Sometimes, I believe in karma. The world just seems to work that way—you go from the lowest low to the highest high in a matter of days, as if the universe is balancing itself out. My trip to Roatan was like this.My lowest low was my arrival on Roatan. I hadn’t slept and had been traveling all day. I deposited my scuba gear at the dive shop, saying only the quickest of hellos to Lee and Anita, my old friends and now owners of Enomis Divers in West End. I was so exhausted I was almost twitching. I don’t remember what I said to the people in the shop—I babbled about this and that, throwing dive gear everywhere and feeling an immense state of shock at being back in this place that had once been my home. I even had a beer with my old divemaster buddy Jurgen, but I have no memory of what we talked about, and the beer did nothing to calm my nerves.
As Anita gave me a ride to my old residence hotel, I felt the surreal sense of familiar unfamiliarity, or what the Thais call “same same but different.” The road was still the same pitted sand mess, full of potholes and hell on car suspensions. But the businesses had changed. One popular dance place, where girls used to dance on top of the bar and wear beads, was now boarded up, graffiti scrawled on its yellow columns. The dance floor was now populated by dead leaves, and the tiny shopping plaza next door was deserted as well, the fountain where children had played emptied and dry.
Other businesses had changed ownership, such as my old dive shop, Pura Vida—now called the Splash Inn. My favorite shack for Honduran food was gone, replaced by a store selling tourist trinkets. Same same, but different.
At my old residence hotel, the Fort Saphrey, things were looking bad. I knew they had fired Avonell, the former manager. Avonell had kept the rooms clean and in good shape, and without her things had gone from bad to worse. When I walked into my room, the sheets were covered in insect debris from the ceiling, and there were no lightbulbs. The new manager, a large black man who spoke with a slow Roatan drawl, told me he’d “take care of it,” and proceeded to shake off the sheets and put them back on the bed. He got me two lightbulbs, at least, and sent a handyman to “fix” the air conditioning, which wasn’t working, either.
I was really only there to look for Buddy, my old cat. I knew if he was alive he’d be at the hotel, since cats are territorial. Right away, I saw “Scaredy” and “Princess”, two of the cats that had been kittens when I lived there. But Mamacat and Buddy didn’t come when I called, which was a very bad sign.
Sitting on the porch in front of another room was a very drunk, very obnoxious individual. He came over and sat next to me, and he stank so strongly of stale beer I wanted to ask him to move away.
“My name’s Luis. Luis Wilkinson,” he says.
“Amber,” I say, not really in the mood for this crap right now. I want to call again for Buddy, but I feel like an idiot doing it with this guy around. Plus, when I called before the cats were scared away by the manager’s dog, so I have to wait for the dog to go away.
“Amber….?” the drunk guy says, implying that he wants me to finish the sentence.
“Amber Foster. What do you need my last name for, anyway?” At this point, I’m annoyed AND exhausted. Nothing, nothing is going as planned.
“I’m just that kind of guy,” Drunk Guy says, watching me as I take cat food out of my bag and feed Scaredy, who is more brave than last time I’d been here. Scaredy looks like she’s recently had a litter of kittens, which she must have hidden around on the roof somewhere like Mamacat used to do.
I ask Drunk Guy how long he’s lived here, and he says over a year.
“Have you seen an orange and white cat around? Really friendly?” I ask, trying to be nonchalant.
“Oh, yeah, I know which one you’re talking about. I haven’t seen that cat in over a year.” My heart sinks.
Then Drunk Guy begins a long rant about how “cats are disgusting creatures, man. They shit inside the house. Who wants a big box of shit in the house? Nah, man, dogs are for me. It’s more natural.”
By this time, I want to thunk him on the head with a box of cat shit, but instead I say, “You’re barking up the wrong tree, dude. You’re talking to a cat lover. I’ll see ya around.” I go in my room and close the door behind me.
The room is stifling hot, even with the a/c running full blast, and I have a moment of complete depression. I mean, what am I doing here? This was all a huge mistake. I wasted a bunch of money to come to a place I don’t even like. This was bad, very bad.
When I get back to the room after a quick dinner, I turn on the bathroom light to see cockroaches scurrying away between the cracks in the floorboards. Just to be safe, I move the bed away from the wall and create a little “island” before falling asleep, thinking only: I have to get out of here.
The next two days were mostly spent looking for Buddy. Anita was a huge help—she knows all the locals, and loves cats, and so she gave me courage to ask people if they’d seen him. We showed Buddy’s picture around, and talked to the cat-lovers around town. We got one lead from the lady who owns the Lobster Pot Restaurant next door to Fort Saphrey. She always feeds the cats, and suggested I come by in the evening when she has customers, because the cats like to beg at the tables.
