Roatan and the Journey to Leon

August 17th - 21st

Hannah and I headed to La Ceiba via a very secure, air-conditioned, comfortable bus shortly after our catch-up chat in the airport's food court. The most memorable part of La Ceiba was our taxi driver who can best be related to the shaved ice character on "Hawaii 5-0"...he was kinda classic! The other highlight was opening the package from my parents that Hannah brought with her - even though I knew exactly what was in it (as I has sent then a request list of things I needed), getting a package from home will ALWAYS be exciting!



In the morning, we took a ferry to Roatan in the Bay Islands and headed to the West End of the island. The weather was warm, the waters calm, and the vibe is probably always very relaxed - the perfect welcome back for Hannah! Roatan in a nutshell (initial thoughts/knowledge when arriving) = gorgeous waters, actual SAND on the beaches that was not black, 2nd largest reef system after the Great Barrier in Australia, lots of money (mainly into the boats but it is also a huge scuba-diving town...and that is just a pricey hobby), expensive (even for an island), primary language is English, filled with many foreigners (especially Australians) who traveled here years ago and never left! That afternoon, we actually went out on a boat with one of those Australian-turned-Roatanites to the Green Lighthouse reef to snorkel and explore the underwater world. Being exposed to that world is literally like "Finding Nemo" - it is a place I have such little knowledge about, so the entire experience is intriguingly disorienting...your mind nearly stops its current train of thoughts and all of your other senses become heightened. The serenity of it was only interrupted by the massive waves that deposited large amounts of saltwater into our snorkels and the jellyfish scattered throughout the area. At one point, our guide, who alerted us to cool things, pointed to a fish we had seen many times prior to that moment...I only realized he was pointing to a jellyfish right in front of us as I slow-motion Matrixed my hand about 2 inches above it! Yikes! The cadence of our exploring went from "la-di-da, fishy fishy" to "la-di-holy crap, what is that?" Nonetheless, we had a blast exploring the reef...and neither of us got stung! Baleadas (fluffy flour tortillas with beans, sour cream, and avocado) for dinner and lying on the docks to watch the stars for an hour rounded out the evening! In university, star-gazing was a pretty frequent occurrence, but it had been quite some time since I last focused all attention to the skies...I'm thankful we did that because it was relaxingly therapeutic to say the least!



You know those scooter scenes from "Dumb and Dumber?" Yeaaaa....that was 100% what we looked like all day Friday! We rented a scooter after passing a test...aka having a credit card, a license, and driving literally 10 feet down and back without crashing. At the final exchange, the man with a Caribbean accent handed us two bowl helmets and said, "now, they are expecting some bad weather later on so just be careful!" Filled with the pure joy and excitement of riding a scooter, we quickly reassured him and headed out to the explore the island! Driving with someone else behind you is nerve-wracking, and thus, you travel along at 10kph, take turns at a near standstill, and when feeling crazy you take it up to 15kph on the straight-aways. We mapped out a few stops along the road...post office, grocery store, and a dolphin museum. To our disappointment, a woman duped us into paying a $1 admission fee to a museum we thought was all about dolphins, but in reality was a museum of Roatan's history. Sadly, the obvious artifact descriptions, and by artifacts I mean pieces of ceramic bowls and a comb, made the exit sign one of the highlights. When we walked back outside, three huge displays about dolphins greeted us...shoot, a whole dollar, gone! Dork commentary: dolphins are AMAZING animals (based on what I learned from those displays)!



