Honduras - Land of the Dodgems

Our last night in El Salvador was spent in the little town of La Palma, just a stone's throw from the border with Honduras. La Palma is known for its artwork and many of the buildings are decorated with a very particular stylised form of bright painting which we found most attractive.

Ethnic wall art, La Palma, El Salvador

Ox Cart, El Salvador

This is how they dry the maize in parts of El Salvador and Honduras

The border crossing into Honduras on Tuesday 18th October was the most tedious we have experienced so far. Exiting from the El Salvador side was very straightforward (as it had been when we entered) but once we got through to Honduras then things changed down several gears. The final part was for the importation of the vehicle and involved being passed through several people, then a chap having to fill in about 15 forms, all in long hand, but he still needed to refer to his computer which kept breaking down. The whole process took two hours but at least everyone was good humoured!

Our first night in Honduras was spent in the town of Santa Rosa de Copan, some 50 miles from the border, and then we set off on Wednesday for Copan Ruinas.

The roads here are interesting. In England, of course, we drive on the left and in most of Central America they drive on the right. In Honduras they drive on both sides of the road. The reason for this is that there are so many huge potholes and people avoid them by suddenly swerving over onto your side of the road when they're a couple of hundred yards away. Sue did not enjoy this phenomenon!

Copan Ruinas is a charming town in the hills just east of the border with Guatemala and, as its name implies, very close to the Copan archaeological site. We spent the best part of four days here.

Naturally we visited the ruins, apparently one of Central America's major Mayan centres and yet another World Heritage Site. They are particularly good on the deep bas relief carved stelae showing their rulers in various impossible postures and there was also a very impressive hieroglyphic stairway. There are a number of unexcavated buildings which are still buried in jungle and give an atmospheric feel to the place.

Carving of Mayan Chief, Copan

Carving of Mayan chief looking more like a Chinaman

Ball court, Copan

Pyramid of the Skulls

Serpent head carving

Scary torch bearer

Unexcavated ruin

Intricate carving of bird and fish

The high point as far as we were concerned was the abundance of scarlet macaws. The scarlet macaw is the national bird of Honduras and there is a breeding/release programme in this area which is why there were so many. Alan was particularly delighted and quickly got his telephoto lens out - he's been missing his birds!

Pair of Scarlet Macaws at Copan archaeological site

Pair of Scarlet Macaws

Alan was up at 5 am on Friday morning to go out with a local ornithologist for a few hours. They saw a huge abundance of birds but they were all too far away for Alan to photograph (Cal will be disappointed). We also visited Macaw Mountain which is a bird park and nature reserve specialising in the the rehabilitation of birds, particularly scarlet macaws, that have been either confiscated from private owners or given up voluntarily.

Copan River in the early morning

Pensive peasant farmer, Copan Ruinas

We left Copan Ruinas on Sunday 23rd October and made our way eastwards to Lago Yojoa, one of the largest natural lakes in Honduras. We found a really lovely place to camp in the grounds of a beautiful bio-park and coffee farm. There were a number of very beautiful trees and shrubs, small swimming pools, and a river which looked like a smaller version of the River Dart, quite bumpy and noisy with lots of rocks. There were also some giant bamboos, the like of which we're never seen before. We camped in a little clearing in the trees and the sound of the rushing river sent us off beautifully to sleep.

Campsite at Finca Paraiso, near Lago Yojoa

River at Finca Paraiso

Large spider

Small person, very large bamboo

On Monday we went in search of the lake which we found by means of kayaking from a very pretty canal which feeds into the lake. The canal didn't look like a canal at all, it had reeds at the sides and quite a lot of bird life and fishes skittering around and we paddled some little way to the lake and then turned left. In the distance we saw a collection of roofs and what looked like a bridge so, in the hope that it might turn out to be a restaurant, we set off in that direction across the lake. It turned out to be a little hotel complete with a restaurant where we had a very nice lunch before setting off back across the lake. A total of three hours paddling so we felt we'd had a bit of much needed exercise.

View of Lago Yojoa from the top of the hill at the campsite

On the road again on Tuesday to make our way to the coastal city of La Ceiba in the north. A long but uneventful journey although Alan had to have his wits about him the whole time due to the seriously deranged Honduran drivers who don't follow the normal rules of the road and are quite unpredictable.

Our main reason for coming to La Ceiba was to make the crossing to the Bay Islands for some diving and snorkelling. La Ceiba itself doesn't have much to recommend it, we found it to be untidy and rather smelly and all the streets are full of rubbish and/or water and it has a generally shambolic appearance. However, we pottered around on Wednesday, having found out about ferries to the islands, and visited a little village further along the coast where there was a nice little restaurant right on the ocean and some thermal springs nearby which Alan flopped around in for a while.

The delights of downtown La Ceiba

Fisherman with a very good sense of balance

Butterflies having happy times on our windscreen

Canoes at La Ceiba beachfront

We stayed at a nice place called Casa de Espana which was run by a delightful chap called Pablo who couldn't do enough to be hospitable. He allowed us to park Lucy in the yard at his house, cooked us a very nice meal of garlic prawns on Wednesday evening and drove us to the ferry port on Thursday morning.

