Carnival, Carribean, Chaos

Spent a few days in Utila, one of the bay islands in Honduras, and really enjoyed myself. I´ve loved working and volunteering so much throughout my travels, but it was nice to feel like I was really on a vacation. Took a ferry out from La Ceiba and stayed at the cheapest place on the island, which was suprisingly cleand and quiet-perfect. Spent a couple of days just hanging out walking around, eating delicious cinnamon rolls (we fell in love with a bakery that had amazing cinnamon rolls, piña cake, and banana bread), and meeting poeple. I ran into a Dutch friend from Guatemala, and a boy who played rugby with the guy my roomate in Guatemala dated-it´s a small world! Anyway, I hung out with some twins from Canada, one of whom took the diving PADI course, and we had fun meeting poeple from her school. Went to a huge BBQ one night at the school and had a blast, also went out to Tree Tanic a few times-a treehouse sort of bar that´s part of an enormous outdoor restraunt/bar area that´s all sculptures encrusted with mosaics, shells, glasswork, and all sorts of random stuff.
We also took a really nice day trip out to Pigeon Caye, where we swam out to Diamond Caye for snorkeling. It was beautiful and we saw tons of coral, sea fans, ¨donkey dung¨ sea cucumbers, balloon fish, damselfish, parrot fish, barracuda, queen angel fish, and a green moray eel. We also bought a huge barracuda fillet and cooked it up for lunch with a salad and homemade ice cream.
The nights were beautiful on the island as well, and there were so many start that we couldn´t even find constelations!
Came back to La Ceiba a couple of days ago for Carnival this weekend-which was totaly chaos. The parade was fun to watch, and all of the women´s costumes were super elaborate. We weren´t sure how we felt about the little girls dressed up to match, doing seriously raunchy dancing with the crowd going wild. There were tons of beads being thrown, lots of confetti and glitter in the air, and I even made my own mask to wear out-complete with feathers and glitter. After the parade there wasn´t a ton to do, but we walked around for hours (the twins, some friends from Xela, and the guys they were traveling with). Unfortunately, two nights ago several people were robbed in the hostel while everyone was sleeping, and then tons of people were robbed while we were out at the Carnival last night-many of the at gun point!
I´m not much of a fan of Honduras at this point and after whitewater rafting tomorrow, I plan to head down to Nicaragua. On the upside though, Honduras does have amazing ¨Baleadas.¨ They´re pretty simple, but somehow amazing-just a flour tortilla with butter, refired beans, cheese, cream, and then whatever fillings you want-my favorites are scrambled eggs and avocado.