Surviving the Capital and Surviving Volcano Boarding

Let it be known that I stayed in Tegucigalpa for two nights and lived to tell the tale.

The capital of Honduras is known for being a bit dodgy, like pretty much all Central American cities- but not so dodgy as San Pedro Sula. To get down from the Caribbean coast to Nicaragua, I had to take the bus through the city, and I thought I may as well stop over for at least a day to breakup the journey. I dislike travelling through towns without seeing them, and it's exhausting travelling for eight or more hours two days in a row. Plus I just really didn't think it would be that bad.

I'd heard about a nice B&B through a friend, so contacted them in advance- the plan being that they would pick me up from the bus station on Sunday night. Of course when I finally arrived, nobody was there. I sat around for half an hour on a bench inbetween two armed guards with machine guns, but gradually came to the realisation that nobody was coming for me. Rather than bawl my eyes out like the child whose mum forgets to pick her up from school, I got chatting to a Turkish guy who had also been on my bus. He'd had a reommendation for a hotel by two local girls, which was supposedly cheap, clean and safe.

We shared a taxi to this hotel, went in to investigate, and quickly left after asking the price: 70 US dollars each! Either the local girls' idea of cheap was different to ours, or they thought that we were loaded simply because we were foreign. And so our fate was in the hands of our taxi driver, who took us to several cheaper hotels whose only decoration were biohazard and despair. It was getting dark, and we eventually setlled on a place called the Hotel San Pedro (or some similar saint). It wasn't pretty, but it was cheap and a whole lot better than any others we'd seen.

We walked two minutes down the road to find the nearest diner, followed all the way by a crazy guy who had learnt some English. "Five dollar", he whinged over and over while we ignored him. "Five dollar is nothing for you rich folk". The further we walked,the nastier he became, calling me a prostitute and threatening to kill us both. I laughed it off at the time, but I didn't doubt that he was carrying a knife. He even followed us into the restaurant, to our irritation not receiving a single word of threat from the staff or diners. Eventually we retreated back to the hotel, stopping at a fried chicken shop- the only place open which sold beer.

Turkey was getting the 5am bus onto El Salvador the next morning.
      "You should try and get out of here tomorrow morning, too", he said.
      "Nahh It's not so bad-" But I was cut off at precisely that moment by the sound of gunshots and screaming just outside the hotel. We barricaded ourselves in one room and drank beer until we fell asleep.

Things seemed better in the daylight and I remained determined not to be intimidated by the place. I would stay a day and see the sights. But first, an attack of sensibility: I needed to stop being so stingy, get out of this area and pay a bit more for a hotel- especially now I was alone. I found a hotel which was about 13 pounds a night- a lot for Honduras, but actually pretty cheap in the grand scheme of things (Why hadn't we stayed here the night before?!). I settled in, had a wash and hailed a taxi into the centre.

I told the driver I wanted to go to the art gallery.
          "There's no art gallery here". He said,
          "But it said there was the national art gallery online?"
          "No. No art. No museums."
          "I just want to find some culture..."
          "Torture?"
          "No... not torture- culture"
So he took me to the centre and I hopped out next to a great big sign saying "National Art Gallery". Triumphant, I went in. Two pre-pubescent looking security guards with machine guns greeted me- or rather, grinned and gaffawed like Forest Gump until I threw some money at them and edged past. It was a nice, old building and I was able to survey my surroundings from an upstairs window. Not so bad- an attractive cathedral, lots of shops... a man running down the road with a handbag...and some posters inquiring after information on a murder.

Inside the gallery, there were some good paintings by Jose Antonio Velasquez, but other than that... well I think there's a reason why Honduran art isn't so famous. Still, I left after a good hour's wandering and daydreaming, before finding a food hall for lunch. The place was pretty busy, so I sat next to a woman and her son, who started chatting to me- fascinted about where I was from and why on earth I was in Tegucigalpa. She told me that many women there try to bleach their skin to look more like me, and I told her that many women in the UK paint their skin to look more like her.

That night I ate a rather depressing picnic of avocado sandwiches and yogurt alone in my hotel room, but for the first time in 4 months I had a TV, and was super excited to find that Friends was on in Spanish. Outside there was a ginormous thunderstorm, the thunder shaking the building every time. I was quite happy, just sitting watching, but later the TV programme changed to a musical playlist of "songs for sad occasions", and suddenly realised that I was sitting in the rain with "All By Myself" playing in the background. To top things off, I´d asked the security guard downstairs to re-fill my water bottle and the idiot had refilled it with tap water. I realised before too long, but suffice to say was not feeling so well that night.

