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.

Jewel Cay, Honduras (just off the coast of Utila) has truly become home for us over the past three months.  We have our own apartment, friends, neighbours, and landlords that have become our adopted family.

Our Apartment

In two short weeks, we will be saying goodbye to it all, dusting off our backpacks, and continuing our journey with a trip to Nicaragua to meet up with my mom.  I’ll be sad to go, but I can’t begin to describe how excited I am to see my momafter nearly 7 months away from our family.

Sunset on Jewel Cay

At first, for Mike and I, the most exciting part of renting our one bedroom apartment on Jewel Cay was finally having an oven (see the pictures below to see just how excited Mike was… if it wasn’t so hot, he probably would have been hugging it!).  After months of hostel kitchens with one pot, one pan, and no oven, we were thrilled to be able to bake things again… so thrilled that we consumed something like 5 pounds of flour, 3 sticks of butter, and who knows how much sugar in the first week alone!

Mike Baking Biscuits

Mike Baking Oatcakes

Mike Baking Bread

We have made bread, biscuits, cinnamon buns, ham and cheese buns, perogies, shepherd’s pie, borscht, and many of the other goodies we miss from home.  In a moment of homesick weakness, we even enjoyed a classy meal of KD (Kraft Dinner {mac and cheese}) and hotdogs.

Ham, Onion & Cheese Buns

The real beauty in having an apartment, though, is that settling in immediately gave us a feeling of home… a private space where we could unpack our things and hang out whenever we feel like it.

Home

We even have a cat that hangs around the hotel where we go to use the internet.  His name is Balls, Scuba, or Slobber… depending who you ask.  He makes us miss our cat, Pi, a little bit less… or is it a little bit more?

Slobber... we call him that for obvious reasons

Renting an apartment has really made a positive impact on our budget, too.  We pay $200 USD a month, which includes power (something that’s really expensive here) and water.  Our only other expenses are gas and food.  Propane for the stove costs about $15 for a tank, which probably lasts a few months (we wouldn’t know since our first tank was stolen and our second slowly leaked out its contents in about two weeks) and we spend an average of about $10 a day on food.  We can buy just about anything we want in any quantity we want… spices, mustard, mayonnaise and vanilla are sold by the spoonful, bread is sold by the slice, cabbage comes in heads, half heads, and quarter heads, and so on.

Really happy to be able to buy just the right amount of vanilla for egg nog and fried bananas. The cost... about 10 cents!

All in all, we’re spending a total of about $500-600 CAD per month.  Even though we’re still diving nearly everyday, it no longer costs us anything, so it’s a really affordable lifestyle.

Our only question now is… do we return to Utila after Nicaragua?  or move on with our travels?

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

6 months. 9875 kilometres. 4 countries. Impressive Amazing Race statistics they’re not, but then again we’re not exactly “racing” around the world. We’re taking it nice and slow.

Six months ago today, Mike and I stepped foot on a plane to Cancun, Mexico without much of a plan and with little idea of what we were getting ourselves into. Today, we are different people. Here’s some of the changes we’ve made:

Physical Changes

Whether we like it or not, the first opinion we form of people we meet is typically based on appearance. And in six short months, I would say we’ve both altered our appearances fairly dramatically. Luckily, we have our pictures from our International Driving Permits that were taken two weeks before we left for comparison sake.

Check out the two couples… which pair would you say are happier, more energetic, and more interesting?

We’ve both lost a significant amount of weight from our healthier lifestyle (exactly how much is hard to say… weight scales are hard to come by here), our tans are darker than they’ve ever been, we rarely ever sunburn anymore, our hair is bleached from the sun (check out how blonde I am now!), and we’re stronger than we’ve been in a long time.

All is not perfect, however. With our divemaster program, we typically go diving 2-4 times per day. We start “work” at 7:00 a.m. hauling tanks and helping students collect and set up their gear. We help set up the boat, check people into and out of the hotel, and spend at least a few hours each day dealing with hotel business, and working on planning and scheduling for the next day. Often, we won’t really have time to ourselves until 7:00 or 8:00 p.m. We have recently started assisting on courses, which adds an extra level of responsibility for the safety of the students around you. It basically equates to having a full-time job (we haven’t forgotten what an awesome job it is though), working 5-7 days a week. And because we’ve got an apartment, there’s housework to keep up with too.

