A Review of Dining and such on Utila

Food, Eating and Supplying on the Island of Utila:

As a human you will likely experience the need to consume nutrient rich sustenance, the good news is Utila is rich in such nourishments, you just need to know where to find it.

Supply on this island is governed by the winds and waters. All goods come via freightor, it is rather spotty, and for first world citizens you will certainly end up wanting something you will not be able to find. But you will never go hungry. The produce, both fruit and vegetable is fresh and as such only certain produce is available at certain times of the year, the winter holds avacados for 10L each and you can get 10 sweet delicious oranges to snack on all day for one US dollar. The summer holds strawberries and mangos and all sorts of wonder that I can only regretfully imagine since I leave on the turning of spring. I say this because you will fare much better cooking yourself beautiful meals rather than eating out.

A Review:

I will simply list the best and worst of the island.

Grocery: There are around ten grocery stores, you may have to go to all ten to find what you are looking for. I will mention the two good ones, both owned by members of the two big island families.

Bush’s on the east side is the largest on the island. You can’t miss it. Closes early

Wardies on the west side is the friendliest, with his father always sitting out front waving to everyone that passes by, he is always fair with his prices, and always smoking a cigarette. There are no signs, it is the white building across from Rehab. Stays open later than most grocers.

Roneys is under a big house up on stilts heading west past “Float Utila”, he usually has the best fruits and vegetables for the best price.  He is the only real outside market.

I recommend becoming friendly with the proprietor and only go to that particular shop, this keeps your costs down.

Baleadas: Baleadas and Pastelitos are the main diet for many divers, heavy users doing 9 a day. Island fast food, some reaching your table in less than a minute.  They cost from 10L to 45L depending on their contents. The two big ones are:

Neyti’s: She is friendly and makes everything fresh, a tiny bit pricier though. She is in a yellow hut next to Skidrow.
 

Rosa’s: Rosa means business, on the east side she sits perched in her chair from sun up to well past night fall, this is where you go for a late night snack. Cheap, cold greasy pastelitos for 10L.

Resturants and Bars:

Munchies: is always a safe bet, the food is consistently consistent decent, as are the drinks. Great in quantity, Mondays is all you can eat pasta (that no Italian would put down (too hard). And free salad bar with meals twice a week.

Mainstreet: ‘s menu is small and rigid, some of the best prepared food around. It also has open mic, which sometimes turns out to be a brilliant night of full Jam bands including trumpets, dobros and sax’s. Excellent mixed drinks as well.

Mermaids: Their slogan is “good and cheap”, it is neither. The menu is essentially what you can pour out of a can and warm. On Thursday you can get a two for one pizza that tastes like poor quality cardboard, I will wait to get back to New York for another pizza. Mermaids is a good place to pass up.

Che Pancho: has a nice breakfast and lunch menu. But it’s smoothies are the best around, you choose the fruit and assorted wonderful additions, milk, orange juice, yougurt…And you can wither sit down with the mighty glass or take it to go in a plastic bag with a straw.

Skidrow: is a good place to hang out. Always packed at night, open all day to the early drinkers. This is where the real characters assemble, expats and backpackers alike enjoy the rum and lemonades and eat food so greasy your sweat becomes dangerously combustable. If you need a new shirt you can do four shots of Guiffiti (Honduran moonshine infused with whatever washed ashore that morning and some old mans cigarette butts) and “win” a Skidrow shirt. This is good for blending in, for on any given day, half the population is wearing such apparel.

El Picante: Terrible food and terrible drinks, they claim to be “authentic Mexican”, I hope Mexico is nothing like that. Best restaurant location on the island though.

Piccolo: So enticing the sign out front is as it lures you in with goganzola ravioli and pesto, in truth it is nothing more than good, it probably has the finest dining atmosphere on the island though, if for some reason you find yourself having "clients" take them here.

Tranquila: The biggest busiest bar on the island, typically a young crowd of several hundred people throughout the night. A beautiful dock that extends far into the water, with nice rickety second story deck on the end, this serves as both a urinal and naked diving board. There is tequila Tuesday with 10L tequila and 2 for 1 rum on Wednesday. Your money goes a long way here.

Treetanic: is a wonderland. The bar is in a tree house ship and there are bridges, tunnels and ladders that trail off into a  fantasy world of stained glass, contorted gazebos, mighty mango trees and general psychedelia. There are also cabins about for those who want to escape into their imagination.

