Greetings all,
The lake house near Alpeneca was very rustic, but lovely. It’s actually in a town called Laguna Verde, named after the green lake there. There were two houses – one a standard house with a kitchen and the other an igloo (though not made of ice – it was more like the house from “The Gnome”). I stayed in the igloo and had a little Gnome window looking out to my gnome garden. There were six of us in all there and we explored the town and lake together. The town was tiny and there was no grocery store, but a couple of makeshift shops with nothing but fruits and veggies, so we improvised for dinner and the Irish girls we were with made a very nice stew and fried potatoes.
The next day, I set out on my own for Suchitoto, which should have been just a few hours by bus, but I ended up having to circumvent a large part of the route because there were no buses that way, so it took me 8 hours on 1 collectivo and 5 buses. Once I got there I searched for ½ an hour for a hostel recommended by a few of the six people from the night before, called “Lago Vista (or “Lake View”) Hostel.” I finally found it after asking four different people, three of which really had no clue where it was (or maybe it was my Spanish). I finally found it and it wasn’t exactly what I’d been hoping for. It did indeed have a beautiful view of the lake, but the rooms were dark and dirty and shared a common ceiling so that the effect was that it was acoustically a dorm, though not so much visually (except for the shared light in the middle of the ceiling). The bathroom was down some stairs and across the yard. But it was only $7 for the room and it was sheer exhaustion that made the decision for me in the end and I decided to spend one night and find another place for the next.
The area of Suchitoto was one of the hardest hit by the civil war in El Salvador, so there is a lot of history there. I ended up taking a 3 hr. horseback ride in the peaks of Guazapa volcano. My guide didn’t feel like riding, so he was on foot . . . and my horse had a hard time keeping up with him. It was a fun and beautiful journey and the time flew by very quickly. He took me up into the hills of Guazapa and showed me the hospital and school used by the locals during the war. It was all very interesting and also all in Spanish, so it was very good practice, but limited the amount I could learn and the questions I could ask.
Before leaving for the ride, I had moved to a new and very comfortable hotel, so that’s where I returned after the ride. In the morning I started making my way toward Honduras with a stop in La Palma for one night. La Palma is close to the border and is a very artsy mountain town. You can climb the highest peak in El Salvador near there, but it requires taking the public bus up most of the way (and relying on it to come for you when you’re done) and, for me, it would have meant going alone as I hadn’t seen other travelers since I left Alpeneca. So I decided to forgo the climb and caught up on my journal instead.
The next day I was off to Honduras, to a mountain town called Gracias. I met a Canadian couple on the bus and we looked for a hotel together. They decided on the first one we found, but the room would have been $17 for me, so I decided to look for cheaper diggs and found a decent one for $5. Then the 3 of us went to book a hike for the next day. The hike was 8 hours and 5 of those were up, with 4 of those being straight up. It was a bit challenging, but just what I needed. As we hiked, the forest changed from Pine forest to a sort of temperate rainforest. It was strange, but very cool. When we got back to our guide’s house, we were thoroughly exhausted and ready to go home for a shower. But our truck wasn’t there to pick us up, so our guide ended up calling a tuk tuk. We made it almost 15 min. into the 20 min. ride without the engine turned on. And the tuk tuk driver took a phone call while maneuvering down the rocky dirt road. Only while traveling in developing countries . . .
When we got back to town, I rushed to my hotel to shower before it got dark (and therefore cold) because I only had cold water in my shower. However, it turns out I was wrong. I in fact had no water at all. So I got dressed again and ran to the front desk to find out what was going on. The woman there could only respond “mas tarde” ( “much later”). I tried my best to explain in Spanish that I needed a shower ASAP because I was filthy and rapidly getting cold as was the air and the cold water at this particular hotel was not room temp., it was ice temp. She didn’t seem to have any sympathy for me whatsoever and simply shrugged her shoulders. I really wanted a shower so I had to improvise. There was a pitcher full of “drinking water” in my room and the back of the toilet (the clean part) was still full. So I had enough for a bucket shower. However, as I was preparing for said shower, I placed the pitcher in a funny position and it fell, spilling water all over the floor. But on my way back and forth to my room, I remembered there was a sort of sink/tub that was always full of clean water. So I filled the pitcher up there and returned for a full, albeit a bit cold, bucket shower. The important thing is that I emerged from that “shower” clean, refreshed, and before dark. Afterward, I met up with the couple again for dinner and some celebratory drinks (for the hike, not the shower).
The next day, we headed in our separate ways, they to El Salvador and I to Copan Ruinas, where there are some Mayan ruins I wanted to see. We took the same bus west and then they headed south while I went north, but not before I helped them find the right bus and time and how to pay for it. Yes, my Spanish has actually become good enough that other tourists want my help.
Copan is another charming little town and I found my room there quite comfortable for $8/night. I tried to get on a tour as they do several tubing, hiking, horseback riding, coffee plantation, etc. tours, but no one else had booked anything and I didn’t want to go alone. Anyway, I was still getting over a clingy cold. So I decided to watch a movie on the rooftop of a hotel which proved to be a poor decision as it was freezing cold up there. So the next day I slept in and then walked to the Mayan ruins and explored them on my own. They were very interesting, more impressive than Quirigua, but not quite as impressive as Tikal. I decided not to pay an extra $25 for a Spanish-speaking guide and simply read the few signs posted. I learned that Copan is home to one of the longest Mayan passages, engraved in the “Hieroglyphic Staircase” and that they uncovered what they originally thought was a graveyard. But after learning more about the Mayans, they came to the conclusion that it was the neighborhood of nobles and that they bury their dead next to their homes.