The next morning I set off on the Tica Bus to Leon, Nicaragua. The border was pretty hilarious- basically a warehouse with a spare room for immigration. The driver took my passport off me, which was alarming, but I figured it was ok because the locals had done the same. He disappeared for a very long time with 300 Lempiras of my money, while I was harassed by children trying to carry my bag for a dollar. I snapped at them to leave me in peace and was surprised and ashamed to find that I´d actually upset one of them a bit. I got over it quickly once I saw him eyeing up the pockets of the person in front of me.

The customs officer (or man in a straw hat who had been hired for the day) told me to open up my bag for him to check, before having a rummage through my underwear and asking me suspíciously why I had a tortilla basket in there (good question, really). Despite the fact that my passport had disappeared, I had no immigration form either, he waved me through and I found myself in Nicaragua. The driver did return our passports, although weirdly there was no new stamp in it. So I may be here illegally. But never mind.

Leon is HOT but a pleasant, colonial- looking city to be in for a few days. Yesterday I threw myself down a volcano on a dirtboard, which seems to be the cool thing to do here. I got the fastest time out of the girls, which won me a free night´s accomodation, too. Who knew I was such an extreme sportswoman.

For some reason my jumpsuit was about 3 times the width of everybody else´s.

Under the seaaa

It took me two days to finally escape from Copan, only to find that La Ceiba was a pretty sketchy town not worth staying in after all. I should point out that Copan is really a sweet little place, worth visiting etc. but too much time there alone and too much time spent fussing over buses drove me a little bit mad.

The next morning I was set to leave at 7am. I made sure that I was on the designated street corner well before, and ready to throw myself in front of any bus that looked like it might leave me behind. At 7.10, a bus arrived, but its driver told me that he was not going my way and that my bus would come at 8. I asked around, but the locals gave me a whole mix of answers, and I wasn't sure what to believe. So I marched down to Suarmy the ticket lady (apt name) in the hope that she would enlighten me... but before I'd even walked in, I got a stream of abuse. "Don't come asking me for another ticket! You idiot, you missed the bus because you were late!.." The awful woman was actually shouting at me!

I may have gone a little bit mental. I shouted back that I was on the corner well before the time she gave me, and that she was the rudest woman I'd ever met. Then I took the ticket back and stormed out. Probably not the best thing to do, considering that I wouuld inevitably have to go back for another ticket later that day, but I was tired and tired of being imporisoned by an incapable bus system. I sat with my ridiculous bag in a cafe for several hours (the next supposed bus was at 2pm) reflected on the fact that I'd managed to have an argument in Spanish, and felt pretty pleased with myself. Eventually, with the help of the boy in a corner shop, I returned to Suarmy for ticket number 3. I grinned at her as I left and told her to have an excellent day. She grunted.

I was the first person on the bus, which left at 1.20... A couple of stops down the road, a six or seven year old boy with horribly disfigured limbs climbed on the bus and sat next to me. I spent the whole journey trying not to stare at him, while he spent the whole time purposefully staring at me. Eventually he fell asleep on me, and even I didn't have the heart to shrug him off.

The journey was long and hot. We passed through tiny shanty villages, whhere the children watched the buses from the sides of the road while their cows and horses munched on big piles of rubbish. There was a lot of empty space, and the towns were interesting to see, but noticably rougher than those I'd seen in Guatemala. When the bus stopped in one town, a grizzly old man pressed his face up against my window and stared at me, mouth open so that I could see his greying gums. I imagine that must be how fish feel in aquariums.

I changed buses in San Pedro Sula, supposedly the murder capital of the world (along with Mexico City, Guatemala City and all the rest...) finally arriving in La Ceiba, on the caribbean coast at around 9pm. One overpriced taxi later and I had arrived in what Lonely Planet described as "the best and only real backpacker's hostel in the town" and what I can only describe as hellish. I was the only guest in the Banana Republic Hostel; my bed was in a smell corridor and looked like it carried several kinds of diseases. The shower was a tap in the wall, which when I turned on, bugs came out of. Outside I could hear the obese owners arguing and car alarms in the street. I was so tired all I could do was laugh at how bad it was, wrap myself up in my sheet liner from home, and hope that my face didn't touch the pillow in the night. I was originally planning to spend a coupleof days in La Ceiba, but after those first impressions decided to set my alarm super early and catch the first ferry to the Bay Islands.

