling on the floor. Finally, a woman was loudly and somewhat violently chewing out her boyfriend who she was mad tipped his bartender too much. "This motherfucker treats strangers better than he treats me." Stuff like that.

After that we got some empanadas, raided a few stores (Lego, Kiehl's, a whiskey store, Montblanc) and then boarded our second first-class flight of the day to Roatan.

This flight, being slightly more alert, was more fun. The pilot came out and asked the first-class cabin, "Anyone celebrating a birthday?" When no one said anything, he followed up with, "Anniversary? Wedding? Graduation? …Divorce?" He got a laugh with that. Then he walked into coach and delivered exactly the same joke.

We used sign language to talk for most of the flight. When we weren't signing we were snacking.

The stewardess came by to bring us snacks. I asked her which one she liked the most and she said, "I've never tried any of these. I try to eat healthy." So I got the cheesy bites and some nuts.

Roatan

If it was hot in Miami it is even hotter here. Upon leaving the plane Eunice says, "Ay! Hace calor!" and a woman says back, "Hace fresco. Antes hace mucho mas calor." That's not reassuring. Or maybe it was. It was too hot to know.

We get to the passport station. They ask me my name, how many days I'm here for etc. Then they blurt out, "Wher are iu estaying?" Well I don't remember and my phone won't download the file and the line is piling up behind me. So I look out to Eunice from across the office and sign in ASL to her:

Me: N-A-M-E? Eu: ? ME: NAME APARTMENT?

She gets it.

Eu: A-V-A-N-T-A S-U-N SUN…

"Avanta Sun, 22." Fingers scanned. Photo taken. I'm in. ASL saves the day yet again.

We get Eunice's customary icy cold coffee granita with cinnamon encima. I think we need to drink this before it melts, but that was foolish, because the paper straw they've given us will not even last the 30 minutes to get to our AirBnB. It breaks in half before the drink is halfway finished. The entire cup however is made of plastic. This system doesn't make sense to me.

Jason, our ride, is driving us. He tells us that it's the temporada de mangos. There's a special kind of mango called a Belize mango. He says they're the best and he can bring us some if we want. We still haven't decided if we want a giant bag of the best mangos in the country for four dollars. (Are we stupid?)

We get to our place and more or less immediately head out to the beach. We pass through IBAGARI, fancy place with art on the walls. One of the pieces is ASL hands. We try to spell it out:

P…L…Y…A…S S…A…R…E…A…M

This makes zero fucking sense to me so we ask the staff, who tells us that it's the owner's name written in sign language. But the owner's first name is Patricia, so they got the P right but nothing else, and not even the right number of letters. The employees insist they're going to get to the bottom of this.

We walk for a little while going West, and come across some fruit on the ground under a tree. It's like a grape with a giant hard pit inside it, and it tastes delicious. I walk up to a security guard nearby and ask him:

"Perdona, hay una fruta…" "Uva de playa. Rica no? Se puede hacer vino con estas…"

His name is Jorge Moya. Security. He's young. He brings us two large plastic solo cups full of uvas de playa. He has two children, says it's nice that they're from the same woman. I tell him in Brooklyn people date all different women at the same time and never have children. This confuses him. "Those people are sick in the head," he tells me.

The ultimate plan is to snorkel but sand flies biting our legs remind us that bug repellent is probably a higher priority. So we get it. And then, realizing we haven't eaten, we stop by Bananarama for surprisingly good burritos.

Let me talk a little bit about something at Bananarama. First, they have pigeons that look roughly like ours but are different. They have blue around their beaks. And they also have jalapenos which are different. I took a big bite out of a slice of jalapeno from Eunice's plate and immediately spat it out. I have not experienced heat like that in my life. My face turned red and I could barely breathe. Eunice fed me her cheesy beans to cool me down. I will never assume a jalapeno is mild again.

Our waiter, named Michael, tells us that he has some trouble eating the jalapenos here. He talks about the other fruits growing on the island and even mentions the Belize mangos. "I wonder what they call them in Belize?" he asks. Eu says, "Mangos." Michael seems to like living here but says the pay is bad and people will work part of the year in the US to pay for a year in Roa. Also, on Sundays they have a hermit crab race. He offers to bring us fruit from his home garden, if we can coordinate it.

Full, we leave. $26 for the meal is reasonable.

On the way down the beach we encounter a man with a capuchin monkey on his back. Eunice says he's famous for having this pet monkey. I ask if it's okay if I say hi to the monkey, and the man says sure! He holds out his arm and this very angry looking capuchin monkey lunges from the end of his arm onto my chest, climbs onto my head, and starts nibbling my ear hard. The guy's like, "woah, woah okay time to come back" and pulls the monkey off of me. I'm not sure I had a good time or not but it was the first time I've ever held (or been held by) a capuchin monkey.

Walking down the beach there's an area near the rocks that people are huddled around. It's the fish. There are large, flat, silvery fish with big stupid heads and smaller fish with black and white stripes. We take turns with Eunice's snorkel. The fish are everywhere and eating the tiny pieces of bread we throw into the water.

I overhear some Americans in the water. I go up to one, Richard. He's from Laguna Beach, started his own companies back in the 80s when interest rates for mortgages began falling. He tells us about some cool reefs to go to. He shows me his water scooter. I've never seen anything like that in my life and my mind is blown.

At some point Eunice tells me about Banana Donut guy. He's famous for walking on the beach and saying "Banan! Donut!" Or something like that.

We have to get back before sunset since, without phones or flashlight, we'd be stranded. So we walk back just in time to see the crabs walking on the concrete (they can climb up the concrete pier and even walk underneath it, upside down).

We come across another fruit floating in the water and on the playa. I don't know what it is, but it's yellow and soft like a fresh date, which is might be. The best I can compare the flavor to is Sunny D-lite. I swear to go it tastes just like Sunny D.

Heading back there's a "water doggie." It turns out to be a pitbull with some pretty large jaws playing fetch with a coconut in the water. Alexis is playing with it. The water doggie's name is Arnie. Arnie has rare energy even by canine standards. Alexis would throw a full-sized coconut into the water, and Arnie would paddle out and bring it back to the beach… and then RIP IT TO SHREDS with its mouth. It did this THREE TIMES and I'm not exaggerating. It tore coconuts into tiny bits with its jaws, for fun, and apparently once did this to eight coconuts in a single session. When we were leaving, Arnie was trying to bury a coconut and was barking, almost ecstatically or frantically, as he was doing so. This dog has a powerful relationship to coconuts.

On the way back we saw the Garifuna dance. These girls can do isolated movements with their butts which I find intriguing. Eunice says it is hard. I believe her. Still want her to do it though.

I mentioned that the forecast was clear. Well, it was, but there's this funny thing about the rain here in Roatan. Apparently no matter what the forecast says it will rain. We realized this while walking home. Within a couple minutes we found ourselves in a flash thunderstorm, cowering under the tiny umbrella I brought (though, perplexingly and contradictorily, walking with our feet in the water.) But once under the umbrella the storm abated.

We ended the night talking to people in the hot tub. I got little out of talking to them, but they felt like different versions of my mom so that was nice.

July 19

Wake up late. I slept well. Eunice slept well. It's 7am Honduras time, 9am normal people time.

The point is to get to the beach early. The sun is out most of the day and it is hot and beats down on your shoulders. We are out the door quickly.

Eunice asks me if we should stop and eat somewhere. I say only before looking at the menu, to see if it's too expensive. (I'm a jew.) I think it is, but I can tell Eunice isn't able to walk any further because she IS LITERALLY DYING RIGHT NOW CAN'T YOU READ IT IN MY FACE? (She is telling me with her face.) So I say, "sure, we can eat here," ignoring the sign to my right that says

IF THE FOOD HERE DOESN'T MEET YOUR EXPECTATIONS PLEASE LOWER YOUR EXPECTATIONS

But all that being said, the food was pretty good. We got some omelettes and bread that was basic but fair, at $7 a plate. The best part, in my opinion, was the soundtrack at this restaurant, which consisted 90% (Eu says 100%) of Celine Dion. I tried to get Eunice to dance with me, but all she could do was talk about how "you could tell who's a morning person."

The people behind us were talking about immigrants, how Gavin Newsom was actually racist for wanting to keep them there, and something something about illegal thugs. Something occurred to me while they were talking: that some people associate being smart with being rich, a la "How can someone become rich if they're not smart?" That set me on a track of thinking about things differently. Also, how come there are so many Republicans complaining about immigrants in ROATAN?

We proceed to the beach. On the way, I try to fulfill my mission of buying a disposable camera. We enter the first store. They don't have one. They tell us to check at the place down the road, La Placita. Ok, sure.

As promised, the water is clearer today. We spend some time with the fish. We see some new faces today.

I was talking a lot about how I saw cell phones everywhere, it made (and continues to make) me a little depressed. Eunice didn't see it that way and that made me sad. I went and had a little pity party by myself in the water for a very long time.

In the meantime, Eunice was eavesdropping (she says she doesn't like eavesdropping) on two girls who were right behind her. The girls were around 12-14. Apparently they could not read and said a lot of bad words in Spanish ("pendejo", "puta", "mierda", "imbecil", "pija") and this made her depressed.

So we were both pretty depressed for around 30 minutes or so.

That's when we decided to set off to look for La Placita and get the digital camera. But on the way we got distracted by the baleada situation. You see, Baleadas are the national food of Eunice, and also Honduras. So she made me eat one. They were priced as "2Y3$". I got the $3 one. It was interesting watching the tortilleras make the tortillas (we estimated their time to be about 15-20s per handmade tortilla. It was impressive.) They worked in a small shop with no external lighting. It was interesting to watch. It will become a theme in the trip to observe that restaurants typically operate just by ambient light in the kitchen area, with lighting basically only in the eating area.

My baleada was pretty good. Avocado was excellent, eggs were moist but not wet, but the cheese was fucking weird. Eunice did not agree and said it tasted normal. I'm going to come back to this point later but for now let me make an important point:

DISPOSABLE CAMERAS HAVE GONE EXTINCT

We went to 5 other stores looking for digital cameras and none of them had them. They are a dead race and we will never see them again. Fin.

Now this feels like it should have been a whole day already, but this put us at about 10:25 am, which I could not really believe, but time goes much slower here, because it's closer to the equator. Trust me, I'm a physicist.

So we head back and we see our last familiar face of Roatan.

Arnie.

That's right. Arnie is out on the pier WALKING HIS WALKER. He has his own leash in his mouth and is pulling it in the direction he wants to go. If you read yesterday's report on Arnie this would make perfect sense to you as this dog (who is supposedly the boss's dog) is clearly the boss and whose immense energy somehow allows him to dictate the direction of most situations. We learned a few new facts about Arnie. He only likes female dogs and male dogs without too much hair. Poodles, in other words, should stay away, lest they end up like the coconuts.

The rest of the stay is uneventful. We learn a little bit about what might be north, but not many tourists go there. I do make a friend at a restaurant, Jack, who tells me that the Sunny-D-Lite fruits are called Obos. He picks a few off the ground and hands them to me, a couple times.

Eunice in the meantime orders an $18 plate of beans because she is grateful to the restaurant for letting us sit at the bar. Honestly they were pretty good beans.

