Honduras Travel

CoCo View Diving Resort in Roatan, Honduras is a resort that primarily caters to scuba divers. It is a small community of bungalows, cabanas and buildings on a secluded peninsula and not a traditional luxury resort with fancy restaurants and clubs.

CoCo View has a very tropical feel, with flocks of Hummingbirds darting around, palm trees and other lush tropical greenery everywhere, and no cars at all. All of the bungalows and cabanas are directly on the water. Diving is sensational, with two walls and a wreck right off the resort beach (see map) and dozens of coral reef/wall dive sites reachable via dive boat within minutes.

All divers know that getting into the waters isn’t cheap. What if we told you about a place with so many dive shops that prices are incredibly competitive, you can easily (and safely, of course) get scuba-certified, and it’s on the rich and colorful waters of the second-largest reef system—the Caribbean’s Mesoamerican Barrier Reef? West End Village is what we’re after!

From the moment he stepped onto the tarmac at the airport at the foot of the central mountains of Honduras, Ironton businessman Robert Slagel entered a world of shocking contrasts.

“As soon as we got off the plane, there was a guard with a machine gun,” he said. “In the lobby of the airport, there were private individuals guarding luggage with machine guns.”

The Ironton (Ohio) entrepreneur was part of three-person team from Christ Episcopal Church going as first-time missionaries to the poverty-stricken Central American country of Honduras. Joining Slagel were Laurel Baise of Ironton and the Rev. Sallie Schisler, vicar of the church.

In a delightful little turn of good timing, we arrived in Tegucigalpa the day before the beginning of the feast of the Feria de Suyapa. La Virgen de Suyapa is the patron saint of not only Honduras but, as of 1982, all of Central America. She usually lives in the small Iglesia de Suyapa, but on holidays she’s brought to the fancy Basilica de Suyapa. This is not too hard of a task since she’s only six centimeters tall.

Where’s it at?

Though the name suggests both mammal and fish, whale sharks are indeed sharks. These bus-size behemoths, found in tropical waters around the globe, can reach more than 12 metres in length and weigh 34 tonnes. Whale sharks are gentle giants, filter feeders that prefer small fish and plankton to people. They often swim with their massive mouths agape to hoover up their prey. Seeing one up close will leave you spellbound and feeling like Jonah.

We were bad tourists today: After four weeks of insisting on only local dishes, we had Wendy’s for lunch. Then we skipped Tegucigalpa’s Museo para la Identidad Nacional and watched a movie we had downloaded on iTunes while the rain — the whiplash of the tropical storm that was wrecking havoc on the Pacific beaches of Honduras’ neighbors — pounded against the metal roof above us.

Every trip has that point, when you’ve had your fill of cultural experiences and the familiar, even Wendy’s, sounds appealing. In a place like Honduras, that point might arrive a little sooner than in other places. Over the past month, we had quadrupled our life consumption from birth to present of fried chicken.