Tuesday, January 21, 2014

One week in Honduras without a plan

Last week Monday, we left Guatemala City to travel to Honduras. Our bus left at 5am (!) and after a quick border crossing, short stops in Copan Ruinas (an old Mayan site.. but we had seen enough Mayan sites in Mexico and Guatemala so we skipped this one) and San Pedro Sula (the murder capital of Central America- let's get out of there), the bus arrived in La Ceiba, the 3rd city of Honduras, around 7pm. The streets in La Ceiba had a very shady feeling and you definitely don't want to walk around at night. We took a taxi to our restaurant, which was closed, so we ended up at Pizza hut :)

The next morning we took a ferry to Roatan, one of the islands on the Honduran Caribbean coast. What a difference from the mainland: the atmosphere is relaxed, touristic and very safe. We settled into a nice bungalow and had a great sunset the first evening!





A bungalow next to the sea, surrounded by palm trees and a nice hammock.. Life is good in Roatan!

Just like in Guatemala, many Americans and Europeans have settled in Roatan to start a hotel, restaurant, or dive shop. Because next to the 2nd biggest coral reef in the world, the main activity on this island is diving! Initially we didn't plan to dive, but we quickly realized that if we ever wanted to try diving, this would be the place to do it - cheap, nice and plenty of English speaking instructors. We started with a one day 'discover scuba diving' course and loved it so much, that we finished the full open water course! BTW - it was cloudy and raining almost every day, so being deep in the water was really the best thing to do :)





The sealife is absolutely stunning here. From turtles, to barracudas, lionfish, parrotfish, angelfish... they all can be seen between the coral reefs. Unfortunately our waterproof camera can only go 5m deep, and we went 10-20m on each dive, so we couldn't shoot underwater pictures - except these at the end of a dive :)





Besides diving, we visited a farm for Iguana's, and really enjoyed the island life for 8 days. Since Roatan is a bit more expensive compared to Central America, and it's full of mosquitoes carrying Dengue fever during the day, and Malaria once it gets dark :/  we can't stay here forever so we're heading for Nicaragua tomorrow!




 "I'm actually a small dinosaur" 



Can you find his head?