Vehicular Awareness

Because Utila is so small, there are very few vehicles around. Most people get around on foot, by bike, by golf cart, or by scooter/motorcycle. Even the police ride around helmet-less on a beat-up old motorcycle, one cop behind the other (on one motorcycle, not two). As you can see below, main street is not very wide, so things can get a little hairy when it's packed with people and the locals want to fly by on their scooters. It was also easy to see the groups of travelers who were new to the island -- they tended to walk 4 or 5 people abreast, blocking the entire road, but not realizing that despite the lack of a centerline, traffic is still 2-way. A couple of scooter scares later, and they all learn to walk on the right.

The Town

The main town on the island is officially known as East Harbour, but everyone refers to it as Utila. It has a population of 2500 and very few streets. Most everything is along Main Street, which parallels the shore, with a couple of streets that head away from the waterfront.

This the main intersection in town where you'll find the ferry dock, City Hall, restaurants, bars, dive shops, stores, real estate agents, churches and banks.

For the most part, the town is quite clean, with the occasional junky lot here and there, or a rusted out bulldozer sitting across the street from a restaurant on main street.

Wal-Mart.

Zellers.

The research institute dedicated to the largest fish in the seas -- the whale shark. We never saw a whale shark other than the one on this building, but if you wanted to, Utila is the place to go. This building is also a part of the Bay Islands College of Diving -- the dive shop that we chose.

Luckily, we never needed to shop here.

There are also some nice quaint houses tucked away near the back of town.

The Coast

Jenny and I left wintery mountains for summery seas, so it was a treat just to sea the different coastlines, shores and beaches.

Chepes -- the main beach in town.

Going to snorkel off the beach by our place.Nice.

Nicer.

Nicest.

The Hammock

We spent the first part of our trip enjoying the outdoors in a couple of plastic deck chairs. This was unacceptable. So I made a trip down to the local hammock store, did a horrible job of bartering for a "very expensive to make, high quality" Honduran hammock, then took it back to the gazebo, where nearly every connecting knot systematically came undone every time we laid in it.

We eventually got the knots re-tied and were able to settle in to the hammock and experience a state of uninhibited laziness, with a strong focus on watching the waves. One of our most commonly uttered phrases became "I'll be in the hammock..."


A little problem arose because neither of us wanted to get stuck in the plastic chairs, so leaving the hammock for any reason usually meant that it got occupied pretty quickly.

We are married now though, so we overcame our fear of the hammock breaking under our combined weight and learned to share.