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Leaving port for Roatan Island Not an overly exciting blog today sorry guys. It involves a bus, a wait at a bus station, another bus, then a ferry and another bus. Massive travel day however after 12 hours we have arrived at Roatan Island in the Carribean Sea.
The day started with us catching the 7am 'chicken bus' from Copan. A chicken bus is the name given to the old American school buses that for some reason have been acquired by the Central American countries for use as public buses. We had pre-ordered breakfast so were glad when our egg and bacon rolls were handed out. Unfortunately, we had also ordered strawberry smoothies however as the guy was handing them out, 3 of them somehow tipped over and spilt everywhere all over the floor. Even worse was that because I was sitting at the back of the bus, I missed out as my smoothie must've been one of the ones blanketing the bus floor. Now, because our tour was called an 'adventure tour', that means that our mode of transport wherever possible is by public transport. So, on our chicken bus were another tour group as well as everyday locals! And it was packed, they
had to start handing out little stools for people in the aisle way to sit down (bearing in mind that the floor is sticky as hell from the dropped smoothies!).
The first leg was about 3 hours long and we arrived into San Pedro about 10am. We were booked on another 10.30am bus however were told when we arrived that due to some strikes happening in the city, we may be a little delayed. Now San Pedro is a big dirty city that is apparently pretty dangerous. All around the bus station were Honduran Army guards holding massive machine guns, protecting us against who-knows-what. San Pedro has apparently got a terrible murders per capita ratio so we were happy to be guarded by these guys!!
We waited around and it was becoming apparent that because of the strikes (which were also blocking heaps of roads around the city) that the public buses weren't running. Our guide quickly got onto the phone and organised a private bus to take us further north to the coast to catch our 4.30pm ferry. The bus took a fair while to arrive so we sat around until about 12-noon, Rach grabbed a mini
Pizza Hut pizza to tie her over and I had a smoothie and a couple of bits of fruit.
Our mini-bus finally arrived were glad that this one had air-con!! We sped away from San Pedro trying to make up time to ensure we arrived in plenty of time for the ferry. And we easily had enough time, even after our bus driver got a little lost trying to find the wharf, we arrived around 3.45pm.
Now our guide had warned us that the ferry trip out to sea could get a little rough, and in his previous 6 tours he always had someone that was sea-sick!! He handed out some anti-nausea pills to us and braced ourselves for a rough journey. The ferry took about an 1.5 hours and wasn't as bad as warned. It was a little rough in places and a couple of people on the boat were sick however our crew got through unscathed. On the route we saw a few dolphins jumping out of the water and trying to catch our boat. I tried to get a photo however the buggers were too quick. Rach told me that “I've always got to be
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Perhaps what happened to the last ferry?? at-the-ready”. So I was after that however no more sealife would join the party.
We arrived onto Roatan Island and caught a minibus to our resort named Seagrape Plantation Resort. Bizaare name as I have no idea what seagrapes are. We quickly checked in and ventured into town for some mexican dinner. We were all starving as we hadn't really eaten lunch and the anti-nausea pills had a drowsy affect so we were all a bit out of it. I ordered a steak burrito and it was the biggest burrito I've ever eaten! Rach got the chicken fajitas however think she was a little food envious. We quickly ate and headed home to bed, ready for our relaxing couple of days by the beach :-).
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Gramps
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What a marvellous record - both written and pictured. It is a credit toyou both. I have at last caught up and look forward to the next one. Thanks for talking with us today. How did you team get on Ben?