Rio Coco: This is the only place you want to go for coffee, Starbuckesque drinks and snacks (but much better than starbucks), I also don’t know any starbucks that has an ocean view. A bit pricier, but worth it. 

Zen and the Art of Scuba Maintenance:

I met the richest man on the island last week, a billionaire with a two or greater in front of the nine zeros. I’m not sure if I’ve ever met a billionaire before, how would you know if you did? Well, millionaires tend to make scenes, it would seem sensical that billionaires would make a scene several fold. Last week I was sitting at the end of a picnic table looking yonder towards the sunset when an old man in a dirty ripped tee shirt walks up and sits down. He doesn’t say much, I can’t recall if he even said anything at all. He simply pulls some palm leaves out of his shorts pocket and weaves an elegant crane of fresh fronds. He leaves it on the table. Stands up and walks away.

A billionaire.

Had two great dives today, the cowfish lost its spot at the top of “my favorite fish list”, taking its spot, the sail-finned blenny. A tiny blenny who hides in finger size holes in small stones. You can pick up a few of these stones and place them face to face and the blennies will proceed to  yell at each other from their doorways like two neighbors arguing over a property line. They will eventually grow violent and kill one another or force the other to relocate.

After the dives I took an equipment maintenance course. I learned all about dismantling and reassembling the entire system. The valves, high pressure hose, primary and secondary regulator, learned the cleaning procedure for the metals, filters and o-rings. I feel a much greater connection to the system, once you are aware of them, you can imagine and sense the parts when you’re using them. You can feel them as if you are inside of the machine. I would love to be able to work more with this stuff. All I need is the esoteric tool kit.

With this addition to my credentials I will soon be able to get a job anywhere in this world (where there is water). 

Sustainable Agriculture:

I was egregiously mistaken when I said the other night that everyone in a hundred souls on this island is a celebrity. The truth is everyone on this island is so profound, paint nor pen may depict it.

I was warmed up by a goodbye drink with the Slovakians when I met a farmer. One of three or four on the island. I confessed my devotion to permaculture and he proceeded to pull out of his pocket a a beautiful cacao pod and the largest lime ever produced. Had this been India I might have prostrated myself at his feet and begged me to show me “the way”. I have been weak, I have been lame. I have sought pleasure in the stead of work. I will soon visit his farm and hopefully return to the path.

Prices (converted to USD):

A sweet pink grapefruit will cost .20

An avocado .50

A baleada or a fresh made greasy pastelito (the equivalent of fast food) between .50 and $1.50

A beer at a bar $1.50

A case of beer, from Archie, coming to .85 a beer.

A bottle of nice Nicaraguan rum, 750ml $7.

A coconut, $1, or free depending on your machete skills.

A movie, $2 and varying levels of sweat.

A book from the “library” $5, or trade.

A tank top and 4 shots of Giffitti, $10

A boat to Roatan $50

My  giant delicious homemade conglomeration, which can last a grown man five nights (A full pot of beans, rice, carrots, peppers, onions, tomatoes, three heads of garlic and vast amounts of curry.  $1.75

The 17^th

My hair is getting pretty dreadful. I called my accountant, Jose Greengold, he told me my dreadlock s were indeed tax deductible. It’s a product of the rainy season, the never ending days when it was too cold to bathe, but your hair is still wet, and salty, interweaving and locking, matting like an unshaved poodle. It is okay though, if my hair wills it, it will be so.

Laissez-faire hair-care.

Went to what was described to me as an “afro beat Garifuna show”. It was at the Red Light, on the side of Airport Road, a one and 5/8^th lane chunky road that connects Sandy Bay to the North Side, the equivalent of Interstate 405. Half of Campanada showed up, various motorized vehicles lined the side of the road a half mile in each direction. I packed in with 5 other people into the most vile of transports, the infernal tuk tuk, I pretended I was a dog and spent the ride with more than half my body outside, dodging trucks and large women. The whole mess turned out to be a karaoke fest, with swarms of people getting high off of the disco and strobe lights and warm beer.

Clean living here, I’ve eaten over 200 avocados, used no soap, cleaned my clothes only in the ocean. I wake up at 6:30am every day as opposed to my previous rising hour of 1pm and I’m on a diet where I only eat things that have bugs in it. They are my food tasters, Hitler had Margot Woelk, I have indeterminate beetles.