And that is where I have spent this week! Utila is a pretty gorgeous little island overrun with divers and dive companies. Most places offer free or discounted stay in their attached hotels for every day that you dive, and mine is pretty luxurious compared to the Banana Republic Hostel. Utila is one of those places where backpackers tend to collect and stay for longer than they intended. Most of the long-term residents along the main strip are travellers who worked their wayup to dive-instructor level and just never left. It's not a bad lifestyle but I think I would probably go a bit mad if I stayed forever. That said, the diving here is awesome- the water is 30 degrees plus, really clear, and it's also supposed to be the cheapest place in the world to do it.

It's been almost 6 years since I did my PADI open water in Indonesia, so I did a day's refresher session and then spent the week doing morning fun dives (as opposed to a course). I'd forgotten how much I love it- floating around 20 metres down with the fish is the perfect kind of sport. I've seen sting rays, eels, seahorses, lobsters, all kinds of bizzarre ad multi-coloured fish, AND- on Thursday we saw a whale shark! They're pretty rare and I'd been hoping to see one after hearing rumours of them being spotted this week. We were on the boat, inbetween dives, when the captain ponted and told us to jump in. So of course I did without really stopping to think about the fact that there was an 18metre shark beneath me. It was freaking huge, and so beautiful it didn't look real. He hung around for a minute before diving down. Probably irritated by the tourists getting all up in his gills.

Today was my best dive: it was just me and 4 instructors, so I had a lot more freedom to go where I wanted. We went down to look at a boat wreck and heard dolphins somewhere in the distance (but didn't see them unfortunately). Sometimes I think I would love to be a dive instructor- it's a pretty awesome lifestyle, but I am exhausted from all the swimming, 6am starts and nitrogen overload.

One of my favourite hobbies in Mexico and Guatemala was counting how many carbohydrates I was usually served on one plate. Copan was no exception- I had a lunch in the market place of chicken,rice, potatoes, pasta, bread rolls and of course tortillas. No wonder they're all so bloody fat. That's another reason why it's a nice change to be on the coast again- loads of fresh fish andveg. I'm gutted to have missed the lobster season though... I told the lobster I saw in the sea that I wanted to eat him. He didn't have much to say about it.

I spent the first half of the week eating out with some Canadians I met in the hotel. They were nice, but talked about Canadian things all the time, telling each other to "Shut. UP." every time someone said something remotely unusual or funny. And they definitly didn't get my British humour. Sorry guys if you're reading this, but I speak the truth! It was still lovely to meet you. For the last couple of days, I've been hanging round with a Swedish girl and a boy from Bristol, both of whom I can be sufficiently cynical and sarcastic with. Tomorrow we'll all get the boat together back to the mainland, share a taxi to the bus station, declare our love for one another and go our separate ways. Such is the life of a traveller!

Not coping with Copan

My first stop in Honduras is Copan, famous for its Mayan ruins. The journey here would have been a lot quicker if the driver hadn´t made several stops to drop of suspicious looking packages to his friends. We´d be haring down the motorway, when he´d get a phonecall, slam on the breaks and stop at the side of the road. On the other side there would be a similar shuttle-bus, with similarly confused looking white people. The two drivers would meet in the middle of the busy road, exchange what probably wasn´t baking powder or sweets, nod, and be on their way. The journey was quite an entertaining and stressful one altogether- we dodged several suicidal dogs, cows and people, passed by two nasty crashes and sheer cliff drops. My favourite moment was at the petrol station. The driver filled up, engine still running, before rocking the van backwards and forwards in order to get more in. He even asked us to lean to and fro to help him squeeze that extra 1 and a half Quetzales. I could only guess that he was getting the most out of his company budget.

I arrived here at about 11am yesterday. The ruins were good, but I will definitly be all ruined out by the end of this trip. Ruined by ruins. The town itself is a little odd- stagnant, I think is the word. It´s very small and quite charming on the outside, but the locals are a little offhand and unfriendly, especially compared to everyone I met in Guatemala.

Nothing seems to happen here: when we, there was a man sitting in his mango cart amongst hundreds of ripe mangos. "Ah, that´s very picturesque," thought I, "I´ll take a photo of him". But when I wandered out for lunch he was still there. And when I returned from lunch, he was still there- in the exact same position. The same later on. This morning when I headed out at 8am to see the ruins, he was STILL there- I checked to make sure he wasn´t dead, shot over some mango-related dispute, but his eyes were open and he was chewing on a piece of mango skin. It´s now about six thirty in the evening and he is STILL THERE in his mango cart, sitting amongst ever ripening fruit. I guess he just can´t shift that many mangos in a tiny town where nobody moves. Like the tortilla woman- sitting on the same kerb, day and night, frowning at passers-by, no longer having the will to say "quiere tortillas?".

