Our time spent on the island of Roatan was defined by white sand beaches, tropical sunsets, and amazing sea life. Our first full day on the island was Superbowl Sunday. We started the morning at our hotel in West End with something we'd been craving for the last month...the biggest bowl of Honey Bunches of Oats that we could pour without looking like cavemen. Cold cereal was a welcome break from a month of eggs and beans. We started to make coffee when all the electricity on the island went out. They told us it would be at least 4 hours. This left us no choice but to rent a scooter! You may be laughing...but this scooter had a 100 CC vs. the normal 50 so it could giddy up! We cruised the island (HUGE compared to any island we'd been on) for four hours barely seeing half. On our bumpy ride we discovered the beaches of West Bay where the rich and famous come. What a beach! It was impossible to access the beach (1/2 mile long) unless you entered through one of the exclusive resorts, restaurants, or arrived by water.
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| West Bay beach |
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| scooter |
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| snorkeling the crystal clear waters |
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| shrimp? |
Super Bowl Evening....certainly something to go down in the books! Because the only place in walking distance was packed, we decided to take advantage of the surprising fact that there was a TV in our room. We hit the store for munchies and ended up with makings for tuna fish sandwiches. I know I know....pathetic! However, this was the same store where our other products had been unbelievably expired and the imported cans with a safe date looked pretty good at the time. The fresh fish market was closed so tuna sandwiches on stale bread it was (and Cheetos Carl)! Luckily...every corner was selling ice cold game drinks. One little detail we'd forgotten was that the game (on our TV) would air solely in Spanish. I did a lot of translating. The game on the Honduran station looked liked it was taped by a teenager hopped up on Mt. Due the way it bounced from shot to shot never actually getting good angles. This and the stale tuna sandwiches made us laugh so hard it hurt :) We woke up sometime around midnight realizing we had actually fallen asleep sometime 3rd corner and had zero idea what had happened. The odd thing is...neither of us remember being tired or laying down... poison tuna sandwiches??? maaaaaaaaaaybe....juuuuuust maaaaybe! We spent the remainder of our time snorkeling on the fabulous beach we'd found and catching the sunsets on the beach by our hotel.
Tuesday the 8th was another travel day that brought us to Copan (western side bordering Guatemala). Copan is where travelers and locals alike come to walk in Mayan footsteps amongst ancient ruins. It's fascinating to learn about their lives so many years ago. After walking around the ruins we headed out on a horseback tour of the neighboring Mayan village. Our tour guide Margarito ran along side our miniature and painfully skinny horses smacking them with long stalks anytime their trot turned into a walk. Five minutes into our trip our worst fears surfaced. There in the dirt road face up, arms and legs sprawled in different directions was a dead teenager. To our horror, nobody was stopping to check him out. I asked Margarito what the heck was going on. He laughed up at the silly blonde gringo and told me he was only "borracho"...drunk. He said whenever people get really drunk it's very custom to just pass out in the street. He wasn't lying, we've now seen it numerous times. Cars, horses, police, and families swerve around the borrachos and pay them no attention. When they sober up, they peel themselves off the ground and carry on.
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| cait and adam |
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| Adam in front of the tree (he's hard to see!) |
Our "horseback riding trip" was hysterical. Adam insisted I ask Margarito a couple different ways if his horse (that looked like a little donkey) had ever carried this much weight. To make it a little scarier the rocky dusty road to the village was incredibly steep. Adam's horse fell to his front knees on the way down one particularly ludicrous hill....luckily all was fine.
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| Margarito |
On Thursday February 10th we woke up hot and feeling a bit ill. The electricity had gone out which meant the fan would not work. It was so incredibly hot through the night we both kept wishing for morning. As soon as morning came, we left the sauna and set off to swim in the river down the way to cool off. At the river we were all smiles. It can be a bit of a challenge sometimes to adapt to other's way of life but man does it make you appreciate what you have. Not to mention, the hotels/hostels are palaces compared to the dirt floor homes with zero electricity and only 2 hours of daily water that most people are living in. The river was so peaceful. We sat eating our plantain chips and fruit and watching a few locals using huge nets to catch fish. What a perfect day it was having nothing on the agenda just pretending we were part of their community.
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| fishing in the river |
Walking back into town after swimming later that afternoon, Adam started feeling pretty badly. What we first thought to be dehydration ended up being....."the bug". We never did figure out if it was the street food we'd eaten or the river (he went under water and some said later it was dirty). Either way the poor guy spent the next couple days in bed with the occasional ginger ale or pack of SODAS (Saltines.....thank goodness they make them here!).
At 5am on the 12th, it was travel time again. As you always do here, we did a good bit of backtracking via chicken bus and then it was off to the capital, Tegucigalpa. Much to our surprise, Tegucigalpa was much better than all the strict warnings we'd read and heard to "stay away" (we had to stay the night b/c of travel). We were in the city by mid afternoon and enjoyed walking around with the herds of people, listening to music on the plaza, and being the only gringos we saw the entire time. There was one sketchy encounter but after pretending we understood zero Spanish, the weirdo gave up on trying to figure out where we were staying and left us alone. The streets of Tegucigalpa are much cleaner than we read about and people seemed happy enough to have us as visitors in their town. We explored (staying on the main streets) and grabbed some dinner at the only place Adam seemed ready to give real food a shot....Wendy's. After getting violently sick for days, it takes some time to trust street food again.
Hanging out looking beautiful in the capital and dotted along every street with shops in Central America, are manikins advertising the latest fashions. I wish more than anything the picture function on the blog would work for this blog entry. You think from the front the manikins are just as they are in the states, until you walk by them from the side and BAM!!!.......J-Lo style butts. It's unreal. In the states, they advertise beauty as being stick thin with no butt. In Central America, its different. A big butt and a bit of a stomach on a manikin are typical.....love it!
Sunday the 13th was our second leg of travel that brought us into the heart of our 4th country, Nicaragua. So far, Nicaragua may be our favorite. We're having so much fun that blogging has obviously been put on the back-burner! If rain comes or we somehow can peel ourselves off the amazing beach calling our names as we sit and type...we will update! Until then....we're playing in the sand, listening to Reggae, catching up with the amazing Becky :) whose also in this awesome town, tanning, and hiking the nearby rocky cliffs off the ocean....missing all of you....and SO EXCITED about our first visitors in 5 days!!!!!!
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