Jason comes to pick us up. The mangos he promised us were nowhere to be found. Apparently, the mango season is coming to a close. But all is not last as, on the way to the ferry (we're closing in on 1pm at this point) he brings us to some mango trees right outside the dock. And there are mangos everywhere! Many in the shade and some that fell right then while we were there. I put a bunch in my hat.

Jason had told us not to eat the ones that were in the sun. He was right. They tasted like baked mangos. You may have a hard time picturing that taste but when you taste it, it is instantly recognizable as baked mango.

Also, Eunice showed me that there were a few mimosa hostilis plants on the ground. We touched them, they closed, it was awesome.

We're waiting in the shade on the dock at this point. There's a guy talking to the attendants. The first thing out of his mouth is, "Ophelia huh? Beautiful name — Shakespeare had a character named that. Wanna guess how I know that? Well I am a college professor…" I label him weird and move on but notice him talking to other people.

Behind us [side note: I can hear someone using Duolingo outside my AirBnB right now.] are two women watching Facebook videos making fun of liberals. They fit the typical description: old, white, possibly alcoholic. The Professor has found new targets. He is telling them he's a professor.

Me and Eunice talk in ASL for a bit. The professor starts talking to the guy next to us. I tell Eunice that I enjoy eavesdropping on people and that this guy is weird. But she tells me (contradicting herself from earlier) that she doesn't like eavesdropping a prefers silence.

Well, now it's our turn. Professor turns to us. "Y'all speak English?" He tells us he's a professor. Some University in Tampa. Says that his students are using ChatGPT now. I tell them if he grades with ChatGPT then the problem's solved. He's some how impressed that I can engage with him and know about "delve" and the "em-dashes" that ChatGPT so often uses. He pegs me and Eunice as smart, but I don't really want to talk to him so I'm relieved when it's time to board.

Me and Eunice hop on the top of the boat to avoid sea sickness. The music is loud and annoying for no reason, so I put in my earplugs and we sign.

On our way out, the professor talks to us again. He wants to know how I'm so smart and how Eunice's diction is so good. But we don't tell him much and instead let him talk us into visiting Cuba, which even now I think is an actual good idea.

Utila is beautiful. Beautiful is an anagram for "F U. Be Utila." There are flags and jacarandas and all the hicoca trees you can imagine. Hicoca trees make little fruits (hicocas) which look like pale apples but have the texture of a marshmallow. Unfortunately they have pits and don't taste like much, but they're fantastically interesting on the tongue the first time you eat one.

On the way we meet two women on the side of the road. "Is that an almond tree?" I ask them. "Yes!" one says. Her name is Emily. She is black with enormous boobs. [Eunice wants me to delete that part.] The other is an elderly woman named Nora. "Pull down the branch!" I pull it down and nibble on the flesh of the fresh almond fruit. These aren't like American almonds. They're large, almost the size of a small apple (much bigger than a crabapple) and the flesh is soft enough to chew. Emily says they make them with honey and spices. She tells us to come back tomorrow and if she sees us she'll give us some.

Utila is much quieter and poorer than Roatan but it's also more interesting at least to my eye. There are tuktuks and motorcycles and dirt bikes everywhere. It should be more dangerous than it is to walk in the street but nothing bad seems to happen.

We drop off our stuff and get our keys. Place is nice enough, if simple. Our plan is to cook food here. We have the basic amenities needed for that.

We stop buy a bookstore to buy a book. We get a translated bunch of short stories by Herman Hesse. Alex, the shop owner, is nice. Speaks great English and tells us the island is overrun by republicans and that if we don't want people to hate us, to avoid talking about politics.

A wrench gets thrown in our plan too cook at home: Mama Rosa's Baleadas. Mama Rosa's is actually run by Tia Rosa, Mama Rosa's sister. The baleadas, however, do live up the expectations and EVEN MAS. Because they're 15 limpiras (in today's dollars, that's 57 cents) for a baleada sencilla and I got two of them and that was dinner. (For context, this is 4 times cheaper than the cheap baleada on Roatan.) I immediately realized that I would much rather eat Tia Rosa's baleadas than cook them at home for however much that would cost because this was just unbeatable. So that's my current position. They were really delicious.

And to return to the point I wanted to make earlier. The cheese this time was really good. But Eu says it tastes the same as before, when I said it tasted like a gym sock. So you, reader, have to decide who you trust more. But these baleadas freaking rocked.

We walked the rest of the way up the road, past Neptune and to a long beach with lots of latinos. It was fun and interesting to see all the little shops we will probably visit while we're here. I even met a cute dog friend named Coffee.

Eunice is sitting on my shoulder now. This evening we read a little Herman in Spanish, had a donut and then a banana. That's when I realized:

I'm BANANA DONUT GUY!! It was me the whole time.

Now we're showered and in bed and Eunice looks beautiful. I'm going to kiss her. No not like that. With tongue. That was better. Wait, one more. I'm really horny right now. And I have a boner. And Eunice is rolling her eyes but, we both know she is starting to get a little wet. Am I wrong. She says I'm wrong. I'm closing this chapter for the night.

Buenas nochecitas.

July 20

It turns out that there are two very different kinds of mangos. The first kind is the kind I'vebecome used to. It has a stringy interior and a pit that you can never really fully eat clean. But today I first experienced a whole other mango possibility - a mango with no such strings, and which has the texture, perhaps, of ice cream that's a touch too warm. Could this be the elusive Belize mango? Our provider isn't sure. All he knows is that these are his mangos. He has a property here in Utila, off a side road off of another side road. He's a mechanical engineer for British Petroleum. He says he works 3 weeks on, 3 weeks off, for a total of 6 months out of the year. He speaks Caracol. Caracol is a mix of Spanish and British English. To say, "hello", he says, "Wayyadoon?"

I'm going to continue writing about the day but I do want to put down that I'm not sure I'm feeling very happy today. I've had moments I suppose but traveling with Eu has been hard for me. I wish it wasn't. I'm finding myself wanting a lot of alone time.

We didn't have sex last night or this morning, or any time in the last two weeks. I tried this morning but when I looked over at her she was staring at the ceiling thinking about something. So I paused, put on my clothes, and went for a walk alone. I stepped at a little mart for a pineapple milkshake. It was rather tasty, despite being unexpected as a combination, but they ripped me off on the exchange rate, giving me only 23L per dollar, instead of 26. I didn't say anything but made a mental note that, to some people here, tourists exist to get ripped off (probably.)

Church is active on Sunday. Around a hundred people are gathered inside the church with the windows open and the lights off.

You can't go too far without seeing one of the following signs:

JESUCRISTO ES LA RESPUESTA JESUS ES EL SEÑOR

On the way home, around 830am, I see a sign for Iguana Station. They say you can come feed the iguanas hibiscus flowers from 830-9. I go back and tell Eu, who agrees we should og. But Utila has a problem. Buildings disappear and reappear elsewhere. Sometimes beuilding are disguised as other buildings. We heard a story today, relayed to use by Glenn, that a man here once went out, partied, and lost his hotel. He could not remember which hotel he was staying at. After looking for a while, he gave up, surrendered his belongings for the night, and booked a new room in an entirely different hotel.

So it should now be more understandable that on the way to Iguana Station we first went to the entirely wrong place (Kanahau Museum), which was closed as it was Sunday. We asked for directions ("turn right when you see the fire station"), but having not seen the fire station, they told us to go back the other way and turn left at the fire station. It is that kind of a place. So we turn left at the place we assume must be the fire station (though it has no markings of one) and knock on a building which has a large iguana on the side of it. Surely this must be iguana station, so we walk up the steps, pet the dog, and loudly knock on the door of it. But then Eu points out that according to the map this can't be iguana station, and is more than likely just some person's house. Anyway, eventually we walk up the street and find the signs for the actual Iguana Station and make our way there around 10, which is an hour and a half too late to volunteer. Or so we thought! Because they were actually closed to volunteers on Sunday, which means we were, as Eu said, not really late, but 24 hours early.

All the swampers are in cages, but Swampy is a special swamper who lives in a large, uncovered pen. We did not see or hear Swampy but I did feel his presence. Maybe he doesn't work on Sundays either.

We head home. We make a few stops along the way. Plum Plantation - closed. Chocolate Factory: also closed. Our apartment: closed. Why was it closed? Because at some point during this multi-hour and circuitous trip to Iguana Station and back, the keys to the rental fell out of my waistband. So we ended up doubling back to every spot we visited: Baleada lady, where we ate; a random pulperia where I bought a delicious raw plantain and ate it (better than any banana); the foresty area where I stopped and looked for mangos under a huge mango tree. We never found it. Ultimately we just paid the $7 to replace the key.

I decide to nap. It's a good and much-need map.

On Pumpkin Hill, a ways away, Eu had heard there's gonna be some kind of "returning tutles to the sea" event. We have a little argument abuout whether we should take a taxi there or not, but I'm afraid of getting ripped off and plus I enjoy a nice long walk. So we decide to that. I'm insistent about it.

The walk takes us along a new road. While not steep, it's at a steady incline. We see a guava tree (confirmed delicious), a flattened possum, a few vultures, and many lizards of all different species. Astonishingly, at the very top of the hill and at what must be one of the direst parts of Uitla, I saw BLUE CRABS. Bafflingly, they live in the forest in little holes in the ground. Weird, and supposedly delicious creatures.

We've walked nearly the whole way in silence. It's my fault. I'm feeling increasingly frustrated and distant. Like something is broken between us. I'm able to tell her that I feel distant. She says that she feels the same. I tell her that something is off with her, buy she doesn't elaborate. A bull with a giant humpy thing on its back utlimately derails the conversation, and soon after we're in Pumpkin Hill. The walk lasts a little over an hour.

This beach is different from the others. It's noisier for sure, not nearly as calm; the waves break and lap against the shore. There are corals everywhere here. Even the sand is loose, with noticeable chunks of coral making up the mix. It almostfeels like unfinished sand. Evidently the material that washes up here is fresher... the sand is younger.

If ti's true that younger material winds up here , that may explain why we also saw another kind of material: plastic. The beach is covered with it and it comes from everywhere -- Honduras, to be sure, but also Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, and other countries. When it rains in Guatemala, the water carries its plastic to Utila. It's a devastating global problem.

Unfortunately for us the turtles were also not working today. No one does anything on Sundays here. The last little turtle walked into the ocean just moments before we arrived -- perhaps ten minutes or so, Glenn says.

Glenn is the man who started the turtle sanctuary here. Much like in other places, islanders still eat turtle eggs, even today. But Glenn is trying to change that. He's educating the children and giving them pet turttles. He's build out his NGO. He's found his life's purpose. It's admirable and even enviable. I could see myself being friends with Glenn.

Somehow talking with Glenn brings me and Eu closer and we agreed we should have sex, but it doesn't look anymore like that's gonna happen tonight (as I write this.)