I am staying in a "hotel" called `Don Moses`. It´s pretty dark and dated, but the cheapest place in the town I could find, after discovering that my intended hostel had actually closed down a couple of years ago. Cheers, Lonely Planet. The "hotel" is essentially a very large house, complete with very large family of all ages. The family members struggle to make sentences, especially if it is me who tries to talk to them, and spend the day taking turns on the public computer to look at each others´ facebook profiles. The only activity in this place comes from the horrible, bratty children, who run around shrieking and throwing food at me when I dodge past. I cannot even pretend to smile at them. They´re probably just bored though, because their parents spend all day staring at screen. Come to think of it, I´ve spent far too much time here staring at the same screen... it must be catching. Time to leave.

I did try to leave today. I´ve exhausted the local activities. Yesterday after settling in, I thought about going straight to the ruins, but it is so stiflingly hot, I knew that going in the heat of the day was a bad idea. So I assessed the Lonely Planet guide again (fool that I am) and decided to investigate a Butterfly House just outside of town- in fact I was pretty excited by the idea. So I walked, armed with camera and water, to the point where cute cobbled town met open highway and cowboy country. I found the place easily, but was greeted by a slightly harrassed looking woman with a child on her hip.
        "Hello, I´d like to see the butterflies please!" said I (in spanish- just saying...)
        "Yes but there is a problem," she said, "There are  no butterflies".
        "Oh, that is quite a problem..."

From what I gathered, the butterfly enclosures, which were set up by some nutty but well meaning ex-pat scientist a few years ago, had been attacked by insects, killing the butterflies or rather their eggs (I assumed...  although she did say the insects ate the butterflies- making me imagine some pretty beastly insects, in itself quite exciting). The woman said I could still walk around the area and see the museum for half the price if I wanted, and I agreed.

The area was nice, and was probably lovely about 5 or10 years ago when it was well cared for and included butterflies. I would have enjoyed the whole experience a lot more if the woman hadn´t insisted on following me around all the time. "Look," she said,picking up dead butterflies from the floor, "dead, dead, all dead. Pah." She was ruining the atmosphere somewhat. What thoroughly depressed me however, was the museum. It was a pokey room with walls of pinned, dead butterflies. I know that´s what people did for fun back in the day, but something about those rows upon rows of sad but beautiful wings made me want to run away screaming and hug the nearest alive stray dog I could find. I came away with the consolation that at least I´d donated about one pound fifty hopefully towards the improvement of the next depressed tourist´s visit.

This morning I got up at the crack of dawn to go to the ruins, which I thoroughly enjoyed. They weren´t as huge and awesome as Tikal of course, but better preserved with amazing detail. Armed with my guidebook, I learnt quite a lot about them and took great pleasure in sitting cross-legged in the middle of what was probs a sacrificial alter, to eat my banana. The site is also home to several wild (but relatively tame) bright red Macaws, which won it for me.

The plan was to leave Copan and head to San Pedro Sula this afternoon...I spoke to the moodiest bus ticket dispenser in all of Central America, who reacted towards me as if I´d demanded a ticket on space ship.
              "The bus leaves at 2pm", she growled.
              "But the page says 1.30?"
              "2pm."
So at quarter to two, I dragged my stupid bag down the hill to see what looked like my bus leaving. But it couldn´t be, because every single bus I´d caught on this continent was about 30 minutes late. Oh but it was. A man in sitting on the kerb told me that the bus had gone because it was already full, but he could drive me to some other obscure town if I wanted?

I complained a lot to the transport folk and will hopefully be on my way straight to La Ceiba by 7am tomorrow. It was probably fate that kept me here in this silly town- San Pedro Sula is apparently quite dangerous and not worth staying in after all. Still, at least the people there are actively doing something- even if it is robbing and shooting people, rather than wasting their lives on facebook. This is my second blog in two days- just think how much of my whinging you´d have to endure if I stayed.

A kind and considered reflection on the nature of the average traveller type.

