Roatan, Honduras, Bay Islands, Honduras
Thursday, August 30, 2012
Mahogany Bay in Honduras was our next cruise stop. It is GORGEOUS here. The waters are all turquoise, and there are beautiful lush rainforests. Today we just did a tour of Roatan Island (which the city of Mahogany Bay is on). It is a relatively poor island, but there was something that most poor islands don't have: a fire station. Everyone mainly speaks English and Spanish. Back then, they used to use red clay and sticks to make the houses. Now most of them are normal-type houses. A lot of them were on stilts though. They said they didn't have psunamis, but the stilts were to protect from any really high tides or floods. Their natural disasters are earthquakes, hurricanes (well, the last one was in 1994) and mudslides where houses would slide down the hills. Most things are imported, but they do have resources like coffee, mahogany wood, and fruits like plantains, coconuts, letchee, avocado and "stinking toe." They also have fish of course. We took a boat out to see a shipwreck. The ship was stripped completely by the villagers for wood and other things to use for their houses. The only thing left was the rusty metal hull. I learned that there are only grades 1-6, and then there are 3 years of 'college.' The only professions you can study in Roatan are tourism, fishing and bookkeeping. If you wanted to be something else you would have to travel to a different island for college (which is really just high school). We went to a couple of different village areas. They were all selling jewelry, mostly made of hematite. The hematite there was pretty inexpensive, so I bought a couple of necklaces from the villagers.
