For Twig, Julie, Taff and Lewis
Trip Start
Feb 10, 2008
1
22
29
Trip End
Aug 06, 2008
Tegucigalpa,
Honduras
Sunday, June 29, 2008
Anyway, let me begin where I left off. You may recall that I was lamenting the fact that my diving instructor had failed to show up on Sunday morning; in fact, it turns out that that failure was mine. Let me explain...
As I settled down to watch the Spain vs Italy match in a local café, I was somewhat surprised at the brevity of the interlude between the players' arrival in the tunnel and the subsequent kick off - they seemed to have skipped the usual fanfare of singing the national anthems and shaking the hands of every man, woman and child in the stadium. I was even more surprised when, just ten minutes into the match, substitutions were being made left, right and centre by both teams! Although it still took a while, it eventually dawned on me that I was watching the second, as opposed to the first half of this vital quarter final.
Dude reading the paper at the bar
It turns out that my clock had inexplicably turned itself back one hour during the night, and so I had been impatiently waiting for my instructor at 8am rather than the arranged time of 7am. After the match I headed back to the divecentre to apologise to Alfred, the very chilled out co-owner, who informed me that the next available opportunity to dive wouldn't be until Tuesday afternoon.This meant that, with no football being shown, I had a completely free day on Monday. As I was greeted in the morning by a beautiful cloudless sky, I decided to head down to the beach to do some sunbathing. Now normally I think of myself as being pretty careful when it comes to sun exposure - with a nose as sensitive as mine one learns from an early age - but unfortunately it seems that the rare appearance of a cloud-free sun roused in me an excitement that overcame my common sense. I must point out that I did put sun cream on (almost) every inch of exposed skin, but it would appear that the back of my upper thighs haven´t seen rays of this strength, or perhaps even any form of daylight, in their lifetime, and so have turned the most pink shade of pink imaginable. Nah, just kidding; I'm not that stupid. Having said that, despite using factor 30 and exposing them to just one hour of sun, they did get slightly burned. This brings me to the following question, which I direct mainly to the pasty-thighed among you: Is it actually possible to go from being utterly white to remotely tanned, without the interim stage that is characterized by pinkish hues and vague burning sensations? Answers on a postcard please.
The beach at Utila
The beach was beautiful, and I spent most of the day alternating between lying sprawled in the sun and sitting in the shade reading a book. During one of these shadey breaks, I was approached by a little local kid who was keen to show off his baseball skills. After a bit of persuasion I agreed to join him in a one on one game, which essentially involved me gently tossing the ball to him, him twatting it as far as he could, and me retrieving it from the sea as he excitedly shrieked "Home run! Home run!" Although he was very cute, after a short while it all became a bit too much for me and I decided to head back to the relative calm of lying spread-eagled in the sun. That evening I went to my favourite oceanside bar with my book in tow, and proceeded to demolish two large pepperoni pizzas followed by a snickers bar. God I love food.
The following day I finally managed to get down to some diving, which was after all the entire purpose of coming to Honduras in the first place! Although I had finished my open water course just fifteen or so weeks ago, I decided to start with a brief tune up, which involved going over some of the safety exercises such as swapping regulators or making emergency ascensions. After this I was free to do a "fundive", where my German instructor and I descended twenty five metres or so alongside a beautiful coral wall. Whilst we weren't lucky enough to see anything as exciting as a whaleshark or manta ray, we did see a few cool crab-like creatures, one of which resembled a giant daddy long legs and seemed happy to crawl up and down our hands and arms, in the manner of an ant or small house spider.
