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Two Weeks in Central America: Bananas and currencies on our first border crossing into Honduras

11 March, 2014 By Anna S E Lundberg 1 Comment

Full disclosure: we didn’t really visit Honduras. We just sped right across from Guatemala into Nicaragua. But it’s the journey and not the destination, right?!

Having arrived in Puerto Barrios by boat from Lívingston, we wandered a few blocks up to the market, where we were again met with shouts of “Taxi? Shuttle?” After five days in Guatemala, we found a bank where we could exchange our quetzales for US dollars, and stocked up on snacks for the bus journey into Honduras.

Feeling prepared, we found a driver heading to the border and we climbed onto the collectivo with our huge backpacks – I find it quite embarrassing, but somehow they always find space.

Annie on the bus
All the major food groups: crisps, bananas, coconut bread (tasted like normal bread – much like the coconut latte had tasted like a normal latte), and a huge tank of water

It was a bumpy ride through the countryside, and each time we stopped we thought: is this where we get off? The Guatemalan customs and immigration offices were actually quite randomly located along the way but as usual if you follow everyone else you tend to end up where you’re supposed to! Then when we eventually arrived for our first experience of a border crossing in Central America, we were quite unceremoniously dumped by our by-now familiar little van.

One complication when spending just a few days in different countries, each with a different currency, is estimating the amount of cash you’ll need so you don’t (a) end up with loads of your old currency that you then need to exchange at a less than profitable rate or (b) find yourself without any cash at all with things still to be bought. We managed to pay the Honduran entrance fee with a combination of dollars and quetzals. (I’ve found a great blog post that details the process of this border crossing so if you’re interested in replicating this journey I suggest you refer to that rather than me repeating the logistics here!)

On trying to use the toilets at the border crossing – remember that huge tank of water? – we found them to be locked. A friendly young man tried (and failed) to open the door with a credit card and then kindly offered to take us to San Pedro Sula in his brother’s car. It was a tempting offer – it would be a couple of hours direct in a car while it would take at least double that time with the changes and stops we’d have to make by bus. Sadly, though, his Chiquita employee badge was not enough to appease my dark imagination, which was conjuring images of being found dead in a ditch the next day, and we politely declined. Banana man departed and we wandered across the border on foot.

Honduras border crossing at Corinto
Welcome to Honduras!

Once on the other side, it wasn’t too difficult to locate the one and only bus that was, luckily, headed to Puerto Cortés on the coast. Looking at a map, there’s really only that one road going from the border into the country. Sheltering from the sun as we waited for the bus to leave at some unspecified time in the future, we met an Australian man who was cycling solo from Alaska to Argentina (all the As), a two-year adventure. I’ve lost his card unfortunately and can’t find his blog but I suppose he will have finished some time last year…

Eventually the bus, our first chicken bus in fact, took off. There are no bus stops to be found, no benches or shelters – instead passengers are dropped off and picked up at various spots along the road, often in the middle of nowhere. It’s actually a very luxury service: door-to-door! On arriving in Puerto Cortés, therefore, we were a little worried about finding the bus to continue on to San Pedro Sula. We needn’t have worried, though: the moment we got off our first bus in the middle of the road, a collectivo across the road shouted at us, “San Pedro! Directo!” and herded us on board.

In the rush to get us onto the bus, the driver had chosen to ignore my question as to whether he took dollars, leading to trouble when he later asked for money once we were well on our way. The smallest bill we had was 20 USD, and we had no local currency. The bus was in hysterics around us, though I’m not sure if the other passengers were laughing at us (most likely) or at the poor bus driver who was at a complete loss as to what he should do. In fact he told the young guys sitting behind us that he would throw them off the bus if they didn’t shut up.

Thankfully an older man sitting next to Annie offered to give me change – 19 single dollar bills for my 20, not a bad deal for him really. I could then give the ticket man 5 dollars. And finally another man exchanged those five dollars for the ticket price in local lempira. Money laundering in action.

Now as I admitted at the beginning of this post, I’m afraid our experience of Honduras was very limited and I’m going to tag the rest of the bus and currency saga onto this post, leaving next week to cover the more interesting adventures of Nicaragua. It simply wasn’t possible to do four countries justice in two weeks – who would’ve guessed it?! – so Honduras had to be sacrificed. Not to mention El Salvador, which we didn’t even enter. We’ll simply have to plan another trip!

