Hello to Honduras

Our first taste of Honduras comes in the form of Puerto Cortes, a clean, friendly, port city reached after 3 hours crossing the sea from Placencia in Belize.

01 Little Salespeople

The first cash machine we used ate our card, but the bank employees retrieved it immediately. Another ´gringo´ in the queue behind us had experienced the same thing and it took weeks to recover. Must have been our lucky day! 

We feel pleased to be back in the familiar Latino culture with the increasingly familiar Spanish language. Strangely enough, even though we didn´t have a language barrier in Belize it never felt as warm or as safe a country to us as Guatemala and Honduras.

We had heard that the small beach village of Omoa was a decent place to spend a night and all it took was a quick bus trip there and we arrived. Beautiful jungle-clad hills down to the beach, or rather what is left of it. A Mexican gas company erected an illegal jetty 2 or 3 years earlier, changing the water flow and almost completely erroding Omoa´s once beautiful beach. Good luck to the locals in continuing to fight this injustice!

02 Omoa scene

The town has a Caribbean feel, extremely laid-back and friendly with kids alternatively selling home-baked coconut treats and throwing themselves off the pier despite the jellyfish circling in the warm water below.

We get our own room at Roli´s place, a backpackers place run by a Swiss guy and his Honduranean partner. An interesting guy to talk to, he worked and drove around the world for 6 years and still has the pick-up truck parked in his back yard. When he settled in Omoa years earlier he thought he´d found his piece of paradise after searching the world. Times change ´though and between Omoa´s beach being washed away and increasingly dishonest backpackers stealing from his place, things are really getting him down. Oh, and not to mention the fact that someone shot at him and his lady while they were sleeping a few weeks earlier! (We´d already checked in and paid by the time we discovered this gem of information). He believed it was the locals who run backpacker places in the town, jealous of his success.

03 Anna at the pub

We enjoy a beer on a bar on the sand and watch the sun go down. Finish the evening with an excellent fresh fish dinner. There we met two middle-aged American residents of the town, whose responses to our standard ´where are you from?´question resulted in two answers:

1. We´re from the United States

2. We didn´t vote for him, we just want to apologise for the idiot in charge of our country and we really hope things change

04 Sunrise scene