North & Central America Trip – We Survived Honduras
Hi everybody,
You´ll be pleased to hear made it out of Honduras alive – just!
We nearly got trapped there – not from protests, nor closed borders,
but because it´s an amazing country where it would be easy to laze around for months.
Before leaving Guatemala, we did some rather ‘special’ markets (see photo) and tried the local fast food, Pollo Campero, which is like KFC but cold and old. Both experiances seem like a metaphor for the country as a whole.
Yes, we’d had our fill of Guatemala by the time we hopped on a 4am minivan to Honduras.
The van played Reggaton at full volume, making sleeping impossible. Just what you want at 4am.
The tourism industry is big in Central America, but sometimes they don’t really get it.
We arrived in Copan Ruinas, which is a small town next to the Mayan ruins.
The ruins have the best carvings and inscriptions, and were deserted thanks to the convenient coup. The highlight was the crimson macaws, giant red parrots who squark and fly freely through the trees.
We also saw turquoise crowned motmots, squirrels, monkeys, and crazy rodents: rats the size of cats.
The next day we went to a bird park which adopts ex-pets and freed black market animals. We ‘played’ with a toucan (pretty much they just chomp down on your fingers) and practiced Spanish with parrots.
After all that we needed a holiday, so we headed up to the Bay Islands in the Caribbean. Here the coup was in full flight. We saw a large crowd of people covered in blood… at the all-you-can-drink Halloween party! We stayed in a sweet pad with hammocks overlooking the water, where you can snorkel straight off the pier.
STOP. Hammock time!
I wanted to try diving, but my nasty cold and chest infection prevented it. Instead we went out on a free snorkeling tour… bonus!
The real draw here are the whale sharks, but unfortunately a storm two weeks previously scared them all away…
We rounded out our time in Honduras by visiting a microbrewery on the shores of lake Yojoa.
The mainstream beer in Honduras is ALL made by
SAB, who also owns Miller. So getting a real pint was refreshing!
After an extended drinking / singing / guitarring session with the owner, we got up at 6am the following day to ‘go birding’. A local guide rowed us onto the lake, where we saw egrets, kingfishers, green herons and more.
This was one of the cleanest, most beautiful places in Central America, and mercifully low in rubbish. Many locals here just dump their trash on the side of the road, or into the local river…
Then we had a 2-day mad dash in local buses down to colonial Granada in Nicaragua. As well as getting assaulted by the usual salesmen on the buses selling snacks, we saw a new breed of salesperson.
The guy who stands up and informed you about tapeworms, enthusiastically pointing at pictures of parasites before trying to sell you the medication. They´re pretty convincing as they sell a lot of it, who would know all of southern Honduras has tapeworms?
Now if Zelaya had promised free worming for everyone, there would never have been a coup at all!
The mixture of development and chaos here really does you head in. If you want to catch a local bus, they work really efficiently.
Whereas when Claire bought facewash in a fancy pharmacy yesterday, she had to deal with one girl who served her, another girl to take her money, and yet another to ‘package her purchase’, all at different counters within the same shop… which had no other customers. Result? 15 minutes to buy facewash. Great customer experience!
However last night there was a free concert of porno-jazz in the square. Totally makes up for it.
Adios,
Clarita y José