A tuk-tuk drives us from Pumpkin Hill to the Jade Seahorse, and exquisitely and intricately decorated hotel. I would like it to Alhambra in Granada. It is hard to believe this is the work of a single man. It's a mix of glass, stone, concrete, coral, ceramic, and wood, but it comes together almost like Disneyworld on acid. A man runs this place. Jewish, "Still Neal" (he introduced himself as "I'm still Neal", but I forget why) says to me, in front of his wife,

"The only good thing about getting married is you can some day look forward to getting set free..."

What a drama queen. He likes physics apparently. Thinks that rocket motion is due to dark matter. I don't find him unpleasant despite his wacky ideas, but Eu does, so I take her to get baleadas since she seems bored.

Later tonight, Eu will tell me about a time where i made a joke about giving her away as a prize for winning a game of Connect 4 at a bar. She nearly cried at the time, she said. I had no idea that a comment like that would make her feel that way. I apologized, sincerely, but she ignored me every time I apologized. I don't know why she ignored me but it was pointless, because now I don't want to talk at all.

I really struggle with this communication sttyle and have started shutting down when I get frustrated. I don't even bother talking about it. It's stopped by this feeling I get of "this is unfixable" or "I can't fix this."

July 21-22

The word of the day is "Earth."

We wake up at 530, because I set the worng alarm. But we watched the sun rise anyway. Took a long morning, got breakfast, and went to Iguana Station.

First task -- to prove we are worthy of the iguanas, we must each pick 100 hibiscus flowers for their daily feeding. Eu counts each one. I just compare my bags to hers. I am smarter.

We learn that the iguanas eat mostly hibiscus flowers, plus carrot, zucchini, and a litle calcium. Also papaya, if you're Swampy -- the olderst and most famous swamper. We finally saw Swampy, though only really his tail and behind, because Swampy doesn't descend from his tree for just anyone. This might explain why we didn't see him yesterday. Swampy also shares his papaya with his roommates, three turtles.

We thought that would be the end of it, but we were quickly pulled into cleaning he cages, which meant being inside the cages next to to the swampers. It was odd being so close to them. They are like little dinosaurs, in fact most of the animals around here seem that way.

Our trainer, Reyina, is nice. She speaks little English. I had her eat her first obo. She seemed surprised that this little yellow grape thingy that grows everywhere could taste so good.

After cutting up the zucchini and feeding the lizards, Reyina comes out. "Fue un incidente." Some of the baby lizards have died. She has them in a little plastic tupperware. We bring them outside, and name them: the first Chrisopho, and the second Jesus. We bury them next to the senior center and Eunice makes a cross out of twigs for each one, and then a little tombstone out of a rock.

The guy in charge, Alex, asks us if we want to lead tours. Like literally today. "You mean, us... right now..."

"Sure, I give you the tour, then you're certified to give the tour to other people."

So, in this way, we got certified.

Animals seen:

Breakfast at Mama Rosa's, now trustworthy and reliable.

June 21-22 part II (Earth)

(continued from notebook)

Reyina brings us pan de coco and lemongrass tea, made with lemongrass straight from their garden.

"Fue un incidente." Two geckos had died. She held up a little trowel. We were going to bury them. The three of us walked over to a little plot near the senior lizards. Reyina dug a hole, and Eunice made two crosses out of wood. I named the two lizards Christopho and Jesus, and we buried them with the crosses and two little rocks which functioned as tombstones.

(after this comes the cleaning — wrote this a little out of order.)

After all this — being interns and internment — we finally left. We walked over to Coral Bay View. It's one of the places that Glenn said still had good coral left on the island. The rest of the corals are suffering.

We stop in, pay the L200 p.p. at the restaurant. On the way in we hear one of the staff call out to a guy: "Bambi!" Eunice asks — is that guy named Alejandro?

Side note: everyone here is named Alejandro or Alex or Alexis.

Turtle guy: Alejando Eunice's friend: Alejandro Lizard guy: Alexis Arnie's caretaker: Alexis

Alejandro and Eunice went to school together. He goes by Bambi. By sheer coincidence, last week he moved to Utila and is the chef at the restaurant we just ate at. They know each other really well and we agree to talk after snorkeling.

I put on my mask and dip my foot in the water. Ooh! It feels warm, like a bath. What's that that just bumped my ankle? A little black fish! I look down at it. How cute. Then it bites me. I scream like a little girl. That shit hurt. What a little bitch (both of us.)

Eunice tells me that for maximum clarity in my mask I have to spit in it. So I do, and it works.

The first impression of the reef is sea grass. There is that, plus a lot of smaller coral around. Walking with fins on is a little bit confusing and I fall a couple times but eventually get the hang of it. Once I'm in the water, though, everything changes.

Eunice signs to me

P-A-R-R-O-T

Immediately present are yellow-tailed snappers and innumerable parrotfish. The parrotfish nibble on the corals, biting off little pieces of them, which they will process with two sets of teeth and eventually excrete as sand. A single parrotfish can produce around a ton of sand a year. A group of scientists estimate that 70% of sand in Hawai'i and the Carribean is produced by parrotfish. https://manoa.hawaii.edu/exploringourfluidearth/physical/coastal-interactions/beaches-and-sand/weird-science-parrotfish-and-sand

The parrotfish come in so many different colors that it's hard to believe they are the same fish. There are the stoplight parrotfish, rainbow parrotfish, midnight parrotfish, and innumerable others. They have the same distinct parrotfish beak and head shape, but beyond that, the colors are really quite shocking. We saw a few with red bellies and black and white scales. Others which were green and purple. Others still which were tan and grayish.

As you move through the water you feel sudden waves of warm and cold water. Sometimes the transition happens nearly instantly. Eunice would speak to me in ASL:

COLD

YES

The water is separated by a thermocline. Basically, the cold water and warm water are different enough in density that they don't really mix well. So as we're swimming the water is quickly changing from COLD to HOT to COLD to HOT.

Eunice is holding my hand through most of this.

In that same zone we came across a gigantic pufferfish looking at us from underneath a coral, just floating there majestically — a few sea cucumbers doing something weird — a very large conch that moved while we swam over it — a gigantic sea urchin half the size of a basketball that I nearly touched — sargeant majors and yellow snappers — a deep blue angelfish — and many other things I couldn't identify.

Being a reef there were also corals. Brain corals were particularly prominent, but Eunice pointed out that nearly all of the brain corals were sick. They have a kind of disease that causes them to lose their wrinkles and just look kind of white and weird. Corals are, surprisingly, animals that eat other animals. They are not like plants, and they are somewhat more fragile than plants. Various conditions — water warming, ocean acidification, pollution — contribute to the disease, which can be a result of a bacterial infection or maladaptation.

Also, it's very weird to think about what all of that might look like from the fish's point of view.

We can't go all the way to the drop off. Coral reefs often have a steep cliff at their edge, where the coral suddenly stops (it doesn't just kind of taper off… but it really does just stop.) Darwin himself actually wondered about this. How come from way out in the sea there's nothing, and then, suddenly, something?

Towards the end of the day I found a beer can called SalvaVida in the reef. I took it out, feeling like he salvado una vida, somehow.

The rest of the afternoon I spent talking with Bambi and playing cornhole with two kids on the pier. One Grayson cheated by taking points away from himself in order the play with me longer. The other, Jackson, was honest.

Eunice and me had a little argument on the pier, but we made up. On the way home we saw a few crabs. One giant blue crab ran through the road and we stood in the road to slow down the cars and save it. One woman driving by pointed to the crab and called out, "You can boil that!"

We stop by Mama Rosa and meet two girls looking for a table, and they send up sitting at ours. They are Cynthia (Hondurena) and Annalee (German). We end up speaking in a mix of English and Spanish. We were expecting to go on the turtle patrol tonight, but Alejandro never texted us back. So instead we end up talking to these girls, who are doing WorkAway and, despite the odds, are actually doing turtle patrol every night. We didn't get their numbers, but I imagine there's good odds that we'll see them again, assuming we end up doing the patrol. I order two baleadas, two pupusas, and a sandilla smoothie.

When me and Eunice get back, I'm too tired to do anything. I respond to messages but immediately fall asleep.

July 21 (Earth)

We have sex in the morning. Eunice is afraid to get a UTI, so we end up masturbating next to each other to close it out.

Alex tells us that Swampy doesn't have a Swampyna anymore because (1) the previous Swampyna died and (2) his micropenises were cut off. That was a lot of lore to drop in a single sentence. These lizards have micropenises? And more than one of them? And they get cut off for some reason? And then they become antisocial? And he said this to us with no reaction at all either.

July 22

Tom told us that you can just walk around the island finding artifacts. He didn't say exactly where, but he mentioned that beaches, caves, etc, are all places where you can find little things, chunks of pottery, etc.

Tom is clearly autistic. The museum serves his obsessive collecting and not the other way around.

—

Also there are no venomous snakes in Utila. Before going out to see the turtles I saw a snake next to the eggs. We handled something that looked like a garter snake.

—

I asked the police officers what it was like to work on Utila. They told me they aren't Utila police per se, that they work for the state and the state moves them around. They don't get to pick. But they only work 20 days on per month, the rest of the time they get to spend with their families wherever they live.

Honduran police said they get a bad rap. Sure, they said, here on Utila there may not be much crime, apart from the occasional domestic dispute or drug dealer — but they're far from "bought and paid for" or "a gang." They seemed proud of the fact that they had to follow the state laws which limit what they can do. They "can't just kick down people's doors, smash their windows, or jail people, like ICE is doing." It made my head spin hearing Honduran police, who are not widely known for their competence, talk about my country like this.

Turtle patrol worked like this. Herson, our guide, gave us red headlamps, and every thirty minutes we'd get up and walk along the beach looking for turtle tracks. We did this from 830pm until about 4am. We didn't see any turtles. In the 30 minute break period I would lay down in the sand and take a nap. I was a midnight snack for the sand flies. They bit me through my shirt and all over my ankles.

For several hours all I really saw were the stars, the white crests of the waves, the sharp chunks of coral and the sand and Eunice's white shirt. There was no moon. Only the lights from the occasional villa illuminated the beach.

We took the scooter home, going slowly. The people who were awake spooked me. Some were clearly just getting up, others had stayed up all night. They looked like the walking dead. It hit me what day it was. This wa the aftermath of Tequila Tuesday.

Earlier in the day a dog had come into Mama Rosa's restaurant, weaving through the tables looking for scraps on the sandy floor. The last thing I saw before getting to our BnB was that same dog with a wake of tipped over trash cans behind him.

From notebook:

I'm writing this from the north beach of Utila. There's a strong southbound wind. The stars and the Milky Way are completely visible. The dm light emanating from Roatan is also visible to the northeast. In front of us is the churning, splashing sound of lapping waves. Behind us are crickets. And the three police officers who are with us are causally chatting with Herson, our young guide. It is 9pm.

This morning was lazy. We wake up later than usual, 6-630, and went to get ready to go to

WATER CAY.

I'm not sure why this cay is called water cay, since all cays are surrounded by water. But the water on this cay is especially beautiful. We depart from the grocery store around 930, making some new friends. Michele, italian, from Lecce. Nicholas, french. Maya and Dan (Israeli.) We took a long langha (~15 min) to the cay. Immediately me and Eu picked up trash along the coast. We were the first ones on the cay, and it was basically entirely empty when we arrived, so we just walked around and kind of observed the scene. You think that when you get somewhere like this there'd be nothing to do, but it was actually quite nice having nothing to do. It felt more like there was everything to do.

