Utila has been the best vacation of my life for a number of reasons, but no place is perfect. To wit: this is my back with hundreds of sand fly bites. The first week on the island I slept in the common room on the couch with the glass doors open and the screen doors closed. Although the screens were supposed to be of the type that sand flies can’t penetrate … they penetrated. I didn’t realize there was a problem til a girlfriend of mine told me there was a rash on my back. A day later, this loveliness broke out.
I’m not autistic and so I’ve not bothered to count the bites on my body, but I assume there are more than a thousand of them. Visually impressive, they don’t itch that bad and they don’t hurt. This pic is pretty low-res, but my back, while getting better, currently looks like the cautionary tale that would be shown to teens at the local meet-up of dermatologists. Along with my back, my feet and waist seem to have been hit the worst.
Whatever. This place rocks. I hope to live here within three years, if that. It would be impossible to list the number of people I’ve met here who came here for a visit and just … stayed. A woman from New Jersey. A Dutch chick. An English gal (yes, every single person who stayed was a female). They come down here for a vagabond dive vacation and they … just … stay.
As I’m a middle-aged man who lives to cook, the goal will be to rent a restaurant space and make a go of it (locals own everything, expats rent from them). Will it happen? Who knows – but it’s a start.
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Beach reading? As a lark, I grabbed Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84, [pretension-alert!], a thousand-page dystopian Japanese novel that I’d heard was The Shit. I’m well into it, and it’s good enough to keep me reading, though admittedly, were I not on a two-week vacation on an island with lots of down-time, I’d not have made it past the first two chapters.
So there’s that.
