The Highs and Lows of Roatan

*All travel expenses for this trip were paid by Princess Cruises, but all opinions are my own

Beached fishing boat in West End Village

During my recent (and first) big-ship cruise aboard the Crown Princess, my pal Samantha and I took every opportunity to disembark and go on a shore excursion to see how Princess arranges for its passengers to experience the ship’s ports of call.

Our second shore excursion was to Roatán, the largest of Honduras’ Bay Islands, set in the Western Caribbean about 40 miles off the north-central coast of the mainland.

*For all our shore excursions, while still onboard the ship, we were given small white tickets with the tour’s name, code number and port, as well as what to bring and where/when to meet the tour.

The Crown Princess website’s tour description:

Excursion: Roatán Eco-Hike & West End Village
Price:            $99 per adult
Length:        About 4 ½ hours

Hikers will enjoy this guided hike through botanical gardens to the top of Carambola Mountain, an ideal location for bird watching, wildlife and photography. When you descent [sic] from the summit, fresh fruit and water is available and the use of restrooms. Then transfer to West End Village. Enjoy approximately 90 minutes to explore the village shops, restaurants and bars, or just relax at the beach and swim before returning to the ship.

My experience:

The Crown Princess pulled up to a long walking ramp beside Roatán (far removed from the mainland and its 2009 political coup), with views of the swanky Paya Bay beach resort, aerial tram, and rusty shipwrecks. The port itself, a shopping complex called Mahogany Bay, looks like a colorful, spread-out IKEA. It was shiny spanking new when we arrived on February 16, 2010, having officially opened just five days earlier.

The port at Mahogany Bay

Once aboard our mini-bus, we were greeted by a slightly bored Garifuna guide with a thick accent and a tendency to drone on without making eye contact. The transition from Mahogany Bay to Roatán proper involved a tourist police checkpoint with officers prepared for riot combat.

The message:  You have things. People here don’t. We’re not thrilled to see you, but we’ve got your back.

Along the winding drive to Carambola Botanical Gardens were chickens, dogs, tattered shacks and mansions in progress. Carambola itself is a moderate tour group draw, and while we weren’t exactly alone by the restrooms, there was space enough for everyone.

It was an overcast day, and the jungle glowed a rich and loamy forest green. Our guide was a very young, skinny and again, Garifuna woman (a descendant of West African slaves and formerly indigenous Arawak Indians) with glasses and dress flats who knew every plant on our trail and had never traveled outside Honduras. Several people in our group were also infrequent travelers and had never seen palms or epiphytes in the wild; she answered all their questions with a teasing tilt of her head and a patient smile.

The 1/2 mile hike wasn’t too adventurous for me, though the tropical plants here were gorgeous and the trail’s steep mountain incline was a challenge to my cardiovascular system. The view at the top is a beauty: lush foliage studded with deep pink bougainvillea and small yellow flowers, all framing a blue-green sea (part of the world’s second longest barrier reef system). Far off and way below, we could just make out dolphins leaping high in the air at Anthony’s Key Resort.

Carambola Botanical Gardens

We saw no birds, but Samantha spied a couple of stunning butterflies, small and black with swatches of red. She was far less impressed by the army of big black ants that skittered pell-mell across the trail, especially the one who attached its pincers to her big toe. This hike fairly cries out for closed-toe, grippy-soled shoes (e.g., my magical, beloved and foot-unflattering Keens).

After shuffling our way to the bottom, we had a brief rest with fruit and water, then hit the small gift shop and its surprising array of Honduran goods. Samantha and I each picked up some Honduran coffee, Café Bella Vista; for $5, this made a perfectly packable and aromatic souvenir.

Then it was on to West End Village. Left to its own devices (albeit with some focused trash collection and improved sewage disposal), this might once again be the sweet little fishing village you can still see around the edges; instead, as a divers’/backpackers’ haven, I found it full of overfed tourists in wetsuits, incongruous Asian restaurants and spacy white kids with their hair in cornrows.

Along the one narrow dirt road through town, there were some relatively upscale-looking places reachable by docks out across the sea, but our mini-bus brought us to road’s end through a cloud of diesel fumes and a clog of precariously passing vans, buses, rental cars, motorbikes and stray dogs. We were deposited at the funky beach-shack Barefeet Bar (which had been touted to me by a guidebook-writing Twitter friend as the place she enjoyed most in town) and given 90-minutes’ worth of options: go wander and find a place to eat, or have a seat and enjoy the tour-complimentary fruit punch or powdered-mix ice tea and fried fish fingers.

Since the latter would have been better suited to a tour group of nine year olds, and it took 20 minutes to learn from the slow-moving proprietress that they were out of many other foods on the menu, we went a-wandering. On this gray, intermittently rainy day, the sea was dirty and storm-tossed and peeling fishing boats were beached along almost every patch of sand.

Scenes from West End Village

By the time we’d taken a few photos, there wasn’t time to consider a proper meal, since service here is more suited to a relaxed vacation vibe than the need to keep to a cruise ship’s iron clad schedule. Ironically, though our small tour group ended up with 20 minutes to kill, our guide was unwilling to switch the script and move us on; having all seen what we could see, we all sat uselessly near the Barefeet Bar on docks and benches, kicking our feet in the sand until it was finally time to leave.

Our drive back wended it way through Coxen Hole, Roatán’s big city, where other cruise ships like Norwegian and Royal Caribbean anchor just offshore. Onshore were a jumble of cramped market stalls, clogged with cheap shell jewelry, woven goods and wood carvings; pregnant women holding hands with dirt-smudged toddlers; a few teenagers with Thalidomide-esque birth defects; and old men perched amidst rubble just shooting the breeze. The city center was a maze of pastel concrete and historical statues, and all the while our guide droned on, her quiet voice lost to the open windows.

My take:

By the time we returned to the ship, we were really hungry and all but fell on Greek salads and tossed lemon-shrimp at the Crown Princess’ delicious International Cafe. Had I to do this tour over again, I would have either: 1) packed a couple of Clif bars and buffet-swiped bananas, 2) picked up some duty-free snacks at Mahogany Bay, or 3) run directly to a seaside restaurant once in West End Village.

Or skipped West End Village altogether. For me, the town was a bummer as a short tour destination, but maybe if you gave yourselves over to it for half a day or more (with sunnier weather), you might better grasp its shabby charms.

Better yet, for a more completely satisfying tour experience, I would take the advice of several folks we overheard on the ship and pair a lush and frondy Carambola hike with the Gumbalimba Park, an open-air jungle zoo with parrots, monkeys and more.

Or, I might skip the tours altogether and rent kayaks to cruise around the island and see native plants and animals without the diesel fumes or crowds.

___________________________________________

See also
All Aboard the Crown Princess, Pt. 1
All Aboard the Crown Princess, Pt. 2
Turtles, Hell and Rum Cake: Grand Cayman