HONDURAS (Copas Ruinas, La Ceiba, Bay Islands – Utila, Tegucigalpa)

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Wednesday, 19th April
Yet another early start, this time a 5am pickup to the border of Honduras and a small town called Copas Ruinas. Copas has the biggest Mayan ruins in Honduras, but after Chichen Itza, Tikal and Tulum, we felt we had seen enough ruins for one trip, so we opted to go straight to the bus station for the 10am bus to La Ceiba, the port town gateway to the Bay Islands of Honduras.

When the bus arrived at 12pm we should have realized it wasn’t going to be a good day! Half way into the journey the bus ground to a stop in the middle of nowhere, and we looked out of the window to realize that we were stuck in a traffic jam – total gridlock man! It transpired that the local peasants had put up a road block in protest at the government not giving them back land that was officially theirs. It certainly had the desired effect as we sat in the blazing heat for 3 hours along with most of the countries other traffic.

Luckily our bus driver had the presence of mind to drive a bit further up the road and stop outside a petrol station which sold beer – hurrah! We finally arrived in La Ceiba after 3 very dodgy videos and slightly tipsy, a mere 5 hours late. This normally wouldn’t have been a problem, 'cos hey – we’re on holiday, but unfortunately La Ceiba is not the nicest place you want to be walking round in after dark with a tonne of baggage on your backs.

We hooked up with a couple of American girls and shared a taxi to a hostel the Lonely Planet rated as ‘clean, safe and friendly’. After we had lugged our dive bags up a million stairs we found a group of dodgy looking men watching football under a fluorescent strip light in a dark hallway. When we were shown our room Sadie nearly ran back down the million stairs as the place was crawling with cockroaches. After a hasty retreat and some threatened tears, we decided to walk around a bit and find another place.

We have never felt so vulnerable in the whole trip as the hostels were in the market area of the town, an area which LP highly recommends you don’t walk around at night! It felt as even the rats and roaches were staring at us waiting for their opportunity to mug us, so despite having not eaten all day and no visible signs of even a bar to drown our sorrows in, we found a marginally cleaner hostel and spent a restless night waiting for dawn.

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Is that bus here yet?

 

Thursday 20^th  April
Dawn never showed up J, but in the early morning light La Ceiba didn’t seem quite as scary as it first had. Nonetheless we were glad to be leaving and hoping that the island of Utila would be somewhat better. After a quick trip to the supermarket to buy the essentials; rum, coke and cockroach spray, we set off for the dock and Utila. It’s a 2 hour ferry ride to Utila which was calm and uneventful, and as we approached Utila we were relieved to see it looked nothing like La Ceiba, but resembled Dahab in Egypt, more in it’s size and atmosphere.

We were a bit put off by the hordes of dive shop touts waiting at the dock though, especially after a sleepless night and no food, so we just barged our way through them quite rudely. One chap called Nicholas realized where we were coming from immediately and offered to take us to his shop. Deep Blue Divers. just around the corner where we could leave our bags and he would point out some nice places to stay, with no obligation to dive with him. It totally worked as obviously we appreciated the help and ended up diving with them for our entire stay. He must have been a bit gutted though when he found out we were both instructors, and there was very little money to be made from us!

It took us approx 1 hour to walk round the whole town and we ended up staying in a lovely little guest house with it’s own jetty into the sea. (There is only one town on the whole of Utila and unusually it has no beach front. You have to walk or take a golfcart or bike to get to the two beaches at either end of the town.)

Rubi’s Inn wasn’t the cheapest place on the island, but after the horrors of the night before we treated ourselves to a night of luxury and promised ourselves we would find somewhere cheaper the next day. Of course we didn’t and ended up staying there for our entire stay, despite there being constant power cuts and therefore no light, fan or hot water at the same time! Still it was close to the supermarket, pub and cinema ( a small hut with comfy chairs and a big DVD player J), so what more could you do?

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Main Street			Cool cat	Public beach, Keppies Beach?
		Eat your heart out Ben!!
Concentrate now....

 

Friday 21^st April
For the next couple of days we explored a bit more of the island, lazed on the beaches and snorkeled from our jetty and contemplated staying on the island to find work, as by then we got to know well Nicholas from Deep Blue (an Australian/Canadian) and his Swiss girlfriend Pris (who bizarrely Sadie had been chatting to through a dive forum in Egypt, and had promised to look up on arrival – how’s that for coincidence?!).

Nic and Pris both said we could earn good money working as instructors there as it is renowned for being the cheapest place in the world to learn to dive. It was certainly busy enough while we were there, despite there being no sign of the whale sharks it’s famous for having during May to September.

