Trouble. I knew she was trouble the first time I saw her reel across the bar,
all oversize Gucci sunglasses, barely-there Versace miniskirt and legs from
here to Cairo.
“A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window,” murmured
Marlowe, somewhere.
An hour later she threw her drink in my face.
A day later she met me for lunch. Two days later she was lunch. Caligula would
have blushed.
Three days later she mentions she’s married, and I’m chewing on eggshell. He’s
back in New Orleans, right? “No, he’s here on the island.” Great. Doing
what? “Business. I guess you could call him a gangster.” Marvellous.
That should have been my cue to “no thank you”. But “thou shalt not” sounds a
lot more convincing in a stone-cold celibate church than it does on this
tropical beach, at midnight, barefoot, a tall rum in one hand, a taller
woman’s salsa-snaking hip in the other, as we dance real close, and she’s
got one hand flamenco-flicking the hem of her skirt and the other in my
hair, and the warmth of her mouth on my neck, my cheek, my ear as she
drawls, “Dan, why don’t you stay a little longer?”
Besides, this isn’t real life, this is Roatan. I fell for the island when I
read its history – originally populated by preMayan Indians, it was
depopulated by Columbus, who decided the subsistence farmers and fishermen
were actually cannibals and they’d be better off worked to death on the
slave plantations of Cuba and Jamaica.
Abandoned for a century, it was rediscovered by British buccaneers, including
the Welsh maniac (and inventor of rum, maybe) Henry Morgan, who used it as a
base to launch noisy raids against the Spanish New World. At the height of
its lunacy, Roatan was home to 5,000 pirates – it must have made Saturday
night in Glasgow look like a Hove retirement home.
Eventually, the Spanish stopped torturing heathens for long enough to clear
the pirates out. The island was empty again until the British abolition of
slavery – although colonial landowners were forced to free their slaves,
they certainly didn’t want them living next door or marrying their
daughters. So the Caribbean forced-labour force was shipped here. Where they
stayed.
I can’t blame them. Roatan’s a place to fall in love and a place to fall in
love with. I love this island because it’s flawed, because it’s not an
airbrushed travel brochure. Sure, it’s rum-and-reggae easy, but I still see
sailors fighting on the dancefloor, still see rude boys playing with knives
outside the clubs, still see a taxi driver chase a colleague down the street
with a gun (fortunately, he shoots like these cowboys drive).
Though it pretends to be as modern as tomorrow afternoon, with Bowling for
Columbine on big-screen DVD and United v Liverpool live on Fox Sports,
though there’s an ATM and internet access and satellite phones, when it
rains, the dirt roads muddy-flood, the power cuts out, the ferry stops and
we’re as cut off as the 19th century. The beaches are beautiful but they
bite back, alive with sandflies the size of blackheads with great-whites’
jaws. New arrivals get it worse and are easily spotted, as they itch like
the Singing Detective. And it’s hot. Damn hot. So hot that breathing doesn’t
refresh, just scalds and suffocates. Getting up makes me sweat. Cleaning my
teeth makes me sweat. First smoke of the morning to last beer at night, I
sweat.
After a week, I’m struggling to find reasons to leave and dreaming of opening
my own hobby bar. It’s not just the island, it’s the people too. Caribbean
rather than Central American, English-speaking (with a heavy Carib accent,
me darlin’) not Spanish, it’s the kind of place where passers-by nod their
heads to the mambos floating out of bars. The kind of place that attracts
thirtysomething gringos and Euros who are a step beyond the usual teenage
gap-year backpackers, a cut above the two-weeker holidaymakers who pollute
the region’s Ibizas.
Then the Blonde turns up. I’m living the dream – doing a whole lot of nothing
on an island hidey-hole and scoring with a woman way out of my league.
Big-grin happy, laughing-out-loud happy, making-up-songs happy. I just wish
it wasn’t at another man’s expense. But it is. The drunken thrill of a
secret rendezvous sinks into sober morning guilt. Sultry afternoons turn
cold-sweat clammy with every car-door slam and gravel crunch.
Should I stay or should I go? Ride and decide. Drag my Dakar motorbike from
under the palm trees, wipe off the monkey poo (cheeky monkey) and head out,
past Sundowners beach bar and its alcoholic dive-master crowd, past the gym
that’s closed due to lack of Californians, past the taxi rank where 225 “The
Seductor” and 003 “Night Stalker” still can’t understand why so few females
take a cab after dark, onto West End’s sandy high street, with its “Cheapest
in the World” dive shops, pink-legged tourists, pointlessly busy dogs and
commuting crabs, and out onto the island’s one road.
It’s an up-and-down, left-and-right, storm-damaged single lane that ripples up
and down the green mountain from the tourist west to the poor east,
sometimes empty, sometimes clogged with too many taxis and too-large
imported trucks. A month ago it worried me – now, it’s a supermoto track,
with humpback jumps, wheelie-practice slopes and slithery gravel slides. A
month ago I always wore gloves and boots. Now I’m happy in trainers and
shorts.
