This April we set out for Roatan, Honduras. Roatan is a little 49 square mile (127 sq km) island in the Caribbean about 40 miles from the northern Honduran coast. Read on to discover how we spent our week.
West End
When looking for a home base we narrowed our choices down to two, West End or West Bay. The West End has a decent amount of economical Air BnB accommodations while West Bay is where most of the luxury resorts are located. Since we meant to spend most of our time under the sea, we based ourselves in a simple and relatively inexpensive air bnb in the West End. Just steps away from West End Road, we were centrally located within walking distance to a local sunset beach, an array of dive shops, restaurants, markets, and cafes.
Our days consisted of diving and our nights consisted of eating and swimming at the public beach.
Some of our favorite restaurants/cafes in Roatan are:
- Bean Crazy Coffee Shop
- Beachers (Seafood)
- The Drunken Sailor (Italian Food)
- Sandy Buns (Breakfast)
- Calelu’s Balleadas (traditional Honduran streetfood)
Diving
We spent a majority of our time in Roatan underwater, scuba diving. Roatan is a great place to learn to dive and to get certified. We chose Roatan because Cara was looking to get her advanced open water diver cert, in preparation for our upcoming trip to the Galapgaos Islands.
Roatan has over 100+ dive sites. We went on a total of 12 dives with West End Divers.
Our diving consisted of 1 night dive at “Dixie’s Place”, 1 wreck dive at “El Aguila”, and a mix of reef dives, wall dives, channel dives and swim throughs at the following dive sites:
- Mandy’s Eel Garden
- Bethany’s Place
- The Bite
- Fish Den
- West End Wall
- Half Moon Bay
- Overheat
- Blue Channel
- Mickey’s Place
- Pablo’s Place
We got to see a variety of marine life including: Eagle Ray, Sea Turtles, Drum Fish, Trunk Fish, Parrot Fish, Scorpion Fish, Bearded Toad Fish, King Crab, Moray Eel, sea horse, lobster, grouper, rare pipe horse, pipe fish, squid, and much more.
Fishing Charter
While most of our time was spent Scuba diving, we did take a couple days to explore some other activities Roatan had to offer. One of those is chartering a fishing boat. We and another couple chartered a boat and trolled the waters up and down the island looking to catch some big game.
While we didn’t catch any monsters, we were lucky enough to catch 3 small black fin tuna. While on the boat the deck hand cut up one of our 3 fish into sashimi and served it to us right on the boat, now that’s what I call fresh!
West Bay
On another of our “off days”we decided to take a water taxi trip over to West Bay. Like I mentioned earlier, West Bay is full of resorts, most likely because this is where the sand is the whitest and the water is the clearest.
We spent the day lounging on the beach with some drinks, swimming in the water, and enjoying food at a local favorite restaurant “Totally Taco”.
We truly enjoyed our time in Roatan, and definately recommend a visit to any one, but specifically to those wanting to learn to dive.