We decided to snorkel. Once we get past the sea grass the sea floor gave way to 5-10ft deep cravasses full of fish. We saw different fish from before. Large angelfish, parrotfish, and beautiful, purple, leafy corals, kind of like cabbage leaves. Brain corals here seemed healthier than before.

To my surprise, you can hear the coral reef. It kind of makes a crackling sound, not unlike a fireplace. Eunice says you can play recordings of this sound to attract fish to a dying reef, and partially revive it that way.

It was one of the coolest experiences of my life being on this reef, and the only reason I got out of the water was because I was being continually waterboarded by my mask.

Once out, Dan offered me some pineapple. It was delicious. Then I took notice of the coconuts above my head. I used some makeshift tools I found around the island to knock them down, then eventually ransacked a little shed made of plastic tarping and pulled out a palo and a pickaxe. The palo got me yelled at -- turns out it belonged to someone on the island ("Hey boy!! What are you doing!!!") but I got to use the pickaxe. I opened up 3 coconuts with it and split them with Dan and Michele. We opened them sloppily so the coconut water went all over our faces and bodies when we drank it. We were like cavemen. Animals. Or perhaps, humans.

Finally me and Eu went to a part of the cay where all there was was shallow water and pure white sand. It was clear almost like glass or diamond. It felt like heaven. I carried her there to keep her from stepping on the corals.

On the ride back we made a new friend, Eleanor, in her 60s or 70s. She grew up on Utila but has never dived or snorkeled or even seen the reefs up close. This is like living in NYC and never seeing Chinatown or the Statue of Liberty or even Central Park. She is, in all likelihood, a descended of pirates. After, we took Nicholas for smooothies at Mama Rosa's and agree to stay in touch. He's a tennis coach who gets summers off. He thinks time is more important than money and that 10-day vacations are too short. I agree on both counts.

At 4pm, we decide to go visit Kanahau, the museum that was closed before. We're in a rush and probably won't make it before closing except:

we pass the scooter rental place, and they now have one rental available. An old blue honda scooter, two-seater, $35/day. We make a game-time decision.

Fuck it. We're scooting. I have no idea how to drive one of these things. It has a large turn radius and does not feel anything like a bicycle. I tell Eunice to get off of it while I learn to drive it. We pay and they give us the keys. On the way out, I nearly accelerate into a crowd of 5-6 people just walking down the street. My legs flew out to the sides. I looked absolutely out of control of the scooter, which I was. Some of them quickly run out of the way of me. Some call that being a dangerous and threatening presence on the road. I call it being the alpha male.

It's time. We're ready.

We make it just before closing. Tom is there and begins showing us the artifacts. He's young -- younger than me, probably -- and has a childlike face about him. He seems to have some kind of familiarity with them, and Eunice asks how many of the artifacts he found himself.

"Well..." Tom says, "all of them."

He's actually the founder of the museum. Apparently he was collecting things just for fun -- fish bones, dead animals for taxidermy, little pieces of pottery and metal -- when one day he just inherited Kanahau (the previous business owner decided he was going to leave the island and put Tom in charge.) So this entire museum is, in a way, a shrine to Tom's hobby, something he'd be doing anyway. He collects pottery fragments, whale bones, and anything else he can find. Says that any time people dig property you can find little fragments of pottery or even art. He tries to save as much as he can before the island gets fully developed. He calls it "rescue archaeology." He tells us that basically anyone can find artifacts here.

Eunice and me decide it makes sense to get more comfortable on the scooter before we kill someone by accident. So we take off in the SE direction, towards the beach. But the road just kept going, so we kept going too. Eventually we end up next to a bunch of otehr scooters on the beach. We see a bunch of young people with black trash bags, picking up trash from the shore. They let us help. The girls are generally nicer to us than the guys, but one guy was just inspiring everyone with his story about wanting to quite working for this hedge fund and move to Utila.

Some time after, a man named Mark (who we saw yesterday playing cornhole) who asked us to help him build a whale shark out of driftwood.

"I just saw this driftwood there on the beach and had this idea that it could be a whale shark. Just need some strong men to help me put it together."

I immediately felt like there was something odd about Mark but wasn't able to tell if it was a good kind of odd or bad. Anyway, we lifted what felt like a metric ton of wood -- it took five of us at max effort. Was it worth it? Maybe. I never don't enjoy lifting large things. I remember in the end feeling like the energy was off with me and the rest of the group. We took a group photo at some point and I put my arms around the other guys but neither of them put their arms around me. So that was odd.

Now we're at BICA with our moped. It's 8pm and we're waiting for Herson to come back from the police station. 3 police have agreed to come patrol for the turtle patro. This all feels completely surreal.

July 23 ("WATER")

It is Wednesday, the day after Tequila Tuesday. I'm in bed, listening to the people chisme outside. A guy and a girl are talking about what they find hot. I just asked Eunice to open the window so I could eavesdrop better. I love being metiche.

Because the turtles kept us up until 430, it wasn't easy to get out of bed. I watched Dustin and Max fight each other, a fight I had postponed since Saturday. It meant remarkably little to me now that I'm here, especially considering that it was something that I was nominally looking forward to. Max won. That was it.

We still have the scooter and I'm still dangerous with it. We are the only people on the island who wear helmets while we bike, but at the same time, we're probably the only ones who need to. Somehow despite going all the way to Pumpkin Hill and back and biking around all day, the tank is still showing as all the way full.

So we have some morning baleadas and decide to go for a joyride before we have to drop off the scooter. We take the main road going south east and just keep going. There are dozens of villas, most of them currently FOR SALE BY JULIE SHIGETOMI, who seems to be one of possibly three total real estate agents on the island (but by far the most popular.) She's so popular that when I see a sign FOR SALE BY OWNER, I assume that "OWNER" stands for JULIE SHIGETOMI.

There are lots of speed bumps. Every time we hit one Eunice goes "Ay!" or "PUCHA!" We continue up the road where it gets increasingly gravelly and bumpy until we dead end on what appears to be a long strip of asphalt. In reality, we have ended up at the Utila airport, where there is no security guarding the tarmac, which we are currently driving on. So we backpedal and head back in the other direction.

We end up, by coincidence, at the Utila Chocolate Factory, which is mostly just a shop. The entrance is marked by a pink sign in the shape of a hand pointing to a door. Only the word "THERE" was written on the hand. It was effective signage. It's mostly a tourist trap, with expensive chocolate and ice cream for sale. I spent my time playing with a dog, who rolled over to show me his belly. He reminded me of my childhood dog Max, who used to do the same thing. The chocolate ice cream, while fine, was mostly forgettable. We saw our Israeli friends Maya and Dan on our way out. On this island, you rarely see people only once.

This is the day that we decide that we're going to consider going scuba diving. Since snorkeling, my mind has begun to change about getting certified. The water here is truly incredible.

We were supposed to return our scooter with a full tank, so we went to the gas station before bringing it back. After the whole day, the tank is still showing as full. We decide to top it off anyway. The grand total for a day of scootering is… $1.15.

That's when we realize that the tuktuks charging us $10 each way to Pumpkin Hill are making absolute bank.

So as another part of our commitment to Utila, or our patronage, Eunice decides that we're going to keep the scooter for another day. $10x2 for one trip to Pumpkin Hill, or $35 for a day of scootering (being a "bad boy") in Eunice's terminology, is an easy choice.

We head to Neptune's, a supposedly nice, secluded beach that you pay L100 each person to access. Laurie is sitting by the boat ready to board. She is 66, Canadian, lives in Utila 8 months out of the year, and is married to a truck driver. She says her favorite hobby is sun tanning. You could have guessed.

As the lancha takes off, as is traditional, our driver plays extremely loud island-pop music, so that most of what I hear is motor mixed with whatever is coming out of those speakers. I put on my scooter helmet to mask the sound. In the meantime Laurie tells us about who lives on this little river that the lancha is taking us on. An elderly woman has bought and refinished a huge property with a swimming pool overlooking the canal. But as far as anyone knows, she lives alone. Another person didn't buy anything, they just built a house on the canal without asking anyone. Apparently you can do that. In Utila, "you can do whatever you want."

We arrive at Neptune's. Nicholas was there! When you meet someone on Utila, you rarely see them once.

Our stay at Neptune's is intentionally short. First, my flippers are comically large and look like clown shoes. The ones they give me next are the size of normal shoes — perhaps bowling shoes — but at least they fit. Then the mask they give me, Eunice put some oil or something in it to keep it from fogging, but that didn't matter at all because the instant I put my head underneath the water it began rapidly filling up with water. At this point Eunice points out /Look! Look!/ I hold the mask against my face while it fills with water just in time to see a fish. Eunice says, "Barracuda!"

"Ok, do those bite"

"They definitely do! just don't move too much"

"Thanks for telling me now…"

I looked like an emoji, with my goggles quarter filled with water. So I changed that one out for a new mask, but then couldn't fit the snorkel into my mouth. So I just held my breath the entire time we were snorkeling. We didn't see much to be honest, maybe a yellow snapper, a few four-eyed fish, sargeant majors, and a bunch of parrotfish on our way out.

On the way out, I see a baby wearing a baby hat. Just LIKE ME! (Eu: for him it's just a hat.) For those who are not on this trip, Eunice has been calling my hat a "baby hat" the entire time and has been saying I "look like a baby in that hat." But Eunice is pushing me to admit that upon seeing that baby wearing his hat, that I did accept that there was a resemblance.

I proactively put on the scooter helmet before we take off on the lancha, but it's not too bad. They play Flo Rida, who Eunice confuses for Pitbull. I'm dancing the whole way. A little girl makes faces at me, sneering at me, for reasons unknown. Perhaps because I'm an adult and I'm having way too much fun dancing to Macklemore.

Eunice wants to get a fancy dinner tonight, but it's Wednesday and to our surprise all the restaurants are closed tonight. We don't know why they would be. So we stop by Bambi's for a lemonade — he isn't there. But there was an American man there who asked us why we were using helmets.

"Because I don't know how to drive a scooter yet."

"…are you drinking and driving?"

"No."

He looks at me weirdly.

"I haven't driven a motor vehicle in years," I say.

"New York?"

"Yeah."

"Where?"

"Queens."

"Williamsburg?"

"Woodside."

He says, "know how I knew?" He points his finger at my face.

"Yea that's where my people live…"

"If I saw two people coming up to me wearing motorcycle helmets in Utila, I would assume they were robbing me."

Anyway, that's how the conversation went and it didn't get any better. This man was from Springfield, Ohio. Springfield has produced John Legend, but also this lame guy who ended up drunk on a remote island in the Caribbean, probably balancing a cosmic spreadsheet somewhere.

Eunice and me head out to find food. We end up going to a small restaurant in an alleyway called Gaga's. Gaga is there and is wearing a shirt that says something like

SPANGLISH (n.)

"When you're trying to buscar the right palabra and end up switching idiomas."

