ROATAN, BAY ISLAND, HONDURAS

The port of Roatan resembled an upscale Caribbean cruise terminal, like maybe St. Lucia, with bright yellow Colonial-style buildings, red roofs, and flowered balconies. Everything was clean, bright and efficient. A conga band and lively big mamma dancers dressed in orange and white native garb greeted the disembarking passengers while zip liners soared over the harbor and sleek catamarans sailed into their appointed anchorages for tours. Brightly-painted bungalow houses clung to the hillsides above the harbor like sparkling jewels. And tour buses sat waiting to take the boat people on yet another trip to paradise.

We had booked a tour in advance through TripAdvisor with a company named Bodden Tours. They were supposed to be the best.

Their brochure outlined the excursion in glowing terms.

“You will begin your tour day in one of our air-conditioned tour vehicles. Your guide will share our unique landscape, local culture, as well as some Roatan/ Bay Island history. Your tour group will make several sightseeing stops along the way, allowing you to get outside of the vehicle for some outstanding photo opportunities. A stop at Roatan’s Panorama Hill offers an open view of our island, villages and cruise ports. Some of the sights that we will share include: shipwrecks off the shoreline, the villages of Coxen Hole, French Harbor, Sandy Bay and West End, overlooks showing the jungles and coral reefs, etc.

Then, a 45-minute stop and optional free access to Victor’s Monkey Business. Here, you may visit the monkeys, sloths, parrots, island deer, and other animals, if you like. Or, alternatively, do some on-site souvenir shopping for Honduran products (mahogany crafts, coffee, vanilla, etc.) If you’d rather, kick back on one of our hammocks or picnic tables surrounded by tropical trees and watch guests as they zip along on the Mayan Jungle Canopy overhead.

After a bit more sightseeing, we will stop by West Bay Beach and the Bananarama Beach Resort. This is Roatan’s most beautiful white sand beach, lined with resorts, restaurants and bars. This is a 2-hour stop and you will be able to explore the mile-long beach, snorkel, swim and relax! You will be provided with an arm-band allowing you access to a beach chair, restroom facilities and fresh water showers at Bananarama Resort! West Bay Beach, protected by the offshore reef, is a wonderful sea grass and rock-free beach with powder-soft sand unlike any other beach on Roatan…it is groomed and maintained daily. There are many water-activities available here, and you can rent most anything: glass bottom boats, kayaks, canoes, snorkel gear, jet-skis, parasail, etc. Or, you can just relax and enjoy a cold beverage or a snack at one of the many restaurants or bars, including the tasty menu at Bananarama!

After your beach-break, we will load back up and do a bit more sightseeing on our way back to the cruise ship ports.”

Rupert was our friendly driver and our guide was an older Honduran lady named Leona.

Our tour first went out to French Bay and East Bay on the east end of the island.

We were now traveling through Caribbean poverty, which has a rural and less desperate feel than the nasty urban poverty of Colombia, Panama, and Costa Rica. This was “beach poor”, and seemed more laid back and less hopeless.

But make no mistake, it can still get dangerous.

Security companies are in great demand and they have flashy billboards along the main roads, showing men in black. Heavily-armed security guards stood in front of banks and many businesses to protect tourists and the locals from “strangers”. This was a recurring line we heard in every country we visited. They tell you there is no crime but when you see a guy standing at a gas station holding a loaded shotgun, it doesn’t exactly make you feel real safe.

Our bus was filled with older folk from South Carolina who peppered Leona with questions about the island and Leona knew her stuff. So, it was all very informative.

The island is 36 miles long and 12 miles wide, and sits about 36 miles from the mainland.

In 1998, Hurricane Mitch almost destroyed the island and the damage is still quite noticeable. It takes decades for any island in the Caribbean to recover from a natural disaster, which is a very sobering thought after the 2017 hurricane season laid waste to most of the Caribbean.

There are 17,000 people living on Roatan Island, including a pretty sizable community of U.S. and Canadian expats.

Roatan was virtually unoccupied until 1833, when slavery was banned. That’s when people, primarily from the Cayman Islands, began rolling in. This explains the Caribbean feel of the place.

I can’t help but also attribute the somewhat civilized nature of the island to the fact that it was once British, versus Spanish. The Brits are all about tidiness.

The predominant languages are English and Spanish.

The currency is the Lempira and the exchange rate is currently 23 to the dollar. Their bills are colorful and the size of Monopoly money. A 10 Limpere bank note is only worth 50 cents. And the average income is about $750 a month.

Power is very expensive and gas was $5 a gallon. According to Leona, most of the locals’ paychecks get eaten up by their utility bills.

There are no tall buildings on the island and only one elevator.

And amazingly, there is only one golf course. And it looked pretty nice.

The housing is mostly shacks interspersed with open air market stalls and shops, with the occasional modern store that indicates at least some recent foreign investment. Pizza Hut and Ace Hardware have just built shiny new stores. And there were, of course, the standard issue tropical casinos that help fuel the economy. All in all, it was a very strange mix of old (poor) and new (rich) decorated with piles of trash and polluted streams where women were doing their laundry.

