Ended up staying longer on Utila then planned thanks to a nasty bout of belly ache for Tim and a full-on Caribbean cold for me, but we can think of worse places in the world to recuperate!

Thanks to a visit to the resident hippie doctor Dr John - a long haired guy sporting dark sunglasses, no shoes and a small puppy under his arm mostly found propping up the island's bar - and a few random Honduran pills and Tim was soon right as rain!

Utila is a very chilled out, laid back place with one 'main' road busy with middle aged tourists on golf carts and rastas on quad bikes. And the local accent is the weirdest you have ever heard, its like a cross between Jamaican, Caribbean and Irish with a touch of northern England chucked in for good measure. Everyone speaks English, and you think you are understanding what is being said but actually you can't follow a word of it. Really very strange, and a bit like being in some Little Britain sketch!

Gold medal for humour goes to the local chavette who innocently asked: "Hey lady, where you from? " Response: "Erm...England." Follow-up classic quote (spoken like a Jamaican Sean Connery): "Ya, I bin dere....you got a lot o' good pooosay dere!".

Stayed in a lovely hotel with a massive sunny room overlooking the bar with a swimming dock and a very friendly couple who were big players in the 7th Day Adventist church movement! We even witnessed a very surreal baptism off our dock and got invited to join the lord as part of our holiday....we managed to politely decline.

The extremely drunk tramp who had been collared off the street was not so lucky tho' and ended up surrounded by well-meaning worshippers desperate to get him in the drink!

Made plenty of new friends to party with including Stuart and Emily from home, James from Leeds and Erin his Aussie soon-to-be-missus and Michelle from London so had lots of fun drinking cheap booze in the infamous Treetanic bar....a wicked bar built up in the trees with walkways and weird mosaics (and huge yellow and black spiders!) everywhere. Apparently its the lifelong work of the German owner!

Also managed to stir ourselves to achieve something a little bit more worthwhile and successfully passed our advanced scuba diving course. Pats on backs all round.

It was great fun, lots of really cool diving, plus our first night dive and our first dive to 40 metres! The night dive was pretty nervewracking but pretty cool. We went down just as the sun was setting so we could see to start with but within about 10 minutes it was totally pitch black and tall you could see was the lights of people's torches in front and behind!

Hoped to see a octopus but instead saw a massive barracuda instead which was pretty shady....only an hour before we'd been warned not to shine our lights if we saw one because they swim right at them and according to Utila legend, one of the at a rival school apparently did and ended up with a broken nose and a totally bitten arm looking like a zipper! So we almost filled our wetsuits we saw the flash of silver swimming round and round us and I was pretty pleased to get back to the surface and into the safety of the boat!

The deep dive was cool, although poor Tim had a leaky mask, it is the deepest we have been by far and at the bottom we had to do a maths test to check we didn't have narcosis poisoning (from too much nitrogen in the blood) which
an send people totally loopy.

Some crazed folks take our their mouthpieces because they think they are actually fish, while others start laughing hysterically or see everything in bright pink. Sadly, we are disappointingly dull and it didn't affect us at all!
One the other dives included a really fun dive to perfect our buoyancy and just involved us playing underwater frisbee and swimming upside down through hoops and stuff....who says learning isn't fun?

We had really hoped to see whale sharks which are massive fish the size of buses but we were just out of season, although typically, there were reports of sightings on the morning we left!!