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Published: March 25th 2013
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We left Kennedy at 3:45 am on Saturday morning, arrived in San Pedro Sula at 6:25 am local time and had to kill about eight hours before our puddle-jump to the island of Utila. After clearing customs and la migra which in Honduras includes getting your picture taken, we drank a cup of coffee and paced in the San Pedro Sula airport waiting for the malls in the city to open. I had looked up the opening hours on-line and we landed with the belief that the mall opened at nine. Before I go on the reader needs to understand that San Pedro Sula, Honduras by some accounts, is the per-capita murder capital of the world. I have visited the city four times without incident, but this being my first time with the mother of my children, I felt strongly about having a well-thought-out plan for the errands we needed to run in San Pedro Sula during our layover. If you are reading this, and you have travelled independently in Central America you can stop laughing now. That’s right, I said well-thought-out plan. Damn it, I have been coming to Central America since 1999 and I speak
Spanish pretty well so if there were a gringo who could execute a well-thought-out plan in Central America, it would be me right? Wrong.
We set out at 8:30 am to buy a cellphone, have a meal, change our money, and be back to the airport to jump the puddle to the island at 2:30. See, the thing about Central America is you will things done (usually) but they will get done the way they are done here, not the way you planned them. For example, while circling the San Pedro Sula airport, I jokingly turned to Martina as said “its 6:30 in the morning we are probably circling because some dude didn’t come to work yet.” Sure enough two minutes later the captain got on the plane’s PA system and said we were circling because some dude didn’t get to work yet. Could you imagine? We probably burned three months of his salary circling the airport. The trip to the mall to get the cellphone and a meal went off without a hitch, except that the website was wrong and the mall actually opened at 10, and apparently the stores open any time they feel like it after
that. We had a very pleasant driver named Santos who listened to Christian pop music and showed up exactly on-time to drive us back to the airport. We got a phone with enough pre-paid minutes to stay on the phone with the US for the whole week, and a damn good plate of papusas. When we got back to the airport it looked like Kennedy airport the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, it was mobbed. We retrieved our carry-ons from the airline employee who we asked to watch them, then went through security and got to the gate before we realized that the time of our flight had been changed from 2:30 to 3:00, and that we never changed any money. You might say half-hour delay who cares? I agree, who cares, except that the screen near the gate said the flight was leaving at 3:00 and the column next to that said “on-time”. So I did the logical thing, I walked up to an employee of the airline and 5 minutes later (at 1:30) we were on a plane headed for Utila. I am extremely proud of the way Martina handled the plane despite its size or lack thereof. We shared
the plane with a dive club from the states who were headed to the same hotel and dive shop I stayed at last time, I was in Utila and let’s just say due to their personalities, overt racism, and blatant disappointment that they would be sharing their dive boat with people not in their dive club we decided to use Deep Blue Divers instead.
There is one place and one person that can be relied on in Honduras and they are the Lighthouse Hotel and its owner Thelma. We arrived to a sparkling clean room right on the corner of the second floor. This hotel provides the tranquillo atmosphere we were looking for. The hotel rests on a pier over the water and provides ocean views from every room. The wrap around porch has chairs and hammocks for resting and taking in the sunset. The water is so clear that you can see fish searching for food in the sea grass. Thelma, provides every guest with her world famous ”Utila 101 dissertation” when they arrive which provides a wealth of knowledge ranging from how to get to the public beach to which restaurants are safest to eat
at and what time to get to them by so that the chef is not too drunk to cook!
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