Our watery exploits in Honduras and Belize

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We began our Honduras adventures with white water rafting at Omega Lodge, a hotel/tour company just outside of La Ceiba, close to the beautiful Pico Bonito National Park. We got a free night in the lodge for doing a tour, and it was very nice, the highlight was the freshwater pool - very nice after a sticky hot chicken bus ride! There was a resturant at the lodge and we had homemade German style pasta for dinner - a little expensive but yummy, also nice to have a candlelit dinner surrounded by jungle... the mossies love it too!!

Next morning we went off to the nearby Cangrejo River (Crab River) for our rafting - which was ACE!! We went down loads of rapids, including one where we didn't quite clear the distance we needed to at the bottom and started being sucked back into the waterfall!! With all of us paddling as hard as we could it made no difference, so we had a rope chucked out to us to pull us in. Somewhere in the general chaos (but FUN chaos!) Ben lost his balance and before he knew it was in the river (and underwater for a little longer than would be normal!). I pulled him back in the boat like a proper knight in shining armour and we carried on our way. At one point we stopped to jump off a big cliff into the river - unfortunately the first time I hit the water flat footed and did my back in, and the second time when me and Ben jumped at the same time I managed to jump exactly where Ben was jumping and we nearly collided in mid air! After our challenging morning we relaxed by the pool for the afternoon, rewriting our Spanish notes from Guatemala - I still have some to write up now and it's been almost 5 months!!

Next day we headed down the road to another tour company and lodge, the Jungle River Lodge. Here they had a zip line course that we wanted to have a go on, seeing as we managed to avoid the hundreds of similar things in Costa Rica. Zipping across the river canyon and through the jungle was a lot of fun, and the scenery was a little more spectaular than "Go Ape" in Bracknell, but no tarzan swings!! Unfortunately the heat or some food I had eaten had made me feel a little poorly so I spent the rest of the day hiding in our room (which was, luckily, stone built and very naturally cool) while Ben had a ball jumping into the river and general river related fun. The setting of the Jungle River lodge is very spectacular, loming over the river canyon, with fantastic views - the food however was very expensive - US $7 for dinner, which is cheap England styley but considering most of our meals in this part of the world struggle to cost more than $2 it was a bit of a shocker! But what a view!

The Bay Islands just off the northern coast of Honduras were to be our next destination, for our next watery activity - scuba diving! For this we had to go back to La Ceiba, where we cornered the poor son/nephew of the guy who had given us a lift for a photo with Ben. He was wearing a Honduras football shirt and had been excitedly looking through football cards in the car, and as we had a mission as Readings' representatives of Honduran football fans for the the mighty Reading Post (there being no Honduran residents of Reading) we took a photo of him. That was the highlight of La Ceiba, apart from me eating a Burger King Whopper (encouraged by none other than Ben!), my first American fast food item in 5 months. We took the ferry from La Ceiba to Utila, the most backpackery and supposedly the cheapest of the Bay Islands. We really liked the look of the place, it had a nice vibe and seemed to have, how can I say this, a "better" class of tourist than in Bocas del Toro in Panama. Probably because not everyone's sole reason of being there was to get drunk every waking minute (although some people did!). Most tourists were on the Island for Scuba Diving, as were we, so we found a dive school called Parrots offering free accomodation and signed up for a "Scuba Tuneup" the next day. It had been almost 3 years since we last went diving (our tragic outing in New Zealand, where I got intensely seasick and the second dive was abandoned due to bad weather!), so we were a little rusty to say the least. You don't want to be rusty when you are 20 metres underwater and you run out of air!

The tuneup went well and we were feeling a lot more confident, especially me as I promptly abandonded my plan of doing some fun dives and signed up for the next PADI qualification, the Advanced Open Water Diver. This involved a bit of studying and 5 dives, including a wreck dive, a deep water dive (up to 30 metres), a dive practising underwater navigation (where me and my buddy got ourselves hopelessly lost...), a dive practising buoyancy (swimming through hoops, knocking over tiny weights in the sand with our regulators (the bit in your mouth you breathe through), and general fun, including a running and spinning backwards Matrix style move) and finally a night dive. The wreck dive was great fun, although my buddy ran out of air in 12 minutes and we had to cut the dive short while he surfaced breathing our instructors air! It felt a bit like in Titanic when they are exploring the ship underwater, but not quite as big... There were also about 40 other divers (probably) at the wreck at the same time so it was pretty amazing to swim above all the air bubbles appearing out of the gloom. The nightdive wasn't as fun as I thought, I got stung to pieces by jellyfish and fire coral, and everyone kept bumping into each other as no one could figure out whether we were swimming up or down, therefore not knowing whether to adjust our buoyancy - so people were sinking to the floor and suddenly a fin or arm would smack you in the face as the person the limb belonged to had no idea you were there.

I also had 2 fun dives with my course, which were great, it was so cool toi practise all the navigation and buoyancy skills (like floating just above the sand without touching it to look at a nurse shark hiding under a rock - before my course I would have been kicking sand all over the place!). We saw an octopus, loads of fish, coral, a lobster, and many other oceanic delights. Ben had two fun dives earlier on in the week, which he enjoyed too - mostly because the water was so warm he didn't even need to wear a wetsuit!

