We arrived at this Caribbean island yesterday

by way of San Pedro, a big, busy, ugly city where I managed to get myself a visa for El Salvador, and then Triunfo de la Cruz, a tiny, sandy town by the sea, where we spent the night.

Triunfo was great. It's a little town of 900 people, nearly all of them Garifunas - African people who arrived in a slave ship, which was wrecked off an island called St Vincent. The captives escaped and settled with the indigenous population on the island, and remained unmolested by the few French merchants who were living there.

The Poms arrived and tried to round them up and put them to work, but the Garifunas resisted, eventually settling all along the coast of Honduras, a few in Guatemala, and some in Belize, as well. They speak a language of their own and are famous for their excellent music.

Triunfo is a sandy little place, with crabs scampering in the streets at dusk, where restaurants right on the sand serve fish and coconut soup while you sit under a palm canopy on the beach. It was extremely chilled out and the people were superfriendly. It's wet season, and a storm rained down on the tin roof of our cabana all night, and the ubiquitous roosters woke us up in time for our bus.

We arrived in Utila by boat after a very damp ride in a leaky chicken bus, and are about to start scuba diving. This island is full of houses like big old wooden Queenslanders - they are very elegant. It's also full of young tourists, all here for the diving. I am looking forward to getting under the water and looking at the fish.