Anthony’s Key Resort is located on Roatan, one of the Bay Islands made famous by Hurricane Mitch. Roatan took a direct hit, but every resort remained for the most part intact, except for Anthony’s Key Resort, which was decimated.

The resort has apparently been rebuilt to the same format, so I think most of my observations will still ring true. I apologize for the poor quality and scarcity of images in this report - this trip predates my digital (and therefore underwater imagery) days. The pix in this report were scanned (on a crappy scanner) from prints taken with a disposable camera.

Roatan is a very tropical, lush island located in the group of three main Bay Islands which include Guanaja and Utila, and is located about thirty or so miles from the mainland. Most Hondurans speak Spanish, but Honduras was once a colony of Britain, so many of the inhabitants speak English too. It is like Cozumel would have been twenty or thirty years ago - small resorts cropping up here and there, one bigger American-style hotel, and a kick-ass reef system that brings scuba diving enthusiasts from around the world to explore and admire the underwater scenery.

Getting There

Not easy. But don’t let that discourage you. Once you get there, you will feel sweet relief to finally arrive at the resort, intact, and you will actually feel blessed if your luggage arrives with you. Hey, life is an adventure, right? You can fly out of several southern gateway cities via TACA Airlines (we travelled via Miami), and be warned: they overbook, understaff, and only depart on time during a blue moon. Leave lots of times for connections coming home, and get to the front of the line when they start boarding.

The deal with TACA (Take A Chance Airlines ;^) is that you have to tag one bag priority. This means that this is the bag you need most for your holiday. I’d suggest you put the scuba stuff in that one, with maybe a pair of shorts, a shirt and a bathing suit or two. Carry-on essentials like medications and sunscreen, Deet (bug repellant), toiletries, your dive computer, your PADI card, your travel documents and a bathing suit. Pack them in a small enough bag that you won’t have to relinquish it if they decide (arbitrarily) that they don’t want any baggage in the cabin. As for any non-priority bags -- say a prayer. It might get there during your stay, it might not. It might end up in, say Guatemala, or in one case we heard about, Detroit. Huh? They don’t even fly there. Oh yeah, and make sure you put identification tags both on the outside and the inside of your baggage -- that way if one gets yanked off on the conveyor belt, it might still find you, one day.

The good news, is other than your dive stuff and the shorts and shirts and bathing suit, you won’t need much. AKR is very casual -- one girl (from a California dive club -- which explains it) actually came to lunch in a thong bikini and put her bared buttocks on the chair. Ewwww.

About the Resort

The resort itself is built on the main island of Roatan, into the side of the hill in a lush tropical forest. The “key” in Anthony’s Key Resort is a little islet, accessed by a small boat with resort staff at the helm, not more than twenty or thirty yards across the water. Some of the bungalow accomodations are on the main island and some are on the key. In my opinion, the key is where you want to be.

We stayed in a little wooden bungalow on the key with rough wooden boards for a floor, perched on stilts over the water. We had electricity (bare bulbed light fixtures, I recall) and a ceiling fan, but there were no windows and no air conditioning. Instead there were just wooden louvres with insect mesh replacing the missing panes. The shower and sink in the very spartan bathroom emptied directly into the sea. I don’t even want to think about where the toilet and its contents went to when it was flushed. I hope post-Mitch that the government has required the resort to make a provision for some kind of septic field or waste containment.

There was a little porch on the front of the cabin with a hammock for an afternoon siesta, as long as you put on industrial strenght DDT to fend off a sand flea fiesta. They bite, unmercifully, any time of day or night.

All that was okay by me - the only sad part about it was that our hut on the little key faced back to the main island and to the compressor shed, or maybe it was a generator, which ran all night. Manmade noise in a tropical paradise. Ugh. It drowned out the sounds of lapping water and wildlife noises, and the sounds of insects splatting in to the screens at the windows, hungry for human flesh. It is one of the blights of the Bay Islands, but it’s pesky at worst. But the incessant whirring didn’t quite mask the sound of a swan honking and hissing belligerently right outside our bungalow at first light, every morning of our week there.

