Honduras, Roatan (Tattoos) 2016-03-22

I no longer have milky white virgin skin.

It was my 30th birthday the other day, and as the date was approaching fast it suddenly dawned on me that I was about to lose my 20's. And I definitely haven't done as many crazy things as I would have liked to do. Sure, I moved to another country on a whim, instantly fell in love and got married to a crazy ginger. Then I took all the money that I'd been saving for my entire adult life and essentially threw it into the ocean by buying a sailboat with little to no experience with, or previous desire to sail. Then I abandoned my new home and sailed off into the unknown, along a ridiculously crazy route that almost nobody else is stupid enough to take. But for some reason it all seems kind of normal now. I wanted to enter my 30's with the same level of craziness that I've managed to uphold during my 20's. There are no nearby planes to jump out of and nothing else accessible that I haven't already done (I greet each day by hugging a monkey. And is swimming with sharks supposed to just be for special occasions? Because those guys are just my friendly neighbours that come round to hang out occasionally). So I decided to get inked.



I always figured I would mark this adventure with a tattoo of some kind. With such a short attention span, nothing has ever struck me as being amazing enough for me to want to have it etched permanently on my body. But this has been a trip of a lifetime and it's one thing that I'll certainly never change my mind about in a hurry. I might not end up a sailor forever, but I have no regrets about sailing off into the sunset. Or straight into the waves, in our case. I've never gotten to the stage of sitting down and thinking about tattoo designs though, so I figured my 30th birthday was as good a time as any.

After doing some research into the local tattoo parlour (Foxy’s Ink), I decided that this was going to happen. Roatan is a tropical paradise in the Caribbean, so instead of ending up with one or two dodgy tattoo artists plucked from a very small pool, really good artists come over here for a working holiday. There’s only one reputable tattoo parlour here and their current guest artist from overseas (Rene) is good at artsy pretty tattoos, so I was in luck. (I should mention that the resident artists are very good as well. Foxy, the owner, has just started out. But she's learning from a revolving door of amazing people and has her own unique style).


Tropical paradise!

I thought a lot about what I wanted, and after a lot of scouring through images, scribbling down ideas and talking with Rene, we were a go. I had hoped to get it over and done with before I turned 30, but my appointment ended up being on my birthday itself. Not a fun birthday. But I was excited nonetheless.

I wanted a boat, which is probably obvious. After travelling over 20,000 nautical miles, mostly upwind, I think I deserve to have a permanent boat on me. Luckily we have one series of photos that our friends Liesbet and Mark took of our boat sailing next to theirs in French Polynesia. We were floating along on calm seas in hardly any wind, so we don't look that impressive. But they are the only photos we have of us sailing – normally there's nobody around to watch us heel over! So Rene took one of Liesbet’s photos and turned it into a silhouette. I was not going to have a random boat tattooed on me forever. It was going to be our Heartbeat.






The basic design I wanted was swirling waves curling over my foot and up my ankle, with our boat in amongst them. Hopefully with a koru kind of design, because New Zealand and my Kiwi husband have definitely set my life on a completely different path. Because of the ridiculous sailing route that we took and the fact that we didn't die, I was hoping my tattoo boat could be sailing upwind as a reminder of how many shitty days we have endured in crappy conditions. But I eventually decided to butt out and just let Rene just do his thing, because the design he came up with was kind of awesome. I've had too many bad haircuts from trying to tell the hairdresser what I wanted instead of just letting them do something sensible. I've definitely learned my lesson. Luckily hair grows back...




Rene made a perfect swirl on my ankle bone, which left us sailing downwind. But he added a heap of swirly waves all around us to make up for this change. There is no doubt that the boat on my ankle is sailing through some crazy waves. Because this is my first tattoo, I was nervous as hell that he wasn't really drawing much onto my foot before the needle came out. He traced on the boat, the words I wanted ("Let's go on an adventure!"), and the perfect circle for my ankle. He added a few outlines of waves but the rest he was going to freehand. I'd seen a lot of his other works so I knew he was talented, but I was still scared!


Ready to go


So may blues!