For all the hype about how we wanted to have an expensive night out, we ended up spending 6 and a half whole dollars eating the same thing we pretty much always eat, baleadas, tortillas con quesillo (quesadillas basically), and catrachitas (nachos). Me and Eunice danced in ASL to dancing queen and then I danced alone to every ABBA song after that.

On the way out a briefly lost control of the scooter and woman yelled at me, "Hey, be careful!" (in Caracol.) I told her

"I'm new to this, that's why I have this helmet!" and of course, for some humor to break the ice, "Don't worry, I've only hit one person today!!" No one found this funny at all, including Eunice, who insisted that I drive away.

We stop at the grocery store for water. Eunice is making small talk with the cashier, who says she knows how to greet people in many languages. She starts listing them off: Korean, Japanese, Garifuna, German, English, Spanish, French…

I say, "how do you say 'hello' in Japanese?"

She thinks for a bit and says, "…ni hao!" Then the grocery door closes with us inside. I guess we are the last customers of the day.

We make one last stop at Alma's for yet another warm, fresh donut. And that's mostly the end of the day. We still have to figure out whether we're staying in Utila or going to Roatan for the dive.

TODO JESUS IS THE ANSWER

July 24

I am sad, writing this from the sofa while Eunice is packing up. I don't want to leave Utila and go back to Roatan. This, to me, is the island I want to spend the most time at. For the last several hours (and it's ten, so I mean, since probably 3-4pm) we've been going back and forth. I want to stay and go to dive school. She wants to have a beach stay in Roatan. I want to get scuba certified and go see what's underwater. She prefers to spend chill time in Roatan, go on the occasional tour, and do a fun dive. To me, it's straightforward, but one of us is going to lose this fight of preferences and it's probably going to be me.

Today we woke up late: around 7, 730. It's our second day with the scooter. We want to max it out.

Eunice and me each get a morning baleada. The first place we head to is Jasper's, the animal sanctuary.

Brian gives us the tour. He talks for about 45 minutes (I'm losing it at this point) then drops us off in the cat shed. We spend a while there, maybe a half hour or an hour (hard to tell around here) just petting the cats. A puppy shared a wall with the cat cabal and I found a way to pet him through the crack between the walls. He put his paws on my hands to tell me he wanted to be pet. It was hard to leave him alone.

We leave and get some star fruit for 12 cents a pop. We spot a guy who looks just like a pirate, wearing a red bandana and just generally looking like a swashbuckler.

We next went to a place I had been dying to go: the bat caves. They aren't easy to find. We had to ask locals in two different locations how to get there, and even then we were stymied by barbed wire.

At one of the places we asked for directions, dogs came running out and barked at Eunice. For a moment, they looked dangerous. But once we started petting Dog 1, whenever Dog 2 would bark at us, Dog 1 would run up to us for cuddles, making it impossible for Dog 2 to be mad for long. Eventually both dogs became friendly with us and followed us to the caves.

Once we found the way to get past the barbed wire, there were no clues as to where the entrance to the caves was (or entrances were.) I walked around for a while Eunice sat patiently for me. She had made it pretty clear that this was an adventure for me and me alone.

I had charged my headlamp, but apparently not enough — it glowed almost imperceptibly dim when I turned it on to test it. I was forced to use Eunice's phone for light, which meant that in my search for the caves, only I would have the phone, so that if something happened to me, Eunice would have no means of contacting anyone.

It took me about 10 minutes to find the cave entrance. The wooden stepping-board was what clued me in. You have to climb about 15 feet high on what I would rate as about a gym V1. It was not easy and I was not prepared for it. The rocks were all made of razor-sharp coral and a fall from that even that relatively low height would be devastating.

But once up, you immediately see the caves.

I took a step in. The caves were deep and a large person could easy stand up. They appeared to go on for a long time, but with caves like that it is hard to tell. Before even being fully inside, I felt immersed, pulled in by the darkness of the cave. It had the feeling of being both safe and dangerous at the same time. Bats are not dangerous animals, and caves are not inherently dangerous, but being in unknown caves presents many unknown factors. I stepped in regardless.

It is amazing how quickly bats move without visual input. I couldn't hear them echolocating, but I did hear the batting of their wings making soft WOP WOP WOP sounds. Those stunned me. They flew right over and around my head.

Afraid to go too far in without light and without a plan, I stayed in the first vestibule and took some pictures and climbed down.

One of the signs on the street corner nearby pointed to FRESH WATER CAVES. I didn't know what a fresh water cave was and neither did Eu. So I figured I'd just take us there, since the only place we had to be was the turtles at 3:30, and it was only 1. That left us a lot of time. We got directions there from a local. Apparently the caves are right near the airport. We must have just missed them when we took our random tour around the island.

The caves exist next to a power plant and are marked by a small sign. There are large holes in the ground, which is mostly stone coral. Eventually you get to a little grotto full of fresh water. Today, it was 32 degrees during the day and the cool water in the grotto felt so intensely refreshing. I was staring at the shrimp on the grotto floor when a man speaking Spanish called to us from outside the caves:

"Helado no?"

"No helado," I say to him.

"Caliente?"

"Normal."

"Se puede nadar."

"Hay camarones!"

"Si, si, and they pinch your feet, too."

I'm terrified of caves, but this man, Luki, apparently has been coming here for almost thirty years. He does tours in the area. He's Caracol and explains that his cousin was the one who found this cave. He says that he was just bushwhacking one day and fell in. Later, him and his friends came by with machetes and cleaned the place up.

Or at least that's the story he tells.

With Luki's blessing, I follow suit and jump in. The water feels incredible. Luki says he'd jump, but regulations say he can't drive taxis with wet clothes. Eunice doesn't go in, but she watches from close by and spots a gigantic blue crab and some bats.

The last spot we take the scooter is the top of Pumpkin hill. I don't know why it's called Pumpkin Hill. It could be called Guava Hill because guava trees line the whole path up to it. Or it could be called Ficus Hill or Cactus Hill for the giant strangler figs or triangle cactus that adorn the top of the hill. Or it could be called just "The Hill" since it is kind of the only one. But apparently it's Pumpkin Hill.

The top of the hill is gorgeous, lush, and jungle-like. We walk along the ridge at the top which forms a kind of closed forest canopy. It opens to some sort of tower, the purpose of which is unclear to me, though there is some primitive electrical cabling being run to the top of it. At the bottom someone has written in marker

SUBE PA ABAJAR ABAJE PA SUBIR

We climb up, me going first. It's a 40ft ladder inside of a cylinder. The rungs of the ladder are rusted and dropping flakes of rust as I climb. Eventually I make it to the top and step out onto a rusted platform. The wind is howling. My hands are hurting with sweat as I write this. I genuinely thought there was a chance I could be pulled off of it. Eu made it to the top but intelligently made the choice not to come out. It was very, very hard for me to safely step back into that cylinder and climb down, but I eventually did.

We stopped for a drink at Rockie's near Pumpkin Hill. Rockie's is staffed by a guy named Eddy Walker whose girlfriend works at the Indian restaurant next door, though she's white and from the UK. This bar has some of the weirdest decoration I ever did see, including a Trump 2024 flag and a sticker on the blender that says

SORRY NO HABLO FUCKTARDO

Next to that sticker is a clock with Albert Einstein's face on it.

He makes us a lemonade and tells me he's from Charleston, SC. We bond over being southern boys and he takes L10 off the lemonade, making it L30.

For our last stop we went to a turtle release. I thought they'd be releasing living turtles, but instead they were digging up a nest that had already had its eggs hatch. These eggs were being marked as "VD" (visible development) or NVD (no visible development.) VD eggs were the reptile equivalent of stillbirths, and NVD eggs were just yolks.

In the nest, there were no living turtles.

It's just our luck because the night before we went to see the turtles, several came to shore. And apparently they did the night after as well. But not the night of. And not the day we went to set the turtles free.

On the way home we stop at the Utila bakery for a cinnamon role. I loved it. Then we painfully dropped off the scooter. It would be the last time we used it. I will miss Eunice rubbing my dick while I drive it. Yes, she actually did do that.

The rest of the day was a challenge. We were not able to decide whether to stay in Utila (my preference) or go to Roatan (Eunice's.) We went so far as agreeing to go to the Utila Dive School and get the paperwork for it, but then we flipped back to possibly going to Roatan, and now it looks like we're definitely going.

At UDC we saw Alek (one of the guys that we collected the trash with) and another one of those guys. You rarely see people just once.

And we also finally managed to meet Eunice's friend Lisa at her restaurant, Captain Wills. She is one of the people who got stuck here. She loves the simple and safe island life. She seems nice. We ordered the yucca fries which came with a blisteringly hot sauce, which I loved. She comped our meal. She told me that I didn't look gringo… more Israeli than anything. And that there were two Israelis right now sitting outside. Guess who they were.

We try to go for pizza at this place we've heard about: RHINO'S. There's one man at the center of this magnificent bar, and it's the pirate guy from earlier. Apparently his name is Rhino. I ask him if he's a descendent of pirates. He tells me,

"No. If I was wearing a sombrero would you have asked me if I was Mexican?"

I think for a second,

"Well… maybe…"

If he had a sombrero AND a mustache, Mexican would probably be my starting guess.

He tells us that they're closed and aren't making any more pizza tonight, so we make other plans. It's 9pm and most of the places are closed, so we end up getting street baleadas.

I hear someone yell to someone else, "I wanna have sex with you!" He must be fourteen.

A man stops us to say,

"Morning!"

I'm confused but I just do the natural thing and say, "Morning."

"Ha ha!" the man says, "gottem!"

July 25

Today was a challenge. Eunice and me never really came to a consensus about whether to go to Roatan or stay in Utila. We ended up going with the default option, which was sticking with the plan that Eunice had made for us several weeks ago. I was deeply disappointed by this, because the trip to Utila had begun to ramp up considerably from the beginning, and I was looking forward to going to diving school. We even created a spreadsheet showing that, cost-wise, it would have been at parity. I thought I had a pretty good idea of what staying in Roatan would be like, and I felt like I knew that staying and going to dive school was the right choice for me. But Eu couldn't be persuaded, apart from a brief moment of panic and frustration where she caved.

I didn't sleep well. I had dreams about trying to convince Eunice to skip the ferry; to move it to another day; and her explaining that that was impossible for some reason or another. I woke up with a headache after just a few hours.

In the morning, around 715, we arrived at Jasper's to walk some dogs. Eu took Barry, who was recently found in a trash can, and I took Mojito, the dog whose face I pet through the gaps in his haula. Barry and Mojito were more concerned with playing with each other than going for their walk and basically did puppy MMA for most of the walk. Later when we brought them back to the haulas, I stayed with Mojito and played, even though most of the time he was trying to hump me.

Eunice and me didn't really talk much on the walk home. I was mostly packed -- when I got home I laid on the couch in silence for just long enough to run into Cliff, who reminded us that checkout was approaching. That made the feeling of leaving feel all the more real, and I didn't want it to feel that way. I didn't care whether a new accommodation had A/C or not, or whether we had a shared bathroom. I just knew I didn't want to be in a boring resort town with expensive food.

There's a man sitting to our left in the ferry waiting room. He's gasping for air, like a fish on dry land. He's talking to himself while he's on his phone. He's got his flippers with him. He looks gringo.