So we spent just one night in Honduras, wandering the streets of San Pedro Sula to find a working ATM, stocking up on more healthy essentials (bread, ham and cheese, chocolate chip cookies and chewy sweets – I seem to be incapable of eating healthily while travelling, and I’m still paying the price after my South American diet experience), and booking the last two adjacent seats on the Tica bus to take us to Granada the following day. We failed at finding the restaurant the hostel had recommended but plumped for Las Casas Viejos where we had stone-baked tortillas served by waitresses in traditional dress (a tourist trap? But the food was very good).

At 4am the next morning, when our taxi didn’t arrive, the man in the hostel reception explained that it just wasn’t worth their while to roll out of bed on a Sunday morning after a late night out. The taxi drivers, I mean. Eventually the hostel owner – a famous jazz musician, as it turns out – arrived to drive the two of us and another Italian girl to the terminal and so we made our bus. Somehow these things always work out…

Tica bus in Honduras
It was a full-day journey across the country and into Nicaragua. Our seats were at the back of the bus, right next to the chemical toilets. Lovely. But at least we had lots of sweets…

Filed Under: Central America, Guatemala, Honduras, Travel Tagged With: Central America, corinto, Guatemala, guatemala to honduras crossing, honduras, puerto barrios, puerto cortes, san pedro sula, tica bus, travel

Two Weeks in Central America: Buses, boats, and piña colada

4 March, 2014 By Anna S E Lundberg Leave a Comment

The Central American adventure continues…

True to form, having taken the night bus up to Tikal in northern Guatemala and gone directly to the ruins on arriving in Flores, my friend Annie and I booked onto a 5.30am shuttle pick-up to get back to Santa Elena, where we took a “second-class” bus to Rio Dulce. It was not uncomfortable but we had the by now familiar late departure with countless stops to drop people off, pick people up, and to get breakfast from various street corners along the way.

In Río Dulce (it sounds more tempting than it is), we had a traditional cheeseburger-and-fries lunch at the Río Brava restaurant and booked onto a 1.30pm lancha to take us downstream. It was very hot but there was a welcome breeze from the river.

Río Dulce, Guatemala
According to the Lonely Planet, the town sees a lot of visitors from US “yachties” since it’s a safe place for boats during hurricane season. The rest of us are there for the boat trip to Lívingston

A lancha, from the Portuguese word for “barge”, is a motorboat. The journey down the river took a little less than two hours with no stops, passing by what looked like luxury beach huts and thick jungle in between. It’s possible to take the journey in either direction, and travelling by boat is in fact the only means of transportation to and from Lívingston, which lacks road connections to the rest of the country.

Settling in for the journey
Annie settling in for a relaxing ride

Arriving in Lívingston, we were met with the usual “Hostel? Hostel? Taxi? Taxi?” but continued up past the docks where we checked into a triple room – we only paid for a double as long as we didn’t use the third empty bed – at the Río Tropicales. Yes, everything here starts with Río. We headed back down to the harbour where we had coconut coffee and settled down on the pier to enjoy the afternoon sun.

Livingston, Guatemala
You can’t beat the calm of sittin’ on the dock of the bay, wastin’ time…

Lívingston was quite different to the other areas of Guatemala we had visited – Guatemala City, Antigua, Atitlán, Flores. This is the hometown of the Garífuna people, descendants of the “Black Caribs” as the British called the Central and West Africans brought to the continent as slaves. Lívingston is also home to the Rastafarian minority within the Garífuna, which as you might imagine gives the town quite a special vibe.

Piña colada in Livingston, Guatemala
In the evening, after a cold drip of a shower, I had my first piña colada of the trip, just to add to that Caribbean feeling man

At this point, we had a bit of an itinerary crisis. As you may have noticed from the last few posts, we were travelling at quite a pace, spending just one night in each place before quickly moving on to the next destination. This was pretty tiring but it was a situation we had created for ourselves given our arrival at one end of Central America and our planned departure two weeks later from the other end.

To be honest, it’s not something I’d recommend. Having said that, if you’re in a full-time job with just a few weeks of vacation each year then you don’t have a lot of choice, assuming you want to do a good bit of travelling and not just lie on the beach.

In any case, we finally agreed to keep moving and hoped to be able to slow down a bit in our second week.

So the following day, we had our first leisurely morning (hurrah!), indulging in waffles for breakfast in the hostel, before heading back down to the docks. (I can’t say that without thinking of Monica. What’s the opposite of man? Jam!)

If you look at a map, you’ll see that Lívingston is actually very close to the southern border of Belize, and you can take a lancha across to Puerto Gorda or, in fact, to La Ceiba and then on to the Honduran Islas de la Bahía where the diving and snorkelling is meant to be amazing. We were headed in a different direction, and once 15 people had gathered to fill the boat, we took off on another course, across to Puerto Barrios.