Buy the Beetles, Get the Bugs

The 13^th

Crack is wack. I’m sick of all of my things disappearing sequentially. Some nimble toed “rock star” made himself welcome into my bedroom whilst I in my blissful ignorance was cooking up some rice and beans in the kitchen. He helped himself to my cellular phone, which of course served only as an alarm clock these days. Two days later he must have admired my bathing suit, for that too is inexcusably absent. So it looks as if I will be reliant on ill informed roosters, whom cookadoodledoo to no regard for Greenwich Mean Time, to wake me up so that I may dive naked.

Speaking of crime, here are two laws that grant you great freedom. You are allowed to steal whatever you please. Unless there are three or more people who saw you commit the thievery. The second liberty you are given is, you may kill anyone you please. But, only as long as you are over the age of sixty. Both of these legislations are actual laws you may and must abide by. Laws that are written on the most legal of documents. This is why you can see your bike ridden all over town and not be able to do anything about it because the guy has many large associates and speaks like a pirate.

This island is very much how I imagine Hollywood is. You are walking down the street and within a few short minutes you see three celebrities. You are star struck every half a mile here because every, one in a hundred people here are a celebrity.  Not a single person outside the perimeter of this island may know them, but you know them, and you know that every single other living person who has been on the island for over a week knows them as well. In fact, they are greater than celebrities, they’re folk heros, and you can appreciate them all the more, because they have actually done something real and of value.

I was at a bar listening to some comedic guitar when Gunter sat down at the table. I hadn’t had the chance to meet him yet, but within a few minutes he made me quite aware that I had been drinking the wrong beer this whole time, and directed me to where to find, real, German, beer.

He mentioned how the sewage flows right into the sea (actually, Tranquilla bar used to flow directly to the sea, with their toilet on the top deck that you could look down into and see sea), the sewer system gets piped through the open drainage gutters and out into the bay. That is apparently why there is such high rates of staff staph infections. When the instructors preform their “confined water tests”, they are in the shallows, also known as the natural waste management facility.

I cleaned a dirty bottom today, the barnacles only bit back a bit. I was given 500 Lempira. I intend to set out to prove one can live a week here on said 500L.

Embrace the Buddhist way

And all will be okay

No more beer

Or 500 won’t last you a week here.

The 8^th

Todays dives were by far the most fun. The first one, we took the offshore passage to the north side to do some whale shark hunting, all of us sitting on top of the wheelhouse staring at the horizon. Nothing. At the Pinnacle the lot of us looked down upon the shear wall into the abyss. We floated down like skydivers in slow motion. At the bottom there was a swim through cave, when I went in I got some narcosis, the perfect amount. I came out the other side laughing and clapping like a drooling sea monkey. I took some skin off my knuckles going through the cloudy darkness and the only thought I had was “woah, I hope there’s a scientific reason my blood is green”.

The best thing to do underwater is laugh, this is so because you start to wonder if the laughing is making any noise and if it does, does anyone hear you, and if they do, do they know it’s laughing, or is the laughing only happening in your head and you are perpetrating an imaginary act in your head to correspond to what you believe should be happening. And all these thoughts just make you laugh more.

In any case I could’t stop laughing. We came upon a Nurse shark on the second dive. You had to sneak into a crevice to see it and you passed a small moray on the way out. “Yikes” I thought as my face swung by. But then out of nowhere a monstrous moray comes swimming from out of nowhere. It goes into the sharks den and slams right into it. It comes out all riled up and starts going for everyones fins and trying to munch on the camera lens. After some action it would swim away and they’d be feeding he shark a lionfish they had speared when all of a sudden the moray is back for blood, swimming through your legs, all the while making the “num num num” face. I depleted a good quarter of tank in laughter.

The following link goes to the video. Courtesy of Shaun.

Nurse Shark v. Moray

Slightly Continued

What I mean to say is, there is it is all take, but no give. Everything in this comfortable air conditioned life is made to order, fast food, no effort, no problem.  Your house is the way you want it, your food is the way you want it. You get it where ever you want, when you want it, in what ever quantity you want it. But no one ever bothers to see where the sausage is made.

No give. Just take.

Everyone knows the best way to flavor food is hunger. People need to get hungry for their lives. I know my beans always taste better when I have been sitting on the floor like a Jain monk, around a pot of beans I have just filled with water and spent the good time picking out the beetles clinging to the legumic life rafts.