The beach at Utila #2
I think my favourite aspect of diving is actually the peace and tranquility of entering a world that is completely alien to our own; I could happily stay down there for hours without seeing another living creature. I also enjoy the feeling of weightlessness, and find great pleasure in witnessing the extent to which your buoyancy is affected by the quantity of air in your lungs. That evening I went out for a few beers with some of the other divers and instructors, but once again it was quite a tranquil affair. On more than one occasion I have find myself pining after the beers, beaches and bustle of Playa Del Carmen, and in fact I have already begun to plan my return trip to that Caribbean paradise. Although I had done just two tanks worth of diving - I had originally planned to do ten - the following day I decided that I would leave the island and head towards the capital Tegucigalpa, in the hope that I could be able to make it all the way to Granada, Nicaragua, in time to start volunteering on Monday. Rather than trying to describe the type of volunteering that I will be doing, I will instead direct anyone who is interested to the organisation's website: http://www.casas-de-la-esperanza.org/ . However, for reasons that are no longer absolutely clear to me, I didn't end up leaving the island until Thursday. I think it was something to do with the fact that there was a power cut on Tuesday evening, which meant that the fan above my bed was out of action, which subsequently meant that any minute that should have been spent in slumber was instead spent lying wide awake sweating my bollocks off.
Some kids playing baseball
It was due to this lack of sleep that I missed the early 6:20 departure to the mainland, which meant that it would now be impossible to reach La Ceiba in time to catch one of the long distance buses to Tegucigalpa. So rather than catching the later boat and spending the night in the somewhat boring town of La Ceiba, I opted instead to spend one more night on the island and make sure that I rose early enough to catch the 6:20 boat the following morning. But, as always seems to be the case when I have a particularly early rise to look forward to the following day, I struggled to fall asleep until the wee hours of the morning, which meant that I awoke at 05:30 tired, irritable, and suffering from that strange sense of nausea and light headedness that always seems to accompany a lack of sufficient sleep.
This was to be an unpleasant beginning to a frustrating day; a day that just so happened to be the first of a collection of frustrating days. First of all I had to endure the bumpy one hour boat trip back to the mainland, which wasn't doing my already present feelings of nausea any favours. The bus I was hoping to catch was the 10:30 to Tegucigalpa, so I decided to kill a little bit of time in La Ceiba's central park. Here I met a young Mexican policeman, who was complaining about being forcefully relocated from his home in Mexico City all the way to San Pedro Sula in Honduras. Don't blame him really. Then again he was wearing the lowest-cut wife beater I've ever seen, from whose stifling grasp his nipples seemed desperate to escape at every opportunity.
Just chillin'
After a delicious and healthy breakfast at Dunkin' Donuts, I made my way to the immigration office to sort out a few passport issues.I should explain; there is an agreement between Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua known as the CA-4, which allows completely free travel between the four countries. Although this has its benefits for travelers such as myself, it is also somewhat frustrating in that the maximum number of days one can be granted to travel through all four countries is just 90. My tourist permit was expiring around the 22nd June, and so I had gone to the immigration office in Tela to arrange a 30 day extension. However the officer there told me that I should wait until the penultimate day to extend it, as the 30 days begins from the day of extension, regardless of whether you still have any time left from your original 90 days. He told me that there was another office in Utila, and that it would be no problem to arrange the extension once on the island. Unfortunately, as I later discovered, this office never seemed to be open - I checked at various times on every single day to no avail. I was getting rather frustrated, especially as none of the people in the surrounding offices could offer any sort of opinion as to why it wasn't open, nor when it might be. Although the easy going nature of the Central American people is great at times, it can also be incredibly frustrating when you are actually trying to get something done. This frustration is only worsened by the fact that this easy going nature seems completely absent in those people whose job it is to uphold immigration laws and policies.
Pretty much sums up my time on Utila
Anyway, because getting a boat to and back from the mainland to get the required extension would cost about $45, I figured that I might as well save myself the hassle and instead just accept that I would have to pay a fine, which I'd heard was about $50. So, back to La Ceiba. To my surprise and dismay, the kind lady in the immigration office informed me that extensions over 90 days could only be arranged in the office at Tegucigalpa, and that the process could be expected to take approximately fifteen days (whether or not this was because I had already gone over my original allotted time, my Spanish was not quite good enough to deduct). Obviously this came as a rather massive blow, as a) I had been hoping to start volunteering in Nicaragua just four days from then, b) I only had about forty days left of my travels, and c) regardless of a) and b), I wouldn't have wanted to spend another fifteen days hanging around in Honduras anyway. When I explained that I had been hoping to start volunteering in Nicaragua that Monday, the lady made a call to the Tegucigalpa office and was told that if I wrote a letter explaining my situation (which could prove an interesting task), then it might be possible that my extension could be pushed through in two or three days. Although this still wasn't ideal, it was certainly much better news, and regardless I had no option but to head to the bus station to catch the 10:30 coach to Tegucigalpa as planned. Unfortunately, upon my arrival I was informed by the gentleman at the counter that the 10:30 departure had been cancelled, due to a strike that was being carried out by all the public transport workers in the city.