Leona said that drying clothes is easy, you just hang it on a line and let the sun work its magic, but washing machines are very expensive.

Many of the houses are built on pilings, though not for protection from storms or flooding, but rather, as a rainproof outdoor patio. Rupert said that was where he learned English as a boy.

A modest house in an okay location will run you about $350,000. But the upscale housing near the ocean, usually marketed by Century 21, can fetch close to a million. Most of the nicer housing is on the west end of the island in West Bay near the best beaches.

The newly elected Mayor is promising to promote tourism. And some of the biggest and fanciest houses we passed were owned by former mayors.

Kleptocracies ruled wherever we went throughout our cruise. The rich get richer while the poor stay poor. And interestingly, they tend to elect millionaire businessmen, like the U.S. just did with Trump, with the naive notion that they won’t steal because they are so rich they don’t need the money. That is, of course, utter nonsense. Rich people only care about their own kind, no matter the country.

Potholed roads are a huge problem in Roatan, but most islanders don’t own a car, so it is a tourist problem. The new mayor is rich, owns land around Mahogany Bay, and is affiliated with Royal Caribbean (where the RC cruise ships dock), so his number one priority is going to be improving the abominable roads. As far as we could tell, the roads were currently being maintained rather haphazardly by industrious folk who filled the holes near their homes with dirt and then stood in the middle of the road with a tip bucket.

There is an International Airport in the middle of the island with 12 flights a day. Space is very limited, so the air traffic control tower is located on the hill above the airport just below the island’s most spectacular overlook where we stopped for some shots of our cruise ship, sitting in the lovely harbor like a white whale.

The stop at Víctor’s Monkey House was a trip. You can’t beat a place where Dexter the mischievous, white-faced capuchin monkey, and Harold, a scarlet Macaw, the national bird of Honduras, will sit on your head, after which you can hold a cuddly sloth for as long as you like.

And it was doubly amusing after our previous excursions into the bush where the guide would point excitedly at an unmoving brown shape in the trees and exclaim, “There’s a sloth!”

At Víctor’s, the lethargic sloths went to sleep in your arms like contented little babies.

One of the aggravating aspects of cruising with old people is they get freaked out on the shore excursions because they are worried they won’t get back to the ship in time and the ship will leave them. And our group was constantly fretting about this and that. “It’s dirty.” “The roads are bumpy.” “The people are just sitting around doing nothing.”

When we arrived at West Bay we were supposed to have two hours of beach time, in one of the world’s best snorkeling waters, and that still meant we would have two hours before the ship departed Roatan.

So, when Rupert asked how long people wanted to stay, the general consensus was one hour.

I flipped out and started to make a scene. Inna tried her best to reel me back in. The South Carolina Trumpsters acted like I was nuts. They had no intention of snorkeling or even swimming. Someone had warned them earlier about sand fleas at the beach, so they just wanted to eat at the Bananarama beach bar, snap a few photos, and split.

I was livid and when we got off the bus I asked Rupert if we could catch a cab from there back to the ship.

“Do you want to go back now?” he asked with concern, obviously worried that he had done something wrong.

“No, we want to stay longer,” I replied.

He laughed. “Don’t stress, sir. It isn’t good for your heart. I will take the others to the ship at three and then come back and get you whenever you say.”

Rupert then walked us to the beach and showed us where we could change into our swimsuits.

“Would you like a good snorkeling trip?”

We pointed to the beach where there were several boats offering snorkeling excursions.

“They are all ripoffs,” said Rupert. “But I can call a friend who will take you out to a really nice reef where nobody goes for $70. It’s a nice boat ride and he will let you snorkel a lot longer than the others. I’ll make sure he treats you right.”

And he was true to his word in every respect.

But the coral reefs are dying. There are a myriad of reasons — warming seas and increased pollution are the primary culprits. And as the reefs die, so go the bright little fishies.

Rupert had agreed to pick us up at 5, so after our snorkeling adventure I headed to the beach bar where I ran into a very interesting retired Canadian named Alex who has been coming to Roatan for twelve years for a month-long stay every winter.

When I asked him why such a wonderful paradise was so uncrowded, he explained that Mondays were transition day.

“Everybody went home this morning,” he said with a big grin, (I had no idea what day it was at that point, which is how it should be.) “and the newbies haven’t arrived yet.”

Alex had purchased an all inclusive package for $1,000 per week in a small luxury hotel on the beach, including round trip airfare from Toronto.

And that illustrates a good travel rule: You will never go wrong following Canadians. They have a nose for finding the nicest places and the best deals.

At 5, Rupert returned and we headed back to the ship through the bustling seaside town of Flowers Bay. And he told us an incredible story along the way.

“There was a huge scene at the restaurant while you were snorkeling. There are long, group tables by the water in Bananarama, and the people on our tour who were from South Carolina, got up and left when a black couple sat down at their table. The manager freaked out and apologized, even offering them a free meal. But the husband said everything was fine. He had seen much worse growing up in the South.”

What could we say other than there is a meanness in this world. And Americans these days have a real attitude because of Trump’s bs about “making America great” again.

And after hearing the story, I didn’t feel bad anymore about going off on those worthless hicks about wanting to leave early.