We're taking the Dream Ferry out of Utila. This time, throngs of people and rows of tuk-tuks thicken the dock. One of the people there is Luki. He's wearing pants. Glenn also intercepts us to tell us we're welcome back to the turtle sanctuary. (I swear, you never see anyone here just once.) I tell him I was impressed by the lifelike sketches, the lithographs of which were on sale in his store. He said "Oh yea, that was just a passing phase in my life. Came and went."

Today's ferry is different. The people here aren't divers or professors. They've brought their own music with them and the girls are all photo-ready. They must be here for the carnival. When we board the ferry there are mardis gras masks applied to the glass and flag streamers adorning the ceiling of the boat.

"I'm outta here," I hear someone say as I board, "I don't like crowds."

We get off to a rocky start. Straight out the dock and the bout is dancing; I can see the reflection of the horizon in the glass in front of me, and it's shooting up and down as the ferry slams against the water. I hear from behind a lot of "Oh! Oh!" The staff begin passing out plastic bags. Now I understand why people recommend sitting on the top of the deck. If you're outside, the visible horizon and breezy air lower the odds of vomiting. But I was already so tired I couldn't keep my eyes open, and when the woman behind me started shrieking and vomiting, I too began to feel the familiar tingle.

"I think I might gonna throw up." These words, think and might, are always unnecessary conditional qualifiers in this context. I promptly vomited in the bag.

The rest of the staff has congregated around the woman behind me. She's black, obese, and shrieking. Each wave provokes its own variant of "Oh!!!". To be fair to the woman, the waves haven't shrunk at all since we started off.

Our taxi driver, Jason, has handed us off to someone else, who has the A/C on maximum arctic blast. I'm not in the mood to talk so I sign to Eu:

COLD

As we leave the ferry parking lot I notice a sign that says

THREE UNIQUE DESITNATIONS ONE SMOOTH RIDE! DREAM FERRIES

He drops us off at our rental. The style is clearly modern. The owners are from Kentucky. Her name is Rebecca and his name is Robbie. Entering our unit, there's a three ring binder with a couple of pens in it, giving us advice on how to best spend our time in Roatan. There are to painting flanking either side of the bed, symmetrically -- posters of Bermuda and the Carribbean. It smells like bug spray. (Later that night, we'll find a dead cockroach on the floor.) The doors are all painting glossy black and the hardware is all new. I am only surprised by the lack of Live, Laugh, Love pillows.

The first thing I do is go onto the terrace and sleep for two hours outside. Mosquitos be damned.

Much like Utila there are dogs and cats everywhere here on West End. Our first stop is a pupuseria, salvadoreña to be sure, where we eat genuinely well. Price wise, pupusas $4 each, lemonade $4, for a total of $16 for the meal. This is probably the price floor for eating here.

We walk along the main strip. I already have a bag full of mangos and sticky yellow hands and am rapidly adding to my collected fruit collection. I notice that there are signs that say NO TIRAR BASURA. I ask Eu if a banana peel counts as basura and she says yes.

"But banana trees grow everywhere here."

"Still basura."

"Can I throw the peel under a mango tree?"

"You can throw it under a banana tree."

When she's not looking I throw it on the ground in the grass. I'll never be convinced that I was wrong for doing so.

We went to a restaurant together: SEAWICHES. We played Jenga while Eu ate a salad. The manager told us about an amazing chocolate cake that she was bringing back from somewhere -- we weren't sure if she was offering it to us or just telling us that we could order some. She was on the phone with someone at some point talking about the Utila carnival. It sounded busy.

There isn't that much else to report for today.

Islands like this inevitably succumb to the pressures of economic development, and always at a cost. It's clear that Utila is changing as it's discovered. As recently as 2012, our Belgian dive shop friend reports, there weren't any ATVs or dirtbikes.

Places which experience explosive growth due to gentrification often have cheap and expensive places side by side. So it is with Utila, where you can have L15 baleadas sencillas just meters from L280 yucca fries with a special chili and house-made mayonnaise dipping sauce. You can stay at the Mango Inn for free if you're diving, $12 a night for a dorm if you aren't — on the other hand it's hard not to notice the number of villas for rent (By JULIE SHIGETOMI) or for sale, alongside houses with tin roofs on pylons with the laundry hanging underneath them. Also common among growing communities like this is the widespread use of technology but with little infrastructure to handle or regulate it. In this case the technology comes via Latin America, through sweet bottled drinks and bottled water, lights and LEDs, speakers turned up to deafening volumes (hearing loss will certainly be a problem for these people), various forms of plastic pollution, and of course cell phones. It is impossible to say what effect these will have on island life in the long-term, but the short-term effects seem clear enough. The island economy bends increasingly towards short-term tourism and nightlife. For now there is no real need for police or rules, but that will change as the community grows and becomes populated with strangers.

The animals are also under threat. Many islands, like Parismina off the coast of Costa Rica, are warzones between the local NGOs who are trying to save the sea turtles and the locals themselves who are trying to eat them. But incredibly there's another story here that's even more devastating. Some years ago, someone brought raccoons to the island and they got free. With no natural predators, Raccoons threaten nearly every kind of life on the island. They eat the eggs of lizards and potentially turtles. And they have multiplied: today's population is estimated to be several thousand per square kilometer. These raccoons eat the blue crabs and threaten the spiny tailed lizards — our friends the swampers — and the crabs themselves. Glenn speculated that the loss of blue crab populations has caused the whale shark population near the island to crash, as blue crab zooplankton are a major part of the whale's diet.

That is the effect of people. But more than tourism, the island is threatened by people who will never even visit it. Parts of beaches on the north coast are almost entirely made of plastic slowly decomposing on the shore: tampons, bottle caps, forks, toothbrushes, and pens. The reefs, which are some of the most resilient in the world, are nevertheless sick.

Despite looking like plants, corals are animals. In the same way that "forests are made of wood," coral reefs are made of bone — specifically calcium carbonate. That makes it all the more incredible that coral reefs can be seen from space. (They are the only such living creatures visible from space.) Coral begin as flexible little larvae that are just visible to the naked eye. They swim and drift into position where they "take" and grow into what we call corals. Those corals combine to form reefs.

Two major stresses threaten the reefs. The first is heat. When ocean temperatures rise, the algae that give corals their color leave, making the coral look white. White corals ("bleached") aren't dead, but if the algae leave for long enough, the corals will eventually die as the corals run out of food.

The second is ocean acidification. As the atmosphere fills with carbon dioxide, some of that carbon diffuses into the water, increasing the presence of hydrogen ions which then reduce the amounts of carbonate in the water, because carbonate is a base. As the skeletons of corals are made of calcium carbonate, this makes it harder for corals to grow their skeletons, and they become brittle and slow to grow.

This is all to say that Utila as it is today will not be Utila tomorrow. In the future, there will be no protecting the Utilas of the world, and they will vanish like the reefs around them.

July 26

Today was both an early and late day. I woke up at 4:00, then went back to sleep, waking up again at 6:30. I'm in the new room, the room that looks like it was designed by real-estate agents. With the doors and windows shut, if you forget about the humidity, it feels just like any other room in Atlanta or Colorado.

The morning was spent on the terrace. We finally found a caption to this week's caption contest: it's a lion sitting in a dentist's chair. We have the dentist saying: "That's funny -- know what my biggest fear is?" I'm proud of it.

The first thing we do is head out to Half Moon Bay. Asking for help, a local bartender tells us how to get there and where to start, but warns us that the reef "es bastante muerto." Not off to a great start. But once we get into the bay, we see plenty of signs of life. Eunice sees a lobster, I see a number of parrotfish, a yellow damselfish, some squirrelfish, among others. If it were not for my mask fogging and filling up with water, my snorkel not fitting my mouth, and my life preserver not fitting me properly, I could have stayed out there all day, but I pushed us to head back a little early just because all of that was getting uncomfortable. We needed to regroup.

We spent the hottest part of the day inside the room reading and laying down. I was reading a book about the caption contest. Eunice was reading some other things about Roatan. We discovered some new places in Roatan, but time will tell if we actually make it there.

At 245 we head out from West End to walk to West Bay. It's the same as I remember, a lot of resorts, selfies, music, weddings. I don't mind West Bay, and it is quite beautiful, but it's also a strip mall of different resorts ("Infinity Bay", "Splash Inn", etc.)

We head out to the buoy line. If you recall from earlier in the trip, we met a man (Orange County) who told us that if we just follow the buoy line out we can see some amazing reefs. So that's what we did. And sure enough, even though the sky was cloudy and dark and the water visibility was poor, and even though were just dozens of feet away from the shore where people were drinking and dancing and tanning, we hit some of the best reefs I've ever seen, rivaling even Water Cay. With very little effort we swam out to ten or fifteen foot deep cravasses, several feet wide, full of parrotfish, angelfish, barracudas, and giant schools of fish just circling around you. We saw elkhorn coral, brain coral, giant sea urchins (Diadema antillarum), enormous parrotfish, trumpetfish, pufferfish, palometas (?), two giant French angelfish (?), fairy basslets, and anyway, it was beautiful. I decided to take off my life preserver at one point and swim down among the fish. It worked, but my ears quickly started hurting. Eunice explained that I needed to do the Valsava maneuver to equilibrate, which I plan on trying out tomorrow.

We walked home to West End after that. It wasn't too eventful, apart from a screaming bird that had me frozen in place for a moment as it circled around us, chasing another bird. We saw plenty of evidence of Arnie there, but the legend himself was nowhere there to be found. We also met a person named Mark who rents rooms on the beach of West Bay for $100 a night. He's from Michigan and most recently lived in Alaska.

In our room I finally looked at the three-ring binder our hosts had left on the bed. It had two pens and a notebook and a map of Roatán; the first page was a picture of themselves, ten or so years younger, and written underneath is how thrilled they are to be our hosts; the binder has all the places to eat and things to do in Roatán including what to do if the massage ladies on the beach get too pushy; and finally, for the athletic guests who want to walk (audible gasp) the thirty minutes from West End to West Bay, an entreaty to please bring WATER! The pages are a minefield of grocer's apostrophe's. The room has two kinds of bug spray, three kinds of sun screen, two emergency lamps, a first aid kid, and a LifeStraw.

The only thing missing is a pillow that says Live, Laugh, and Love.

Oh and we finally saw a Guatusa.

July 27

We don't set off as early as we wanted to, but we're lucky to see that beneath the tall aluminum bridge a school of fish is forming patterns below. We're in West Bay before 8:30. I know that because the grocery store is closed and I'm hungry.

Not off to a great start. Fins are available to rent at Infinity Bay for just $5 -- the last missing piece to my get-up -- but they want a $50 cash deposit that we don't have on hand. "Lo siento chicos." We move on to the next-best option -- rental from a "stand on a beach", where the guy tells me it's $10 for two hours, then I watch as he types in 309 limpiras ($12.36) into his calculator.

"That's 309, that's not $10."

"Yea well, you gotta pay the tax. [Lie.] It's what, like 30 limpiras or something [also a lie.]"

