No, Gracias

We returned to San Pedro Sula in order to take a bus south to Gracias, Lempira. In the bus station there are people everywhere trying to get you onto their buses and being backpacking gringas we were everyone asked us "Utila?" Our response, attempting to find the correct bus, was "No, Gracias" which of course made everyone walk away. Probably should have thrown a "ciudad" in there with it ha.

We took an old school bus 5 hours to Gracias. It was actually a nice ride - the bus wasn't very full and Gracias is in the mountains making it a really pretty route.

This was our hotel lobby. It did rain on us through the hole one day which was pretty amusing.

I enjoyed visiting in the city - we ended up staying for almost a week. It's not a large city, but there are some very good restaurants, a bunch of shops, and everyone was really friendly. (It must be growing - all of the guidebooks said there weren't any ATMs, but there are now 2!) One of Claire's first observations: "Look, they have trashcans, and people actually use them!" There's a cute coffee shop where you can sit on the second floor of a little tower in the middle of the  Parque Central,so of course we took advantage of that. My favorite part of the park was the beautiful orange flowering trees.

One of the churches in town:

San Cristobol is a fort that overlooks the city. It's free which is nice, but it's also the spot where a lot of young boys hang out. This would be fine if they hadn't enjoyed trying out their English pickup lines.It was weird.

The best Nativity scene we found -- the mini pond had tadpoles in it! Second place had dinosaurs.

Lorena's sells nothing but canned foods and ice cream:

We spent a bit of time eating of course. There's a Chinese restaurant where we asked if two dishes was enough for three people. She responded "I think so"... then brought out two of the largest overflowing plates of food I have ever seen in my life. One would have been too much food. Our hotel restaurant had some amazing curry chicken. And we had a lot of tipico. Tipico changed a little depending on what meal of the day it was, but always included beans, eggs and crema with tortillas. Other additions could be cheese, avacado, fried plantains or ham. I might be back to the point where I could eat it again. Maybe. We had it a lot...

In addition we went to one of the local hot springs. The best way to describe it was like the public pool - there were a ton of people there hanging out, bringing food, listening to music. The one thing that we were surprised by though was that no one wore bathing suits. Everyone was in regular clothes jumping into the water. And if anyone did have a bathing suit they covered it with shorts and a t-shirt. We stuck out A LOT being the only blanquitas and the only ones in bathing suits. But again, no one gave us any problems about it.

We had two side trips while we were in Gracias which I'll get to separately.

April :(

Rose's Restaurant

$2 glasses of wine, half priced appetizers, and all the ice fishermen you could possibly want.

Madison, WI...

Where the Wiener Mobile randomly hiding  by your apartment is normal. (But makes me happy every time!)

Swimming with the Fishes in Utila

Utila in the morning

It didn't stay quiet for long - eventually the streets are full of pedestrians, bicycles, scooters, and 4-wheelers (the streets being all 4 of them) - but the morning is nice and exhaust free. Within the Bay Islands Utila was reported to have the  more backpacker vibe while Roatan is supposedly more upscale/resort (we didn't get to go, the catamaran between the islands wasn't running while we were there) so I was a bit surprised there were so many ATVs. Maybe I shouldn't be since it's developing quite a bit - much to the chagrin of some.

Fun animal spotting in Utila includes: cats at meals

Roosters

And someones pet monkey (who likes to chew on power lines....)

Perhaps it was this monkey that inspired the delicious Monkey Lala?

Our main reason for choosing Utila over other beach destinations within Central America was that it has one of the cheapest SCUBA certification rates in the world and we thought why not have an adventure!? We dove at Captain Morgan's which meant we could also stay at their hostel for cheap. Minus our roommates being hostel-awkward, the entire experience was amazing! (Also except for the part where SCUBA seriously freaked me out... but we'll get to that). Our days went something like: Breakfast at Ultra Light Cafe (they had the best fresh OJ), beach time (typically included some hammock time), maybe some snorkeling, lunch at the hostel (tasty lunch special that changed daily), scuba in the afternoon, town wandering/dinner/drinks. It was a pretty rough time.

Hammocking is hard

So SCUBA.... It was my idea to get our open water certifications and I have no clue how I thought I'd be able to do it without any issues. The ocean kind of freaks me out, as does the idea of not being close to the surface. Those two things are kind of a large part of the process which led me to being not very calm. Not very calm at all. Lets just say that on day 1 in the shallow/confined dive I didn't get through too many of my skills and thought very seriously about abandoning the course and sticking to snorkeling. Day 2 was shallow/confined part 2 to finish what I didn't get to the day before plus a shallow dive which actually made me feel much better about the whole thing. Once we were swimming around looking at things rather than kneeling and taking the regulators out it was much easier to forget the surface wasn't very close. (Sharks being able to come out of nowhere and eat me however was another issue. Focus on the coral... focus on the coral.) Long story short, I eventually made it through the 4 dives to become certified, plus we got extra "fun dives". I have to say I'm glad I didn't give up! It was so much fun. Being able to see the fish past the surface was spectacular. We saw quite a few great things but the highlights for me were the eagle rays, seahorses and the lion fish. I definitely hope to go again in the future. Plus they have some pretty neat sounding specialty courses like night and wreck diving.

Certified!

