The overnight trip was pleasant with the very light wind, so we had to start engines in order to make it to Guanaja before the sunset. The last 4 hours the wind picked up - up to 27 m/h, very unexpected, we barely had time to reef the jib and the main sails. This time seems that charts were more in sync with the reality and we made it fine to Guanaja island. The anchorage near this town is not very pleasant since you find yourself parked in the middle of the water traffic. We stayed on this uncomfortable anchorage for two night because we had some little trouble to check-in (we lost our original renewed boat registration), and we waited for the "fruit" boat from mainland (from La Ceiba) to show up on Thursday to fill up our provision.The quality of the produce was much better than in Kuna Land!
The people on the island speak both English and Spanish, and unfortunately, are not so much nice as Colombians in Providence. Everybody tries to get money from us, gringos, and we ended up paying to many people just for asking and help to take us to the restaurants or stores. Definitely, we did not like that. One local guy, named Red, shows up at the boats and falsely pretends to be an official from the immigration, then takes cruisers to the offices and copier tienda, requesting payment at least 3 time more than it should be. We paid for the customs and immigration $26 when it should be just $2.50! Paid for documents copies $1 per piece when next day at the other store we paid just one Lempira (2 cents)!
The town in Manaki (The Cay, as locals call it) seems very overpopulated, there are no cars or motobikes around, because the streets are very narrow, barely fitting couple people, houses don't have any space between each other, but streets are clean and you don't see much trash around. In the middle of the day it's practically impossible to walk in this town - very very hot!
Most of the time we spent anchoring near Manati restaurant, further away from the busy town. The restaurant Manati is the place to meet expatriats and cruisers. The food is very delicious - the native shwabish german Annete with her husband Claus are serving freshly homemade shpetzle, shnitzels, sourcrout, homebacked bread, fish, and, of course, the best german potato salad. The drinks are not cheap, but you got a good size of the draft german bier. We spent at this place almost every night, zerh gemutlich! We met there a lot of US couples who moved to Guanaja and some started their businesses. We met there a couple from Austin, TX who opened "G&G restaurant and resort".
The other restaurant we loved was "Mi Casa Too". It's a bit of a hike up to the hill to get to this place, but the view, very delicious local food and cheap drinks are worth it!
One of the days we dinghy through the cut in the island to the west side, much calmer with beautiful white sandy beaches and hikes to the waterfalls and in jungle. We saw the best corral reefs so far - very alive, with a lot of different fish and different types of corrals. There are not so many human beings around here on this side, so, not so many objects to ruin the reefs.
We really loved this place, the live here is relatively cheap and you still can buy land for $20K with the beautiful view and close to the shore.
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