Day 10: Traveling (Roatan to San Pedro Sula)

Caught a taxi from our dorm in West End to the port at 5:45AM (interesting ride at 5 something in the morning…try putting 6 people into a 4-person car…cozy) and waited for an hour to board the ferry.

It’s good to arrive early so you can get the good seats up top in the open air (no sick bag needed plus a beautiful ride!).

The view from our seats

When we got to port we picked up our bags and found our friends’ truck. The 5 of us piled closely into the truck and headed on toward San Pedro Sula.

David, Lin, and Saben in the back of the truck

The drive normally takes 3-4 hours but we stopped several times along the way for snacks, fruit stands, traffic jams, and a really cool Garifuna village right by the ocean. The Garifuna are an interesting subset of Honduran culture. They maintain there cultural identity and speak there own language (also called Garifuna). We met a few young girls walking home from school and they were nice enough to teach us a little Garifuna and sing the national anthem in their language as well. Not something you would ever see on any tour!

Lake and Garifuna Village

Saben crawled out the tiny back window and rode in the truck bed for most of the way, waving at passing kids, people on bicycles, and other people enjoying the warm sun from a truck bed (very common in Honduras). Every bicycle had at least two people on it but many had 3-4 people stacked on. Whole families—father, mother, and two kids riding down the road on a single mountain bike!

Despite the natural beauty of the country, there is so much disregard for it. People litter as a normal practice, trash cans are common but rarely emptied so the trash just piles up and blows away. Still, it was such an amazingly beautiful—and fun!–drive. We drove straight up and through the mountains, passing African palm fields, the endless Dole pineapple fields, and lots of banana trees. We had fun trading and sharing snacks, chatting about the past week we shared in Roatan and learning lots of things about Honduras and its culture. David taught me how to eat a lychee fruit—you just crack it with you mouth and pull the halves apart and then pop the fruit out of it’s little case into your mouth. Very tasty!

Lychee fruit peeking from its shell.

We got to meet the family of our friends who had so kindly prepared an amazing lunch for us.

Beef Empanadas with salad on top. Very Very Tasty

They helped us make plans for getting to Guatemala giving us info and tips calling up friends they knew who could give us even more information and help. Frank and a friend who knows the city inside out even went further out of their ways to drive us around to find a suitable, inexpensive place to stay for the night! We were inexpressibly grateful and felt a little silly just saying thank you—it certainly wasn’t enough to properly thank our friends and their family for everything they did for us! We are extremely grateful for their incredible hospitality and generosity!