horses in Roatan

On our Caribbean cruise on the Majestic Princess the ship overnighted at Mahogany Bay in Roatan, Honduras so there was no worry about getting back to the ship on time from a long excursion that we had booked through Vacations to Go. After meeting with the guide for the tour outside of the port since it was not a ship’s excursion, we rode the little excursion bus to a sloth and monkey sanctuary where we spent some time with the animals before moving onto the next stop.

beach resort

The second part of the excursion took place at a little beach resort that had a stable for the horse rides as well as boats to take people snorkeling and a little restaurant for the included lunch. It also had places for people to relax and enjoy the beach as well as lockers where people could put their belongings when they weren’t using them, and a separate building with bathrooms and changing rooms. Nobody else on the excursion was doing the horse riding, just the three of us so the rest of them had more time to hang around the little beach area when they weren’t out snorkeling or having lunch.

Pinto

They had a stable full of horses and brought out 3 of them for us. Hannah had a pinto named Pinto. I had a darker pinto named Pinto Negro even though he was actually very dark brown rather than true black. Negro (pronounced nay-grow) means black in Spanish. If his brown patches were actually black instead of very dark brown he’d be a piebald. (In horse colors piebald is black and white and pinto is any color and white.) He does look black in the photo, but he wasn’t really.

Pinto Negro

John’s horse was a dark bay named either Burro or Burl. I couldn’t tell which they were saying. Bay is brown with a black mane and tail. That horse was pretty skinny, though the rest of them were not. There were a lot of little no-see-um bugs. I didn’t get any bites on the ride, but John and Hannah did. Probably because they wore shorts and I had long pants, which are far more comfortable in a saddle than having bare legs rubbing on the leather even if there aren’t any little bugs biting your legs.

the guide walked instead of riding a horse

The ride is all done at a walk and the guide walked on his own two feet rather than riding one of the other horses. We went down dirt road and through a gate. The trail there led down to the beach, passing by an abandoned house before the horses went into the water and walked along the edge for a bit.

riding at the water’s edge

Unlike her mother who grew up riding horses, Hannah had not ridden before other than leading her around on our horses when she came for a visit when was very little and we still had some, so even though it was a slow ride it was quite fun for her. I sold the last of my horses well over a decade ago and hadn’t been on one since we did a horse swimming excursion in Jamaica years ago so it was nice to see I still felt quite at home on one.

snorkel boat

The ride was pretty short, under an hour. Back at the little beach resort we ditched our riding clothes for swimwear. After a short wait we were directed to a little boat that had pulled into the dock.

blue fish

The small boat took us out to the nearby reef, which is a small part of the Mesoamerican Reef that runs for about 600 miles from Mexico to Honduras. We had 2 snorkel stops in different places with the first starting near a shipwreck, which we swam to from where we got out of the boat, looking at different things along the reef on the way.

shipwreck and snorkelers

The reef had several different types of coral and a variety of fish. The guide said the shipwreck was an old steamer of which the boiler was the main part visible above the water. There were parts of the ship scattered about under the sea, and another piece protruding above. A lot of the underwater bits of it were covered with enough coral and sand that it would be pretty easy to miss that they were even part of a ship. Other pieces were still easily visible and more obviously ship parts. It looked to have been there for quite a long time.

part of the shipwreck underwater

After everyone got back into the boat it moved on to a different part of the reef. The second stop was in a place with a lot of large starfish. These were the sort of sea stars that look like a 5-pointed star. They were nearly all sitting in the sand rather than actually on any of the rocks or coral. They were not the crown of thorns type of starfish that are known for decimating reefs.

starfish

The part of the reef where the starfish lived was in shallow water, but it was just a quick swim over the reef to the part called the wall where it drops off thousands of feet nearly straight down. The boat had moved out into the deep water so that is where we swam back to it. The underwater view went from coral and things in the shallows to things clinging to the wall going down until it dropped out of sight to open water where there was no bottom anywhere in sight. Life jackets were provided for anyone not confident in their swimming skills, but they didn’t make us wear them if we didn’t want to which I appreciated because I don’t want or need any sort of floatation device when snorkeling.

drop-off at the wall

Back at the little beach place we were served lunch with a choice of fish, shrimp, or chicken along with some rice and beans before returning back to the ship.

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