I get an alternating taste of two worlds in Roatan, Honduras. The first is the glinting, too bright taste of tourism. I’ve just stepped off a cruise ship, so technically I am a tourist. The pier storefronts are freshly painted and cheerful. The kiosks with their vendors advertise fresh drinks, fresh food, the perfect gifts. My plan is to get beyond the shops and the lines of tour guides who walk next to me, thrusting maps under my nose, pointing out the features of the island, trying to convince me to take their tour, to get in their taxis, to pay them. It’s a hard job to do. It’s a hard job to be subjected to when all I really want to do is walk around the town.
I’m four days into a week-long writers’ retreat on The Liberty of the Seas, and this is my first time to Honduras.
Intent on avoiding the most touristy of experiences, I nearly make it to the end of the tour guide line without collecting a guide. I’m free and clear. Or so I think. But no, not so fast. As I walk on, one guide comes alongside me. “I do walking tours,” he says. I figure he’ll give me an opportunity to accept or deny the service, that at some point there will be a negotiation or transaction. He does not. I don’t press him. I don’t tell him to go away. Suddenly, I don’t mind the company even if I have to pay for it. As we walk, he shows me his tourism card, a way to ensure me that I’m in safe hands, and introduces himself as Victor. We make our way down the sidewalk and he tells me facts about the island and what we’re seeing, “There is a bank. That is a restaurant,” and I find out that he is twenty-three, and has never left the thirty-seven-mile long island of Roatan. Victor speaks English, Spanish, and Creole, he has a seven-year-old daughter, lives on the top of a hill with a spectacular view of the town and the sea (he points out the hill, but I don’t get to climb it to see where he lives or the view that he has from there). It’s from him that I get the briefest taste of what it is to be a local on an island just like this one.
I do.
We pass some children sitting in the shade of the entryway. There are children in the open plaza. Boys lined up with a uniformed officer leading them in a march, in saluting, in standing at attention. The girls are in a separate group on the other side of the plaza.
“Do they have to join the military?” I ask.
“It’s not mandatory,” Victor tells me. “We don’t have to join.”
We stand for a minute while I watch the exercises thinking about mandatory and non-mandatory military service and then we head back out to walk past more restaurants, houses, banks, and shops with their colorful paint and green-leafed fruit trees.
A bit later, we stand on the edge of a short pier and Victor tells me how he used to come jump in the water here after school to cool off. How the kids from the school come here to swim too. It’s hot. And I think about jumping in myself as I stare at the view. Off to the right is the cruise ship. Off to the left is a lush, green island. Victor tells me that the island has been privately purchased and is used for tourism purposes. None of the locals can use it.
It’s not fair. But so much of life isn’t. Victor might not hear what I say, even if he does, he shrugs it off. It’s the way things are. We keep walking.
On the bridge, I stop to take a picture.
“Do you swim here?” I ask, mostly for something to say.
“No,” Victor points to the houses that are near the water. “Too much trash and sewage.”
I do not think about jumping in.
We come to the road that will circle us back to where we started from.
“This is where I had my accident when I was eight,” Victor says as we walk up the slight incline and follow the road as it curves left. It’s a bit of a blind curve. He’d been riding his bike and got clipped by a car and dragged down the road. He shows me the scar on his leg, tells me how he woke up in the hospital, about the long time it took for the wound to heal. Now, today, he walks without a limp. With the still noticeable scar tissue running from his knee to his ankle, that seems like a beautiful miracle.
Switching places with me so that he’s walking on the outside and I’m in the safer inside position, we come up on a man standing with his hand on the back of a folding chair outside a walled in area.
“He fell out of a tree and can’t work so I help him when I can,” Victor tells me. He takes money out of his pocket and approaches the man.
“Victor, my friend,” the man says, fingers closing around what Victor gives him. “You take good care of me.” He smiles at me.
“I only have American dollars,” I say.
The man smiles even bigger. “That is our money too,” he says.
I give him a five dollar bill.
Leaving the man behind us, we walk back to the road and past the walled trees. Near the end of the wall, Victor points. “That’s the tree he was climbing when he fell. He can’t chase off the people who come to take the fruit anymore.”