I found out what happened to Buddy when I went there for dinner on my second night.
I was the only customer at the restaurant, and the young woman who takes care of the cats came over to my table. I asked her about Buddy, and her eyes lit up with recognition.
“Oh yah, I remember that one. He’d be over here beggin’, then I’d here you callin’ ‘im, ‘here kitty!’ and he’d take off like that!” She clapped her hands together, then laughed. “He was real friendly, that one. My daughter loved him, she used to feed him all the time. Then we had a big rain last year. It was a big one! And then a bunch of them cats didn’t come round no more. I don’t know what happened to them.” There had been a massive storm, flooding out whole portions of the beach. She supposed the cats had died, or “wandered off.”
So I sat at the table and fed juicy scraps to Scaredy, one of the last of her clan. I knew then that Buddy was gone. I’d domesticated him, and trained him to be dependent on people, then left him to fend for himself. Even if I’d been able to come back sooner, I would have been too late. I knew
Buddy wouldn’t have left his territory. He was dead. But a little part of me likes to fantasize that someone adopted him, and took him to a loving home.
While asking around about Buddy, I ran into Ronnie, owner of Ronnie’s Barefeet Bar next door to the Fort Saphrey. As it turned out, he had a little apartment that he was planning to rent long term, but the renters wouldn’t be coming in until August. It was brand new, never been lived in, and available for the rest of my stay. We worked out a deal, which worked out great. I got out of “Fort Hellhole” and into proper vacation digs. The place was up on the second floor with a nice view of the sea, and plenty of cool sea breezes coming through at night. I would save a bunch of money not staying in a hotel, and I would be able to cook my own meals. It was perfect.
When I went back to the Fort Saphrey to get my stuff, Drunk Guy knocked on my door, leaning in with one arm propped on the doorframe.
“I’m a doctor, here on the island. So, you know, if you have any kind of emergency, anything happens, I’m your guy,” he says.
I’m thinking simultaneous thoughts of: does this actually work on women? and I don’t believe for a second this creep’s a doctor.
Instead, I say, “What kind of emergency? You planning to injure me in some way or what?”
He waves his hands. “No, no, nothing like that. You know, just, if you need anything, that’s all.”
He stumbles back to his room, and I make my escape, taking one last look around for Buddy, even though I know he’s long gone.
And here is where my story turns from the lowest low to the highest high.
At the dive shop, I was introduced to Han, a dutch dive instructor with an underwater camera, who would be my dive buddy for the length of my stay. Han is a mellow, easygoing guy whose day job is computer science teacher in Holland. In the summers, though, he leaves his wife and job behind and offers his services as “shop helper” at dive shops around the world. He doesn’t ask for money, just the chance to dive and be a part of a shop dynamic.
The main problem I usually have with diving at an unfamiliar shop is that they saddle me with an incompetent divemaster or a buddy who is less experienced than myself. But at Lee and Anita’s shop, I was at a definite advantage—not only did I know all the dive sites, but Lee and Anita trusted me to navigate them on my own, without any assistance. Lee and I did our instructor course together and even worked together at Pura Vida, so he gave me complete autonomy to dive wherever and as long as I wanted. Han came along for the ride and got to do his own fundiving, and since I was more familiar with the dive sites, he spent most of our dives just trailing behind, letting me lead. Honestly, sometimes I forgot the guy was even there! There is nothing better than diving with you, your buddy, and the reef, and not another diver in sight. And the fact that Han was an underwater photographer was the icing on the cake—that way, any time we saw anything cool we’d have a picture to take home as a souvenir.
At the shop, I also met Alejandra, a 23 year old student living in Roatan for a month while working on an outdoor adventure program. She spent a good deal of time hanging out with the rest of us, since she was in limbo, waiting for her rescue course instructor to return from the mainland. I liked her immediately, and we chatted like old friends within ten minutes.
It’s hard to pinpoint what I did during my ten days on Roatan, because vacation has a funny way of blurring your perception of time. I woke up every day, had breakfast, and went diving. Some days I dived at 9 and 11, some days I dived at 11 and 2. It all depended on boat schedules and other factors. After the first 3 days, Lee’s boat was confiscated by its owner (he was renting it, and the renter decided to renege on the deal), so for the last week we were diving with Tyll’s Dive shop, about a half a block down the road. Most of the time, Han and I had the boat to ourselves, although occasionally we had to work around the needs of Tyll’s divers. In the afternoon, after a shower and lunch, I’d hang out in the shop, chatting with everyone and playing with Lee and Anita’s kitten, Cinnamon. In the evenings, I’d often get together with one or more of the others for dinner at one of the many inexpensive restaurants around town. Then it was off to bed.