Our stay on the island coincided with New Years Eve which of course involved a beach party! We all went to Bandu Beach where a DJ was set up for the night. There were fire dancers and fireworks though we did miss out on the midnight countdown... no one did it! So sad. Also sad was that the sparklers I purchased for midnight would.not.light. They were the most ridiculously uncooperative sparklers I've ever met in my life. Boo. 

Overall Utila was fun, we completed an adventure, and it was time to move on to the next.

Winter Break: Getting to Utila

With 4 weeks off for winter break it seemed necessary to go somewhere! Originally Therese, Claire and I were thinking about an epic road trip through Central America down to Panama; unfortunately we didn't have enough time or the capability to do it. The next best thing was 3 weeks in Honduras and El Salvador!

Everyone was to meet in the Chicago airport on Dec. 26. Therese was flying in from Denver, Claire from New York and I was busing down from Madison. I was worried that Denver would be a problem but... it was New York. Claire was stuck at home while Therese and I hung out at the USO (which was crazy full because of people delayed going East. No cots for us.) until our flight at 5am the next morning. One thing I will say about O'Hare - it is seriously boring if you're stuck outside of the gates. They should think about keeping the bar in terminal 5 open longer :)

We got to San Pedro Sula, Honduras without a problem. We'd decided to stay in SPS for a night to check it out. It was fine, but I probably wouldn't again. The hostel we stayed at was clean and we were the only ones there which was really nice. Wandering around SPS was felt a little odd because everything had gates and barbed wire, and there were random guards everywhere with pretty large guns. Even the restaurant we went to for lunch had a guard at the door. This is probably because in 2012 it was listed as the worlds most violent city. Probably should have looked at that before.... But honestly we never felt unsafe, even when we were wandering around at night looking for the Crepe restaurant (which we never found. No street signs. I was really disappointed, it supposedly had local recipes mixed into crepe format.) This maybe wasn't the best overall but it got dark at 6pm! While Therese and I were looking for crepes, Claire was driving to LaGuardia in a snow storm and then slept on a bench in the airport with the bums who also frequent the heated check-in area.

By day 2 Therese and I had quickly found our spanish to be less than stellar. I definitely thought I remembered more than I did. Terrible spanish abilities in hand we were dropped off at the bus terminal to go to La Ceiba. This place was like a mall! (Complete with gun store...) It's a crazy mess of people, stores, and buses everywhere which you find by a combination of signs above an exit and people yelling city names at you and seeing if you react. Luckily Ceiba is a big gringo destination because of the ferries to Utila and Roatan so they were pretty quick to figure out where we were headed. The bus ride was easy - air conditioning, comfy seats, people selling snacks through the bus windows when we stopped. Our problem was the exit. We thought the stop at Ceiba would be more noticeable or at least mentioned... no. We totally missed it and about 20 minutes past the city, when there was absolutely nothing around anymore, realized that fact at which point they told us to get off the bus and walk towards the ocean. *insert mini-mental-freak-out*. 

They pulled our stuff from under the bus except they didn't. Therese was traveling with two backpacks because we planned to hike later and they only pulled one of them off. Cue Therese running after the bus to get her clothes. Stuff finally in hand we started walking on the road towards the ocean which luckily had a sign for a hotel at an unspecified distance in that general direction. Yay? After kilometer or so we came upon this: 

There was no one there. I wasn't feeling very hopeful at this point. Then we came upon a guard station (which I didn't take a picture of because both of us were nervous we were going to get a gun pulled on us. We definitely did not expect a guard station to be present in this scenario.) This was a really bad time to have a lack of spanish skills. I definitely expected the 3 guards to tell us to leave but they were incredibly nice. Eventually we got to the understanding that we missed our bus stop and subsequently our ferry and needed a taxi back into town so we could catch the morning ferry. Short version of the events is that one of the guys checked on the price of a room at their hotel and it was a kind of expensive but when he mentioned it was all inclusive including alcohol - SOLD! Hello, Hotel Palma Real!

We are fairly certain we were the only guests to have ever: 1) walked up 2) carried all of our luggage via backpack 3) stayed for only one night and possibly 4) stayed without a reservation.

They brought a lovely covered wagon out to get us (pulled by a tractor!)  and we were hooked up with Fabio who showed us around. He made sure we got checked in quickly so we could make it to the afternoon snack which we took full advantage of. Then we hit up the pool! Best missed bus stop ever. 

Our tractor 

One of the pools as the sun started setting

Part of the lobby 

Hi ocean!

We also lucked out in that we were between two large groups of Canadians checking out and checking in, so dinner wasn't full. We may or may not have gone up to the buffet 3 times... The wine was also quite tasty. It was really too bad we couldn't stay longer, it was a great place! 

Meanwhile Claire had added a flight from SPS to Ceiba in order to make it to the ferry to Utila. Unfortunately between the airport and the taxi taking a while she didn't make it, and after enduring some rudeness from a guy at the ferry dock had to go back into town to stay the night. She wandered around the poorly lit and closed down town trying to find some usable internet and food. She did not get a dinner buffet. Did I mention we had free wifi? Sorry Claire! 

Her reaction to our hotel pictures:

"*!&#^("

The next morning we did make it to the ferry (though after some debating about "missing" it again) and met up with each other. We were successfully on our way to Utila!

A photo from the bus