I shouldn't have been. He produced a pile of different coloured blue ink and got to work. It was really sore at first, then after the first hour it became excruciating. I'm not sure who's stupid idea it was to get my first tattoo on the bone of my foot and ankle, but here we were. I had thought long and hard about it, and had come to the conclusion that I would rather sit through a bit of extra pain than spend the rest of my life with a tattoo in a place other than where I wanted it. I quickly wished I had wanted it somewhere else! After an hour or two I was screaming into the pillow, trying so hard to stay still. My foot kept twitching when he was doing the words, because it kept hitting all the nerves in my foot. I was terrified I was going to involuntarily move and wreck it. Garth was amazing, holding my foot down to stop it moving and just generally being lovely. I'm not sure which part hurt the most because after a while it just became a big blur of pain. But I'm probably going to go with that pretty swirl on my ankle bone. That was never going to be a stroll through the park.





As he moved up my ankle and onto the sails, the pain reduced significantly and it was more like getting laser hair removal. After talking to a lot of tattooed people this is what I had been expecting the whole thing to feel like - very painful but not too bad. I've had lots of laser and for a while I managed to distract myself the same way that I do when I'm having hair removed - by playing games on my phone. But once he'd finished that little section of my ankle where it wasn't just all bone, he went straight back down and continued torturing my foot. Foxy, the owner of the shop, was really sweet and lovely. She cranked the music so I could scream into the bed to my heart's content. Everybody kept trying to distract me, but all I cared about was keeping still.



So after a few hours of torture, I had an explosion of colour on my ankle. Which had swollen up to twice it's size. Rene told me not to walk on it for at least three days, which I tried really hard to do and then failed miserably. How do I not walk when I live a boat? I can't exactly hop from one room to another! It took five days for the swelling to start going down and over a week before the first bit of skin started peeling. I couldn't wear shoes or walk to the showers. The marina bathrooms are down a dirt path, and I was supposed to wash my foot every day without walking or getting dust on it. After care on a boat is really, really hard.


The next day




Still puffed up a few days later

I ended up wearing a sock whenever I could, and half hopping half limping between the facilities and our boat. The hotel lobby (wifi!) and the tiki palapa are even further away than the bathrooms. So I ended up losing a bit of colour exactly where Rene said I would if I didn't keep my foot up. Damn. Luckily we'll be back in civilisation again soon so I can get a touch up like a normal person.



A week and a half later

While I was at it, I got a wedding ring tattooed onto my finger. I'm so sick of not having my wedding ring. It's super dangerous wearing a ring on the boat, even when the boat's not moving. I've seen so many pictures and heard so many stories of people getting gloved by their rings, even just getting in and out of the boat on the dock. So the ring always stays off and the newlywed inside me is sad. Now I have it forever!



Interestingly it didn't hurt at all when Rene was tattooing my finger. Like at all. I could have had a nap. I guess my fingers have more skin on them than my foot!

After a whole day of anticipation and a whole afternoon of pain, the rest of my birthday was lovely. Everybody came out to celebrate with me. Our friend Ellen made me her special ribs which she finished off on the BBQ (one of the best things I've ever eaten), Debbie produced cake and cocktails and after driving me into the tattoo parlour that morning, Fred came all the way back out to Fantasy Island bearing champagne. There were a few thoughtful presents small enough to fit on the boat and I just generally felt really loved. I'm going to miss these people so much when we go!





After spending all afternoon watching me scream and squirm, the next week Garth decided he wanted in on the excitement. He has always wanted a tattoo of a monkey, but has never been able to figure out exactly what it is that he wants. After chatting with Foxy, he decided he may as well get on the bandwagon if she could figure out how to get the image of what he wanted out of his head and onto paper.


Foxy’s original design, which she was nice enough to let us have

She came up with a very cool design to start with, which was amazing. But it wasn't what Garth had been picturing for all these years. It turns out that he just wanted a simple outline of a monkey climbing up his back. To make it more special, the monkey he settled on is a Capuchin, just like his little friends here on Fantasy Island.


Foxy doing her thing



In an attempt to annoy me, Garth decided to get a tattoo that didn't take long and hardly hurt at all. Damn him. Fred was amazing enough to give us another lift into town and then then he even stuck around to take us back. It was late when we got home, so we went out to dinner. That's where I discovered one of my new favourite things - a Corona tipped upside down into a margarita. It starts off as all margarita and ends up as mostly Corona. Awesome.