Later on, we sought refuge in a delicious bakery while a torrential downpour passed - there are worse places to be stuck than one that provides hot chocolate and croissants! When the rain died down to a tolerable level, we went back out on the road, Hannah now at the handlebars of "The Great Dilbertraus." Turns out both positions, driver and passenger, on a scooter are nerve-wracking! Though Hannah is a wonderful scooter-er, she only has two speeds: stopped and really fast, and relatively speaking, she will try to avoid the former at all costs. Luckily, Hannah handled the painful, stinging falling rain to the eyeballs quite well! I'd say on any given day, on a scale of 0 to ridiculous spectacle, Hannah and I usually live around 2 (mostly because we aren't Latino and Hannah has blue eyes). However, for a mental picture: two white girls in helmets that sit far back enough on their heads to be yamakas, soaking wet, faces twitching/heads retracting like turtles who've just tasted lemon for the first time with every heavy raindrop that was a direct hit to the eye (about every 2 seconds), rocking forward to "help" the scooter get up the hill, being honked at and passed by nearly every car on the island, and all with huge grins on their faces (unless the direct rain hits to the eyeball occurred every second, which prompted the same face a 3-year old kid would make if a sibling stole their new toy...yep, that revenge face). When the rain got really bad or if we needed a restroom, we would stop off - for us, it was a brand new 4-star resort very far off the main road and a huge supermarket. Either way, we'd walk in with our helmets still on, grins on our faces, making squishy noises with our soaking-wet sandals, and leaving a small linear trail of water (or small pool if we stood somewhere for longer than a few seconds) wherever we walked. We got lots of laughs both on and off the road - if we were pulled over taking pictures, some would slow down to make sure we weren't broken down, others (like the public transport buses) would slow down simply to take in the ridiculousness of the situation. Toward the end of the day, after passing all major "towns," we realized our tank was on E...actually, a little below the red E box. Luckily, there was one last gas station near the West End...which closed 15 minutes before we got there. We ended the scootering a bit early to conserve the little gas we might still have to reach the station in the morning. The remainder of the night was spent eating baleadas, journaling, and reading in new, dry clothing.





The next two days were traveling logistical nightmares. However, I had the disctinct honor of sharing a matrimonial suite for 300 lempiras with the one and only Hannah Smith...for 3.75 hours. In hindsight, I should have carried her across the threshold, but instead I carried the groceries and my baby bag. Regardless, the shorter version...Travel Day #1: check out from hostel, ferries currently not running to mainland, mission fill Dilbertraus: fail x1, barely make it to town (here is an idea, make the tank bigger than 1.27 gallons?), mission return Dilbertraus: fail x1.25 hours, must be on 2pm ferry and at 1:20 still no scooter rental guy, hand payment and keys to a neighbor who is on the phone with the owner, haul butt to docks, ROCKY ferry ride, research 1 hour on how to get to Nicaragua, have taxi driver tell us our plan sucks, sudden and drastic change in plans to take night bus to San Pedro Sula ("Fast & Furious 2" in Spanish, still awful), arrive at Honeymoon Suite around 10:30pm. Travel Day #2: 3:45am wake up call, reach bus terminal at 4:15am, told all tickets to Nicaragua on the 5am bus were sold out, new game plan to go through Tegucigalpa, wait outside other bus company's office until realizing the only day there were not buses was our day, try our best to avoid the loud, rude, and demanding Israeli girls who somehow kept following us, try not to hit anyone when girls push us out of the way at the ticket window to get theirs first, Zen breath, get tickets on the 6am, befriend a Honduran woman who kept losing important things (phone, passport, etc), reach last stop in Tegucigalpa and "Amazing Race" it to the bus terminal to beat out the other girls (PS, we would rock that show), wait x4 hours, Zen breath when Israeli girls were in our seats, loooong ride, take all bags with us to be searched at the border, wait 1 hour for liason to return our passports. The highlight was meeting Marcus, the cutest and kindest red-headed Scottish boy we've ever met! Also, our hostel had no dorm beds available so we had to share a private room price (more expensive)...until the hostel owner was showing us our "private bathroom" and couldn't get the door open, so he turned and said, "I will charge you dorm prices." Haha.

We look forward to exploring Leon and everything Nicaragua has in store for us! Miss you all back home, stay safe in the crazy string of natural disasters that seems to be attacking the east coast!