From there, we would travel into our second country, Honduras.

A lancha in Livingston, Guatemala

Filed Under: Central America, Guatemala, Travel Tagged With: black carib, Central America, garifuna, Guatemala, islas de bahía, lancha, livingstong, puerto barrios, puerto gorda, rio dulce, travel

Two Weeks in Central America: Journeying to the Tikal ruins in northern Guatemala

25 February, 2014 By Anna S E Lundberg 2 Comments

Having started our journey in the south of Guatemala – Guatemala City to Antigua to Atitlán – my friend Annie and I had been umming and ahing about whether or not to head up north to Tikal.

These ruins, one of the largest sites of the pre-Columbian Mayan civilisation, had been described by our contacts as “unmissable”; but including a visit to Flores, the closest town, in our trip would mean a detour almost up to the Mexican border before heading back down again and across two or three more countries still to reach our flights out from San José, all in the space of ten days. Flights would be expensive, buses time consuming.

According to our trusty Lonely Planet guide:

“While bus travel at night in Guatemala is rarely a good idea for anybody, it is strongly advised that solo female travellers not catch buses at night time, the exceptions being the overnight buses travelling between Guatemala City and Flores. There have been no incident reports regarding those services.”

So we opted for this one night bus that was deemed safe, saving us the cost of one hostel night while getting us up north without “wasting” the day trapped on a bus.

From Panajachel on Lake Atitlán, we booked onto a mini-bus to take us (via Antigua for some reason) to Guatemala City, where we arrived in the dark almost five hours later. There we waited at the bus station for our “deluxe” night bus up to Flores, leaving a little after the scheduled departure of 9pm.

Now for our first experience of night buses (and the last, in fact, although a year later I was to repeat the experience a few times in South America), it could have been much worse. With my earplugs and eye mask, I actually got quite a bit of sleep.

Unfortunately the entertainment system was set to repeat the same old American film over, and over, and over – dubbed into Spanish, of course – so poor Annie eventually had to go and ask the driver to turn it off. And every time the bus stopped in the middle of nowhere I would wake up abruptly and imagine gunmen climbing on board. This is one of those times when having an active imagination is not such an advantage. Thankfully, the gunmen stayed in my imagination.

With my very limited Spanish at the time, though, it was quite an uncomfortable experience as we never knew what people were saying around us. At one point, we all had to get off and it turned out we were to show our passports, along with visiting the toilets if needed. Usually you get by if you just do what everyone else is doing…!

In any case, we survived the journey and arrived in Santa Elena around 6am, still pitch black all around us. Flores is actually on an island across from Santa Elena and apparently the bus would not take us all the way. After some hesitation, we had no choice but to get into one of the unmarked vans waiting there at the otherwise empty bus stop, and ask the driver to drop us off at Los Amigos hostel in Flores. Ah the adventure of travel. Alas, the reception didn’t open until 7am but we had a bit of luck when someone inside the gate saw us and let us in. We sneakily had a shower while waiting and eventually got a room when reception opened.

Super efficient as ever, we immediately booked onto an 8am bus to take us to the Tikal ruins. We didn’t get a guide but we had a decent map and spent a good four or five hours wandering around (at the end of which we were pretty hot and water-less). I’m so glad we decided on the detour, though, as these ruins really were spectacular. They will have been my first pre-Columbian ruins, so that’s always going to be extra special.

Tikal Ruins, Guatemala
Climbing up to the top you get a fantastic view – the location of the Tikal ruins in the midst of the tropical rainforest really makes for an unusual experience
Tikal Ruins, Guatemala
The ruins would suddenly appear from behind the trees as we followed the trails through the national park
Monkeys at the Tikal Ruins, Guatemala
I’d watch out for those monkeys, if I were you…
Tikal Ruins, Guatemala
The Great Plaza was the heart of this important city, the capital of one of the most powerful kingdoms of the Maya for the period 200-900 AD. Best fact: one of its kings was known as Ah Cacau, Lord Chocolate. Less attractively, the Tikal army was the first in the region to use “air power”, conquering their enemies by surrounding them and throwing spears at them rather than by traditional hand-to-hand combat

We took a 2pm shuttle back to the hostel (a quick visit, in the end, but plenty of time to explore!) and had a lovely relaxed afternoon after another shower.

In the evening, we indulged in strawberry daiquiris and mojitos along with a huge burrito for dinner. We were joined by Calem the Welshman, Eugene the Australian, and Baptiste the Frenchmen, and spent the night playing Cheat and Bullshit. There was also Chris who was working in the hostel since two weeks and, providentially, looked like Dennis Quaid. Which I appreciated. (Ooo I suddenly noticed the resemblance between Benedict Cumberbatch and Dennis Quaid. Interesting.)