Sometime before the end of my trip, I realized that I was having a once-in-a-lifetime, perfect dive trip. I may never get to dive like this again, with such freedom. In a year or two, Lee will retire, and Enomis Divers will take on new ownership. Without them, it just wouldn’t be the same. I had to quickly move past my sadness over Buddy and embrace the moment. This is the kind of diving divers dream of, and I was going to take advantage of every moment.
Other random events that occurred, in no particular order:
1. There was a big shakeup at a local restaurant near the shop. One of the staff stole an ipad from one of the owners, and we watched as police were called and an investigation took place. The excitement ended as all the staff were fired, and the owner started interviewing new servers and cooks as we watched. When you live on an island, this stuff is better than a soap opera!
2. One night, there was a lightning storm over the island. It was like fireworks, big electric forks shooting across the clouds and down to the ground. I have never seen so much lighting in my entire life. It went on for more than an hour, and the thunder rattled the walls of my apartment.
3. Since Lee and Anita didn’t have a night dive scheduled, I went into one shop to ask them about it. They gave me the runaround, saying that they couldn’t let me go on a night dive unless I dived with them first, so they could see “how I am in the water”. I informed them politely that I am an MSDT instructor, with experience teaching on the island, and they can bet their asses I am just fine “in the water.” They asked Lee, and Lee said I was fine when I wasn’t blowing bubbles up his ass (a little prank I played once), which they didn’t think was funny. Then they said there might not be room for me on the boat. In response, I walked down the street to West End Divers, and asked to get on the boat for their night dive. “No problem,” they said. No questions, no hassles.
The night dive was very nice, although I was a bit annoyed to be stuck with a group of advanced students, who spent the first ten minutes doing skills on the sand. Even so, I saw a big king crab and a bazillion lobsters, as well as a lionfish swooping in for the kill. When we got to the surface, I heard everyone shouting, “Agh! Sea wasps and jellyfish everywhere!!” so I inflated my BCD to max and held my hands up out of the water to avoid being stung (I have a long wetsuit so I was pretty well protected). I arrived on the boat unscathed, but the others had welts everywhere. One lady was so shaken up she had dropped one of her fins, and the divemaster went back into the water (shirtless!!!) to get it. We spotted it over the side and circled it with our lights so he could find it. He came back with a couple of nice welts on his rippled abs, which I guess makes him très manly. But when I looked over the boat, I saw millions of them, from large to small, swarming on the surface, attracted by the boat lights. Their white bodies gleamed with iridescent light. They sure are beautiful (if painful) little buggers. As a side note, I missed having Han as my dive buddy, especially since I couldn’t take a picture of all the jellyfish. Note to self: Buy Underwater Camera.
4. Fish buying FAIL. One afternoon, I decided to have a dinner party at my house, since Han and Alejandra don’t have a kitchen at their hostel. So we go hunting for fresh fish. We talk to a local fisherman, and he tells us to come back at sundown when he’s back from fishing. So Han and I buy all the ingredients for fish soup, only to come back at sundown to find that the fisherman didn’t catch anything. So we go back to the place with a half a chicken bought at a local restaurant, and have vegetable soup instead. It all tasted just fine anyway, and it was nice to sit on the deck with my friends, drinking Coronas and talking about diving.
5. DM-ing again. One morning, I show up for diving and there are 4 fundivers in the shop. Lee asks me if I want to take them, and I say “sure.” So Han and I tag-team the fundivers. I lead the dive, taking point, and Han stays behind keeping tabs on the two open water divers (the other two divers were more experienced fundivers off the cruise ship). It was an eventful dive—in the first attempt at descent, one of the open water divers didn’t have enough weight so I handed Han one of mine to give him, then one of the two cruise shipper’s expensive camera floods and we have to ascend to get it back on the boat before it breaks completely. After that, things went a bit more smoothly—at least, until one of the cruise shippers saw an eagle ray and took off, dropping down to about 90 feet before we finally got her back up to a reasonable depth again. She stayed low most of the dive, despite Han and I asking her repeatedly to come up to our level. To boot, the other cruise shipper ran out of air after 45 minutes, making it a short dive (usually, Han and I dive for 60). Despite these setbacks, it was fun to play DM again, and Lee even offered me instructor work. Sadly, I hadn’t paid my PADI membership dues so I couldn’t teach. Besides, I was on vacation! So when the cruise shippers decided to go on the 11am dive, Han and I wisely passed, waiting for the 2pm dive when we would be free as birds (or fish, as it were).
Okay, so if you actually read this far, you’ve heard all about the high highs and the low lows of my Roatan trip, my Buddy and fish-buying failures and my diving and divemastering successes. So everyone can just stop pestering me about my whereabouts and whatdoings. I mean, really, people, get a life!! Just kidding. You know I love you all.
Until next time…
