Advertisement
Published: August 15th 2007
Our journey to Central America was an epic to say the least. First was a 13hour flight from Singapore to London on a full plane (we luckily managed to get ok seats, though sadly not up the sharp end) changed planes and terminals at Heathrow (and nearly died converting the prices of everything in pounds.. SG$10 for a coffee?!?) and after 4 hours flew on to Miami. Another nine hours later we were ‘stateside’ where we negotiated the bus and train to transfer to Fort Lauderdale airport and had a seven hour wait (naturally, the plane was delayed) before we got a 2hr flight to San Pedro Sula, Honduras. Thanks to the wonder of time zones we compressed over 40 hours of real time into around 24 hours. We were quite tired by the end of the trip you could say. It makes us realise we are not cut out to be party animals, 40 hours with minimal sleep and no showering just wasn’t our cup of tea.
We spent about a week on Roatan, one of the Bay Islands in Honduras (Islas de La Bahia). A pretty little island, not as backpacker-y as its sister island Utila but we
San Pedro Sula
- our first view of Central America from our hotel after a very deep sleep!chose it because, well, we don’t really know but it turned out ok. The prices were fairly expensive, both in terms of where we’ve been (we now realise really how amazingly cheap Asia was) and in terms of Central America. It’s a destination to which a lot of Americans come to for their holidays.
We found “cheap” accommodation but were frustrated by the fact that despite rolling blackouts being common to save power, noone was prepared for it, and very few places have generators. Half the day generally has no power and of course with electric water pumps, no power means no water. We splurged and moved to a nicer place, assuming they had a generator. They didn’t. So we moved back to our cheap digs and were quite lucky that we had full power for a few days.
The diving was nice, a little different in terms of different fish and different colour corals and the visibility was great, the sea was a fabulous aqua blue. We also hired a scooter one day, Al drove and Lise clung on behind and we checked out the island. It’s about 40 miles long but only one mile or so
Exploring Roatan on a mean machine
Surprisingly this little scooter had enough power to get both of us up very steep hills! wide and there’s basically one road so it was easy to navigate.
We also enjoyed the change in the local food. The staple is beans and tortillas generally but there’s a lot of tex-mex sorta stuff which makes for a nice change from fried rice and noodles, and it’s been fun exploring the different dishes on the menu.
The biggest hurdle we have is speaking very little Spanish. Al learnt some a while ago and it all came back to him fairly quickly, luckily, so with a combination of his knowledge and Lise’s hand gestures (mostly non-offensive) and apologetic looks we managed!
From Roatan, we headed onto the town of Copan Ruinas, near the border of Guatemala is a pretty town with cobblestone streets. Basically, it’s a town that exists on tourism as it’s the closest town to the ancient Mayan ruins of Copan. These ruins are small in comparison to other Mayan sites but they are generally accepted to be the most incredible as they are very well preserved and lots of detail is still visible. Fascinating to learn some of the history of the Mayans, one of the most interesting was one of their ceremonial
Lise diving off Roatan
The coral was different, but there weren't as many fishes ballgames, where the best player had the honour of being sacrificed at the end of the game!
Next stop is Antigua in Guatemala, only a short bus ride away.
A quick note, if you are still reading this far… we had both our mobile phones stolen, so we have lost everyone’s phone numbers.. could you email them to us please!!!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.102s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 13; qc: 50; dbt: 0.0671s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
