Honduras

13 August 2010

After our mammoth and overcrowded speedboat ride we got off the boat in Puerto Cortez, Honduras to be mobbed by overcharging taxi drivers and find out that our passports had been collected by customs and taken off to the immigration centre in town which was a little unnerving.  We teamed up with a couple of Welsh doctors, Huw and Lowrie, and found ourselves a cheaper cab from the main road and headed off to get our passports back.  From there we bussed it in air-conditioned style up to another port town called La Ceiba and then got the ferry in the morning to the lovely Caribbean island of Utila where we spent the next couple of weeks.

We were accosted upon arrival by representatives of various dive shops, but we'd been recommended a couple so went with the rep for Utila Dive Centre.  You're treated like royalty for the first day - bussed up to the free hostel and then down to the dive shop to book your diving.  From then on you have to start paying for stuff and they don't drive you anywhere!

Utila

Utila Town is really small with just one road along the shore and one road heading back towards the hill.  The roads are completely crammed both sides with bars, shops and houses and those on the shore side are built out over the water.  This means you can have a lovely drink on a deck over the water, but also means that there is no beach in town.  Luckily our hostel had a swimming pool so we spent most of our time when not at the dive shop there.

Me and Lou in a rather glam pool for a hostel

Mostly we just did a lot of diving; I recertified as Advanced Open Water (my original certification from Thailand in 2001 having been lost in the mail) and Louisa did her Rescue Diver course.  By all accounts my class was a little more relaxed than hers - she having been threatened by her aged Tennessee ex-law enforcement tutor that he would make her cry on the course which she duly did!

The diving was reasonable, but certainly not brilliant.  I saw lots of fish, soft corals (not v colourful though), some turtles, eels, devil rays etc.

My main memories of Utila though are unrelated to the dive shop -cinnamon rolls for breakfast, lunch and tea, heavy drinking at a variety of bars on decks over the water, an amazing bar built like a treehouse and lavishly decorated, some great pizza at our hostel, crazy Aussie and American guys we hung out with, a pool party at the hostel, and some great breakfasts at a really old beautiful house.  We had a really really great time there.

But we eventually had to leave so we went by boat and bus and another bus up to the town of Copan on the western edge of Honduras, really near the Guatemalan border.  Amusingly we arrived in the evening and got a little lost walking up from the bus station, so Lou stopped to ask this woman standing in a doorway for directions.  It was only the following day, walking back down that road again that we realised that the nice lady was a prostitute.

View of the countryside around Copan

Copan is home to Honduras' only major Mayan site and we headed up there the following day on tuk-tuks (motorised rickshaws) for a wee wander around. Everything was going so well, we'd met some Americans to share the cost of a tour guide with and had a lovely walk around the site, when it simultaneously started to rain and massive groups of schoolboys descended upon the site.

It's just a fact of life in this part of the world that as a girl you're going to be harassed pretty much non stop.  If you're a gringo girl then it's even worse. So I'm very much used to guys shouting pervy things at me when I walk down the street and I can shrug most of it off.  But the schoolboys were pretty bad - they were taking pictures of me and Lou and blatantly ogling and hissing at us. Lou shouted "un poco respecto" at them which means "a little respect" but they paid no attention.

We escaped off to the site museum which was one of the best presented museums I've been to on this trip. It was lovely and open and airy and there was a full scale mock up of the Rosalila temple which was discovered by archaeologists tunnelling under one of the massive temples on site.  Afterwards we went to a bird sanctuary (in the pouring rain) which was quite fun.

And from Copan we commenced the final leg of our trip together, off to Antigua in Guatemala.