/tags/roatan-tours.rss en-us Before you pack your regulator away, there’s one prime dive destination that may well have eluded your attention. The tropical paradise marine park island of Roatan in Honduras is an underwater world teeming with parrot fish, sea turtles and sharks. Roatan is a small island, 60 miles across, just off the coast of Honduras. The island is a prime dive site—one of the best dive sites in Central America—hosting the second largest reef in the world after Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, and attracting dive enthusiasts from all over the globe to dive Roatan. While the ocean bed shimmers pure white sand amid the dense reef, sea turtles venture as far into shore as to be almost visible from the beach. You need only snorkel 20–30 metres off Tabyana beach in West Bay Village before you are swimming with 3-foot parrot fish, sea turtles, and a reef “drop off” that’s more than 25 metres deep. This is paradise found, and after a fine morning of great snorkeling or diving, with near-perfect visibility, the nearby beach bars, restaurants and Roatan hotels beckon you for lunchtime Mai Tais and Long Islands. All along the kilometre beachfront of West Bay Village, native island fisherman will take you out for snorkeling and mangrove tours, and there are several professional dive organizations and dive resorts in Roatan. The locals have deep knowledge of the island that you could never obtain from a book, and it’s all presented in an affable and joyous island personality that seems to permeate the whole of Roatan, despite the fact that 75 percent of Roatan’s inhabitants live in shanty towns and barely scrape a living together. Most tourists that currently visit Roatan do so to enjoy the splendid underwater world of the Roatan Marine Park; although the island has many more trinkets to offer, both on and off land. Coxen Hole is the urban centre of the south, and many other towns, such as French Harbour, have a colourful personality well worth seeing. Over the last decade, Roatan has increasingly become a developed tourism site, opening itself up to Caribbean cruise ships that dock at Coxen Hole. It also somehow manages to identify with its roots and not become tainted by the influx of tourism. Roatan’s character can be best seen in the mixture of its native Garifuna people and Spanish Hondurans. The Garifuna were formerly referred to as the “Black Carib” under the British Commonwealth administration, which took control of St. Vincent from the French in 1797, and deported the Garifuna to Roatan, the largest of the Bay Islands. Utila and Guanaja are the other main inhabited islands in the Bay Islands, a part of Honduras, which also have great diving and snorkeling sites. There are eighteen “departments” in the Bay Islands, each headed by a governor. The main hub of tourists concentrates in an area of Roatan known as West Bay Village, and West End, where most of the Roatan hotels and dive resorts are located. West Bay is where most of the luxury accommodation is. West End is a 5-minute water taxi ride away, and is less dressed to suit, but retains more island character, and is the main go-to place for a lot of divers. No article on Roatan would be complete without mention of this guy: Captain Karl Stanley. Self-titled Capt. Stanley is an American living on the island who advertises in the local brochures that he’ll take you down 2,000 feet in a submarine that he’s built himself. He’s generally regarded on Roatan with mixed opinions, although, apparently, several tourists have done it and claim it to be an incredible once-in-a-lifetime experience. Mon, 31 Oct 2011 13:15:04 +0000 http://www.thecircumference.org/experiences/roatan-marine-park http://www.thecircumference.org/experiences/roatan-marine-park