Another 4am start this morning to catch the shuttle to Copan, Honduras. I was the last to bed and the first to rise in my dorm, which earnt me several hearty sighs and tuts... I tried my very best to be silent as I scrambled around in the dark at 3.30, but it is amazing how every rustle is amplified at that hour. It´s also funny how dorm attitudes vary- sometimes there´ll be someone who insists on going to bed at 8pm and giving everybody else an earful for waking them up or keeping the light on, but other times a dorm will happen to be a collection of similarly spineless people too polite to even turn the light off at 2am, simply because one person isn´t back yet (and yes, that actually happened in one hostel in Antigua).

Once on the shuttle, I was greeted by a familiar voice through the darkness. A couple of weeks ago in that refugee-camp known as the Jungle Party Hostel (which I returned to far too many times as a result of friends wanting to drink there, resulting in flashbacks of chicken broth and waves of nausea), I met an Aussie called Grant.
              "Hey Cheeeeka, my name´s Graaaaayyunt!" he said, in his charming Queensland accent.
              "Nice to meet you Grahhnt", I said in my sensible British one.
              "Nah mate, it´s Graaaaaaayyyunnnt!" he said, everything extra amplified and sweaty like some kind of Foster´s advert mockery.
              "No, I´m sorry I just can´t do that. I´m going to call you ´Grahnt´," and that was the end of that.

GraHnt was on the bus. He was whining on about something far too loudly for such an unearthly hour, until he took a sleeping tablet and began to snore like a horse. He fell asleep on an British girl´s shoulder who gave him and the rest of the bus an earful, which was amusing. Grahnt was thrown against the window and the bus slept.

Breakfast was a stop at a very sad looking road-side hotel. The dining room had disturbingly large (as in, mural-sized) black and white photos of 6 or 7 year old girls all over the walls. I had the worst chicken sandwhich in Guatemala and we set off for the Honduran border towards more heat and humidity.

*

San Pedro was quite fun, but not really what I´d expected it to be. Lake Antitlan is impressive, but the visibilty tends to get very poor in the afternoons. I did get up at 4am to climb up the "Indian Nose"- a part of one of the big hills, to see the sunrise, which was well worth it. A group of five of us and a guide, Juan, scrambled up in the dark from halfway up (hell no was I going to do the full 2 hour hike at 3am). We sat at the top, oohed and aahhed and took photos of the pink sky and awakening villages below and shared a pack of biscuits before agreeing to head back and find a fry-up. Juan looked confused, asking "Don´t you want to see the... sunrise?", which is when we realised that the sun hadn´t actually come up yet. Juan no doubt spent the afternoon laughing to his friends about the idiot Gringos. To get back down to the village, we jumped in the back of a pick up truck which was loaded up with the day´s supply of freshly baked bread, and clung on for dear life as we and the bread swung down the almost vertical hillside road.

There is a certain type of tourist that dwells in San Pedro la Laguna. He goes by the name of Giles, wears head to toe hemp, disregards the needs for shoes because he wants to "feel the earth", and spends the whole time off his face on drugs, inadvertantly insulting friends and saying ridiculously patronising things about the locals in his Eton school accent. This may sound a little harsh. But once you´ve been sat next to a charming but repungently smelly, hairy hippy girl at dinner and put off your food, you´ll think my rantings just. And yes I did meet a boy who was travelling around the world on his daddy´s credit card after failing to get into university. I wonder if daddy knows that Giles is spending his pocket money on MDMA and other concoctions of drugs with vague but edgy sounding initials: the hipsters of the drug brands- if more than ten people have heard of it, it´s just so not cool anymore.

Example conversation:

            "Oh man this AMT is really making me see the indigeonous tribes´ conflicts in a whole new light. It´s just such a shame that they can´t get together and do some TCP and feel the peace."

           "Yeah man, I mean poverty... flip... This combination of PIN and ATM is totally buzzing. The Mayans should really just merge all their languages, like make a new dictionary called... Mayan, I AM."

Put some bloody shoes on and have a wash and pay your tourist card fee and go home and get a job. In a mine or something.

So yes, I did enjoy San Pedro for a couple of days, but no mother I didn´t do any drugs. I was staying in a great hostel called Mr. Mullet´s, which was run by a crazy Dutch guy. He cut himself a mullet originally to annoy his girlfriend, but soon realised that to be serious at the front and chilled at the back was the best way to be. Now he runs his hostel with a dog called Whiskey, and offers a free night´s stay for anyone who will get a mullet. Some of my friends might not like my new look, but they should realise that we´re all just one big happy earth family and it´s wrong to judge people based on their cleanliness and ability to string a logical sentence together. In the words of somebody on FRIENDS once, I will wash when Tibet is free. Peace out.