Roatan, while admittedly touristy, is fabulous. Our stay on the West End, despite a few days of rain was pretty much perfect. To offset the inflated costs that came with staying on an island for a week and a half, we opted to make extra good use of the rental’s kitchenette, and the local produce trucks and mini-mart. We had our daily menu of fresh fruit and eggs for breakfast, Cup O’Noodle or ramen for lunch, and pasta or quesadillas for dinner. Not bad, actually…we were feeling pretty resourceful.
From Roatan, we took the ferry back to the mainland of Honduras, and stayed overnight in La Ceiba with a friend of a friend. Then back on a bus the next day to the city of Tela, which has turned out to be a pleasant surprise. It wasn’t ever on our initial itinerary (as are many of the places we are going or have already been), but we found an airy, clean, well decorated hostel purely by chance, and it has worked out.
When we initially arrived a bit after sundown, the first man we asked, an older armed guard, pointed us to a Chinese restaurant across the street. After trying to politely decline his help and explain that was not what we were looking for, we found this hostel half a block later.
We took a trip out to the Lantecilla Botanical Garden (the second largest tropical garden in the world) and then spent the rest of the day at the beach, just a couple of blocks from our hostel. So far, in my opinion, the best beach yet. Clear, warm water, no large crowds, and soft smooth sand, free of those nasty sand flies! Perfect.
Dinner was, embarrassingly enough, at the same Chinese restaurant that we had been directed towards last night, due to my growing craving of Asian cuisine, which we haven’t had in nearly two months. Chinese food in Honduras is a little different from Chinese food in San Francisco. The two dishes we ordered, in Spanish no less, were chicken chop suey and fried rice (hey, options were pretty limited). They were preceded with a basket of white bread and butter, and the dishes themselves were enough to feed a party of 10. Despite the size, both dishes were mediocre and did not curb my craving. Tomorrow, it’s back on the road. We are headed to Puerto Cortez, where we hope to catch a ferry to Belize.
