Roatan travel diary

Roatan hell

The following morning we didn't waste a second and took the first available bus to La Ceiba, a large town from which it was possible to board a boat to Roatan, the largest of the Bay Islands. These islands are famous above all with dive enthusiasts... they say that Uthila (the smallest of the three) is the cheapest place in the world to get a diving licence. We, however, had chosen Roatan because, unlike Uthila, it had beautiful beaches where we could spend our future sunny afternoons. With this conviction we headed to the port and boarded for a trip of about an hour and a half to Roatan. We disembarked late in the evening and were immediately mobbed by taxi drivers shouting to get our attention. The taxi drivers claimed that at that hour it was impossible to find a bus to West Side beach, the place we had chosen to stay on the island.

As good tourists we already had in hand the address of a cheap hostel and, having haggled over the fare (dropped monstrously compared to the initial price!), we got into the taxi, which in twenty minutes took us to our destination. Oh my!!! But where have we ended up??? That was the thought pervading our minds at the sight of Valere, the hostel that bore the name of its owner of the same name. Indeed the condition of the building mirrored that of its owner, a nutty old English woman who was constantly in a state of drunkenness.

It's hard to describe in black and white the state of our dorm... a chicken coop, abandoned even by the hens! Let's start with a description of the dormitory room: a collection of rotting wooden planks, criss-crossed however they came. The rear was bounded by some sheet metal and pieces of nylon that separated us from a sort of open-air rubbish dump. The light was provided by a single bulb placed on the bedside table... practically useless!!! The room, like all the others for that matter, was infested with tiger mosquitoes, which during the day found relief from the sunlight and at night were attracted by the faint electric light and above all by our bodies: a hell on earth! The kitchen was a collection of dirty, greasy pots stacked in a corner that promised nothing but filth.

The bathroom was located in a corner and was perpetually damp with water stains scattered everywhere: this made it the favourite place for mosquito breeding, a sort of authorised breeding farm; the water, rigorously cold, came out with difficulty from a cut pipe... many times it was necessary to fill a bucket and wash with the water from that bucket to manage to get the shampoo off (sometimes only a few drops and lots of noises came out of the pipe!). We had decidedly ended up in the worst dump we had ever encountered in all our wandering around the world!

Despite all this, we summoned our strength and went to dinner. Yet another surprise... life on the island was very expensive and, in order not to completely break the bank, once seated at the restaurant the only thing we could order was a miserable little salad: starving!

With our tails between our legs and our stomachs rumbling, we headed to our hovel to feed the mosquitoes: generous!

In the morning, woken by sky-high humidity, we had a breakfast of dry biscuits and milk, bought at the local supermarket, which was also very expensive! Once our sad breakfast was over, we headed towards what everyone said had to be the best beach on the whole island: West End. This beach was about forty-five minutes from our "royal residence". Armed with a great thirst for discovery, we set off along the beach convinced we would find something better. The whole walk was punctuated by a beach that was certainly not white and by a sea that, apart from the first few metres by the shore, was practically a carpet of seaweed. We pressed on in the hope of a surprise that was slow in coming. Finally we arrived at what was supposed to be the best place on the island.

Here the beach was indeed white, but the seaweed persisted in the sea: what a disappointment! Everyone had warned us that on the island there were hordes of tiny black insects called sand flies; at first we hadn't paid too much attention, since our attention was already taken up with the countless swarms of mosquitoes... an unforgivable mistake that cost us dearly. You should know that it is practically impossible to walk and lie down on the beach without being attacked by these clouds of parasites: it's impossible to get rid of them, they buzz around you and they're so small that it becomes truly difficult to kill them. Their bite is truly unpleasant, both because it causes a persistent itch and above all because it leaves very visible red marks on the skin, unpleasant to look at: impossible to withstand. For this reason we spent most of the time immersed in the water up to our eyes.

But in the end we had to give in and get out of the water to go back to our chicken coop. It was a lethal move but a necessary one: our backs (the favourite target of these black devils) came out disfigured and torn apart by a myriad of small reddish sores. Once home we were already planning our escape for the following day, without forgetting, however, to feed for yet another evening all the mosquitoes that shared the dorm with us. To save a bit of money, for the last dinner on the island we decided to use (and risk) the kitchen and the pots and pans that seemed to have been lying in that corner since time immemorial. We made ourselves a classic spaghetti with tomato and anchovies, after which we went to bed dreaming of our escape from the island.

The following morning, without wasting a moment, we took the first available taxi and, once at the port, we re-boarded for the mainland: La Ceiba.