San Pedro Sula

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My friend S. was spending three weeks traveling through Central America, Guatemala to Costa Rica. When I found out I could get a few extra days off work I decided to join him for part of the trip, first flying into San Pedro Sula and meeting up in Copan Ruinas. We would then travel overland via El Salvador and back through Honduras to Nicaragua, where I would fly out of Managua 6 days later. This was a quickly planned trip, I literally booked the tickets two days before I left.. wasnt able to get tickets out of Austin so had to settle for San Antonio.

I left work today about 2PM for the (hopefully) quick drive down to San Antonio to catch my flight to San Pedro Sula. Traffic in downtown Austin is always bad no matter the time of day, especially bad on Fridays but was able to make it through in short time. Only took a little over an hour to get to northern SA. I planned to park at my other travel buddy´s house, he could give me a lift to the airport.

Construction in and around the airport in SA is neverending it seems. We arrived and had to do a bitof a walk to get to the terminal as the normal dropoff point was torn up. There was no line at security, a nice change from when I flew out of San Antonio last May. I still had over an hour to wait for the flight, so grabbed a snack to wait.

The flight to Houston was a short 40 minutes. After arriving there I still had an hour wait before the flight to San Pedro departed. I was able to get into the Presidents Club in Terminal E as I had a first class award ticket, very nice but they don´t have their own internet terminals, they assume everyone has one. Huge TV room and bar area. I filled my Nalgene bottle with water from the bar here as I would be needing it in the coming days. The flight to San Pedro was only a little over 2 hrs.

I was one of the first ones off the plane, and immigration was easy. I only had my carryon so no waiting for luggage. A huge crowd outside was waiting even for so late at night, I wormed my way through to the waiting taxi stand. They said $15 into town which seemed a little pricy. There was a bank at the airport where I was able to get out some Lempiras, the local currency.

The drive into town was about 15 minutes, past all the American icons, Pizza Hut, TGIFridays, etc. The center of town was pretty dead and it was drizzling. I went to the Hotel Teraza, $25/night. A long slog up to the 4th floor to my room. It was basic, a small bed and shower but had a fan and TV. It was already 11 PM and I planned to catch an early bus the next morning to Copan Ruinas, so hit the sack. There was a noise like a generator firing up sporadically that kept me awake for awhile but was finally able to get to sleep.

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