The final week :(

Wow, how quickly does time fly? I can´t believe I am writing this with just 3 days left here on the island before I head off to visit the Mayan ruins at Copan.

I´m still recovering mentally from my amazing whale shark encounter last week. For days after I kept waking up at night and had to look at the images on the camera to remind myself it was real. On Friday Terrie and I spent the afternoon cleaning and organising the laboratory at the Whale Shark Research Centre. Terrie is going to carry on after I leave, cataloguing (spelling?!) and helping them stock up with what they need. Friday night I played cards with Jeff and Terrie, then Terrie and I hit the clubs! In other words we went to the infamous Bar In The Bush! It was a good laugh and we danced like mad for a couple of hours. I decided to call it a night at about 1.30am (sign of old age!) as my knees were starting to hurt and a man with a beer belly had just tried to rub his groin against me! Bless him this act was made somewhat more difficult by the size of his stomach. I´m sure he was a very sweet guy but I really wasn´t in the mood for a grope and figured it was high time I made a hasty exit!

The weekend was pretty dull, it rained most of the time so I was confined to quarters again. Not least recovering from the dancing of the night before! Although Sunday night on the way home from getting some dinner I did see a tarantula not far from the house! Luckily I like them! Monday was lovely though which allowed me a day on the beach. Yesterday I went diving with Bay Islands College of Diving. It was wonderful. Two lovely dive sites, although there were a lot more fish at the second one, and a hawksbill turtle who swam alongside us for a while, happily pausing to feed so clearly not bothered by our presence! I have uploaded some of the better photos I took.

This afternoon I am going on my last whale shark trip, followed by a night dive. Then day time diving again tomorrow, and laundry in the afternoon! Friday I am hoping to hike to Pumpkin Hill, there highest point on the island. There are bat caves there and a small beach on the far side. Saturday will be for packing and hopefully some final beach time before a very early departure on Sunday. Copan is supposed to be a lovely town and I am looking forward to seeing the ruins. There should be internet access there so I will hopefully be able to upload some pics for you.

That´s all the news for now folks. I will try and get online before I leave Utila.

Love and hugs to all :)

P.s. I wanted to add here as I didn't make a post about it that we did see whale sharks again on my last trip, but nowhere near as good as the week before. My last day diving was ruined by a jerk of an instructor called Clayton, who decided it would be good sport to make fun of me in front of 4 other people for being safety-concious and carrying a surface marker buoy (in Egypt I believe it is a requirement for at least one person in every dive group to carry one since several people got swept away from their dive boat by freak currents and weren't found for 3 days) which is quite ironic coming from an instructor who should be carrying one himself! Then after our first dive he loudly snapped at me for setting up my equipment in the wrong place! I admit I was tired and not thinking straight but still, hardly good customer service! Oh well, says a lot more about him than it does me. Luckily I wasn't actually diving in his group, I was with a very nice Australian instructor called Rob along with a couple of his advanced open water students who were very nice. So just to slightly amend my view of Bay Islands College of Diving, the majority of them were really great, really welcoming and good fun to dive with! I didn't make it to Pumpkin Hill either as I was sick on the Friday :( but I did spend my last day chilling out on the beach, things got a bit tearful in the evening when I had my last meal at Cafe Mariposa and they insisted it was on the house! Such seriously nice people. I'll miss them :)