Utila
A long day of travle – two buses and one ferry – and we are finally in Utila, an island in the Caribean making up the Bay Island group.
Our main reason for being here was for some R&R before heading home and to go diving. So dive we did.
How nice was it to be in warm water after our Galapagos experience, and to have some visability? What a difference. Although there wasn’t as much life around as we were expecting, the coral was different to that we’ve seen in the Red Sea – a lot more soft corals around – and we did see a turtle and some lobster (seeing the turtle made me feel very guilty about the turtle we’d eaten in Cuba…) I particularly liked watching the fan coral swaying about in the currents. We were only on the island for two full days, but managed to dive twice on the first day and three times on the second, including one night dive. I love night diving – especially the phosphrecence (or however it is spelt) when you turn your torch off & wave your hands around. Because you only have your torch light to go by (we had no moon on this dive so it was very dark!) it means that you look at the corals more closely and are more focused in what you see.
We stayed at the accomodation associated with the dive centre, which made life easy! But it also meant we had a sea front room – can’t complain at that – the views were amazing, especially at sunrise & sunset, and we didn’t have to walk far to go diving (how lazy?)!
(Our room was the second, brown, door in from the right in the white building)
The highlight of our far too short a visit, though, has to be on the way to the first dive sight on the second day. A pod of at least 50 dolphins, playing in the waves of the boat. We were lucky enough to have enough time too to jump in and snorkel with them for a bit – an amazing experience. We’d snorkelled briefly with some dolphins in Marsa Alam in 2006, but this was very different. There were many more of them, and they hung around for a lot longer too. No photos though, as the main camera wasn’t on the boat – didn’t want it to get wet – hopefully the couple we took with the waterproof one will come out, but we won’t find out until we get home & have it developed.
Neither will we forget the ferry ride back to the main land…it only takes just over an hour, but a lady managed to give birth to a son in that time – he certainly wasn’t hanging around!! Luckily there was a nurse on board so she help her out!
Tags: Honduras, Travel, Utila
Jenni
Leave a Reply