Central America #5

I never completed the Central America blog, so I'll write up a summery of what it took to return to California on schedule.

Nico and I partied hardy a little too late the night before our departure back to the mainland and we missed the 6:40am ferry that we needed to catch to get to the airport on time. Obviously, this was a problem.

After an hour of asking around, we found a travel center that had a charter plane service to La Ceiba, the port town we were being ferried to, and where we needed to catch our bus back to Copan. This cost me $150, but turned out to be one of the coolest experiences we had. Not only did we get to fly over Utila and see the Caribbean from the air, but the pilot let me fly the plane most of the way there! Pictures are available on facebook.

Once we got to La Ceiba, we missed the bus by 15 minutes and had to wait 4 hours in the terminal for the next one. This was awful, and marked the beginning of the worst part of the trip.

After the 12ish hour bus ride back to Copan, we caught a scooter-turned-cart/taxi to a hotel where we slept for about 6 hours, then got up to catch a van across the boarder to Guatemala. What followed, was about 16 hours of transferring between vans, traveling between the small towns that pepper the otherwise breathtakingly lush, green, mountainous terrain that is most of Guatemala. One van started with about 10 people (full), then began picking up passengers on their way. Every time they stopped, I was frozen in awe as they found a way to fit the new passengers into the cramped vehicle. This van was made for 11, but by the time we offloaded, it had exactly 28 adults, 3 children, and 2 babies on board, totaling 33 people.

33 people in a van made for 11, they were literally hanging out the windows and open sliding door to make room. It was nuts.

Anyway, after our 36-hour mad dash across 2 countries, and a 7(?) hour flight back to LAX, I was so happy to see the US again, I could have cried. Everything was huge, metal, and labeled with ridiculously large signs. Plus, I could finally pull out my iPod proudly without worrying about the unwanted attention from strangers that ipods got from folks in Central America. Compact Disk players are still pretty tech out there.

We ate at an overpriced Mac Donalds at LAX that tasted better than fast food ever had before. Then, having missed our flight back to San Francisco, we asked the Virgin Airlines guys if we could get on the next flight out, possibly at a discount. The guy gave us both free tickets for the next flight out and in the process, won Virgin 2 customers for life, and completing our journey home to what seemed like the greatest place on earth.

Photos of the trip are available on my facebook page:
http://www.facebook.com/people/Fritz_Huie/547943243

Fritz