There were nicer, quieter, rooms on the other side of the key, which faced out to the open sea and to the sunsets, but when we there in November the weather was unsettled and stormy, and the folks in the front row seats got pretty soaked. I hate to think what it was like when it was whipping itself up into a hurricane. But, if I was going back, I’d buck up the extra $$ to have one of those choice ocean view bungalows on the key, and I’d make a wide berth around hurricane season. We were told when we were there that the best time to visit to take in calm seas, awesome underwater viz and clear skies was between late January and early April. We visited in November and have no doubt why the island is so lush -- it rained every day, hard.

The food was mediocre at best, compared to the sumptuous feasts offered at say, a Club Med. It was buffet for breakies and lunch - no frills food designed more for comfort and speed than for gourmands. At dinner, I think there were a couple of choices, never very inspired, but after being starved from diving all day and sustaining ourselves with Snickers and beer between meals, we were happy to see food in any shape or form. But despite the only-a-few-steps-up-from-boarding-school-fare, it was a neat dining experience. The dining area is actually perched in amongst the limbs of a huge tree, up high, overlooking the key. I felt like I was in a treehouse. The dining ‘room’ had no walls, and no screens, just a roof for protection from the elements. Macaws and parrots would make the rounds, shimmying sideways as they chicken-stepped their way along the wooden railings, from table to table, begging for tidbits with very bad manners. I almost lost a finger for my generosity.

The Diving

The best thing about Roatan was the diving. It gets the big thumbs up from divers as being a very interesting and abundant barrier reef (it is purported to be the second longest coral reef in the world, after the Great Barrier Reef of Northern Australia). We were assigned a boat at the beginning of our stay, which was our dive vessel for the week. The boats are hand-made, cumbersome and with few amenities, but that was made up for my Dennis, our Honduran divemaster for a week. He was an older guy, a granddaddy by his own account, and when we asked him how many dives he had logged in his life, he just smiled. Twenty-five or thirty years, three dives a day, four on the days of the night dive, with one day off per week. That’d be a few. And except for being a bit hard of hearing, due to chronic swimmer’s ear, he was none the worse for wear. The coolest thing was that he was still keen to get in the water, no matter what. It’s rare to see that kind of enthusiasm from a diehard divemaster taking a bunch of scuba-starved tourists on a dive.

Right away we were knocked out by the corals. Abundant and varied and incredibly colourful. There were less big fish and big animals in the water than in, say, the Bahamas, and the terrain was not as interesting - mostly a sloping wall down to about a hundred and thirty or forty feet, sometimes with deep fissures running the length of the wall, at the bottom of which there was a wide, sandy-bottomed ledge. The techie divers from California (one of whom delighted all the boys on board with her thong bikini that grossed me out at lunch) who were assigned on our dive boat were rubbing their bellies in the sand so they could nudge themselves into having to do some deco stops on the way up. I never could figure out what they were doing down there - all the life and the colour were way up above. I guess for some people, diving is about the thrill, and for others, it’s about the wonder.

The resort offers three dives a day, and two night dives a week. They tank you up, take you out, bring you back for the surface interval while they refill the tanks, and then head out for the second morning dive. Then it’s lunch, a quickie siesta, and then the afternoon dive. If it’s a night dive day, you’ll head out one more time, late in the afternoon, just as the sun sidles down over the horizon, and you’ll be back in time for a late dinner.

Daytime dives are guided or non-guided, your choice. You are assigned to a boat at the beginning of your stay, and you will be required to do a check out dive off the dock at the resort before they’ll let you into the big, bad sea. Buddy diving was permitted and diving profiles were generous. You can maximize downtime by using a dive computer. The dive staff and boat crew rely heavily on tips as their main source of income, and work hard for them. You tip at the end of the week on your way out -- and bring cash -- there is no bank or cash machine within easy range of the resort. They do offer safety deposit boxes at the reception, and I think it’s a good idea to use them for valuables like, say, your passport, your tickie outta there and your money -- the rooms are, after all, basically open-air.

El Aguila

El Aguila is a freighter that was sunk for divers just off the reef that protects the lagoon in front of AKR.