Past Anthony’s Key, the $200-a-night exclusive honeymoon hideaway, past Parrot
Tree Plantation, the first pirate colony, past a bright-green monkey lala
lizard sprinting on its back legs, past a gaggle of kids wobbling
unpredictably on oversize bicycles as they race downhill, past the barrio
shanties of Coxen Hole, riding as long and as far and as fast as I can, till
I reach the other dead end and turn round and do it all again.
Five minutes from home, I hit a junction and decide at the last minute to
swing left, up a road to nowhere but a beautiful view of both sides of the
island. Park up, watch the setting sun paint the scene fiery gold, baby
blue, cat’s-mouth pink. I love this island.
Decision made, I head back. The blonde’s gotta go – adultery’s adultery even
if the marriage is a sexless sham, an arm-candy-for-shiny-bauble exchange. I
wonder where she is? If she’s at the Italian I can get some pasta while we
talk and... bang. I crash hard.
The front wheel makes a tearing sound as it breaks free on a righthander and,
wallop, the bike’s heavy on my right side as my arms spread in front of me
and we scrape downhill, shriek downhill, and the tarmac tears my trainers
and grinds down my toes, biting at my hips and snagging my elbows, burning
my knees and ripping off my clothes, and the speedo’s still reading 50 and I
wish this would stop.
It stops. The stalled engine pings, my dizzy ears ring and everything stings.
“What goes around, comes around,” the spinning wheels sing. A cab pulls
over. The Spanish driver’s taking his wife and son home. All three get the
bike up, get me up, then coo sympathetically when I wobble and throw up.
“Can I take you home?” I wish.
I thought I was abroad. I thought the people here were scruffy acquaintances,
drunken partners, passing lovers. Turns out they’re friends. Turns out I am
at home. Patricio, the Argentine hotel owner, half-carries me to my room,
strips me with no embarrassment and puts me in the shower with a Cuba Libre
and a bottle of Dettol. Alex, the Italian restaurant manager, and Julio, a
local street hustler, throw the bike into a borrowed pickup. The Blonde
turns up with a mouth full of kisses and a bag full of goodies. “Okay, we
got rum, beers, juice, smokes and Valium. I gotta run.”
She leaves, they arrive – the Sisters of Mercy. Lauren from Georgia snaps on
rubber gloves and cleans the wounds, Danielle from Florida snips up
dressings and tapes on bandages, and Jeanine from Alabama sits on the edge
of the bed looking purty.
Next day, a doctor with kind eyes and cruel hands scrubs my wounds clean. With
a soapy bristled brush. Scrubs. After he’s run my cross-eyed body through
the x-ray and confirmed two broken ribs and a chipped kneecap, he scolds me
for riding in my shorts. He’s absolutely right.
Everyone crashes eventually – and without proper kit, it hurts. Really, really
hurts. For weeks. You try doing anything fun without using your palms,
knees, toes or elbows. Truth is, I’ve been lucky. I crashed minutes from a
familiar hotel – it could have happened in the middle of nowhere, at night,
somewhere genuinely foreign. And though I’m sore, I’m not broken. I’m
useless, but not for long.
The bike’s a bit battered but crashed well. Mainly because I took most of the
damage. Bent bar, scuffed guards, four popped indicators (apparently I hit
both sides – I’ve no idea how); the only real problem came from the smashed
switches – the righthand cluster exploded and the kill switch is dead, Zed.
Rob, a Florida mechanic, helps me bodge it back together.
I arrange to meet the Blonde for dinner. Her friend, the Brunette, turns up
instead. “She can’t see you any more. He knows. You should leave.”
Next stop – the 6am ferry to the mainland. Tomorrow.
Travel brief: Roatan is the largest of the Bay Islands, off the
Caribbean coast of Honduras. If you fancy a few days there, Journey Latin
America (020 8747 8315, www.journeylatinamerica.co.uk)
can tailor-make trips throughout the region. A 10-night trip in Honduras
costs from £839pp, with two nights at the Mayan ruins of Copan, three nights
in a luxury rainforest lodge on the Caribbean coast and three nights on
Roatan. Prices include accommodation and transfers but not flights. Expect
to pay about £520 for flights to San Pedro Sula (the best gateway to the
islands), with American Airlines via JFK, also through JLA. Or try Explore
(0845 013 1537, www.explore.co.uk) or
Audley Travel (01993 838000, www.audleytravel.com).
© Dan Walsh 2008. Extracted from These Are the Days That Must Happen to
You (Century £18.99), out on Thursday. To buy it for the reduced price of
£17.09, inc free p&p in the UK, call The Sunday Times BooksFirst on
0870 165 8585
