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Yesterday morning we left San Pedro Sula via a local direct bus to La Ceiba. No bullies on this bus, just a four hour trek through beautiful Honduran terrain.
La Ceiba, Honduras' third largest city, sits on the Northern coast of Honduras, a great launch place for our final destination, to Roatan.
In La Ceiba, the sea view from the city was nice but the beaches are very polluted and strewn with litter. Nicer beaches are around La Ceiba.
Our hotel was in the Zona Viva, which is basically the night club zone. Even though we don't go to nightclubs, we chose this location because of it's central proximity to the city and beachfront hotel.
Our room had good cable and for the first time in our adventure, we had ABC, CBS and NBC... We decided to get food to go from a typical restaurant and dine in our room, enjoying a nice relaxing evening after so much travel.
Our evening became more interesting the later it became. From our balcony, we could see the zona viva in it's prime. We were thankful to be safely above the action. Prostitution runs rampant. We saw two young
girls working their corners, a pimp, or what seemed like a pimp, chasing one of them and yelling. A few shady characters in what appeared to be more illegal activities.
For all of you, which there are a lot, who have said we are crazy and what we are doing is not safe.... we finally heard our first, second and third gunshots of the trip, very close to the scene below.
No worries, we were above it all - safe in our room. I was going to take pictures of it but Steve was concerned they would somehow see the flash of my camera and find their way up to our room. No night pictures. However, I did post some of the streets below when we woke up at 6 am.
Even though, we witnessed some pretty scary activities, I have to say, all cities have crime. Yet again, during the day, we enjoyed La Ceiba. The people were wonderful and we had some of the best food of our trip.
This morning, concluded the long-distance, hustle and city portions of the trip. We took a ferry, the Galaxy Wave, from La Ceiba to Roatan.
At the Galaxy Wave terminal, we checked our main packs and kept our day packs with us for the boat ride. They had security similar to airports. You put all your carry on items on a conveyor to be scanned. As we were approaching the security, Steve informed me he didn't think he would make it through because he forgot to check his multi-tool, knife and pepper spray. Great!
Sure enough, when the bag went through - it was flagged! Steve was convinced they were going to confiscate those three items. Low and behold, and to our surprise, the inspector asked if he had any liquor in his pack. We were shocked that it wasn't our bottle of rum that they were so worried about. We checked it in and made it on board with pepper spray and multi-tool in tow. Go figure!
The ferry was large, played soft rock. The wind was blowing gently, sun was gleaming on the sea - we were back to paradise.
We have checked in to a quaint hotel, dive center in the middle of West End, Roatan Tourists galore, restaurants, bars, dive shops - and activities.
We may rent
kayaks, or hike tomorrow. For the first day in several, we have no travel and all the comforts.
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