Andre and Wendy: Island Tour

Today we have booked a full day Island Tour to see some different site around the island. We have a driver and his friend an English guide to look after us for the day, and a nice air conditioned van.

At breakfast we spoke to a couple that did a tour yesterday and visited a butterfly farm, and some mangroves on their tour, when we met up with our guide we would like to include these as well.

We drove along and stopped for some pictures of some scenic spots, Liam's favourite are in front of signs that say Roatan J

Liams favourite spot for pictures

Our first real stop is at Mayan Eden, which is a pretty spot where the butterfly farm is. We get out of the van and there are wild monkeys running around. One gets in the van so has to be taken out, this same one got into Andres pocket and stole a protector he had for his camera filter, it was just a little piece of Styrofoam that the monkey took up into the tree, tried to eat it, broke it in half then threw it on the ground. We are laughing so much already and we just arrived.

Off for a great tour of the butterfly farm. We see all the different stages of life of the butterfly. We didn’t know that they only lived a few months, and this is in captivity, less in the wild. It was a great tour, we were the only ones there, up to 60 people can be going through at a time when cruise ships are in port.

After the visit with the butterflies we get to go outside again and the monkeys are there waiting for us. They are coaxed for pictures with food and happy to be help. They also have parrots that are loose, but also come around looking for food for pictures. Because we are the only ones there we basically can take as many pictures as we want, and stay as long as we want. They haven’t yet figured out to have a photographer there to take pictures and sell them to you. We next visited a few other animals that they have in cages while visitors are there, but many they let loose once we are all gone. Not a fan of zoos, but this was pretty cool.

Liam has a girlfriend!!

From here we walked up to the highest point on the island. There was a rope across the road, but a short walk up. When we got there we realized that we had been here before when we did a tour from the cruise. Last time there were lots of vendors up here, this time just empty stalls. We remembered the very pretty view, so different with no one around. We had picked today for our tour purposely because we knew no ships were in port today.

We drove by Mohagany Bay which was our cruise ship port and first introduction to Roatan. Next was Flower Bay, this was really pretty, not touristy at all, a real town, I would have loved to have time to walk around and spend some time here.

Our next stop is at Jonesville which is where we did the mangrove tour. This mangrove alley was supposedly created by pirates to hide their ships. It is really unique, like going through a tunnel of mangroves in little boats, we’ve never seen anything like this before. Our boat captain picked us up at a rickety old wharf with his whole family on board, we were taking them with us to drop them off at a beach for the day. After the family drop off we stopped for a short disappointing snorkel, we have snorkeled in mangroves before, but here you really couldn’t go too far into the mangroves because of boats. While we were snorkeling the captain took advantage to jump in and do some cleaning on the bottom of his boat.

Captains family along for the ride, these are his twins

Mangrove tour , very cool and narrow

So graceful getting out to snorkel, be careful not to land on the captain washing his boat

The boat then took us to a little restaurant that is at the end of this section that can only be reached by boat called the Hole in The Wall. The owner/bartender was quite the character, an expat that had been there for years that now lives in his boat docked off the pier. Joey ordered a rum and coke, definitely more rum than coke. We all tried our luck at the bar free drink games, but no luck there. After waiting an extremely long time and seeing people getting their food that arrived after us I went to the bar to see about our meals, turns out he forgot to put in the order. All this time we see the Captain of our boat has friends that are there that are buying him beer, a lot of beer. Our guide and driver come over to our table and we tell them our order was just put in. We ask for another plate and share with them when the food arrives. We were there nearly 2 hours, but when Andre and Joey went to pay the bill it was much less than it should have been, so I guess we got some kind of discount. Back to the boat and I mentioned to our guide that the captain has been drinking quite a bit, I look around and the guide is now driving the boat. He works for dive boats as well and says he likes driving the boats, this is a little tiny boat, but I was still glad to see him driving, hope the captain made it home safely after he left us, and hope he didn’t forget his family on the beach.

Hole in the Wall restaurant for lunch

Liam grafatti

Wendy putting in bar order

Happy sisters!

Lunch funally arrives, at least it was good

Our captain after 1 one too many beer, our guide took over the boat

Our next stop is at Punta Gorda which turned out to be lots of fun. It was raining when we first arrived, but didn’t last too long. On Sundays this town pretty much closes up and turns the main street into a dance party. Kids/grandparents, everyone dancing, it must be really fun when they really get going at night. All live music, blowing conch shells, one of the drums was a turtle shell, guitars, drums and singing. The dancing could be the original twirk. It is all based on the Garifuna culture.