Garh couldn't wait to show Cheeky the new tattoo and he was pretty interested in it at first, but then he went back to searching Garth's pockets for almonds and eating all of his hair. Typical.


What’s all this then?

Edit: My tattoo a few months later




X xx Monique

Click here for LOTS more pictures!

Honduras, Roatan (Repairs) 2016-03-09

Fixing. Fixing, fixing, fixing.

That’s all we ever seem to do. Luckily this time we’ve had a lot of help. So instead of spending all of our time rigging up weird ways to fix things because we don’t have access to what we need, everybody around us has just been overwhelming us with generosity. I can’t even name all the people who have helped us out in some small way, because I think I would just be listing everybody here. Whether it’s somebody shouting us a beer after we rock up to the Tiki Palapa covered in fiberglass and dust, or all of the numerous things that people have loaned us to help get the job done faster. Our friends Liz and Marty have put in ridiculous amounts of time helping us out, from spending a whole afternoon slaving away on the sewing maching to throwing copious tools and parts at us that we’ve needed to finish various jobs. The boat has certainly not been neglected in the last while, but we’re taking advantage of the shops and ability to order things online to replace all of our temporary fixes with real ones. Plus the marina here is really cheap, so we’re just doing everything at once while we’re attached to land.



We took out all the windows and replaced the seals, which is a job we’ve been wanting to do for a while. We replaced one side a while ago when water started getting in, but we hadn’t done the other one yet. The seals were the same age, so we had to get onto that before it went as well.

We also decided to give in and redo the deck, which has been a challenge. We did it in New Zealand when we first bought the boat, sanding it all off and repainting. When we sanded it back we discovered that the deck had been covered in teak at some stage. That teak had been attached with rivets, and instead of removing it properly the previous owners had just sawed the rivets off. The right thing to do was to drill out all the rivets and fill the holes with epoxy or something equally as waterproof, to keep it watertight. They didn’t do that. They filled a few of them properly, but not all of them. The first time we stripped it back in New Zealand, we went over the whole deck with a fine-toothed comb and fixed all the rivet spots we could find. Then we painted it over, good as new.



Unfortunately, over the last year a few rust spots have been popping up here and there, which means that water is getting in through some of the neglected rivets. Not good. So this time we weren’t taking any chances – we drilled out every single rivet on the entire deck and filled it in, whether it had been done before or not. We were going to do them all ourselves this time, to make sure it was done right. With the deck sanded and the rivets drilled, you could see exactly where the teak had been attached. There were lines running across the whole deck. So we dried it out, made sure the balsa core was all good and there wasn’t any water in any of it, then we filled all the holes in. It’s so watertight now it’s not even funny (knock on wood!). However, it’s taken us a lot longer than we originally thought. It seems crazy undertaking such a big job so close to the end of our trip, but we wanted to make sure our baby stays in good condition after we’ve said goodbye to her.





We’re bad at fine touches, so we tried really hard to do the painting properly. I covered all the windows and anything that couldn’t be taped with plastic bags. Liz and Marty, amazing as always, spent a whole day helping us finish sanding off the deck before we started and then they helped us mark up the edges. I can’t even begin to express how much time they saved us. The deck was beautiful, all ready for the paint.




But we awoke the next morning to the sound of little monkey feet running all over the deck, ripping off every bit of plastic they could find. There were new toys to play with! It took us several days to finish the painting, and every day they came onboard and tried to rip off all the plastic bags. I’m not sure why I bothered fixing them. They were so excited that we were outside all day that they kept coming by to visit, and I had to keep chasing them away… despite my best efforts we still ended up with a few trails of white monkey footprints that disappeared into the trees!





We used Kiwi Grip for the deck last time, which is a type of paint that you apply with a textured roller. It drys with a bumpy texture, which leaves a non-skid surface on the deck. It’s fabulous. Unfortunately, it’s very hard to find outside of New Zealand. Most people make a complicated mix of sand and paint to produce the desired effect, which can be quite harsh on bare feet and much harder to remove later. To do this after sanding the deck we would have had to reapply the layer of gelcoat we took off and then put the sand and paint mixture on over the top of that (The gelcoat is a very hard type of plastic paint, which protects the fibreglass from UV). Instead of going to all the trouble of painting it with two different things, we decided to just paint on a layer of gelcoat using the textured roller left over from the Kiwi Grip. It worked perfectly. Our deck is now solid and very non-skid. Plus, if we want to re-do a section, we don’t have to sand the edges back properly to remove all paint first – we can just apply more gel coat over both the remaining gel coat as well as the fibreglass.





