Do you know about the lionfish? Some might call the lionfish a beautiful fish. Some even go so far as to purchase lionfish to keep in their aquarium and show off to their friends and family. And maybe, at one time, that was a reasonable sort of thing to do. But not now, not here in Utila. Here we like our lionfish dead. That’s right… the only good lionfish is a dead lionfish.

Why? Because they are not supposed to be here. The lionfish are an invasive species to to the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean. They were introduced somewhere around the mid 1990’s on the Florida coast, and have been spreading like the plague ever since. Already their population levels are orders of magnitude greater than the levels found in their native habitat. That’s because here they have no natural predators and they breed like submersible rabbits. It’s estimated that at least 27% of the current population would have to be killed monthly just to maintain population levels. If you are trying to reduce their numbers, or better yet eliminate them entirely, you’re going to have to kill a lot of lionfish.

To make matters worse, aside from just being here, they are harming the local reef ecosystems. They have a habit of eating a lot, compromising the survival of native fish species. Over the long term the lionfish’s appetite could lead to an 80% reduction in reef diversity. That’s a lot of fish species that we won’t be able to see anymore. Bad lionfish.

But There is a Silver Lining:

Lionfish are delicious. They fry up really nice, they are good in stew, and make wonderful ceviche. It’s also a lot of fun to hunt them with spears. They are the only marine life you are allowed to hunt while diving, so they do add a whole new dynamic to diving that wouldn’t exist without them. For a lot of people, killing lionfish has become second nature, and it’s almost expected that you bring along a spear when fun diving. You can kill as many as you like, and there is no shortage of them either. Seeing 3 or 4 in a dive is almost routine.

Annually, the dive shops on Utila organize a lionfish derby and cookout to promote the new sport. In 2011, they managed to catch a little over 300 lionfish in a single day. All of them hit the grill and were eaten up by the hungry masses in mere minutes. And let me tell you, everything was delicious.

Lionfish Lunch

If you want to kill lionfish, help the environment, and get free lunch all at the same time, there’s a few things you can do. First, plan for a few days of fun diving. You can’t bring a spear along during any courses, so just plan on making a few extra dives just for fishing. If you don’t already have your advanced certification you might consider getting it. The advanced certification extends your depth limits from 18 metres down to 30 metres. Lionfish love the deeper water, so your odds of seeing some you can reach improves dramatically. Finally, ask about diving on the North Side of Utila. Lionfish numbers are substantially greater on the North Side, and your kill count will benefit from that.

Our first underwater video! A Lionfish Killing Compilation.

When you are not diving, it’s nice to get out and stretch the legs some times. I really appreciate a good walk. Especially after living on our little Cays for the past two months. It turns out that diving is a lot different from walking, and my legs have more or less forgotten what walking is all about.

The problem is that Jewel and Pigeon Cays, where we live, have but a single sidewalk between them. The length of this sidewalk is somewhat inadequate, spanning around 400 meters, and I feel like the locals will start to think me crazy if I start speed walking laps every day.

Jewel Cay and Pigeon Cay

But the island of Utila, which we have come to call the mainland, has a lot more to offer by way of walking. There’s enough roadways to walk around for a few hours without doubling back on yourselves as long as you avoid the traffic. You can go to the fresh water caves at Pumpkin Hill, and you could check out the “drug plane”.

There is a crash site about an hour’s walk from town on the North side of the island, not far off the main road and the beach. Local legend has it that the plane crash landed in the middle of the night several years ago. When the police arrived on the scene, they discovered 1 ton of cocaine hidden in the walls of the aircraft. At least that’s the explanation given for why the whole aircraft has been completely gutted. How much truth there is to the story, I couldn’t say.

Finding the plane can be a bit of a trick. We had a guide, who had been shown the site before. If you ask around, you should be able to find someone who knows roughly where it is. Once you turn off the beach and head back inland you find yourself in the most gruelling part of the hike bushwhacking through trees and vines, and balancing on sharp, uneven ground made from ancient uprooted coral mounds. It’s not exactly hard, but it’s not a walk in the park either. Wear a good pair of shoes.