I'm ready to walk away but I realize I don't want to fight this dickhead over two dollars and ruin my own afternoon, so I just agree to pay it and grumpily put on the fins. Trying not to let this petty thing but a damper on my day, I decided to tell myself that my life is probably better than his, and he's out here renting fins precisely because he's the kind of person to try squeeze an extra two dollars out of a stranger.

Anyway, so we begin the tour of the buoy line for the second time. This time I'm prepared. My mask fits apart from a small leak into my nose, I have my partially deflated life preserver, and my fins. Right away we see a school of blue tangs, which I swim with. They don't really get bothered by people too much. They mostly just go with the flow. Later we see a rather gigantic fish (I claim a hogfish) just relaxing squarely between two underwater reef cliffs (a cravasse), a pair of French Angelfish.

We head out of that cravasse, and after an instant, I'm staring face to face -- maybe two feet away -- from a giant blue chub. Eunice has it on video. It is staring me the fuck down. Having already been bitten by one smaller and much less aggressive fish, I tried to swim away, but it target locks on me and pursues. I try to kick it away but that only makes it follow me. I start to shriek. Cry. Squeal. This is it. This is my last dance. Those two big idiot eyes and slack mouth are going to be the last two things I see before I die.

But as soon as it appears, the chub is gone.

"Yea those are the ones that people feed on the beach," Eu says, "they bite."

"Yeah, no shit."

The rest of the trip is uneventful. We go to get some food. Walk to the grocery store, empanadas for $3, a Saran-wrapped Everything Bagel for... $5?

"I'm trying to understand the price of this bagel," I say out loud to the cashier.

"Bagels. Five dollars."

"Just a plain, regular bagel?"

"Yeah," he says, not facing me.

"Specialty item," Eu says.

I think of Mama Rosa. Instead, I walk to La Placita where I pick up two baleadas sencillas for $4. I also think of Mama Rosa. While I was there I tried Googling about how to see underwater without the mask at all. I learned that some children in the Philippines could do it, and that some other children in Sweden also learned how to do it, so I figured fuck it, I'm not using this stupid mask anymore and I'm going to swim underwater with my eyes open.

We try snorkeling again, but this time, with no fins, and the mask crushing my face, my sinuses now filled with salt water, I tried opening my eyes underwater. And guess what! A total surprise. I could not see shit. I could barely see my own fucking hand. I put the mask on for a moment and exclaimed to Eunice,

"Wow. There are fish here."

I asked Eunice if we could go back. On the way (mask off of course) I couldn't see the coral right beneath me and smacked my leg into it and drew a little bit of blood. Today I learned, while watching videos of Coyote Peterson, a YouTuber famous for getting stung by increasingly painful animals, that in order to get an accurate scale of discomfort you must compare two things -- a common reference. For example: how many times would you get bitten by an ant before getting a single sting from a bee? (85, for me.) In this case, I'd take 8 of these knee scrapes to not get bitten by a single sand fly one more time. Fuck sand flies. I haven't said enough about them here so I'll say it now.

Back when me and Eunice were doing the turtle patrol, I asked Alex if bugs were going to be a problem. He said that, because of the high winds, there would be no mosquitos. He did not lie. I did not get bitten by a single mosquito that night. Instead, it was dozens of sandflies that got me and I barely got a good night's sleep for days because I was scratching myself to pieces in my sleep. They got my arms and ankles and went straight through my clothes (a web search, typically, says this is impossible.)

Anyway, mildly bloody and bruised, we take the athletic walk back to West End. We see only evidence of Arnie as well as his friend (female, short-haired.) We stop for pupusas at the usual place and get the now usual order: a pupusa con quesillo for Eunice (\$4) and two pupusas for me (one loroco, one jalapeño) (\$8) and a melonade (\$4). I just realized that that's an anagram to lemonade (also \$4). A very fat and cuddly black cat with emerald green eyes joins us for the end of our meal. His name is Chimuelo and he's 7. I figured out very quickly that this cat likes his butt patted. I would pat it 10 or 20 times, then he'd do a ninja roll onto his belly. We repeated this process 10 or 15 times, then he started meowing, which was my indicator that things were about to get serious (one way or another.) I wasn't sure I was ready to progress to belly rubs with Chimuelo so I took my leave.

The rest of the afternoon has been quiet. I'm sitting here now next to Eunice with the box fan blasting us. We're watching lightning in the distance. Rain is coming and going. Last night we fell asleep to South Park, Temporada 27 Ep 1, where they finally introduce Trump's face. I'm not sure what we'll fall asleep to tonight.

Being in Roatan feels different than before. I wasn't as tempted to use my laptop before, but there is less to do here, and so distraction comes easier. It is very hard to do anything in Roatan without spending a fair amount of money or, perhaps, compromising one's safety. There is snorkeling, but there's a limit to how much one can snorkel. My calves are beet red even after applying sunscreen (I suppose I needed more, but still.)

I wish it were easier to find free things to do. At 6pm, there is the hermit crab race at Bananarama, but we skipped it since it's a 40 minute walk from us. Instead we're here at home, not doing much, and writing this to pass the time.

Addendum:

We decided to go get some groceries. Stepping out Eunice was the one to get bitten, this time by a leafcutter ant. On the way down the hill we see the usual guard who cranks open the gate about a foot to let us walk under it. We all need to feel useful I guess. Unfortunately all the grocery stores were closed (Google lied) so Eunice couldn't get her midnight bananas. But the mango tree is always open, so I took a few good ones from there, dodging the leafcutter ants when necessary. On the way back, after limboing under the gate (as is our custom), as a gesture of appreciation I told the guard he could "elegir lo que quiere" (choose what he wanted) from my mango bag, and he took the two biggest mangos and left me with just one and a half. Lesson learned, I'm never doing anything nice for anyone again.

July 29

Our morning begins the usual way mornings begin. With watching Finding Nemo. I cry for most of the movie. I learned a little bit from reading what Andrew Stanton (writer/director) had to say about it. It inspired me to want to try writing a little. More on that later. I took a call from Jesse that he promised would be 10 minutes, lasted about a half hour, and involved him asking me if I think his request to "cum on Machiran's chest" was too much.

At around 11 we headed out of the apartment for the first time. We ate at Calelu's which I give one thumbs up, rotated slightly to the side. It's got decent food, and it's cheap-ish (definitely cheap for this area) but I can't say I love going there to eat. On the way out we tried to find bananos for Eu but she had a L500 bill and they wouldn't cash it for her so she went bananoless. A similar stop at a community center left us without much to do so we headed back for the afternoon.

At around 330 or 4 we decided to go back to the reef for another dive. We tried to get to the north side of Half-Moon Bay but couldn't find a way in. I asked someone on the way if there was a path to get to "this side" of Half Moon Bay:

Man: I don't... I don't understand the question (mystified) Me: Like is there a way to get to this side of Half-Moon Bay, and not the other side? Man: Half-M... ...this whole thing is... Half-Moon Bay. Me: Okie dokie!

I am putting this in black and white that if there is ever a murder near Half-Moon Bay, to look for the guy in the dive shop wearing a red hat. It was him.

There were no coconuts on the beach. Every single coconut I found had either been opened by a machete or had no liquid in it. I deduced that what actually happens is people go along the beach in the mornings and collect all the coconuts and then sell them for ten bucks a pop to tourists. That made me sad. If we just all shared the coconuts there'd be enough for everyone. This is why we can't have nice things.

Speaking of red hats today I saw the second MAGA hat here in the Bay Islands (the first was the classic "Make America Great Again.") Today's hat said, "TRUMP WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING." A black guy from Roatan was wearing this.

Anyway, we made it into the reef. Although it did not have the same kind of "healthy reef sound" as the reef in West Bay, it was far from "bastante muerto" (though it may be indeed heading in that direction.) We saw an orgy of fish. It was extraordinary. Yellow snappers, a weird black fish with yellow stripes and some sea anemones. Schools of blue tangs. Eunice tried to get some videos. Unusual reef dynamics however. I noticed a bunch of fish with their mouths pointed up -- some I thought were dead, until they moved -- and the fish were extremely active and gregarious. More than usual, especially for a somewhat quiet reef. On the way out, I saw a rather long fish that looked pretty barracuda-ish and I leaped out of the water and left Eunice to get eaten. But it didn't take the bait, and left her alone.

In the evening we got baleadas, this time with crema, from the baleada lady. We ate them on the balcony under a deluge of rainwater smashing against the tin roof. Eunice called it fast food. I called it fast and furious. This time they were only a dollar each which, Eunice says, is relevant. We also found two leaf-cutter ants INSIDE THE HOUSE. THE ANTS ARE COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE. And they have surrounded the perimeter! Thank god I am not made of leaves! But if I were a salad I'd be worried.

We were supposed to have APU tonight but Joseph was having too much fun partying somewhere so we canceled it. I stayed in and worked on my story. When I showed it to Eunice, her most common remark was "Men are gross." Helpful, and truthful, but not what I was going for.

I'm going to continue writing until I get tired.

July 29

It's July 29. I had a lot of dreams last night. One was about Jerry Seinfeld, being part of a charity that supports high school girls.

For breakfast we go to PetroSun -- a gas station that serves baleadas. They are... fine. But also the cheapest on the island at L20. This time they come with mantequilla (crema) and that's definitely, in my opinion, superior to the normal hard cheese.

We walk up the hill to go to Sandy Bay. On the way we pass a dark red colored mango tree, but I don't think they were ready so we passed over picking them and eating them.

The walk was mostly dangerous and scary. But we make it to BICA. I see a lot of animals on the beach, mostly kittens, and although they try to play with me Eunice doesn't let me because we're in a rush.

We arrive at BICA. There's a cat named Pina ("peanut") and a black dog named Sasha who appeared to be the matriarch of the house. Incredibly tender, gentle, and loving. Would march around the house licking all the other dogs and making sure they're okay. She's a black lab.

Eunice and me are put on Mangrove duty. Pilar, our host, takes us there. We learn a little bit about mangroves (manglares). Our job is to replace the seeds that didn't take (pegar).

A rather beautiful (and almost bulbasaur-esque) pitbull walked up to the mangrove zone we were working in. I asked if it was friendly and the owners said yes. I went to pet it and it immediately growled at me. This dog was not on a leash and I sort of saw my life flash before my eyes before I went back into the safety of the mangrove zone. I am learning to avoid animal bites.

While working on the mangroves we saw a "lora de nuca amarilla", beautiful parrots that appeared to live in a strangler fig near by. Eunice says they're endemic. But that was not the most amazing thing that we saw. Because just outside there was a dolphin show happening right in the bay. Apparently, according to Pilar, the dolphins are completely free to do what they want, but they choose to come here and perform for people because a guy lives them little fishies. I find that hilarious and a bit sad actually that they'd rather do this (report for work) than go live their free lives. But in general, I'm supportive of this arrangement. No one is forced into it. (The resort is called Anthony's Key Resort).

Here's something I learned about manglares: they are a crazy carbon sink, capturing ~5x as much per unit area as other trees because they pack the soil around the roots with carbon. So preserving mangroves is incredibly important for reducing atmospheric carbon.

