Semana Santa (week of the saints - or easter) in Central America is a big affair and involves basically the whole continent congregating anywhere coastal with their extended families. It really wasn't that bad in Utila, just took a little bit longer to do everything from walk down the street to eat dinner – well the ferry was a different matter. The dive shop wasn't really affected as the accommodation is open only for divers and not many Hondurans dive. We decided to leave Utila on Good Friday - but turned out that the ferry to the mainland wasn't running. No biggie, we could leave the next day and still be in Costa Rica by Sunday night...or so we thought.... We tried to buy a ticket for the 6am Sat ferry the afternoon before - turns out it was sold out and we were told to come back at 7am the next morning to see if a 9am ferry was running, dependent on demand. We rock up at 7am Saturday morning to a massive queue, it ended up taking us over an hour to buy tickets, and we missed saying goodbye to few a people who had gone out on the morning dive boat. It was a little rough on the ferry, took us two hours instead of the customary hour – as soon as we started moving Steph bolted outside and stayed out with a worried look on her face the whole time, while I sat comfortably watching a movie…
The ferry arrived at La Ceiba and we grabbed a cab straight to the bus station to try and get to the capital of Honduras, Tegucigalpa (pronounced te-goo-si-gal-pa, we stuck with Tegus), by mid afternoon. We then were supposed to have the choice to catch one of two buses the next day that head straight to Costa Rica. Surprise, surprise the bus to the capital was full…we ran into a group of Europeans who had also missed tickets and were heading straight to the luxury bus company across town…we decided to do the same so jumped into another taxi to the other bus station. We were travelling with another Aussie who was also trying to get to the capital. We got to the bus station and there was only a single ticket left to the capital – so Pete (Aussie) bought that one. Turned out the Europeans got 4 of the last 5 tickets. I hadn’t mentioned that we were going to go straight to the luxury bus from the ferry, but Pete persuaded us to try the other bus first. ggrrr. We had to settle for a bus that arrived at a dodgy, dodgy city called San Pedro Sula. It is the economic capital of Honduras and also houses the main airport, but also is on par with any of the most dangerous places in Central America. We had arrived at the luxury bus station in La Ceiba around midday and had to wait around for the bus to leave for San Pedro Sula at 7pm…fun, fun, fun. We eventually got on and arrived in San Pedro at a little after 10pm, this city is dodgy as, travellers are advised not to walk anywhere after dark. We got in to a cab, locked the doors and hoped for the best. We chose to stay at slightly better accommodation this time – a hotel – with air con and hot water! Luxury!!! We had a quick shower and tried to investigate our options for the morning - at this point we were not liking our chances of getting on a bus….got to bed just before midnight…beep beep beep the alarm goes off at 3:30am (it’s Sunday now) to get checked out and be at the bus station by 4am to try and buy a ticket to Costa Rica on a bus that would stop overnight in Nicaragua, and get us to the capital of Costa Rica by 5pm Monday….. We got the cab to the bus station and you guessed it – sold out!! The next available bus was not until Wednesday – so we said screw it (actually a lot stronger language than that) and asked the cabbie (who had waited for us) to take us to the airport so we could try and get on a flight…..
$900 later we are on the plane to Costa Rica – we thought it was worth it as we would of only had 2 days in Costa Rica had we waited for that next bus. We were due to fly to Ecuador on Saturday and onto Galapagos Sunday . That and the fact we didn’t have to spend two days on a bus without a toilet…. A couple hours later we were in Costa Rica