Walking on Coral

The Cockpit

The Fuselage

Emergency Exit

Climbing on the Wreck

A Bit Broken Up

Posing for the Photo

Dear readers, friends, family. Ashley and I want to wish you all a very merry Christmas. I know it’s been a long time since we’ve seen many of you. Somewhere in the neighbourhood of 6 months, counting back to when we first started on this journey. Some of you we’ll see in the new year, and we are really looking forward to that, but for the most part, we’ll probably spend 2012 apart. I know it’s hard to stay in touch over such long distances and time, but we’re committed to keeping you up to date on what’s happening in our lives through our blog, facebook, twitter and email. We love hearing about what you’re up to as well, and have cherished every email, and blog comment that you’ve sent our way. In short, we just wanted to say… we miss you.

Here’s a little update on what Christmas has been like for us on the Cays (pronounced Keys)

It’s warm. It was 25 °C yesterday, and will probably hit 27-30 °C today. As you expect, there’s no snow, but we did have a healthy Christmas Eve rain shower yesterday which passed our test for a “white Christmas”.

Despite the lack of snow, there’s no lack of snowmen or decorations. Here’s photos of just a few. What’s really amazing is the amount of lights on display. Electricity here is really really expensive. But people cope by only turning their lights on for a few hours after sunset each day. A simple energy conserving trick you could try at home… maybe next year.

Christmas Decorations

Snowman Without Snow

We spent Christmas Eve with a couple of good Austrian friends, sharing a fabulous Christmas dinner in line with the Austrian tradition of celebrating on the 24th of December.  We had the best roast chicken, stuffing and homemade perogies in half a year, listened to the Hawksley Workman Christmas Album “Almost a Full Moon”, drank some rum and eggnog, and generally had a great time. By the end of the night, it really did feel like Christmas.

Ashley making perogies. The Nalgene water bottle doubled as a rolling pin!

Christmas Dinner

We were also invited for a pot-latch supper in Utila with the Captain Morgan’s staff. Unfortunately, we couldn’t be in both places at once… and a combination of boat captains taking the day off, weather, and a headache on Ashley’s part forced us to send our regrets. Merry Christmas guys, we’ll try and make it out for the next social.

That brings us to the 25th – our traditional day of Christmas back home

We opened our Christmas presents this morning, a new dive computer shared between us (an essential piece of diving equipment for any serious diver), and a potato masher. We actually used the potato masher last night to make the perogies, and it worked so much better than mashing with a fork!

If all goes well, we’ll get to try out our new dive computer this morning. Later for supper our landlords, some of the nicest people on the planet (we started the day with Christmas hugs from them), invited us over to their house for Christmas supper. We’re really looking forward to it.

That’s our Christmas!  When you get a chance, maybe drop us a line (through a comment or an email) and let us know how things went for you this holiday season.

Utila is a small island off the north coast of Honduras. It’s a fairly famous backpacker haunt because it’s the world’s cheapest place to learn how to scuba dive. An average certification course costs somewhere in the neighbourhood of $240-$270USD. When we left home, I had never heard of the place. Once we were on the road, It didn’t take long to meet people who had either already been to Utila, or were planning to go there.

If you recall, we had made plans to scoot through Honduras and spend some quality time volunteering in Nicaragua just as we were leaving Belize. After a lengthy bit of decision making, we decided we just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to get Ashley her open water scuba diving certification. I already had my certification from 11 years ago when I took the course along with most of my grade 12 class, and hadn’t been diving since. I’d never been diving anywhere near an ocean, and really wanted to give it a go.

We also figured that even if we couldn’t afford to do a lot of diving on this trip, we’d make good use of our certifications sometime down the road. It is a lifetime certification after all. So we planned a week long detour in Utila.