With heaps of gelcoat floating around, we’ve taken the opportunity to fix up up and paint the dinghy. More fibreglass, lots of sanding and some tweaking of the rudder and tiller. Garth came up with a good way to attach the rudder and he tweaked the parts to make it move more smoothly. A few coats of gelcoat and our dinghy finally sails!



The other person who’s been helping us out a lot is Fred. He’s the sweetest thing, and his boat is right in front of ours on the dock. He has a house in Roatan as well as a car, which he’s been very generous with in regards to giving us lifts and just generally helping out. His house is pretty much my dream house. It’s all wooden and quite small in terms of normal houses, but the exact size I’d like my house to be. There’s a small lounge, a generous kitchen and two bedrooms, one of which is a loft with an amazing view of the ocean. He also has a huge verandah which wraps around three sides of the building, and a small workshop downstairs with everything you’d ever need to build stuff. Oh, and it’s perched up in the mountains in amongst the trees and is completely off-grid. I love it so much.






Looking up from the lounge room. Kitchen on the left, awesome loft up high

He invited a heap of us over for a dinner party last month, which was a lot of fun. It was really nice to get off Fantasy Island and see more of Roatan, and the company of all our new friends made it even nicer.

We’ve been completely blown away by how nice everybody is here. I know I’ve said that a whole heap of times, but it’s true. I’m not sure whether we’ve just been lucky to meet so many amazing people, or if it’s because we’re in a populated place where we can hang out and drink with everybody (which we haven’t really done before). Either way, Fantasy Island is kind of magical.


The view from the Tiki Palapa



A really amazing family came through here a while ago on a big catamaran (Tanda Malaika) filled to the brim with kids. They were all teenagers (not really kids at all) and every single one of them was a lot of fun. They were in the Palapa every night dancing along with Pete, and the kids (affectionately labeled ‘the creatures’ by their mum) all visited our boat while we were at anchor to have a go on our trapeze. So we’ve had a lot of fun hanging out with them. (They've been doing a lot of interesting humanitarian work lately and they're a great bunch, go check out their blog!)


Emma hanging out on the trapeze

The parents (Belinda and Danny) are equally as awesome, and Danny brought out his drone so we could play with it. He got some amazing shots of the anchorage which made me really, really want one! It would be amazing to launch it while we’re sailing, and I bet they get some pretty epic footage out there. Belinda is a dive instructor and she volunteered to take us out for an introductory dive near the Tiki Palapa. It’s mostly sand out there but it’s shallow and the perfect spot for an intro dive. It was really sweet of her and Danny to take us out and let us use their gear! We don’t have room for dive equipment on the boat and don’t have the money to hire it, so this whole time we’ve been telling ourselves that we’re not missing out on anything. We’ve seen so many amazing reefs with our snorkels and they’ve all been pretty shallow – we can usually get down to the bottom with our dive belts on. These last few years have been filled with amazing underwater adventures. So we were happy without the dive gear. But after we went out with Belinda and Danny, I realised that we had in fact been missing out on a whole lot! The fish act really differently around you when you’re diving as opposed to when you’re snorkelling. They normally dart around and swim past you, sometimes hiding and sometimes swimming away. We’re always surrounded by fish and it’s always amazing. But scuba diving allowed us to just hang out near the ocean floor and the fish just sat there staring at us. They hardly moved at all. I guess because we weren’t really moving much either. It was definitely a whole different world, where everything was a lot calmer and more serene. I thought diving would be really different but because we were in shallow water it felt the same as snorkelling anyway. We just didn’t have to go up for air.


A dodgy photo of the drone camera screen. You can see how pretty both the anchorage and Fantasy island are! (As well as the reflection of my phone…)



Roatan (and the other islands near here) is the 2nd cheapest place in the world to get PADI certified, so after that amazing experience we were really tempted to do a dive course. But unfortunately we just don’t have the money or the time. It’s cheap to visit and you get unlimited dives as a resort guest, so maybe we’ll be back in a few years mingling with all the tourists in the hotel!