The island also seemed like a good fun, and more importantly, cheap place to live. We deliberated for ages as, on one hand we knew we could earn money and also save ourselves a long onward trip to Curacao – our final destination. On the other hand we felt obligated to Mark & Suzy at The Dive Bus, as they had seemed so keen to employ us in Curacao (God knows why!) and been extremely helpful and flexible with our travel plans. However the decision soon made itself obvious as we started diving...........

We had heard nothing but good reports about Utila and it’s neighboring island Roatan, so were dismayed when we first got in the water to find poor visibility, dead coral and no fish! We thought perhaps it was just a bad day, and asked Nic and the other instructor Kelly to take us to the islands top dive sites. It soon became apparent over the next few dives that unfortunately this was the norm, with their favourite site ‘Blackhills’ being no better than the worst dive site in Dahab. On reflection the reports we had all heard were about it being a good place to learn to dive/do your Dive master or Instructor training, none of the actual diving itself being outstanding!

We decided then that despite the money we could make, we couldn’t bear to dive in such poor conditions day in day out, so resolved to carry on to Curacao.

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Soft coral...feather duster	Flamingo tounge	Sponge and sea stars	Toitle and french angel fish having lunch		Spade fish
				Adult spotted drum	Arrow crab

 

Saturday 29^th April
After 10 days of diving, drinking and lazing around we decided it was time we moved on again. Utila is a great place, a vibrant mix of nationalities, locals and foreigners (hearing the local blond haired blue eyed children speak with heavy Caribbean accents takes some getting used to!).

It has a laid back atmosphere but also some great night life if you know where to look; Coco Loco’s on the dock behind Deep Blue popular with the trendy backpackers, The Bunda Café where we came last in at least two pub quizzes, and our favourite the Treetanic bar which is a bar set in a massive tree house with walkways between each seating area and a ‘voodoo loo’ that has to be seen to be believed. The entire place has been constructed from local wood and recycled goods, and where Aaculaax in Guatemala had seemed cheap and trashy, this place was inventive, arty and inspired.

We also made some good friends in Nic & Pris and met some really nice people including Kelly the other Canadian instructor at Deep Blue, Scott the DMT, Lou and Morgan an English couple traveling the opposite route from us who had hilarious and sometimes scary travel stories of their own, and Giles a Chinese/English geologist from Birmingham who was also traveling southwards.

It may not be as pretty as some of the places we have visited, but if the diving had been any better, this is probably where our travel blog would have ended for some time!

So decision made we all decided to go out for a last night at Treetanic where we consumed far too many beers, talked a load of old rubbish and then ended up in Coco Locos’s until 3.30am watching the trendies throw fire around and the lads all hit on Jemma, an extremely pretty single English girl who had just signed up to do her open water.

Haliburton wreck dive				Mr Wiggly's first dive....
		Hang on.....Kelly, Morgan and Louise, and ano....

 

Sunday 30^th April
Why oh why.....do we always seem to have our biggest nights out before a long days travel? We awoke to hear the ferry back to the mainland toot it’s horn for departure at 6am. Swearing loudly we stuffed our remaining unpacked clothes into our packs and stumbled along the road to the dock. Luckily we made it with minutes to spare, but were not so lucky with the weather this time. Sadie spent the next two hours lying on the top deck of the rolling ferry desperately trying not to projectile vomit over it’s side! Once on dry land we headed straight for the bus terminal and the local McDonalds – that well known hangover cure.

This time with no border crossing to contend with and no miffed locals the 8 hour bus journey was relatively uneventful…that was until we started reading our bible the Lonely Planet about our destination, Tegucigalpa – the capital of Honduras. Yet again we were advised not to go out on our own at night and to take care of our belongings at all times. We were starting to wonder if we would ever have started this journey if we had read the books before we set off!

Thankfully this time though the book was wrong. We managed to find a cheap but clean and friendly hotel called the Granada II in a fairly central location. At first it was daunting trying to find somewhere to eat, but then we realized that it was just deserted as it was Sunday night. We ended up in a Chinese restaurant with a couple of drunk locals entertaining us as they sang along loudly karaoke style to the cheesy music playing in the background. They welcomed us to Honduras, asked where we were from and invited us to join in. Luckily for the owners we declined and made our way back to the hotel for an early night for a change.

Next stop........Nicaragua and The Corn Islands........

(Traveller’s notes:......from this point onwards we have lost all of our records of travel and accommodation costs. So big apologies to anyone who's actually using this travel journal for planning their travels.......more info on this to follow....)

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