1st class baby!
Excellent. The strike had actually been mentioned to me by the Mexican policeman earlier that morning but, possibly because I had had only a couple of hours of sleep, or alternatively because I spend the majority of my waking hours with my head in the clouds (amongst other such wondrous locations), or most likely because I couldn't stop watching his nipples' frantic attempts to escape, I hadn't taken any note of this at the time. The following departure was at 15:00, by which point there seemed to be a general confidence that the strike would have died out. Luckily the four and a half hours wait went by fairly quickly, as I spent the majority of it in deep slumber sprawled on the marble floor of the bus stop, and also killed some time watching the football and chatting to two Brazilian women who were sharing my fate. I'm sure anyone who is reading this can share my anguish, then, when they hear that we were told at about 14:55 that there would be no departures at all that day. It turns out that the few coaches that had already attempted to cross the picket line were lynched by the striking masses, and the entire highway had now been shut off. I had no option but to stay in La Ceiba that night, and so booked in to the hotel that I had stayed in during my last visit. That evening was essentially spent lying around naked in the hope that I could once again make / ruin the maid's day.The following day, after another dunkin' donuts breakfast, (what did I say about always trying to patronize local establishments?) I headed back to the bus stop with my fingers crossed. Apparently I hadn't crossed them hard enough however, as it turned out that although the strike was indeed over for the time being, all the seats on the 10:30 departure had been booked up. Super. That is unless, the man in the kiosk said with a sly look in his eyes, you want to shell out an extra 350 Lempiras for first class. My initial reaction was a sort of "hrrmmph" noise, which at least in my mind signaled something along the lines of "No way Jose". But then a number of things occurred in rapid succession - first I imagined waiting for another four and a half hours in the bus station, then I realized that 350 lempiras was only about 8 pounds, and finally I had the eureka like revelation that this was roughly the amount of money I would receive for just one hour of work back in the UK... I would be a fool to refuse the kind man's offer! Of course it is extremely dangerous to translate all of my expenditure here in Central America into extra hours of work or the foregoing of other expenditures back in the UK, as I would be obliged to work 140 hour weeks and spend my money on nothing but stale sainsbury's economy bread and BHS 'buy two get one free' pairs of y-fronts. But those were some of the last things on my mind as I stepped onto the 1st class section of the coach, or "heavadise" as I have this very moment so wittily decided to dub it (a mix of heaven and paradise you see). As well as being brought a bottle of water and a carton of apple juice, I was even brought an (admittedly random) lunch of some cashew nuts, an ice cream flavoured sweet, and four fruity pastries! What's more is that my ridiculously comfy single chair had a mechanism that turned it into more of a bed than anything else, and even came with its very own blanket and pillow. Talk about luxury. On the downside my MP3 player ran out about twenty minutes into the seven hour journey, but luckily I was able to make full use of my superhero like ability to sleep on any form of public transport, and it was in this state that I spent practically the entire journey, despite having had more than eight hours the previous night. However, I am ashamed to inform you all that towards the end of this marathon sleeping session I had my first ever FACEBOOK dream. And it wasn't even interesting - I just logged onto my facebook account, saw that I had two messages, read both of them, and then returned to what I had been doing previously. In fairness what I had been doing previously was making my way to a specially designed space shuttle that was about to transport me and a few lucky others to the centre of one of the volcanos in Nicaragua. But still, I dreamt about checking facebook....
My first evening in Tegucigalpa was spent at the cinema watching Super Agent 86, which turned out to be much funnier than I had been expecting. And although I am currently typing this at 16:46 on Sunday afternoon (congratulations Spain), I just don't have the energy to fill in the gap that was yesterday and this morning. So there.
Adios
x
