TEGUCIGALPA - Believe me when I tell you Utila is a tough island to leave! We almost stayed for `just one more day`which would surely have led to another, and another, and ano- and then it would be July. After spending two weeks we met a lot of great folks (most of whom were British, strangely) and had a lot of fun times so it was hard to say goodbye.
Here´s Anna and I with our new Belgian friends Rita and Phillipe. We met these guys in Tela, Honduras and then we ran into them again on Utila! We spent a lot of time hanging with them and they were a lot of fun. Phillipe, I´m still waiting for that picture!!
One day on the island these two swedish sisters came running up to me, grabbed my arm and said in heavily accented english "We need you to come to our place!". I thought it was my lucky day! Anyway, I got Anna and we both ran off with them
Turns out they had a tarantula in their bedroom and needed me to save the day...
Along with the tarantulas - that love to hang out in the banana trees behind where we stayed - were these ginormous and much scarier looking spiders. I have no idea what they are but they were huge and were everywhere. The giant one is the female and she lived outside of our room... notice how small the male is.
Here´s one of many pretty sunsets we managed to see on the island...
Here´s the staff at Deep Blue Divers. From left to right is Ian (our Advanced Open Water instructor), Phil, Tracy, Mike and Victoria. They were a great shop, very friendly and full service too - at the shop Victoria gave Anna a gorgeous haircut one day, I updated my ipod, Anna bought a few bracelets, we had lots of ice cold beer... and on and on. I wouldn´t hesitate to recommend these guys to anybody. Hopefully we can hook up with Ian again for the Rescue Diver course next year. Conspicuously absent is Russel, our dive master - I think he was still hung over from working at the Jade Tree-Tanic bar.
On our last night we headed up to ´the water tower´ to watch the sunset with Russell (our crazy British dive master), his girlfriend Annette (an absolute sweetheart), and her housemate Emma. I had a blast diving with Russell... we pretty much spent our time making fun of each other. I may have been thrown off the boat and into the ocean once or twice, but I don´t want to talk about it anymore. We all got on famously and we´ll miss hanging out. See you in New Zealand sometime??...
Anna took this on the ferry off the island... notice the jagged mountainous outline of the mainland in the background.
Here´s our last look at the harbor on Utila...
We met Chris and Helen (also British), and shared some drinks and dives, but we don´t have any photos of them at the moment. Chris took a bunch of underwater shots on our dives though so I´ll be checking his website
http://www.chrismillen.co.uk/. If anybody ever makes it to Boston, be sure and look us up!
