I am better! I had totally recovered by the time I started work last Monday and now I'm feeling as healthy as ever, perhaps more than usually so since I've been exercising so much - on top of the usual four hours of earth-hauling and mixing Roatan, one of the Bay Islands proved to be a divine place of sea kayaking. Your mind can lose itself gazing at the coral but the following morning your body is brought painfully back down to earth with stiffness.

Work is progressing well on the building project - as the pictures show the walls are getting taller than even the tallest of us now, forcing us to use Honduran scaffolding. Again, see photos for a demonstration of the excellent safety of the wood constructions! The physical labour has taken on a new dimension as Marcos needs to oversee most of the actually changes occuring to the walls, leaving us to fetch increasing amounts of arena, the fine black sand, from a large bit at the bottom of a nearby hill. This task is very hard - we have to carry down all our tools then hack away at the dry, solid face of sand. Pix-axes are the best method as their heads are heavier and give more power for each stroke (and are obviously harder to wield too!). Then the powdered sand is bagged and manually carried up the hill to the building site. I cannot imagine how any family could build a house on their own since even with five fit, able and well-fed young men the process is painfully slow. But this makes our efforts all the more rewarding - we can see with every task we complete how much harder it would be to do construct one of these houses with a fraction of the labour as most familoes have to.

On Thursday I set of with two other volunteers (Erin from the states and Grady from Edmonton, Canada) on my biggest trip of the holiday. It marks the half way point so I decided to take two days out from volunteering - I felt guilty but will make up for it with extra work in the INFA centre this week. The journey was an amazing experience, mainly because it was a logistical nightmare, depending on two seperate buses, two taxis and a ferry all being on time. Luckily for us, they all were and we travelled from Esperanza to the West Bay of Roatan in a single day, albeit a 15 hour one.

We came into the Port of Roatan as the sun was setting behind the forested hills, casting a unreal glow over the shipwrecks littered on the coral. We couldn't really appreciate the beauty of the Island until the morning but our cabin was a welcome comfort - a small kitchen, big beds and working showers were all very much enjoyed! After the sun was up the idyllic beech was unmasked - white sand almost painful on the eyes, a blue sky only matched in its depth of colour by the sea and lush tropical trees spread along the shoreline made it a truly breathtaking sight. The days were suitably lazy - a lot of beech time and just as much sea kayaking, mainly because rental was gloriously free at our accomodation. Light and very responsive the kayaks were the perfect was to explore the bays and their famous rock formations and coral (not to mention get an even and some solid exercise!). The water was so clear that you could pause for a moment and look down through two metres and see the multi-coloured coral quite easily.

But the highlight of the trip was the snorkeling - after a five minute swim past the underwater garden of weeds the barrier of coral suddenly emerged, a vast network of sandy valleys with walls stuffed with the polyps. Beams from the sun penetrated down into the forest at intervals and vivid striped fish flashed in and our of the natural spotlights, giving divers a brief glimpse of their yellow and black bodies. Schools of vibrant blue fish moved slow enough so that I could follow their progress from above, watching as they deftly steered a course through the water to the next feeding ground. It is a shame that I have no pictures for the most memorable experience of the island but hopefully my brief description gives a flavour of the swim.

The food on the island was considerably more expensive than elsewhere in Honduras but the quality was good - plenty of fresh snapper and prawns that had probably be caught a day if not hours before arriving on our plates. Food in Esperanza is wholesome but not particularly inspired so the bombardment of culinary quality which we were confronted with made a great temporary change. Two days was clearly not enough - I would have loved to dive but to do so would require a whole trip to the Islands and diving was not why I came to Honduras. At the end of the trip I felt slightly uncomfortable at the idea that the luxery we had enjoyed was a result of missing days of volunteering. I wouldn't hesitate to go again but not during time that is intended primarily for other purposes - it was with an odd sense of relief that I returned to work today.

As a final note, for any family who may be reading I am fixing my flights so that I will make it back in time for the reunion! I can't promise not to be jetlagged but I will certainly have plenty more stories to add to this blog...