Getting Muddy in the Mangroves





The great thing about volunteering at the Iguana Station is that you get to see a side of the island your average visitor doesn't venture to.



Mr Osgood and his well behaved dog Popali.



Every Monday, at our weekly meeting, there's usually a great clamour to sign up for a trip and more specifically to go out with one person, Mr Osgood.



Osgood (the Mr is a Caribbean sign of respect) is a reformed Iguana hunter and former chief of police for the island (presumably at the same time). A living legend, he lives next door to the station with his mad German wife Elke. Occasionally when we're chilling on the balcony across the darkness will float Mr Osgood's cry of 'Sammy I hear you' or 'Sammy, what you do?'.



So Once a week Osgood leads a few excitable volunteers through the mangrove swamps of Rock Harbour and over the petrified coal of Iron Bound on an iguana hunt. Except only Osgood, with his hunter's eyes, is any good at spotting them so the rest of us pretend to be looking for knees and elbows (supposedly how you find them) whilst he gets out his fishing rod, bootlace attached, and wrestles a vicious pregnant female from her tree.

Washing our boots at Rock Harbour





Rock Harbour on the northern side is Mr Osgood's favourite hunting spot, and ours too since he will usually leave us to swim on the rarely visited beach whilst he runs off to catch a few more iguanas. Getting there also involves a 100m wade across the lagoon, made more difficult by the station's un-official dog, Beauty, who gets tired halfway across, tries to turn around and ends up getting carried the last 50m.



Guess which foot I lost to the mud?





I reckon the reason why we love going out with Osgood, apart from his hilarious stories and dire warnings that I will die on the mainland, is that he lets you feel like you're ten years old again. Squelching though muddy bogs, jumping from precarious mangrove root to precarious mangrove root, losing a foot or two in the stinking mud, it's like everything your Mother told you not to do.

We return with pillowcases of iguanas, caked in mud and after all that adventure, in need of a nap!





Darling it's better, down where it's wetter, take it from me...

Shortly after anyone arrives at the Iguana station, once the where are you froms and where have you beens are out of the way, the next question is inevitably, 'Are you going to dive?' Followed by 'When?' and 'Who with?'.

You see whilst we all pretend to make the nauseous boat ride over (they actually hand out sick bags when you get on) for the sake of the iguanas, the islands biggest draw is its diving.
Slap bang in the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef Utila is supposedly the cheapest place in the world to do your PADI courses and you get to see some pretty awesome fish at the same time.

So it was on Friday that myself and three other 'iguana people' donned out wetsuits and prepared for the Open Water.

Except they don't let you dive in just like that.

First we had to sit through three and a half hours of possibly the world's cheesiest instruction video, followed by a cold afternoon in the pool, followed by a second cold afternoon in the shallows off the dock.

But finally on Sunday we suited up, jumped in the boat and then jumped off it again. I'll spare you rhapsodical descriptions of the underwater world but suffice to say it's pretty cool. Even when you're not seeing much in terms of fish (barracudas, angel fish, spotted drum fish etc.) the coral formations are enough to keep you open jawed. My favourite site was one nicknamed 'The Labyrinth' which looks somewhat like an underwater canyon with several swimthroughs and tight valleys which required our newly acquired and excellent buoyancy control. When all you can see for 360 degrees is fish and coral it's hard to think anything other than the hackneyed 'awesome'.

If anyone's heading out to Utila at anytime I can't recommend my dive schhool Bay Islands College of Diving, not only the cheapest place on the island but one of the most professional and bang next door to the hyperbaric chamber. My instructor Nick was everything you need when you're descending 18m in to the deep blue sea, meticulous, reassuring and Belgian.

The advanced course is next so stay tuned for tales of night dives, wreck dives and being 'drunk' underwater.

Rice and Peas - The Island of Utila

Apologies for not having written since I arrived but two planes, an intolerable five hour layover, a bus and a boat later I arrived on the Honduran island of Utila.

Utila is a bizarre place. Years of being a stop off for pirates and smugglers has left the island with a culture quite unlike the Honduran mainlanders. The ethic mix of the island is diverse. There are the white utilans decended from Pirates who have strong Caribbean (rice and peas) accents. Then there are the black and hispanic utilans with the same strong accents. Then there are the most recent arrivals, honduran mainlanders who get accused of everything from stealing schools' computers to eating all the fish and all the iguanas.

It's the iguanas I am here to protect. Despite not knowing anything about the reptiles before I left I have become quite knowledgeable about the 'Swamper' Utila's endemic species of Iguana. For instance did you know iguanas have two penises? Or that, like a shark, once they bite in to something (a nice squishy finger) their jaws won't release until they want them to!

Current estimates have it that there are 10,000 swampers on the island but the people I'm working with would put it closer to 3,000 which is why this last week has been a haze of iguana feeding, catching and cage building with the odd sunbathe on the beach and the occasional beach party.

Life on a Caribbean island is good.

Apologies that are no photos, they will follow shortly