Antigua, and Rain Delays Play in Honduras

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Everyone was getting excited for the Caribbean, if not for the hard days of bus transport it would take to get there. After passing through San Pedro, Honduras’s financial center and second-largest city, we spent a forgettable night in a pit-stop town called Tela, significant only because it was the first time I saw the Caribbean, and ate a delicious chicken, fries and salad lunch for $1.70. Oh, and there was hard-core porn on channel 98. Apparently. Em, moving on…which we did, a lot this past week. 16 hours on a bus over 48 hours, although the Honduran bus networks did have English movies, only the sound was usually softer than the sound of the air-conditioner freezing everyone rigid.

Last year’s hurricane season was the busiest in recorded history, with the US Weather Bureau running out of letters for their names. In 1998, Hurricane Mitch practically destroyed Honduras, killing 7000 people and wiping out crops, roads and most of the economy. Mitch sounds like a high school jock prick, so what did they expect giving it a name like that? Point being, I’m here in hurricane season, and fortunately there hasn’t been any significant ones, yet. “A cold front is keeping ‘dem at bay, man,” says David, the weathered night guard at the hotel in Tela. As a result, the sea is rough, the sky overcast, the streets wet with piddles and puddles. Our 6am bus ride two hours to the ferry to Roatan Island was rewarded with a postponed ferry. Four hours to sit around and wait, while a construction crew banged away on top of us. As we watched a few episodes of Scrubs on Val’s laptop, bad news seeped in like a flooded bathroom above your apartment. First, the weather has been so rough there hasn’t been any ferry for three days. And then, finally, the ferry is officially cancelled. On top of that, some fraud outfit has taken the group credit card and maxed it. And so, as with all challenges, you take a deep breath, and forge on. We found a strange hotel with a caretaker who looked as friendly as a dog with rabies, the one and only place to stay near the ferry terminal, and headed into the nearest town of La Ceiba to celebrate Fran’s 24th birthday. Travellers were hanging around the town waiting to get on the island, while in Roatan, travellers were hanging around waiting to get off it. With the wind and rain, nobody was winning either way. The forecast was looking gloomy, but there’s always hope.

Val finds a piñata, and the two of us head into the center of town to find a cake, iced “Happy Birtday [sic] Frantastico! There’s really nothing to do but drink, and it’s no accident that the biggest beer in Honduras is called Salva Vida - literally, Life Saver. Soon enough, the piñata is out, tequilas get slammed, the red panties we bought for the stuffing (along with: plastic frogs, candy, a Shakira toy cell phone, hair ties, grape and strawberry flavored condoms, and a party popper cap gun) gets turned into an impromptu blindfold. The bar, much like most of off-season Honduras, is empty, and has a reggaeton playlist on repeat. I manage to persuade the bored, quasi-useless staff to let me take a crack at the music, which is how I came to be programming a playlist while the big boss (who was actually quite little) counted thick wads of dubious cash with a silver 9mm gun sticking out his shirt. He projected no love for the gringo whatsoever. Then things got stupid, as they usually do when you want them too, and a few of us ended up in one bar after another, feeding jukeboxes (carefully avoiding the dozens of US country music artists), dancing with big, black beauties, each other, and fate, when we took a long taxi home.

Sure enough, I awoke with a hangover and the news that the ferry was canceled again, thus ending my Caribbean adventure before it even started. No dolphins, no deep sea submarines, but hey, once you tango with an orange-and-black piñata, its tough to be disappointed.

So back on the bus, seven hours and change to Tegucigalpa, arriving late at night to empty streets and balaclava-wearing army soldiers on street corners carrying machine guns. I would spend a short night at the Hotel Boston, freezing in its huge rooms with just a thin sheet to keep the cold, mountain air at bay. It’s fitting that unpredictable weather would be my lasting impression of the country, but it’s not all bad. It just means I’ll have to come back one day to see what I missed.

Hotel Los Balcones
Leon, Nicaragua

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