Weekend at the Coast!

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(I thought I already had posted about my trip to Tela...but it's gone....the magic of computers I guess. So here's try number two!)

Tela is a small "city" on the North Coast of Honduras, about 5 hours from Copan Ruinas. I went with Nicole, a student I met at Escuela Ixbalanque (a Spanish School in Copan). We were both eager to get out of tiny Copan for a weekend of FUN IN THE SUN.

We spent our first day on the beach and got COOKED! I was baked red by the afternoon. But it was worth it to be back by the ocean. We walked to the very edge of the "touristy" part of the city, to where the real people lived, and while we were lying in the sun a couple kids that lived nearby came over. We ended up playing in the water together, and then they brought us a fresh fried fish and plantain. Super-sweet kids!

Our second day we took a tour to Punta Sal, a jungle like peninsula about 45 minutes away by boat. We got to walk through the jungle, saw blue crabs, howler monkeys, and a cove that had once been a pirate hide-out. It was also my first time to try snorkeling! We weren't at any amazing coral reef or anything, but it was neat to see some tropical fish and underwater ocean life. We finished the trip with a "typical Garifuna meal" of fried fish, plantains, and coconut milk. (The Garifuna are descendants of Africans from shipwrecked slave ships that live along the Honduran coast). Our 45 minute ride back to Tela was a non-stop ocean shower as the small boat hit the waves! We were all drenched by the end…but it was worth it.

Although there are some foreign tourists in Tela, a majority of the visitors come from San Pedro Sula, a large city just a couple hours away. It’s also known as a hot-spot for Discos (there was one just a couple blocks from our hotel room that blared the music until 4 in the morning!).

But Nicole and I had a great time checking out the restaurants, and shopping (she bought clothes…I bought ALOE LOTION!), and getting manis and pedis at a little local salon, and talking a European family into going on the Punta Sal trip with us, and discovering a soda that tastes like liquefied apple jolly ranchers, and making our hotel guard very happy by giving him our left-over fettuccini alfredo and potato salad, and getting banana liquados for breakfast, and surviving her horrid-tasting pills, and not getting stung by jelly-fish.

Yep, it was a good trip. 😉

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