The ferry trip to Roatan, the largest of the Bay Islands, took one and a half hours and then we set about hiring a car and finding somewhere to stay. Roatan is about 40 miles long, running East to west, and 3 miles wide with only one main road so it didn't take us long. We found a nice little hotel on the north side of the island at West End immediately overlooking the sea.

The Caribbean Sea was not in good humour. For our entire stay it was crashing against the coral on the shore in front of the hotel and throwing up large columns of spume with the spray frequently reaching our first floor balcony. However, we enjoyed going to sleep with with the door to the balcony open and the sound of the waves as accompaniment.

How the other half like to travel

Caribbean behaving like the North Atlantic

We spent four days on the island. There was a very good Botanical garden with a lot of specimen trees and shrubs where we saw some beautiful flourescent green humming birds. It had a trail that went off up what they rather grandly called a mountain but was actually something between a pimple and a hill. It was however quite a nice stroll up through the forest area and when we came out on the top there was a wonderful view over the northern part of the island.

View from the top of the hill, Roatan

View from the top of the hill showing the reef, Roatan

Sue in grove of palm trees, Botanical Gardens

Very busy leaf cutter ants

Emerald humming bird

Humming bird picking its nose

The Western end of Roatan is quite well developed for tourists but the Eastern end is much more remote with beautiful views from coast to coast which we could see from the road on the island's hilly interior. We had a look at the fishing village of Oak Ridge with all its wooden houses built on stilts around the edge of the harbour but we didn't find the locals very welcoming. So we left there and drove our little hire car along a dirt road (with Alan occasionally forgetting we were not in Lucy as we bounced over pot holes) until we came upon a little restaurant fronting a classic deserted Bounty Bar beach.

Market at Coxon Hole, Roatan

View of North of Roatan Island

Sheep grazing (but what on??), Oak Ridge harbour

Ship wreck from Hurricane Mitch (1990's), Oak Ridge harbour

Local houses, Oak Ridge

Washing day, Oak Ridge

Home sweet home, Oak Ridge

Slightly battered home, Oak Ridge

Classic Bounty Bar Beach, Roatan

Alan finally got his diving trip on Sunday although the weather was too rough for Sue to go snorkelling. There were seven other people booked to go on the dive trip but in the event all the others cried off because of the poor weather, leaving Alan to have a dive boat and dive master all to himself.

He had two dives and saw a lot of interesting fish but the main attraction for him was the beautiful coral and sponges, of which there were many different varieties of all shapes and colours.

Our stay on Roatan provided a very relaxing respite from the travelling and needless to say, we ate a lot of wonderful seafood whilst we were there. Alan had lion fish for the very first time and pronounced it to be excellent. Lion fish have become somewhat of a nuisance in this part of the Caribbean as they are aggressive predators of other fish and there is a general campaign to try to reduce their numbers, mostly by serving them up in restaurants!

Sunset from our hotel balcony, Roatan

Wreck, Roatan

We got the ferry back to La Ceiba on Monday 31st October and dear old Pablo and his wife met us as they had promised and brought us back to their hotel.

The rain started in ernest at about four o'clock and continued until we went to bed. The road outside the hotel which has a kerb of about six inches soon was a river and shortly after that the footpath itself was under about six inches of water. Most vehicles were turning round at what was now a lake but we watched a cyclist with a child on the front of his bike who peddled manfully through about eighteen inches of water.

The Pico Bonito National Park, the largest national park in Honduras, is very close to La Ceiba, so we decided to take a look on Tuesday. We followed the Rio Cangrejal until we came to a hut where we paid a dollar each to access the park via a hanging bridge high across the river. A strenous but satisfying walk took us up and up on a rocky track through some very jungly stuff to a very impressive waterfall and then back down on a different path, three and a half hours in total to complete the circuit. It definitely wasn't a little stroll in the park.

View of waterfall from the road, Pico Bonito National Park

Hanging bridge, Pico Bonito

Looking at the waterfall and spray from below

The old man cooling off in the spray from the waterfall

The Rio Cangrejal is supposed to be a mecca for white water rafting and kayaking but we didn't see any and Alan said that the white water (which was actually a very muddy brown) was probably about a grade 5 and above even his pay grade.

We left La Ceiba on Wednesday to drive back south and stopped again at Lago Yojoa at the beautiful campsite where we had stayed on the way up to the coast. Unfortunately, we discovered that the mattress and duvet were soaking wet so we could not camp after all. We are not sure how the interior of the tent got quite so wet but there was a great deal of torrential rain whilst we were on Roatan and Lucy was parked at La Ceiba, so we guessed it seeped in under the tent cover somehow and through the fold in the tent floor. The only other accommodation they had to offer us was a cabana for 7 people which cost us $100 US instead of $5 to camp!

We got on the road again on Thursday morning and drove to Comayagua, the old capital of Honduras, where we stopped for the night. In an effort to get the tent dry inside we erected it in the hotel car park, much to the bemusement of the security guard.

Today is Friday 4th November and we have had a very long drive to Choluteca, a town without any redeeming features other than it is about 40 kilometres from the border with Nicaragua. We conducted a little survey between ourselves on the way here and have ranked the Hondurans in first position for being the most dangerous drivers we have encountered on our trip so far. Alan is currently enjoying a well earned beer after five hours solid driving on these awful roads.

All being well we will cross the border into Nicaragua tomorrow. We also hope that we are finally coming into the dry season in this part of the world, it's about time!