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Time for a face-off. If you want to travel to somewhere along the world’s second-longest reef, Belize or Roatan, Honduras?
When divers talk about Belize, they get all misty-eyed and start daydreaming about their last trip there. When anyone else who has been there talks about it, they say something to the effect of “too bad about the beaches.”
What they mean is, there hardly are any beaches. Unless you have a boat at your disposal or are staying at some private island resort well away from the shore and built-up Ambergris Caye that is.
I thought I might find a bit of the same in Roatan, but it’s a very different story here. I’ve been running around reviewing hotels for an assignment and of the six I visited on different parts of the island, five had great beaches. One had just a small beach, but I got to swim with their dolphins in a huge enclosure in the sea and kayak around their own little islet so that makes up for it—you can’t do those things just anywhere.
Here are two photos facing different directions on the most popular beach, an area with the unimaginative name of West Bay. Happy hour from 4 to 7 at the beach bars, the tallest building is three stories, and you can go snorkeling right off the shore. It’s only really crowded when the cruise ships dock nearby (more on that later). The powdery sand is postcard perfect, though apparently some people don’t get along well with the sand flies. I didn’t get one bite, but if you attract bugs you will need a steady supply of cactus juice.
The other main drawback is that Roatan is a very long, spread out, decentralized island, so there’s no chilled out, pedestrian-friendly spot with reasonable beach huts like Caye Caulker in Belize. Once people get to their hotel, they tend to stay put as going out to dinner would require a major excursion in a car. The only town of any size is called Coxen Hole and you can get a sense of what it’s like from its nicknames with the expats: “coxen sucker hole” and just plain “sh*t hole.” Of course this is where the now-expanding cruise ship terminal is, which shows once again that people who travel on huge ships continually see the worst of what an island has to offer.
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