Our quick dive experience was one of the few fun things we’ve done lately. So after spending so much time slaving away on the boat, our friend Anju dragged us away with Liz and Marty to be tourists for a day. Anju is really lovely. A lot of the hotel guests are Canadian, because they do cheap package deals to Roatan from Canada. So Anju (she’s French-Canadian) works for an airline at the hotel as a tour coordinator. She doesn't really work for the hotel but she stays in one of the rooms there, so she’s more like us than the rest of the hotel workers – living here temporarily and just doing her thing each day. She often hangs out with us at the Tiki Palapa and it’s nice to see a friendly face floating around the place.


Looking down at a village on the way to Punta Gorda

There’s a place called Punta Gorda not too far from Fantasy Island, and on Sunday afternoons all the locals gather there to sing and dance. It’s not really a tourist attraction but it’s a fun thing to do if you’re in the area. So Anju drove us all out there and the afternoon quickly turned into a party when she emerged from the shop across the road with local spirits and little cups. It seemed to be the thing to do, as all the locals were involving themselves in the local drinks as well, so I’m glad she was with us to lead the way! It was a bit drizzly so they had moved the dancing under cover, which quickly packed out. It was indeed mostly locals, with a line of guys drumming away in the middle. There were also some guys blowing on conch shells in the corner in time to the beat. Everybody took turns dancing in the middle, including very young girls who were trying to copy their parents. The dance was really hard and involved moving your weight onto your toes and shaking your hips from side to side as you kind of jump quickly from one foot to another. It was like a combination of polynesian dancing with hips swaying everywhere, and twerking. Either way there were a lot of bums bouncing from left to right!




Anju pouring out the drinks



Everybody had a go, including the older ladies (who had way more energy than they should have!). After it got dark and a lot of shots were had, Liz convinced a young girl to show her how to do the dance. She then dragged us onto the dancefloor and the locals cheered their heads off for us. It was exhausting! I tried to exit about halfway through but our instructor said I couldn’t – it was up to the guys on the drums. We had to dance for as long as they wanted us to. I had noticed them getting faster and faster for some girls, amid the cheers and laughter of the crowd. The dancing always matched the music, and it wasn’t until we were in amongst it that I realized the drums were indeed in charge. They stopped when they thought your dance had come to an end. The beat was constantly changing for the mood of the crowd, and it was a lot of fun to both watch and be apart of. I really love it here!



Xxx Monique

Click here for LOTS more pictures!

Honduras, Roatan (Sloths) 2016-02-22

Best. Day. Ever. Our friends John and Lisa from S/V Morningstar took the lovely Shelley and I on an excursion to cuddle some sloths. I freaking love sloths. There were lots of them in Panama, and it was really exciting when we went out in the evening to find a random sloth hanging off a tree or creeping along a power line. But they usually only come down from the trees at night, so the only pictures I have are of blurry grey shapes lurking in the darkness. Occasionally they would hide in the electrical box near the La Playita anchorage during the day, because it was much cooler in there. But for the most part we didn't really get to play with them.



It just so happens that there’s a little zoo thing near the anchorage here in Roatan. I don't do zoos. I don't like seeing animals in cages, and I don't support places that cage up animals. But I decided to give in just this once so that we could see the sloths. I don't think they’re native to Honduras, but the climate here is exactly the same as in the neighbouring countries where they're abundunt, such as Panama and Costa Rica.

I was hoping it would be more like a sanctuary than a zoo, but there were still animals in cages. We were the only ones there and it wasn’t a big place (we’d certainly never heard of it). The friendly owners were probably just looking after the animals in their backyard to start with and they figured they may as well charge tourists to see them. There were a few smaller animals in big cages (three racoons and a few of the native watusas that you see everywhere near the marina). There was also a spider monkey in a cage and another one on a long leash, which I hated. But he was on a leash so he could live in a little tree house and still hang out in the trees without running off. I didn't like it, but he seemed pretty happy playing up in the branches. Spider monkeys can be pretty aggressive if they want to be, so I doubt they would last very long running around with the people on the island. The one in the cage was very possessive of the guy showing us around - Mr monkey reached out and grabbed our guides hand, wrapping fingers around his arm and pulling him closer. The guy said that because they play with them every day and are close with them, the spider monkeys don't like anybody else taking away their attention.