When we weren't diving, we spent our time on Utila swimming in the sea, trying not to get bitten by sandflies, , walking round the island (mostly Ben did this while I was diving or doing homework), eating food (there was very good food to be had if you looked for it!), watching the football, talking about diving, uploading photos to the internet and desperately trying to cool down our oven of a room! The island was VERY HOT, and I think the hottest place we have been so far, although Ben disagrees with this. Either way, it made nighttimes and trying to sleep not the easiest thing. But we made it, both a few dollars lighter but much better scuba divers!!

I spent the boat journey back sleeping, and the bus journey down the coast towards Guatemala. The travel sickness tablets we have are very good at making you drowsy!!

We spent one night in a small fishing/beach town near the Guatemalan border called Omoa. It was the weekend and there were a lot of day-trippers (from San Pedro Sula we think) who were having a great time on banana boats, swimming in the sea and drinking beers. We joined in, having a baleada and a beer, and we also went to check out an old Spanish built fort (to stave off pirate attacks in the pirate and privateer days (we now appreciate the distinction between a pirate and a privateer thanks to the onsite museum!)) which had some stone cavern-like rooms that had fantastic echoes. Everyone's joviality was ended abruptly though when a power cut knocked out the power for the whole town until later that night.

The next day we took a bus to the border, the easiest and most tranquil crossing yet! No one was there, and we were poking around the empty offices wondering what to do when the border office chappy came cycling up on his bike, then flicked through our passports and waved us through. Our joy at the ease of this ended very soon though, as the mini-bus that had taken us the 20 or so km to the Guatemalan border office got fed up of waiting after about a minute and a half, unloaded our bags and drove off! And yes we had paid to go all the way to Puerto Barrios, a town an hour or so away. Dastardly chaps they were. So we waited a while for the next one to come along, and come along one did. Soon enough we were in Puero Barrios, where we went to the slowest 'fast food' restaurant on the planet, so slow in fact that we told them we'd now have it to take away as our boat to Belize was scheduled to leave in 5 minutes (we had ordered our eggs, beans and bread meals in the empty restaurant 30 minutes previously), and thus it was that we found ourselves in a small boat (capacity for 10 passengers more or less), hurtling out of the bay and into the choppy waters of the Carribean, trying to eat scrambled eggs, drink orange juice and coffee, and not spill any on our 3 passenger companions. We had great views of the distant coasts on this 1 hour boat ride, particularly the couple of times when the engine stopped working and we floated in circles while the captain/driver chap and his helper (who had rode me to an ATM on the back of his motorbike earlier - lots of fun) took it apart and did whatever they did to make it work again.

Back on dry land we were struggling with the sudden language difference. In Belize English is the official language!! If felt very strange and sometimes inpolite to say hello not hola, and thankyou not gracias. Of course there are lots of people who speak Spanish in Belize, as well as the creole dialect/language, Garifuna, and the various indigenous mayan languages. It is a very multi-cultural place, and the few days that we were there, it seemed very harmoniously so.

We took a chicken bus from Punta Gorda, where we had disembarked from the boat, aiming to get to a little town called Placencia that sits at the top of a long and thin sandy peninsula. Like everything else in Belize, the chicken bus was not at all hurried and manic like the other Central American chicken buses. They wait for you to get on, walk not run when they are loading baggage, and never break a sweat. It is very refreshing! However they are a bit too laid back. I asked the helper chap to let us know when to get off the bus to catch our connecting bus. He said to me 'at the end of the road' but also 'yes, i'll tell you', having just driven into our connection town. Driving back out of the town, Sarah and I exchanging anxious looks, he ambled back up the bus collecting fares, saw us, stopped, and then you could see him take a second while his mind kicked into gear and an abashed grin took hold of his face. He apologised for not telling us when to get off, his excuse being 'I was talking to a girl and I thought you'd got off...'. However it wasn't bad as we could travel a bit further North and catch a different connection, negating the need for a water-taxi later on.

Placencia is a really lovely, really relaxed and very very pretty little town. The peninsula sticks out into the warm and usually clear Carribean (recent storms had made the water a little murky, and there was a lot of driftwood washing up, as well as the subsequent rubbish), and has a healthy proportion of people living there to tourism. We stayed for just a couple of nights, as time was (and is) really ticking! During which time we lazed on the beach, swam in the sea, ate some lovely food that used healthy amounts of coconut, mango and rum in the cooking, drank the local cocktail, 'the panty ripper' (yes that is actually what it is called on menus) - a concoction of pineapple juice and coconut rum, as well as margaritas and some pretty plain Belizean beer. I also had an impromptu lesson on how to stand and walk on a tight rope (I pretty much mastered the standing (if standing consists of only 5 seconds or so) and will start to work on the walking part when I get home).

After two and a half days in Placencia we set off on a mammoth Northward journey through Belize and into the Yucatan peninsula, Mexico, arriving at our destination, Tulum, 15 hours after setting off (at 6.15am). The best thing about this journey was when a chap came onboard selling seaweed drinks. A few hours earlier a similiar event had occured, and one chap on the bus exclaimed loudly 'I ain't got me no woman tonight, I don't be needing none of that seaweed, ha ha ha', so I was interested to try it. It was a gloopy, jellyish white drink that was flavoured with cinnamon and other things I couldn't name, and was absolutely delicious.

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Photos

White Water Rafting
The waterfall that was shortly about to suck us back in and pull Ben underwater

Utila Beach
Bay Islands

Utila Beach
Bay Islands

The view from our balcony
Placencia

Comments

[GD]

Wot no volcanoes! Lovely photos of fascinating places though. See you soon.