wastin' away in Margaritaville

Utila is an odd little town based on an industry of backpackers and divers. The climate is hot and humid, over 30C every day and very warm even at night. Its population is 2000 locals, 2000 tourists, and 2000 "tourist locals" - non-citizens who are living and working here. There is one main street through town, following the coastline for a couple kilometres, with a few smaller residential streets perpendicular to the main road. The main road is lined with restaurants, bars, dive shops, hotels, 3 churches, 2 banks, a fire station, a theatre, and a few homes. There are 2 beaches, one at each end of the main road. Wanting the full experience of Utila, I decided to stay at the "Margaritaville Beach Hotel" rather than another place with some bland, nondescript name. The traffic here immediately made me think of the Jetsons - imagine going to another world and finding new forms of the appliances and cars, but nothing else is changed. So Utila, instead of car and truck traffic, has 4x4 ATV's, dirtbikes, scooters, golf carts, and the occasional light truck mixed in with the pedestrians and cyclists as there are no sidewalks. I've seen a couple cyclists get annoyed after a motor vehicle passed them too closely - pretty familiar to me as a Toronto cyclist. Arriving here I think I felt a greater culture shock than when I arrived in Guatemala from Canada. The level of cost and affluence is so much greater here: one morning with 2 dives costs $35US, or about Q280 at Q8/US$1. A (male) campesino in the coffee fincas near the Escuela de la Montaña would have to work 12h/day for about 2 weeks to earn this much, a female campesina more like 24 days, assuming of course they didn't have anything else to spend that money on. I probably wouldn't have come, and wouldn't have stayed a full week if I hadn't agreed a couple months ago to meet a friend from Canada here to go diving. However I'm here, and the diving experience is truly remarkable. It would be a wild fantasy if it weren't true. Breathing underwater with the fish, experiencing weightlessness, floating along the edge of a coral cliff that disappears into blue nothingness. All this amongst swimming hoses, balls, boxes, discs, tiny umbrellas that move by opening and closing, fierce-toothed predators, and other curious shapes in black, white, camoflage, red, yellow, the fluorescent blue of those nifty LED Xmas lights, with other colours and bizarre combinations thereof. I'm told by more experienced eyes though that this reef is in very bad shape, and this is an interesting story. The area is heavily over-fished to provide the fresh local fare that visitors to a tropical isle expect, and the fish are actually very few compared to 20 years ago or to other less impacted reefs. In particular, the natural predators of the damselfish: tarpon, marlin, permits, sailfish, barracuda, groupers, and shark have been overfished to the point that damselfish are doing better than ever. Damselfish survive by farming a patch of algae on the coral, and fearlessly defending it from any other algae-browsers. As a result the coral is green, covered in algae, to the extent that the reef itself may be out-competed by the algae and die. The dive shop I attended (Bay Islands College of Diving) has a shark research centre and prides themselves in their environmental awareness, and as a result don't serve any fish in their restaurant. Of course they have all the other meats instead, but do have a few decent veg options too. The island has one recompression chamber, for divers who go too deep for too long and have nitrogen bubbles form in their blood - a fatal or paralyzing condition without a recompression chamber. Interestingly, many users of this chamber have been local fishermen diving deeper and deeper in search of lobster which have been fished out of the shallower waters. One of my highlights here was a specialty course on whale-shark ecology. We had a 3-hour lecture where we learned all about whale sharks, which I had never heard of before. The following day, we motored around looking for whale sharks which the on-board scientists wanted to tag and observe. I saw a whale shark from in the water, with snorkel gear, about 3m (10ft) away. Not to worry though, whale sharks filter-feed mostly on algae, and are not dangerous to humans. One more quick note. A certain local character offers historical tours of the island. I visited him to inquire, and although I didn't take the tour he chatted for about half an hour about the island. He claims it is the island where Robinson Crusoe was shipwrecked, and where the fictional story "Treasure Island" took place. He says that looters spent years finding and emptying the treasures on and around this island, while he tried in vain to alert the authorities. Someone else told me he was a crackpot. It deserves further research.