So it was with heavy hearts that we left Roatan. We spent 6 nights there and had a great time in our jungle hideout amongst all the wildlife. It was also nice relax by the beach and to get back into diving after a couple of years (6 for Betta!). Thankfully we had a very tranquille trip on the ferry back (no sea sickness this time) and got on the bus to the capital Tegucigalpa.
Now, we'd read a lot on this place and were not expecting it to be a particularly nice, but we weren't prepared for the reality. Dimly lit concrete streets, piles of rubbish in the road being faught over by rabid dogs and humans. Gangs of druggies inhaling big bags of glue and homeless people in rags everywhere. As well as that you had guards on almost every respectable business and bars and gates locked over almost every window. To make matters worse the taxi drivers we got were appalling. None of them knew where to go and had to keep stopping to ask directions, and when we finally got to our hotel, they had even written their name on the sheets so you couldn't steal them!!! It was safe and quiet though so we were very grateful for that.
Safe to say we got out of there first thing in the morning and headed to Granada in Nicaragua, via Managua. We arrived after 22 hours of travel in 2 days and were pretty shattered so found the first decent lodgings and crashed.
Granada is a nice enough colonial town. Certainly the nicest place we'd seen for a few days. The trouble is though is that these towns are all very similar. San Cristobel, Antigua and Granada are all basicaly the same. Maybe we are getting spoilt. So following a day exploring there we took 2 chicken buses and a chicken boat to the Isla de Ompete (8 hours travel - $5p/p). The Island of 2 hills.
This is a unique place as it's an Island in a masive lake made from 2 great volcanoes. It's very pretty. We are here for some chilling out and relaxing but decided to climb the smaller (1300m) of the 2 volcanoes yesterday. We were expecting a pretty hard few hours to the top but we got a lot more that we bargained for. It was 3.5 hours of solid, sweatty, dirty, muddy graft, straight up, and 3 back down. The terrain was so slippery and difficult with large vertical sections where you had to haul yourself up tree roots and strategically placed wires, through, over and under wet tree trunks. Man, it was tough. And to add insult to injury, we got to the top and all we saw was cloud cover! There was absolutely no view at all the whole way, and the descent was probably even worse as it was so trecherous underfoot (especially in urban trainers). We likened it to a 6 hour session at the gym. No more fun than that. And boy do we ache today...
We're here for one more night, then into Costa Rica, and our first border crossing by boat.
PS - It's day 50 today, and approximately a quarter of the way through our trip. How time flies.
MandB
Lookin' good, lookin' good...
ReplyDeleteGlad to see the journey is going well : ) BESOS