It was about the time we arrived that Hurricane Rina decided to pass by north of us. The weather wasn’t really that bad, as the hurricane did keep its distance, though the wind and waves were enough to keep the dive boats at bay for a few days. That gave us plenty of time to shop around for a good dive shop (of which there are a lot) and work out a low season discount. If you like the sound of the word discount, and are planning your own trip, plan on arriving during October or early November.

Then comes the tweet-up. That’s like a meet up, but with introductions and planning made through Twitter. We were fortunate to tweet-up with Talon and his son Steven from 1dad1kid.com. It was our first ever tweet-up and as luck would have it Talon is not only a super great guy, but he’s also an awesome scuba instructor. He was freelancing with a few shops, which luckily included the very same shop Ashley had picked out to do her course through… Captain Morgan’s Dive Centre.

By the time the winds had died down, Talon was secured as Ashley’s instructor, and she had already completed the theory portion of the class. Yes, becoming certified as a diver requires reading a manual, writing knowledge reviews, and a test on top of some skills in the water. It takes a bit of work, but it’s not so difficult that you need to worry about your ability to pass.

Talon and Ashley

I, on the other hand, spent most of my time in the hotel (included with the course!) reading books, watching movies, and trying to teach myself how to become a web programmer. For a few days at least. Each certification course comes with a couple of free “fun dives” so I had purchased a couple for myself so Ashley and I could dive together when she was officially certified. After two days of listening to all the amazing stories of spotted eagle rays, lobsters, trunk fish, and other cool marine animals I just couldn’t wait any longer. Not even the single day Ashley needed to finish her course. I decided to use my “fun dives” and then… I became hooked.

The truth is “I’m leaving tomorrow” constitutes the biggest lie told on this island. So far, our 1 week stay has been extended out over 6 weeks, and we’re certainly not leaving tomorrow.

At home in Honduras

We have always loved to cook and traveling around the world has not changed that one bit.  Cooking in a hostel is a bit different though, largely due to poorly stocked hostel kitchens.

In Central American hostels, for example, you have to overcome a few obstacles in the kitchen:

• No oven!
• Burners with limited temperature control
• Dull knives
• Probably no more than 1 pot and 1 frying pan

What we have come to love while traveling are simple dishes with easily found ingredients, that can be cooked in one pot with minimal fuss, and that smell and taste so good you’ll become the envy of every other hostel cooker.

Enter Hostelbookers.com and their #hostelkitchen approved recipes.  They are putting together a cook book just for us hostel cooks, created from entries like this, and voted on by their facebook fans.  For more details, check out their site here.

Coconut Curry:

Coconut Curry - Hostel Style

Ingredients:

3 – large potatoes (skinned, and cut into 1/2″ cubes)
5 – cloves of garlic, minced
1 – can of chickpeas
1 – can of spinach
1 – can of coconut milk
4 – tbsp curry powder
1 – tbsp salt

Directions:

In a large pot combine all ingredients.  Include the liquid from the canned chickpeas and canned spinach.

Cook on medium-high.

When it comes to boil, turn down the heat to low and continue boiling for 30 minutes.  There’s no need to stir… go read a book, have a beer, or hang out in the common room.

Serving:

Spoon curry into a couple of bowls or just eat it out of the pot.  There should be enough to comfortably feed 3-4 people.  As a couple, we usually make it as one big supper for the two of us, and then eat the leftovers for lunch or breakfast.  (It’s even tasty cold!)

It can also be served over rice (as pictured above), on quinoa, or with a side of bread.

Substitutions and additions:

These additions/substitutions work well:

• Add eggplant cut into 1/4″ cubes (love it)
• Add cauliflower (curried cauliflower is amazing)
• Substitute 2 plantains for 1 potato
• Use fresh spinach instead of canned.  You will need to add a little water if you do this.

Have a suitable recipe for a hostel kitchen?

Head over to the contest’s site and submit your own!

It finally happened… we found a place we just didn’t like. In fairness, we didn’t give Orange Walk much of a chance either. We spent only one night there, and were more than happy to be on the first bus out of town the next morning.