It’s a great dive, although a little deep for newbies. The keel rests at about 120 feet, down where there are some wonderful eel gardens, and the wheelhouse is at about 75 feet. Windows and doors have been removed to allow full penetration of the wheelhouse, as well as easy access to the holds. When we dove the wreck it was still quite new and had a lot of coral and sponge growing to do before it could support a mini eco-system of its own. One of the highlights of the dive was the slow, meandering ascent up through the deep fissures in the sloping coral wall that provided lots of opportunity for exploration and swim-thrus. I came around a corner and surprised a mammoth grouper with it’s fins fully extended and a yawning cavern of a mouth open to the cleaner fish who were having quite a picnic. He let me stay and watch for a while before he sauntered away.

Cayos Cochinos

The highlight of our trip was the day excursion we bought through the resort to go diving in Cayos Cochinos. C.C. is a small group of islands that is wedged between the Bay Islands and the mainland. Talking about remote. If getting away from it all is your gig, this is the place for you. The miniscule little dive resort that accomodates fifteen max in very spartan accomodations graces the biggest island of the group. There are no roads, so no cars. Groceries and medical assistance are only available by boat and I doubt there is a tv in the place. It was charming and quite primitive and we were lucky enough to have an excellent lunch there, with a special guest appearance by a Mr. Hairy Tarantula. The area around Cayos Cochinos is a marine preserve for the Smithsonian - the reefs are covered in some rare, neon-blue tubular growths called blue tunicates, and they are protected. I was even more wowed by the black coral trees that grew tall on the reefs and the abundance of life teeming around the pristine coral.

The Truth About Daytrippers and Dolphins

In the last few years the cruise ships have started to come to Roatan. It’s not a good thing. Freds and Ethels abound during the day - squawking about how cute this or that is, buying up t-shirts and straw hats, and willing to pay ridiculous amounts to swim with the dolphins at the marine institute located next to the Anthony’s Key Resort. To me, paying US$50.00 (which really smarts in puny Canadian dollars) to get in a pool with Flipper is a waste of hard-earned cash. I mean, it doesn’t have the magic of a chance encounter. I wanted to have a wild dolphin encounter, an experience where the animal doesn’t come and play with me because he knows who’s forking out the fish, but because he is curious about me, or wants to connect in some way. I did have an encounter with a school of spinner dolphins in Hawaii. But that’s another story.

I had an encounter with a penned dolphin, in Roatan, as it ended up. And it didn’t cost me a penny. My husband and I donned our snorkels and masks and flippers, and we swam across the lagoon from our little hut to the dolphin pen on the other side of the bay. It was not too ambitious a swim, and it was a hot day, so it felt pretty good. When we got to the pen we could see the dolphins cruising back and forth on the other side of the loosely woven orange netting. We weren’t cheeky enough to actually climb over the wooden boardwalk that separated us from the dolphins. So my husband and I clicked and chirped and tried to entice then to come on over and meet us. We could hear them pinging us with that sort of click-click thing that they do when we put our ears under the water. I don’t know who or what we told them we were, but when my husband went to give me a bit of a hug, one of the dolphins took a run at the net and took a nip of my upper thigh through the mesh. Ouch. Hard enough to hurt, but not hard enough to break the skin with his or her sharp little teeth. So I figure that those dolphins are either decidely cranky about their lot in life, gleefully playful, or perhaps horny. We’ll never know, although I did read a story recently about a diver who was accosted by a large green turtle that was intent on mating with him. It’s a wonderful world, under the sea.

Would I Go Back? -- The Bottom Lines

Never say never. Despite the hassles with Taca, the sand fleas and the rain, we had a great time. I think it would be a great place to take some scuba divin’ kids -- most of the best diving was between 30 and 60 feet. The water is warm and the viz can be outstanding. And they do offer summer programs for kids there too -- dolphin camps where the kids are apparently introduced to the wonder of these animals, and are given lots of opporunities to interact with them. It’s not a wild dolpin encounter, but it’s a start.

I don’t think it would be a great place to take a non-diving spouse or family. There is no beach to speak of -- and what little sand there is is infested with the dreaded flesh-chomping fleas. Snorkelling must be done from a boat. They do offer horseback trail rides (with long sign up lists) which we did not do, so I can’t report on that. And there are few touristy spots on the island (yet) that are worth visiting.