The morning came too soon. Actually, it came on time, the only problem being that Grand Cayman Time was an hour earlier than Ship Time, and Roatan Time was TWO hours earlier. Like it or not, we were losing time by traveling west, which meant that we were losing sleep! The long trip, 36 hours awake, the late nights and the disco beneath our floor (not to mention The Screaming Italian) were starting to take their toll. We woke to Room Service (FREE Room Service, I might add) pounding on the door with our breakfast. CRAP! We overslept! We got ready as fast as we could, simultaneously scarfing down a meager breakfast of Raisin Bran, grapefruit wedges, orange juice and tea. Chelle looked out the balcony door as the ship sailed into port. Chelle remarked, “Wow, there’s a traffic jam on Roatan!” Sure enough, I saw a line-up of vehicles clogging the only road we could see winding through what could only be described as a “shanty town.” Clapboard houses with corrugated metal roofs lined both sides of the road. People walked or rode bicycles past the terminal, largely ignoring the approaching ship. The terminal itself looked thrown together with every bit of building material that the locals could gather. Still, a walled-off area in the terminal showed new construction occurring. We had all of our gear ready, our bodies clean and our brains in explore mode before the ship docked. Outside we could see police boats circling, which made me feel uneasy. What did I know about Roatan? It was part of Honduras. What did I know about Honduras? Nothing was coming to mind. Then it occurred to me, Customs must clear the boat before it could dock, therefore we were in a holding pattern. I turned to Chelle. “How about some REAL breakfast?” She smiled, so we headed up to Rosie’s, the buffet/café on the Valor. Bacon, sausage, fruit, pastry, plus some dry cereal to take with us for snacking (though our excursion included food and drinks, plus a dinner stop). Disembarkation was much happier in port. No waiting for tender boats, just walking down the gangplank. Cheery reggae music filled the air, but it couldn’t knock down the smell that hit us. How to describe the smell or Roatan? Low tide at a sewage treatment plant? Not colorful enough. The smell a dog makes after he eats a box of cigars and then gets explosive diarrhea? Too “earthy.” We settled on the smell of a homeless camp with no plumbing while the occupants are learning how to perm each other’s hair. We cleared the terminal and were immediately beset by children feeling our pockets for loose change, wallets, and other valuables. Now, Roatan is a relatively new cruise ship destination, which explained the construction going on at the terminal. After docking ships there for 6 years, it occurred to Carnival that improving the terminal would probably make a better impression on their customers. I imagine that only weeks before, people had to disembark by crawling down the mooring lines hand-over-hand, “Batman”-style. The dock literally dumped passengers off into a residential area rife with… well, let’s just say that calling it a ghetto is an insult to ghettos everywhere. The chickens outnumbered the pickpockets, only because chickens multiply faster. We figured out where Chelle’s “traffic jam” came from: Everybody with a car and something to make a sign with were parked on the only road along the terminal, trying to pick up tourists for sightseeing tours. They were a surly bunch, filling the air with the sound of angry shouting and blaring horns, all against a background of cheerful reggae music. Our tour guide came highly recommended online, so we opted to book our excursion off-the-boat. Victor Bodden Tours allowed us to pick and choose, so we opted with Zip Lines, Monkeys, Food and Drinks, Photo Ops and Snorkeling. The website options even included dinner. A FULL day, and the most expensive excursion on our trip! The overall consensus seemed to be that Roatan would be the most expensive stop on the cruise, in spite of the poor economy there. The excursion was all checked out online and confirmed by Victor via email. This was the infamous email that I only got printed in Miami after the Doubletree people saved our butts. According to the email, Victor would have a driver waiting for us across the street from the terminal, near a booth that had a Bodden Tours sign stapled to it. We dashed across the street, avoiding the mad motorists and other tour guides skimming for customers. We found the sign and introduced ourselves. We were handed over to our driver. He walked us up one block from the terminal gate and into a mud driveway shared by five 2-room houses set up on stilts, presumably to avoid the high water during hurricane-driven increases in sea level. The only things that outnumbered the dilapidated minivans were children trying to simultaneously sell us bracelets and pick our pockets. Oh yes, and the ever-present chickens. We waited for 15 minutes while he shuffled minivans around to find just the right one. Once inside our luxurious transportation (no seat belts!), we sat for 30 minutes in front of the terminal, crawling forward inches at a time. Chelle let our driver know, “Victor said we might be rushed for time, so the snorkeling is more important than the sightseeing.” The driver smiled and nodded. The van crept forward. Horns honked. “Where are you from?” He asked and smiled. And crept. And crept. And crept. The car ahead of us signaled to turn left. Suddenly our minivan lunged out into oncoming traffic and shot around the car, cutting it off as the other driver started turning. Our driver honked his horn and waved. The other driver waved back, surprisingly with all of his fingers and not just the middle one. Bicyclists flew everywhere, avoiding the minivan. Chelle looked at me. I looked at my life insurance. It was going to be a skinny