Before I get into why we didn’t like it, I should mention why we bothered to go there in the first place. According to our traveler’s bible (the Lonely Planet) Orange Walk is famous for two things – it’s home to Belize’s cheapest and best street food, and it’s the starting point for a river tour to the Lamanai Mayan ruins. We were less interested in the ruins, and much more interested in the food.

You see, Ashley and I love to eat. We’ve also become rather frugal (which is just a nice way to say we’re uber cheapskates) as we try our best to conserve our savings to extend our trip as much as possible. Naturally, street food has quickly become a staple for us when we’re not cooking in our hostel. It is both delicious and cheap and we love it a lot more than we probably should. The prospect of street food that was even more delicious and even more cheap than what we had grown accustomed to eating was too much to pass up. We had no choice but to go.

By this point, you are probably wondering just how good the street food was if it was worth a special trip.  So are we. Unfortunately for us, and our gourmet supper plans, the weather just didn’t cooperate. When supper time finally approached and our tummies started to grumble, the sky let loose one of the most torrential downpours that we had seen in a while. The rain washed the streets clean, and sent all of the vendors running for shelter, packing up whatever they had prepared to serve that night and taking it all home with them. We never tasted the famed street food of Orange Walk.

But that’s not why we hated it. If it were just rain, we would have gladly booked ourselves into the hotel for another night and waited for a nicer evening. What we hated was the way we were treated by the people. Specifically, the people who treated us like walking ATM machines. Which was pretty much everyone.

Before the rain hit, we had a few hours in the afternoon to walk around the town and get a feel for the place. In that brief period of time, we were approached continuously by locals trying to pressure us into buying a tour to the Lamanai ruins. It must be that everyone in town is on commission. I don’t think there was a person we met who didn’t try to sell us the tour. There was the man who sold us a tamale outside the bus station, two hotel owners, the driver of a white van who had to pull over on the road to try and sell us the tour, a fellow in the park, the baker, a gentleman who was out for an evening stroll with his wife and newborn baby, etc, etc.

Just when we’d had enough and were heading back to the privacy of our hotel room for a reprieve, someone had the nerve to call us “cheap ass white motherfuckers” because we refused to buy a cellphone from him in the middle of the street. It certainly didn’t help improve our opinion of the place at all.

When we made it back to our hotel room, and the rain started, we only needed to look at each other to know that we were not spending another day in Orange Walk.  Not even for the best street food in the country.

I guess we can’t love every place we visit.

I hate to stereotype, but sometimes you just have to. In this case I’m going to stereotype travelers. Of fellow travelers we meet on the road, we often find more often than not they fit into somewhat of a mould. For example, they are usually professionals, or on their way to becoming professionals. Thus we meet a lot of lawyers, doctors, engineers, teachers and grad students. I’d say the whole works of them have a very leftish view of politics, are spiritual in one way or another but not devout followers of any organized religion, drink beer, and smoke pot.

Being myself an ex-politician, an engineer, and recent pilgrim stumbling down the road of self enlightenment, I find I have a lot in common with the average traveler even without smoking pot. As you can imagine, when you get a big enough group of travelers together, in a chill laid back environment full of cheap booze, it’s easy to start talking in circles and try to solve all the world’s problems.

Here are some thoughts from a group of travelers on a balcony in Caye Caulker:

• The universe is infinitely large and infinitely small; all things in it are infinitely complex and infinitely simple
• The major problems of the world are easy to identify and just as easy to (theoretically) solve
• Even if everyone in the world wanted the world to change in the same way; the world would not change
• You can change the world by changing yourself
• Definition of Evil: when someone tries to do the best thing, but fails to consider the morality of their decision
• Accomplishments bring happiness
• Too many people are addicted to buying new things
• Your life is worth more than anyone else’s life, but nobody’s life is worth less than your own
• All things are relative
• Political correctness is a dangerous excuse to keep the world ignorant
• Discussion tempers the extreme
• It’s one thing to learn, another to apply

I’m sure everyone has similar nights, where you feel like you’ve solved all the worlds problems.  At least until you wake up in the morning.