Even on an island that’s only thirty-seven miles long, a man’s walled off trees are still not his own. Not safe from thievery. But what need do those who come to take the fruit have? Especially during a pandemic when the cruise ships don’t come as often as they used to.
Coming around a corner, we pass a man who says something that makes Victor laugh. I can’t tell if he spoke in English, Spanish, or Creole. It doesn’t matter to me. I don’t ask. Even so, after a beat, Victor says, “He said he could tell we went far because of how sweaty we are.”
My shirt has large wet patches. I’ve almost (almost) stopped trying to wipe off the beads that form and drip off my face. This is the Caribbean. This is heat and humidity. Later, when I check, my phone’s weather app shows Roatan at 87 degrees with a Feels Like of 98 degrees and a humidity level of 70%.
For a moment, I wonder how these tours usually work for Victor and if I’ve made him walk more than he should have.
We pass by the cemetery.
“Can I go in?” I ask, thinking of other cemeteries I’ve been in; Highgate Cemetery outside of London, the plague cemeteries of Prague, Restland where my grandparents are buried.
Victor walks me around to the entrance. The graves are raised boxes and don’t seem to be laid out in a discernable order. The ground is uneven beneath my feet.
“Does anyone get cremated?” I ask.
“What is that?”
“Burned rather than buried?”
“No,” Victor says. “We don’t do that.”
Walking with Victor is like walking with a new friend, but I am still thinking about payment for this tour that I walked into. That he walked himself into. We come out of the cemetery and Victor says, “Let me just take you to the zipline place, just to show it to you.” I’ve almost forgotten that was his original goal. I’ve not quite forgotten that I’m a tourist, but I had almost felt like a traveler again instead. He’s already told me the cost. “It’s much less than what you would pay through the ship,” he’d told me.
I think about saying no. But what else do I have to do today? I have a bit of cash on me. And I don’t mind supporting Victor or the local economy.
So we go to the ziplining place.
On our way out of the building where a woman takes my money and gives me a wrist band that shows I’ve paid, I ask Victor, “How much do I give you?” For everyone works for tips.
“As much as you feel like, mama,” he tells me.
He gets me handed over to a person who fits me with a harness and then ensures I get in the truck that will take me up to the first platform.
“I’ll be waiting for you here. I’ll make sure you get back safe to your ship.”
“Okay,” I say. And off I go. The truck driver leaves me and four other zipliners with our two new guides (I try to calculate how much cash I have for tipping everyone) and as they get us ready, I take pictures from this higher view.
I’d wanted a higher view. Now I’ve gotten it.
Ziplining with these two guides is great fun. There are sixteen platforms and the guides encourage us make each line-run its own adventure. They flip and spin and fly when it’s their turns.
“Can I do a flip?” I ask. They teach me and I do it. There’s no fear, no free fall of adrenaline. It’s just sheer, out-and-out fun.
Later, I tell this to another writer who had ziplined before and he says they weren’t allowed to do anything except zip from platform to platform. And here I am with the adventure guides and loving it. How lucky I am.
I go upside down. I do a handstand into a flip. I do the Superman. I take a side-swinging leap.
“She was made for the jungle,” one of the guides says.
One of the other zipliners tries the tricks as well, but the others are okay with a more conservative, traditional approach.
Eventually, we reach the final, swaying, wooden bridge and then arrive back to the beginning point. I hand each of the guides a five dollar bill. It’s hard to tell if I’m tipping correctly with the right amounts. But it’s what I have. It’s what I can do. The rest is set aside for Victor.
Just as promised, there he is waiting for me at the end.
“How was it?” he asks.
“Great fun,” I say.
Without much talking, we walk together back to the entrance to the pier. “I can’t go past this point,” he tells me. Again, it feels like the island he can’t visit. Another place with a door that closes in his face. I slip money into his hand.
“Thank you,” I say. I think of his seven-year-old daughter. I think of the places in his country that are off-limits to him. I think of the year and a half when no cruise ships visited Roatan. I think that he’s never left this place and doesn’t seem to want to. I hope the couple hours with me have been worth his time.
“If you think it was a good tour, tell everyone about me,” he says.
Pulling out my ship entry card, I smile and walk back into the world where I am a tourist like all these other people around me.