We returned to the community center to paint some signs for a marathon. This time, some kids were there to help us. The girls wanted to help paint, so Eunice drew some of the lines for the letters and had the girls fill them in. Meanwhile, the boy asked me one question: "Barcelona or Real Madrid". I asked him what his favorite team was. "Barcelona", he said.

"Then that one."

Talking with Pilar after the painting was done, I mentioned that I went into physics because it was a real challenge and I needed a great challenge in my life in order to grow. I compared it to the people who put their hands in gloves full of bullet ants; the hard thing I did to prove to myself that I could do it. I asked her what her hard thing was. She thought about it for just a second and then said, "learning to drive."

On the way out I found my first coconut in a while that hadn't been stolen by some guy trying to fleece a tourist. I smashed it open against a rock and drank its delicious coconut nectar, getting it all over my shirt in the process and feeling completely salvaje. I told Eunice about how nice it would be to have a machete, so that I could find all my own coconuts and open them myself. That today was going to be my day of coconuts. She joked about me finding a gleaming machete, just waiting for me.

Well wouldn't you believe it.

On the way back home we spot first Lucy, the adorable canine that doesn't get nearly enough love from its owners (or that's the story we currently believe) and Lucy takes us to Robbie, which leads to a conversation about me loving coconuts, which somehow leads to Robbie taking his ladder and climbing up 30 feet to get me coconuts from his tree, that we then opened together with a machete over some conversation about life.

First, some things I learned about Rob:

  1. He's presbyterian
  2. He went on a mission trip to Africa
  3. He is a stock broker that worked for 3 different companies and LOVED HIS JOB. He said helping people make their retirement goals a reality was his life's mission and that it made him so happy. This reminded me of my mom, who talks this way about real estate.
  4. He seems like a very nice and agreeable guy

He basically forced me to take all the water from 6 coconuts and put it my fridge and enjoy it. He seemed really insistent about this. Also, it was hard to tell where he stands as far as his views of the outside world, but we bonded quite a bit about enjoying the community here in Latin America. Though he doesn't speak spanish as far as I can tell and also referred to one of the locals as "Crackhead Craig." (Rebecca said not to judge them because "he is an actual crackhead who literally smokes crack.") Crackhead Craig was the most recent beneficiary of this properties coconuts. Followed by me. Not sure what that says about me.

We went out for baleadas. No more Calelu's for us, it's Baleadas Karen all the way, 25L a pop. On the way there Eunice PUNCHED ME (someone call the police) every time she saw a "cangrejo!" There were a lot of cangrejos but fewer after the cats got to them. We also ran into a frog on the way home.

Total lives saved today:

We saw Lucy on the way in. It hurt me to tell her goodbye and close the door on her but Eunice will not let her in the bed. But to be fair to Eunice, she did save a 1002 other lives today so she is a good guy.

Nothing much else to report today.

July 30

It is my last day, I suppose, in Roatan.

The days have been getting shorter here. The time distortion effect that was so prominent in Utila, where it seemed like weeks had passed in just a few days, was not really present here on Roatan, and especially not so in the last few days, where things seemed to move at a normal speed.

Let me try to piece together what we did today.

Around 9am we left to eat at "Yahungre?", a place widely considered online to be the best breakfast spot in town. I thought it was good. Me and Eunice ordered the desayuno tipico, which to me just felt like a deconstructed baleada. I think I would have been similarly happy anywhere around here (West End.) This town isn't really made for people who want to get out of their comfort zone. In fact, it is a comfort zone, and designed to be so. It's a village where everything is nearby, and where things aren't nearby, there are water taxis and other taxis to take you there. And with the way the taxis drive here, definitely better to be in one than next to one. I nearly got hit twice today.

At Yahungre? there was a man who ordered his meal and his back tattoo was a monkey, whose tail was curled up in the air, and who was leaning between his legs (so that his face was upside down and facing you) and on his buttcheeks was written

AL O HA

where the O was the red ring of his anus. I have no idea why someone would get that tattoo.

We had a chill day in the afternoon. I played chess for the first time since the trip started and won the majority of my games (vacation brain is real) and we also spent quite a bit of time thinking about this week's NYer caption contest which is freaking hard. We still don't have a winner yet.

At 4ish we went back to Half-Moon Bay for one last snorkeling session. Oh I forgot to mention, for the last two or three days I've been talking to Eunice in an Appalachian accent, like Clayton Bigsby from Chappelle's Show. And I spoke to Eunice in that accent while we were snorkeling, for the most part. (Eunice says "THE ENTIRE DAY NOT JUST SNORKELING! Que mentira")

Ok she's right. I did speak in that accent for most of the day... "Take yer kween, BITCH! gottem" and "barracooda! errybody outta tha water! barracooda!"

Rebecca and Robbie gave us some mamones on the way in. They are nice people. They recommended some restaurants to us, but in the end we just ended up at the old classics: the baleada lady and the pupuseria. While we were getting baleadas, the police tried to boot a guy's tire, and in either trying to drive away or trying to stop the police, he flattened his tire (boom! hiss...)

The pupuseria was a nicer experience as usual. Me and Eunice argued over which frosty drink we'd get. As I was tired of melon, I forced us to get lemon, which was the right decision because the sourness was just perfect and I was choking on chile cabro from the baleada lady (Karen), who scolded me for sitting on the table (I was trying to keep my feet out of the dark because the mosquitos bite the shit out of me here.) Ordered plantain pupusa, which was new, but I enjoyed it. At some point Pupuseria Lady (Sandra) puts on some music which has some rather odd lyrics:

I'M ON THE ROAD TO NOWHERE! CAN'T TURN BACK, I'M ALREADY THERE! THE JOURNEY'S LONG BUT I DON'T CARE

THE SIGNS ARE BLURRED THE MAP IS TORN I DON'T KNOW WHERE I'M HEADED BUT I'M BORN TO ROAM!

Those are the actual lyrics. Eunice says to me, "What if this is this guy's most famous song." I said to her, "What if this guy's most famous song is just lyrics written by ChatGPT. "No lo se Rick." "I'm just saying, this sounds like it was written by AI." [Song changes, same shitty lyrics...]

THE VOICES FADE IN THE CHAOS OF LIFE I NEED SOMETHING TO CUT THROUGH THE STRIFE

I looked at Eunice and said, "really? life and strife??? LIFE AND STRIFE" and for some reason this reminded Eunice of Creed. She told me that that guy was really hot, that he looked like Jesus without the beard. Anyway I'm now convinced that this guy is the shittiest songwriter ever and I wanna know who he is, so we ask Sandra if this is the same artist or a different one from before (Eu insists that it's a different guy on this last track)

Sandra: "Oh! Si! Es un cantante diferente!"

And she runs over to to her phone to show us the playlist. Then she pulls up ChatGPT and asks it "Who is this artist?" and ChatGPT of course responded with,

"I can help you find the artist, but I need more information..."

She didn't include any audio or anything, just the sentence, "help me identify this artist" or whatever it was. Anyway, Eunice and me memorized the youtube channel with the intention of looking it up later, but something caught my eye about the channel title:

Queen, AC/DC, Bon Jovi, Metallica, Nirvana Style [emphasis mine] - Classic Rock Songs 70s 80s 90s Full Album

Sandra, it turns out, really likes me and Eunice for some reason. She told Eunice a story about her Christian conference, took selfies with us, got worried about how the lighting made her look too red and then took another set of selfies with us, then we left. She also complimented Eunice's Spanish. For some reason, she made me happy. She had a very nice energy.

When we got home and looked up the channel we discovered that that music was fully AI generated so wow. Not sure how to feel about that. Pretty dystopian indeed.

"Nothing is real anymore," says Eu, "the music, the images, the captions for the New Yorker -- everything is ChatGPT".

She's right. The first caption to really make us laugh tonight came from ChatGPT, via Adam, who discreetly used it to caption this week's contest. The cartoon shows the Creature from the Black Lagoon sitting in a life guard's chair holding a megaphone at a beach. This has stumped me and Eunice to the point that we made a spreadsheet to connect disparate ideas. But ChatGPT just comes straight out the gate with

"Beach is closed due to... me."

I don't know what it is about that, I think there's a part of the humor that's due to ChatGPT not knowing how silly that sounds, but it is genuinely funny to me and (and Eu) and we couldn't really stop laughing for at least a minute or two... so credit where it's due.

July 31

This is our last day of vacation. The morning is slow. Having not done proper laundry in two weeks, and having packed light, I don't have any clean clothes left. Everything smells like rags. I take my least dirty clothes and put them on. The rest gets stuffed into my backpack.

For our last meal, we stop by Sandy Buns and get a $5 breakfast burrito ("Our best recreation of a gas-station burrito.") The waitress has deep blue eyes. Her husband worked at a steel mill and the moment he could retire they moved here, to Roatan. Eunice wonders out loud if staying here turns your eyes the color of the ocean. I think it's more likely that they're colored contacts.

We go sit by the beach. Someone has put rental chairs on the public beach with lots of instructions: "No more than one person per chair. No putting your things on the chairs." There's Hebrew writing at the bottom, inexplicably. Someone from the water calls out to me and says I can use the chair for a few minutes. I assume this is the chair tsar and shake my head. We sit down on the beach for my last burrito.

The guy who seems to be the chair tsar is yelling to a man on the beach. He's saying what shirt he wants. "Negro! Negro! Octopus! How do you say octopus in spanish?"

Me and Eunice yell it out. "Pulpo!" That starts the conversation.

Turns out he's not the chair tsar. He was just offering us the chair he had already rented. He's a Christian missionary who's here in Honduras, teaching English to kids and helping them build houses. His name's Tim. He used to work as an ice cream salesman in Georgia. His wife, Jodie, has a deep southern drawl. They met while he was managing a KFC. She was a customer, and the other kids working there kept bringing her water and napkins and ketchup packets and all that just to keep her there longer so Tim would have a better shot.

We leave shortly after, to head to the airport. Jason picks us up.

Flights are getting cancelled, apparently, due to storms in Miami and Washington. But the whole flight there we didn't notice anything out of the ordinary. Seems we had just missed the storms. I guess that's how it feels to be lucky. Like nothing at all.

On the way through customs I email Larry Wood, the guy who wrote the book on How to Win the New Yorker Caption Contest. I asked him for help on my captions. He picked the best one, and even told me he liked mine more than he liked his. So that was nice.

On the next flight me and Eunice are joking around as we get into our seats. The man sitting to my right in our group of three is talkative. He thinks we're funny, right off the bat, and starts to talk to us.

His name is Jerry Lankford. He tells me he's a lobbyist for haemophiliacs (and that he's a haemophiliac himself.)

"That sounds like a setup to a joke..." I think. The caption contest is on my mind. I'm imagining a haemophiliac yelling something out like, "We can't keep hemorrhaging money like this!"

The last three days we've spent fine-tuning our captions for the caption contest. The odds are always small but you never know. I show him my captions. He laughs hard at every one. I like this guy. He thinks I'm funny.

I talk to Jerry for a couple hours. He tells me a lot of things. About his brother who died under suspicious circumstances. About

#TODO

  1. The possum in the road (Glenn: "it gets flatter every day", Tom: "Oh, everyone's been telling me about that possum."
  2. Cockroach in the trash on Water Cay