Enough early starts for a life time

One of the best things about travelling the ´gringo trail´ is bumping into the same people time and time again. I´ve seen people I´ve met before at bus stops, dorm rooms, gas stations and today I saw three Australian guys who I met in my hostel on my first night and a girl who I met in the customs line at Cancun airport! It´s actually rather nice seeing old friends again, I just hope they don´t notice that I´ve been wearing virtually the same clothes for 3 days (obviously not acceptable in civilian life!).

Antigua was a great city and probably my favourite place so far. It is a beautiful colonial town rich in character and charm. I can´t remember the last time that I wanted to go into every shop, cafe and restaurant I walked past (and that includes Reading). 

One of the ´must dos´in Antigua is to hike up a volcano. So, satisfying the A-level geography student in me, I went for it. Ok, it was actually a reasonably easy climb - chosen for that reason - but after a pretty craaazy night in an Irish bar in Antigua (there´s one in every city) and a get-up time of 4:30am, I was not feeling on particulary good form. So, after giving up about three-quarters of the way, I left everyone else to go to the top so I could bask in the stunning view. After deciding to ´just rest my eyes´, before I knew it was being woken up by a group of Japanese tourists. That, for sure, tops my Most Random Places I´ve Slept list!

Sad to leave Antigua and some awesome people I travelled with, I made my way to Honduras with the aim of getting the The Bay Islands (North of the country in the Caribbean). Being so far north, getting to the islands invloves a lot of travelling and a few quite random stopovers. The first was in Copan, a small town just near the Guatemalan-Honduras boarder which has some pretty ruins. Meeting an Irish girl, a Swedish girl and three dutch guys, we decided on a quiet night with a movie showing at one of the hostels, it was much needed! (We watched Buried. If you haven´t seen it, it has the most un-American ending...and for the first time I wished a film did have an American ending!!) 

The next day I begun my journey to The Bay Islands. And what a journey! I have now learnt that whatever duration a bus company in this part of the world quotes, you in fact need to times it by a third to get the actual duration. Starting at 6am in Copan, I spent 8 hours on two busses followed by 1.5 hours on a boat (colourfully referred to as the vomit comet, not a nice journey) and then half an hour on a taxi to finally arrive on the island of Roatan. Luckily I saw some Aussies I met previously so was able to wile away the time with aimless banter. Roatan is famed for its excellent diving, but unfortunatley when I arrived the weather was not great - they had a hurricane a few days before - and with no sun to work the tan, I gave up and decided to head for the colonial city of Granada, Nicaragua. Although I would LOVE to learn to dive, it´s just a tad too far out of the ol´ budget...

All in all the past week or so has been a blur of very early morning bus journeys (4am departure, whaaaat?!), endless rip-off taxi rides, stomach-churning ferry rides and about 8 different towns and cities. No wonder I got in last night and crashed for 12 hours! ...Not a lot being done today that´s for sure!