Really, this is the best part of travelling to me, what happens in the evening. You’ve had an amazing day seeing something you’ve never seen before, you’ve had a shower, and you’re now relaxing with a cocktail while chatting to random strangers you meet in the bar. It really doesn’t get much better than that…

Filed Under: Central America, Guatemala, Travel Tagged With: backpacking in central america, Central America, Guatemala, guatemala city to flores, night bus in central america, tikal, tikal ruins, travel

Two Weeks in Central America: Antigua and Atitlán

18 February, 2014 By Anna S E Lundberg 5 Comments

So I’m cheating a little here, because I’m not actually in Central America. I’ve found my notes from my trip two years ago (see? cheating!) and since I didn’t have a blog back then I thought I’d share my experiences now.

This trip was really a precursor to last year’s sabbatical in South America, though I didn’t know it at the time. It reminded me of how much I love this kind of travel (how could I have forgotten?!), reassured me that I’m not too old for backpacking (never!), and gave me a much-needed break from PowerPoint (ahhhh!).

The choice of Central America was mainly the result of trying to match affordable flights for my friend Annie, who was coming from London, and me coming from Geneva. That’s how we ended up with arrival in Guatemala, departure from Costa Rica. Having booked the flights, we were very relaxed and didn’t really plan anything, until suddenly, as the trip approached, I began to think that maybe we needed a rough idea of how we would get from Guatemala City to San José in two weeks. Yep, four countries (albeit small ones) in two weeks. So of course I consulted my Lonely Planet and realised that we would need to make some choices and move quite quickly if we were ever to make it home. I ended up with a table with five different options that could be mixed and matched to see as much as we could within the framework of certain deadlines. Doesn’t that sound like fun?

(It would be remiss of me not to mention at this point that I actually flew to Florida first, to run a half-marathon dressed as a pirate. But I’ll come back to that later.)

After meeting up at Guatemala City airport, we headed straight out to Antigua, a UNESCO Heritage Site located between three volcanoes about an hour away from the capital. Originally one of the colonial capitals of the Spanish Empire, it was abandoned after an earthquake in the late 18th century and became known as Antigua Guatemala.

So in Old Guatemala we spent our first night, the following morning enjoying a “traditional Guatemalan breakfast” consisting of omelette, black bean purée, avocado, fried plantain, cheese, and toast, and then a wander through the colonial streets.

Santa Catalina Arch, Antigua, Guatemala
The Santa Catalina Arch is arguably the most recognisable of Antigua’s landmarks
Iglesia y Convento de Nuestra Señora de la Merced
Another yellow façade: Iglesia y Convento de Nuestra Señora de la Merced, built in 1755 and surviving the big earthquake
Chicken buses in Antigua, Guatemala
Our first encounter with chicken buses, the retired school buses from the US that resemble battery farms for human passengers; though we didn’t have to get on one just yet…

From Antigua we took a bus out to Lago de Atitlán, the deepest lake in Central America. We had heard great things about this lake, promising to be a really beautiful location with a choice of small towns around its shores on a scale of all-night parties down to yoga and meditation.

You may indeed need meditation when you come straight from a Northern European corporate environment to be faced with the slow pace that seemed to be the norm here. Timetables were more like guidelines, really, and you have plenty of time to practise deep breathing exercises as your bus drives around town forever picking up more passengers than you could possibly imagine would fit into the vehicle, or you wait in a little lancha that you hope will eventually take you across the lake to your hostel.

I adapted quickly, though. And here, at Atitlán, I found peace.

For many months after I returned to Geneva, when things got to be too much, I would just close my eyes and journey back to Atitlán. Lying in my hammock, looking out over over the lake and the surrounding mountains.

And at night, the stars. Oh how I love the stars.

Casa del Mundo, Jaibalito, Guatemala
Rooms at the Casa del Mundo in Jaibalito were a little pricier than a standard hostel rate but the location, the views, and the hotel itself made it all worth it
#happy
#happy
Good night, Atitlán
Good night, Atitlán

Next week: the Tikal ruins in northern Guatemala.

Filed Under: Central America, Guatemala, Travel Tagged With: antigua, casa del mundo, Central America, Guatemala, guatemala city, lago de atitlan, lake atitlan, travel

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Anna Lundberg is a success coach and business strategist who helps experienced corporate professionals reimagine success outside of the 9 to 5.

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