I would be lying if I said that I’m footloose and stress free with all these obligations. Just before Christmas, I found myself with a 72+ hour migraine. Then I woke with an ass-kicking, back-flattening flu on the morning of New Year’s Eve that confined me to nearly a week in bed and is still keeping me out of the water (Mike woke up with the same sore throat that morning, and was fine by day’s end). I know that this is my body’s way of telling me I’m trying to do too much. Just like at home, as responsibilities get piled on and the perfectionist/over-analyst inside of me works overdrive to do everything to 150% of my ability, I lose the ability to keep my life balanced. I become consumed in the stresses of things that are beyond my control and my body starts sending out S.O.S. messages in the forms of headaches and unchallenged bugs that my immune system should be able to beat into submission without much trouble.

So I know I need to keep working at finding balance in my life.  This is a critical lesson for me, because at some point we may find ourselves with 9-5 jobs again and I need to learn how to keep myself from getting burned out.

Emotional Changes – How We Feel About This Journey

When we travelled to the Yukon the summer before last, we stopped and did a few day hikes in the mountains on the way. When we returned home, we were reviewing our photos and found some landscape shots, taken from the summit of a mountain, that surpassed in beauty what we remembered seeing. We put one of these photos on our Traveled Earth business cards to remind ourselves not to take any moments in life for granted. We have truly experienced each and every moment on this journey (the good and the bad)… not just with a snapshot to remember it by, but a true appreciation for everything we are seeing and doing.

It was only about a month or so ago that we realized this journey no longer feels like a mere vacation. It’s now our lifestyle.  I think getting an apartment on Jewel Cay (one of the Utila Cays in Honduras) for a couple months has really helped us reach this point.  Having a place where we could unpack for a while and put the backpacks away helped fight some of the homesickness we were starting to feel.  We still miss the people at home (a lot!), but we now see just how easy it is to start up a life somewhere new.  We have friends, neighbours, and people that feel like family in close proximity to us.

Intellectual Changes

As I reflect over the last 6 months of my life, I am blown away by how much reflection I have done.  Taking away the stresses of a job and a house has given me the time and the freedom to explore other intellectual avenues.  Instead of thinking about my lesson plans for the next day, I spend a lot of time thinking about topics that have always interested me, but have never been enough of a priority to spend adequate mental time and energy on.  I have had some great discussions and reflections on world politics and economies, religion, spirituality, morality, ethics, cultural norms and beliefs, and physics (string theory, quantum mechanics, and relativity), to name a few.

Changes To Our Budget

Our original budget goal was $100/day for the pair of us, including international transportation, accommodation, food, and all other expenses.

As of today, we have spent $10 642.48 CAD, which works out to an average of $57.84 per day, including the big ticket costs of 6 weeks of Spanish courses ($990 CAD), and all our diving courses in Utila (total cost = $2970 CAD) 1 open water course for me, 2 advanced open water courses, 2 rescue diver courses, 2 divemaster courses, 2 deep diver specialties, 2 wreck specialties, and 2 nitrox specialties). If you exclude these “big ticket costs,” but still include all the other excursions like swimming with whale sharks, snorkeling, ziplining, etc., our spending to date totals $6682.48, or $36.32 per day.

We now believe that a $100/day average for the entire journey is far too high. Because we don’t know how long we plan to spend in each country, it is nearly impossible to calculate a reasonable trip budget average, but we will try to use $100/day as a cap for the most expensive countries.

Changes To Our Packing List

Let’s be honest… this is a post in itself.  So look for it soon.  I will say, however, that I am currently typing this on our brand new, Boxing Day special, netbook.  After six months of sharing a single laptop, we realized we really wanted another one.  While we could keep getting by with one, we just didn’t want to any more.

Changes To Our “Rough Itinerary”

Six months into our trip, and we are already five months behind our “rough itinerary.”  Honduras, our home for the last two and a half months, wasn’t even included on it. Not too shabby, eh? We knew before we left that we weren’t going to stick to a schedule and we were true to our word.

Our immediate plan is to finish our divemaster course here in Utila by the end of January, head to Nicaragua at the start of February to meet up with my mom (can’t wait to see her!!!), and then maybe follow her into Costa Rica or head back up to see the parts of Honduaras and El Salvador that we missed out on.  In general, we are heading south… we keep saying we would like to catch a boat from Panama to Colombia when we finally get there, but we know better than to lay out a specific plan for ourselves.

We are definitely still planning to check out more of the world than Central and South America… but when?  Your guess is as good as ours.