Continuing on the Gringo Trail: Honduras
Updated: link to photos actually works now.
Thanks for the concern regarding the 6.8 earthquake that hit parts of Guatemala and El Salvador. We had left Guatemala for Honduras and were unaffected. We read in the news that there were no casualities.
After returning to Antigua from Tikal, we loafed around for about a week finding excuses why we needed to stay just one more day. We explored the city, watched a lot of movies that we hadn’t seen this last year, and tried more restaurants.
The number of tourists is noticably picking up as the college crowd flocks down here under the guise of learning Spanish. Katherine (the Australian woman we’ve mentioned before) delayed her departure back down-under for another month. We met up with her again in Antigua. She joined us as we continued on the gringo trail to the Copan Ruins in Honduras.
Copan is just over the border from Guatemala, about 6 hours from Antigua. The ruins are just outside of the town called Copan Ruinas which is a great little town. They say that Tikal is the New York of the Mayan world and Copan is the Paris.
Tikal was big and sprawling, while the Copan ruins are more sophisticated in their carvings. There was an archeological conference scheduled for that week while we were there. Cue 3rd grade archeologist joke: A single woman should seriously consider marrying an archeologist because the older she gets, the more interested he will be. Boo!
We only stayed a couple of days in Copan visiting a butterfly farm, the Copan ruins, and doing a zip-line canopy tour near the ruins. The zip-line canopy tour was a lot of fun and gave us a good aerial view of the surrounding area.
We all could of easily stayed another day in Copan but decided to move on. Katherine went back to Antigua to head toward Mexico where she will eventually fly out back to Australia.
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| Honduras Pix-click on photo for more pictures |
We took a bus to the east coast town of La Ceiba and spent the night in order to catch the morning ferry to the island of Utila. Utila is one of the three Bay Islands off the coast of Honduras that provide scuba diving lessons. We arrived on Utila in the morning and were all excited because we went to the school that we wanted and they had a class starting that afternoon. We grabbed the forms, filled them out and then were told that Jess needed medical clearance because he is on prescription medication. Boo! The dive instructor was kind enough to drive Jess up to a medical clinic on his motorcycle to get the doctor to sign off. Unfortunately, doctor was not there. Nurse said to come back in the afternoon. We walked back up to the clinic and waited. Nobody came. We went back to the dive shop on Friday. They said that the doctor should be in and we needed to catch him within the hour or else the doctor would be gone until Monday. We caught one of the few local taxis and headed toward the clinic. Being a Caribbean island, the taxi driver stopped along the way to greet his friends and neighbors. We arrived at the clinic – it was open Yeah! however the nurse said that the doctor had just left on his motorcycle to catch the ferry off of the island. Boo! Taxi driver said, “Get in, we’ll find him on the dock waiting for the ferry.”, so off we went back down the hill to the ferry. When we got there, the taxi driver didn’t see the doctor, but he found a woman waiting for the ferry who knew what the doctor looked like. The taxi driver handed us off to her and she waited with us to identify the doctor. After 10min, the doctor came walking down the dock and the woman went up to him to explain our need in Spanish. $10 later, we had his signature clearing Jess to dive and the doctor got on his ferry. Hopefully our next entry will include something to do with actually scuba diving. Now, we just need to take a nap.
Tags: Antigua, Bay Islands, Copan, Copan Ruinas, Travel, Utila
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