Utila – Week 7, Day 1: Christmas in Utila
UTILA
Week 7
Day 1: Christmas in Utila
December 25, 2022
Christmas morning at Underwater Vision – in Utila, Honduras, in Latin America – just hits different. All of us were hungover, on a sunny beach, with reggaeton music in the background. So unlike any other Christmas I had ever celebrated. I wouldn’t have had it any other way, to be honest. This place felt like home – a home I’d be leaving soon enough.
That day was all about recovery. God knows we needed it. With Amelia still feeling low from the previous day’s events, all we did was sulk and wallow until it was time for yet another one of Tammy’s momentous potlucks. She had warned us beforehand. If we thought Thanksgiving dinner was a blast, this was gonna be a nuclear explosion.
And lemme tell ya, it really was. Amelia and I went the lazy way and picked up a tray of brownies and cookies from Carolina’s. Meanwhile, everyone else seemed to have gone wild. From Honduran and Israeli cuisine, to Italian, Mexican, and American, the table was a multicultural feast. I gotta admit that my favourite was a tie between Tammy’s turkey and Ahinoam’s shakshuka. I swear, I’d never eaten so much in my entire life!
As always, these Underwater Vision family gatherings would give all of us a chance to mingle and get to know each other a little bit better. In fact, I had one of the best conversations of my entire life with Ella – a writer and journalist from the UK. She told me all about how she’d slept with Jagger and fallen in love with him over one night, and how her abandonment issues were getting the best of her. I got to play therapist (something I always knew I’d be good at) while she gave me advice on how to get published.
Then there was another heart-to-heart with Catherine. We had a talk about our love lives (or lack thereof) and, when the conversation turned to ‘the one’ (or lack thereof), her eyes suddenly twinkled and she just went, “Camilla.” The way she said it, using the same inflection as that ‘no‘ back when I told her I was gonna leave, was just heartbreaking. Needless to say, we spent hours talking about anything and everything – my love for her expanding with every sentence!
Stuck in a food coma and not really in the mood to keep celebrating, I decided on yet another early night. Knowing I’d be leaving so soon and having to say goodbye to Underwater Vision, Utila, and the family I’d found there, I practically cried myself to sleep.
Stay wild,
Marius
Post-Scriptum
Ever since Andreas had left, Amelia and I had been super lucky, sharing the four-bedded dorm between just the two of us. I used the pillow from the bed above mine, and she used the bed above hers as a makeshift shelf. But when her mattress got drenched in rain, she had to switch to the bed above mine – which was coily and terribly uncomfortable.
Now, after all this time, we suddenly had a new roommate: a perpetually drunk American called Alex, who’d been at Underwater Vision about three years previously as a divemaster. Let’s just say he and Amelia started off on the wrong foot when he took her now-dry and comfortable original bed.