The Inter-American Highway

It is just five of us, but we are all crammed into one hotel room, a little bit scared because we are the middle of Tegucigalpa and our guide book tells us it’s a dangerous city and people on the street have echoed that sentiment.  We ate at the hotel cafeteria because we didn’t want to test our luck in the dangerous streets of the Honduran capital.  I sit here typing now for there is little else to do.

There are five of us because one member of our group, Alex, is heading back home before heading to Israel and Angela was feeling very sick this morning so she stayed behind with Travis to visit a doctor.  Her ears have been bothering her after our week of scuba diving in Utila.  Hopefully it was nothing serious.

The eight of us pose with five of our dive instructors.  Scuba Steve is front and center flashing his patented hang loose symbol, Maya our Danish spitfire of a lead instructor is behind Steve, Aurelian, the debonaire Frenchman is to the far left, hailing from Guatemala, Adriana, is to the far right and Wes the Coloradan is lurking barely visible in the back.

Angela’s sickness was the only damper on a stellar week that concluded in us receiving our PADI open water certification and doing our first recreational dives in which we went to a sailboat wreck that was carpeted in coral.  We saw a variety of marine life including a green sea turtle, trumpet fish, and schools of blue fish (I'm not being vague, this is what they are actually called).  The impressive thing is that the Utila area has been severely overfished and we saw only a hollow shell of what a thriving coral reef ecosystem would look like.  It was hard to leave Utila and they were trying to sell us on the Advanced Open Water course to expand upon our first scuba course, but we realized we best move on to a new locale, which is why we are now in Tegucigalpa.

The view of the Nicaraguan countryside from my bus window.

Another bus ride and a taxi ride later and I am in Granada, Nicaragua in a Internet café across from our hostel, the Kalala Lodge.  The eight ride was smooth and without a hitch except when we blew out a tire and had to stop for at least 30 minutes while they put a spare on.

The Tica Bus employees assess the blown tire situation out in the scalding afternoon sun.

We arrived in Managua around 6 p.m. on the Tica Bus from Tegucigalpa and we found a taxi cab driver named Eddy who would pack all our stuff in his cab, squeeze all five of us inside, stop at an ATM and for food and then drive us all the way to Granada, a one hour ride.  We paid 200 Cordobas each (about ten dollars).  The place we chose to stop for food was Quiznos.  We couldn't help ourselves after seeing this little piece of home transplanted in Managua.  The Chicken Carbonara I ordered tasted heavenly since I hadn't had one in at least five months.  He led us to a hostel since Angela had our only guidebook for Nicaragua and we had no idea where to go.

We have heard from Angela and Travis and they are also in Granada and we should be able to reunite tomorrow.  We don’t really know what we are going to do with the rest of the time.  I suppose the beach is calling us, but we are content simply to have relocated farther south and neared our final destination of San Jose.