Sailing from place to place is a lot like voyaging among different planets. "Spaceship Windom" is a self-contained little world, with everything we need to travel through the void of blue water, and when we touch down in a new harbor it's almost as though we've rocketed out to hyperspace and back, rather than just moved a few miles down a coastline or across a strait. We're now in our third anchorage along the 30 mile length of Roatan, but each has been as different from the others as if they were on separate planets -- or at least on separate islands. Helene was a backwater island out of the Eastern Caribbean of 40 years ago, French Harbor could have been on the seedy side of Venezuela's Isla Margarita. West End, where we've been for the past week, is clearly Vacationland. Or better yet, Temptation Island.
That's the name of a television show, the French version of which is being filmed at the Luna Beach resort, directly in front of the yacht anchorage. Model-beautiful actors and actresses walk on the beach, ride kneeboards, and zoom through the anchorage on the resort launch, all the while followed by a camera crew desperately trying to keep their equipment from being ruined by salt spray while they film the action. We're part of the background scenery, all these picturesque yachts.
Even without the sexy TV people, West End is full of temptation for us and for the mostly European twentysomething crowd staying at the small resorts and guesthouses that sprinkle the beach. There's the temptation to eat out at the restaurants; we had pizza one night, barbecue the next, and we hear there's a Thai place that's pretty good. Two for one drinks at happy hour is a powerful temptation we've given in to several times. When we are not spending money to fill our bellies with food and drink, we are spending money to fill our SCUBA tanks with compressed air. Roatan has a very impressive fringing reef here, and since it's fairly close in and there are a number of buoys marking the dive sites, it's easy for us to go dive from our dinghy on our own. For diving farther off -- there's a wreck we've heard good things about -- we have our choice of about twenty gazillion dive operators. The one temptation we can't give in to is spearfishing, as the area is a designated marine reserve. (Which is why we're eating out at the restaurants nearly every night!)
West End seems a world away from the "real" Roatan, where black Bay Islanders and hispanic Hondurans scrape by in a declining economy. Most of the dive shops, hotels, bars and restaurants are run by non-Hondurans. It's not the luxury resortland of many eastern Caribbean beach areas, with fancy hotels and all-inclusive retreats, but it's still Touristville. (Although the tourists here are likely to prefer to be called "travelers", sport interesting piercings, and stay in a shared room with the bathroom down the hall in order to save money.) The hotels look a bit funky and in need of maintenance, and there aren't a whole lot of people staying in them. Maybe it's the season, maybe it's the economy.
The town filled up on Tuesday, which some other yachties had warned us was "cruise ship day". We saw the Norwegian Sun, a huge modern white monstrosity, glide by in the morning, on its way to Roatan's principal city of Coxen Hole. When we dinghied in an hour later, the tour buses had already begun to disgorge the type of people the "travelers" disparagingly call "tourists": pasty white, overweight, older (like, over 30!) Americans. We saw one troop of 40 or so marching down the street to the beach, an army in uniforms of bathing suits and bright orange life vests, kayak paddles at the ready. Another group was being outfitted in inflatable life jackets and given what sounded like a ridiculous level of instruction for going out to snorkel the shallow reef. Still more were being herded on to two of the charter sailboats that are based at West End, and the dive boats were running full, occupying most of the visible moorings along the reef. For one day, West End was a full-on resort town. But by late afternoon, the cruise ship passengers had returned to their floating city, and West End had returned to its usual sleepy self.
This has been a fun place to hang out, especially since there's another boat here with interesting people about our ages. Naturally, they are on their way south while we are going north! But it's been fun to have new people to chitchat with, to dive and go out for drinks with, so we have yielded to the most insidious temptation of all -- staying here rather than moving on after a day or so as we had originally planned. At this rate we won't make Florida until hurricane season...2003. So, lead us out of temptation, please. The next stop will be Utila, and then Belize's outer atolls.