One of the best quirks about Roatan is the mail service, or lack thereof. No bills, no junk mail, no credit card offers. No mailboxes to check. No nosy postman. No searching for a mail drop. There is apparently a post office on Roatan where mail can be sent to general delivery, but you have to there to pick it up and it can take months to arrive, if it even arrives at all.
Mailing postcards from your travels has been a part of visiting new destinations for a long time. Visitors to Roatan often ask me how to mail postcards off the island.
I happen to love postcards. I am a little bit old-school when it comes to snail mail, I used to really love sending letters and I always sent postcards when traveling. In the age of Instagram, I kind of feel like people who will take the time and effort to write and mail a personal postcard are a dying breed.
The first time I came to Roatan, it really threw me in a loop. I had these beautiful postcards with pictures of the gorgeous beach in West Bay on them to send to my friends and family who were back in the snow… but how was I supposed to mail them? No one seemed to be able to give me an answer about a) where to get a stamp, b) where to drop it off to be mailed or c) where the post office even was.
The next day I learned how to mail postcards from Roatan – one of my dive instructors asked me if I would take some of his postcards home with me and mail them from Canada when I got back! Our visitors are our mail service. You will often find people asking tourists to take postcards or letters back with them to mail from their home country. So basically, if you want to mail a postcard when you’re on Roatan… you take it home with you and mail it from there 🙂
– rika
