The Cruise: Isla Roatan

Wednesday morning we got up and got ready to spend the day on Isla Roatan, a small island owned by Honudras. This was a very painful morning. Aaron observed that I hobbled around like an old man, due to the pain in my legs from the sunburn.
We just felt wiped out that whole day. That made our chosen excursion tiring and less fun.
Here we were just pulled up to a dock, so we disembarked and made our way to the waiting area for our excursion. We followed a big group to some buses and boarded. We drove through the jungley island, which was pretty cool. We went through the capital city, which was so different from anything you find in the US.
Just something we saw from the bus.

We finally made it to Gambalya Park. I think. That might the wrong name. We were given lots of rules and instructions on how to be around the monkeys that we would be seeing and interacting with. They made it sound like there would be monkeys all over the place climbing on you and trying to steal your stuff.
We then followed our tour guide around with the big group and looked at different things around the park. We saw lotsa iguana's, hummingbirds, pretty plants and flowers, and a cashew tree.
And this tree.

They also took us through some caves and stuff, which were hot and stuffy, to show us diaramas about a pirate. I could have done without a lot of that touring. But maybe it was because of the pain and exhaustion.
Soon we came to this bridge.

Only eight people were allowed on it at a time, and it took forever to get our group across. Some people went VERY slowly. It was fun and wobbly though. Definitely good to hang on.
On the other side of the bridge we came to the McCaw area. It is the national bird. Or maybe just the island mascot.


Then we got to have them on our shoulders. The bird on me immediately squacked in my ear, which was LOUD, so I flinched, which drew attention to my braids or something, and the bird spend most of its time on my head chewing on and picking at my hair. And my hair was nasty. All the walking, plus the humidy, does not for clean hair make. Sweaty stuff. And they made me take my hat off earlier so it wouldn't be stolen by any monkeys.


Aaron's bird was much more mellow and just posed nicely.
After the mccaws we went to the monkey area. The advertisement promised we would see and interact with three kinds of monkeys, but no. There were only the cute white-faced monkeys. No howler monkeys and no spider monkeys. And they weren't just jumping all over the place. Most were up in the trees ignoring all the humans. On was being bribed onto peoples shoulders for a quick picture, and the other was a younger monkey on a leash. That's the one we got to handle. It was really cute.
I got my turn and the monkey immediately zoned in to the beads on my shirt. He spent the whole time handling them, chewing on them, and trying to rip them off.




Then Aaron got his turn.
Then Aaron made the mistake of making a little clicking sound with his mouth to get the monkey's attention or something. It worked. It spent the rest of the time trying to pry Aaron's mouth open and reach into it. They had warned us about chewing gum in front of the monkeys because they would want to have what you were eating. Maybe this monkey thought Aaron was chewing gum.


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It wasn't long before our group had to leave the monkey area. We went back to a pavilion and just kind of sat around. There was a beach there, and a swimming pool, but exposing more of our skin to the sun didn't sound in any way appealing.
I did buy some souveniers from some local vendors. Oh, and we bought a package of pictures from this. You may have noticed the difference in quality of some of the pictures posted. Our camera produced the poor quality ones. We had about 48 pictures of the both of us, which cost $20. The same price for the ONE photo the day before.
That night on the ship we watched a magician act. It was entertaining.