John with a spider monkey. They were very different to the spider monkeys we saw in Panama

There were also capuchin monkeys. Lots of them. They were in two huge cages, with a few running wild around the place. I was trying to figure out why they didn't let more monkeys out to play, when the guys working there found us a sloth.



The sloths were just hanging out in the trees, but there was one close to the ground with a little baby clinging to her stomach. It was pretty much the cutest thing I've ever seen in my life. The baby was sooo little and sooo cute! The pair were munching on leaves together and being adorable, when a capuchin monkey came along and peeled one of her hands off the branch. Then it peeled another hand off. They move so slowly and the monkeys are so quick, it was very easy for them to just drop the sloths off the branches. When the guys yelled at it, the monkey tried to pick up the baby. It was being an absolute terror. The guys said that the monkeys loved causing trouble and that they’re always trying to drop the sloths into the water. This one in particular needed to be watched all day because of the little baby. So that's why most of the capuchins were locked up…



Our friendly guide went about finding us a sloth near the ground who wasn't trying to look after a tiny little baby. This was the one he came back with.


Shelley with our new friend

Sloths are just ridiculous! He was so chilled out and relaxed. When the guy picked him up, he pretended his arms were branches so the sloth just gripped onto his hands and was slowly moved onto us. They look so silly hanging in the air! You could tell these guys cared about the animals, which made me feel better about the whole cages situation - they showed us where to put our hands so the little guy would be supported properly, and our slothy friend was handled like a delicate baby.

John with the sloth

He seemed perfectly content to just cling onto us. He looked around every once and a while, and we we were told he was slowly trying to decide which tree he was going climb up onto once we were done. This seemed like a decision that he wasnt going to make easily… there was a lot of pondering going on in his little head. I could just picture him sitting back in an armchair slowly sipping a cup of tea and thinking about his options for the entire afternoon. He made no signs of wanting to move any time soon, and just sat there quietly.





I nearly died when it was my turn. It was like cuddling a koala bear that doesn't stink, isn't going to go to the toilet on you and has no interest in scratching your eyes out. He wrapped his arms around my neck, holding onto my back with his claws. The claws were very long but not at all sharp. I was tempted to just walk off with my cuddly little friend, and I don't think he would have minded. But I think we would have had some concerned caretakers chasing after us!







After we were done cuddling him, John placed him back onto a tree with the help of our young leader. He looked around and very slowly made his way back up into the branches, trying to find the perfect spot to hang from.


Inspecting the branch

We went to check on the baby again before we left, and I nearly died when I saw the other caretaker playing with it. Sloths only produce milk for two weeks and they only carry their babies for a few months. After that they're on their own. This one was still very small, but it was starting to look around as it gets ready to explore on its own.



I'm not sure sure if the monkeys were messing with it or if it was being returned from an exploratory mission, but the guy had it sitting on his chest. It looked so tiny next to a full grown person! It was just this little furry ball clinging to his shirt. I got the impression that they didn't handle it very often and I've never seen two boys fuss over something so carefully before. They agreed to let me hold the baby when I nearly exploded from excitement and cuteness, but I'm not sure they were very confident about it. I was given very specific instructions on how to hold it. The little thing fit right in my hand! I held my hand out to support it and it latched onto me, wrapping both legs around the bottom of my hand. It gripped on tight!




You can just see his tiny little claws clinging onto the bottom of my right hand

The boys weren't happy with that, so they detached it from me and then placed it on my shirt, where it could grip with tiny little claws. I nearly passed out from the cuteness overload.





I didn't get to play for long, because they wanted the bubba back on mum’s tummy. It's still very young and and I don't think they've really let anybody else handle it before. It wanted to go exploring along the branch, but eventually it snuggled into her fur and wrapped itself around her as much as it could. So. Cute.



We got to visit with some birds before we left, which was actually pretty cool. They had Macaws and some green parrots, both of which are native to Honduras. I think he Macaw is actually the national bird. I had no idea how big they were! We got to go in the enclosure and feed them, which was exactly like feeding a normal parrot...If the parrot was the size of a small dog and had the ability to bite off your hand along with the birdseed.





Xxx Monique

Click here for LOTS more pictures!