An Island by Any Other Name

If you just read the word Útila, the name of an island in Honduras Bay, it’s pronounced OO-tee-lah. It is, after all, a Spanish word, and it tells you how to pronounce it, since the stress is not on the penultimate syllable. But if you go to the island, you’ll mostly hear people saying, “you-TILL-uh”. This is not because the word violates the usual rules for spoken Spanish, but because most of the people that you as a foreign tourist would encounter there are other foreign tourists and ex-pats, largely USian.

They’re all over the place: in restaurants and bars, in stores, on the beaches and on the streets. Rather filling the streets, which creates something of a problem. All over Central America, at least all the places we’ve been so far, the streets and sidewalks are often masses of motion. People are moving about on foot, on bicycles, scooters, motorcycles, tuc-tucs, cars, buses and more. It all works quite well because, for the most part, everybody is repectful of others and they want everybody to get where they’re going, all in one piece.

But on Útila, the streets are populated with foreigners and their foreign ways. And the spirit of cooperation, of traffic management by consensus (on which more later), is largely absent. In its place is the pattern one usually sees in the States: “out of my way, I’m in a hurry.”

And this doesn’t apply only to traffic. Throughout Central America, people greet each other, whether they know them or not. When you encounter some one walking in the other direction, you usually exchange, “Buenos dias”, or just, “Bueno”, or even “¡Hola!” When a person walks into a restuarant, s/he’ll often greet everybody in it, and upon leaving say, “Buen provecho” to all. But not on Útila. There, the behavior is much closer to that of the States: an unspoken, “if you don’t have specific business with me, you don’t exist.”

Apart from all that, the island is pretty nice. And in fact, the above rant probably applies only to the part of the island centered around the dock where the ferry from the mainland lands. There are a number of other villages scattered around the 7×3.5-mile island, which unfortunately, we didn’t get a chance to see. In those, non-tourist villages, my guess is that the people interact in a manner more similar to what we’ve seen on the rest of our journey.

In the tourist area, there are approximately two activities available: diving and partying. The former also implies snorkeling, kayaking and other oceanic activities, and the latter usually implies mass quantities of alcoholic beverages. We mostly eschewed the latter, but some of us dabbled in the former. One of the many dive centers on the island offers “fun dives”. After an hour or so of instruction, you suit up and go down with a dive-master keeping close tabs on you and your equipment, doing for you all the things you would have learned to do yourself in a full certification class. You dive to a maximum of 18 meters, for about 40 minutes, and see lots of marine life.

I wasn’t sufficiently interested to justify the expense, but Elizabeth and Joe gave it a try. Then Joe went down again. And then two more times the next day. I guess he liked it. Maybe he’ll even blog about it.

We spent two days on the island. The afternoon and evening of the first we spent in an absolutely beautiful room in a little hotel on the bay. It had a little balcony overlooking the water, with a porch swing on it, excellent beds and other furnishings, and plenty of space. We loved it for a few hours, and then the toilet exploded. Sigh. The replacement room was not nearly as wonderful.

After Joe’s second morning underwater, we packed up and caught the ferry back to the mainland, remounted Rocinante, and headed out for parts West.