funeral, best just to ask to be cremated. Unfortunately that would be the only time our driver cracked the 35 MPH mark. We wandered through a sort of downtown area (“That’s our grocery store. That’s our school. That’s my brother. That’s my wife. That’s a church. That’s another church. That is the brothel. That’s my sister.”), then through a slum (“That’s the other grocery store. Those are houses. Look kids, Big Ben… Parliament …”), then through a sort of countryside that was a mixture of slums and palm trees. Chickens ran across the road. We nearly hit a bicyclist. Our driver honked and waved. The bicyclist waved back. An hour-and-a-half later, we were at the only sightseeing spot on the island, a peak where you could see both east and west coastlines of the tiny island. It was 1.5 hours of our lives we would never get back. More chickens, more children with wandering hands and homemade bracelets. We got out of the van, avoiding the children, took pictures, then got back in. “We want to be sure to snorkel!” Or driver smiled and nodded. An hour after that, we arrived at the Zip-Lines. Now to be fair, we had a FANTASTIC time on the Zip-Lines and playing with monkeys. Zip Lines are long cables that go from tree to tree 30 feet off the ground. You are put in a climbing harness, then you climb up onto a deck on the first tree. Your harness carabiner is affixed to pulleys that ride on the cables. Once you are secured to the cables, you jump off the deck and zip down to the next tree. The cable runs vary from 50 to 300 feet long. We were there for a bit over an hour, zipping from tree to tree, turning upside down and spinning around, having a grand old time! Once we finished the Zip-Line run, we went to pet the monkeys. A guest ahead of us got peed on by one of the white-faced monkeys (“Seven years good luck!”), but we avoided that experience. However the guest before us also gave the monkeys some grape soda. Lucky us! I will always treasure the image of Chelle with three white-faced capuchin monkeys on her head, their sticky hands and fur making purplish smears on her face and hair. “Oh my GOD, I’ve got MONKEY on me!” Total time with monkeys and Zip Lines, 1 hour, 15 minutes. For the remaining 2 hours (still reeking of monkey and grape soda) we were essentially trapped. Snorkeling? The driver smiled and nodded, and then he told us that food no longer came with the package we’d requested, so we needed to find food. He dropped us off at a beach that smelled like death, pointed to a small path between two buildings and said, “There are two restaurants back there, go on, I will wait here.” Drunken locals stumbled around. The few tourists who were there did what they could to avoid them. One of the locals, a drunken black man sporting dreadlocks called to me from the back of the pickup truck he was sitting in. “Hey, long-hair! You from Caleefornia?” He smiled and raised his bottle of Heineken to me. The three men with him laughed. One said something in what we assumed was the local variation of Spanish, or French, or something, and they laughed louder. “No, we’re from Oregon.” I smiled in a way that I hoped wasn’t somehow going to get my long-haired ass kicked. “Oregon? I been tuh Salem, Oregon. Lived there, mon!” Now, if he hadn’t coughed up Salem, Oregon, I wouldn’t have believed him. “Salem? Really?” What do you say to some guy in Honduras who once lived in Salem, Oregon? Chelle filled in the blanks. “Salem? I’m sorry!” She laughed. In my mind, a rain of beer bottles was already about to bludgeon us into unconsciousness. Thank God the men laughed, too. We said goodbye and turned to the overgrown path that the driver pointed us too. The men behind us kept laughing. Chelle muttered to me, “We are going to die here, aren’t we?” I grabbed my camera tripod like it was a club, and we pushed through the palms that grew across the pathway. We did find 2 restaurants there, with pretty good food, though it was overpriced. Once we ate, we were out of time. No snorkeling, just a long slow drive back through every ghetto the driver could find. When he dropped us off at the terminal, he tried to charge us full price for the trip. The trip that ended up NOT including snorkeling, food or beverages, mind you. We argued with the tour guide about his trying to charge us full price while failing to deliver based on their contract with us. Our argument: When the reservation says food, snacks and drinks, the trip should include it. When we’re told that it no longer includes it, the price should be adjusted accordingly. When the tour guide fails to move the tour along to cover everything ordered, the customer should not be held responsible for his failures. HE is the one driving, not us. Especially when we specifically say that we want to be sure to snorkel. His argument: “Not my problem. You will have to talk to Victor.” We ended up compromising. I gave him full price, minus food cost and snorkeling. When he objected, I told him, “Not my problem. Talk to Victor Bodden.” Then we boarded our ship. Our impression of Roatan: Visiting Roatan is like visiting a garbage dump. It is a dirty and depressing place, missing third World Country status by dint of the fact that it has electricity. It smells bad. Everyone overcharges. The sightseeing opportunities seem to revolve around driving through slums. Avoid it. Maybe in 10 years they will clean things up. Until then, stay on the boat for this stop.
Copyright Notice: All entries are copyright (and the responsibility of) their respective authors. For re-use rights please contact the author directly. Do NOT use without prior consent. If you cannot get in touch with the author directly, please mail
use the Contact Us link above.
![[Powered By MySQL]](/images/mysql-04.gif)
Copyright Notice: All entries are copyright (and the responsibility of) their respective authors.