That evening, there were still no tours scheduled for the next day, so I decided to hop on a bus and head for Utila the next morning, an island just offshore famous for cheap, but good diving. A Brazilian guy I met in Copan was on the same bus and we made our way to the island together, picking up an Argentinean guy along the way. We got to Utila a little after 5P and spent over two hours talking to different dive shops to figure out who we wanted to dive/stay with (each dive shop comes with a hotel package). In the end, they decided to dive with Captain Morgan’s Dive shop. Their hotel is actually on a smaller island, called Jewel Cay and is a 20 min. boat ride from Utila proper. I was taking a couple days off diving to recover from a cold, so I had a few days to make a decision. The next day they were off to dive with Captain Morgan’s and move to Jewel Cay for the night. I had a couple of friends in Utila, so I decided to stay and continue the search. In the end I settled on Captain Morgan’s as a dive shop, but decided to stay on Jewel Cay one night and then at an independent hotel on Utila proper for the rest of the time. I got a nice, breezy, light private room on the water with 2 large beds, a fridge, and hot water for $18/night (which is actually expensive by Utila standards).
I spent the next two days diving in the mornings and spending my afternoons on Jewel Cay while waiting for the boat to return to Utila. Then I took a day off so I could stay out late to see off one of my friends that I’d originally met in El Salvador and reconnected with in Utila. It was the first night I really got the opportunity to dance. I was having such a great time dancing that I forgot to zip up my purse and lost everything except my wallet. The only truly tragic loss though was my mosquito repellent. I had bought it in Thailand and it smelled great, felt good on my skin, and worked brilliantly.
After a night of partying, I spent a lazy day watching movies and running errands. Then over the next couple of days I went on 6 more dives, for a total of 10. After I completed my dives I took a day to hike around the island with a friend I’d met 6 years prior in Australia. We just happened to be in Central America at the same time and were able to meet up with very little effort. We were trying to find the path up Pumpkin Hill, but weren’t having much luck, so we ended up scaling it on a path that was very steep (there were ropes to help pull yourself up) and looked like it hadn’t been used in 10 years. Afterward, we searched for the freshwater caves and eventually found them. The whole venture took us 5 hours and it poured buckets for more than half that time. We were soaked. So we went off for naps to recuperate for the St. Paddy’s Day celebrations that night. We did a bit of barhopping that night which included a bar that was holding the “Beer Olympics.” It was a competition of teams of 6 in activities such as a mini-triathlon, mud wrestling and beer pong. It was entertaining, but not as much as I’d hoped.
The next day was another lazy day. The only thing I attempted to do was see the local doctor about my ear injury from nearly a year ago now in Sipidan, Borneo. I was diving with a cold and had trouble clearing my ears. But three dives cost me $220 and there was a wait list (so you had to book it several days ahead of time) because it’s a tightly controlled marine park, so I overdid it and tried too hard to equalize, apparently blowing too hard. I immediately got vertigo – not a fun thing underwater – and discovered upon surfacing that I was nearly deaf in one ear and it was ringing. It took me a few hours to regain my balance and I ended up having to snorkel for the other two dives. I saw 2 docs in SE Asia and neither could tell me anything. By the time I got to the Philippines, I’d recovered most of my hearing except for some, but my ear was still ringing constantly. So I decided to see if diving again would make any difference. It didn’t make it any better, but it didn’t make it any worse. So I saw a doc in the US for $370 when I got home and all they could tell me was that I had minor hearing loss and they wanted to run a lot of very expensive tests that may or may not be covered by my DAN (diving) insurance. It took my insurance company 6 months to pay me back. By that time, there wasn’t really any point in continuing the testing. But I’d heard good things about Dr. John in Utila. He specializes in diving injuries and is very knowledgeable, if not a little crazy. Unfortunately, I got to his office too late that day and they couldn’t fit me in. I had been planning on leaving the next day for Roatan, so decided to try and see him the next day in the morning and catch the 2P ferry back to the mainland where I could catch another ferry to Roatan.
I arrived at the doc’s office at 10A and was the first patient in line (they open at 10:30). I was told I’d be seen first when the doc arrived at 11:30, but 3 other people (apparently emergencies) were seen before me and I finally got put in a room at 1:40P. It was a very rushed visit in which I paid $20 for the doc to tell me what I pretty much already knew from searches on the internet. I’d probably sustained inner ear barotrauma. But he told me something I wasn’t sure of from my research – the hearing loss would never resolve and my ear will never stop ringing. Kind of a bummer. But at least I can still dive.
Anyway, I barely made my ferry, but arrived in Roatan late last night and was able to get in on two dives today. We saw a turtle and a spotted eagle ray. Roatan is also much nicer than Utila. It reminds me of some of the nicer beaches in SE Asia that I’ve missed. But I have 3 weeks left as of yesterday, so I’ll leave here the day after tomorrow for Nicaragua.
Much love to you all and I hope you’re doing well.
Here’s the link to the photos:
El Salvador:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2920484&id=8369089&l=bf948f0012
Honduras:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2927416&id=8369089&l=2c94511353
