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Blah blah, soggy camera, worked for a bit. Then it started getting lazy. Now screwed and winging its way back to England for a bit of TLC. Having trouble connecting my disposables to the computer while I wait for a new one to be posted out to me here.

Look, no photos!

Graham Perkins
2006-08-21 13:15:45

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Muslims at the moment cos they're such a small country and most of them I've met over here. Some four weeks later and I've learned so much... badly pronounced tongue-twisters, swearwords, nursery rhymes... My life is so rich now. Seriously though, I was quite surprised that they can be such a sociable and outgoing little people. Well, until they get into groups of more than, err, one that is! (HEJ! Det var kun min spøg...)

Entering Honduras it quickly became clear that the people seemed a lot more cheerful than their Guatemalan counterparts, and the place felt refreshingly new to me after all the time I'd spent in Guatemala. We spent a couple of nights going out in Tela on the mainland before getting to the port on Honduras' north coast to get out and learn how to scuba dive.

The islands we were making our way towards are about 35 miles off out to sea and are reputed to offer some of the world's best diving sites. Las Islas de la Bahía - The Bay Islands - comprise three main islands, which (after being cleared by the Spanish, to use the inhabitants as slaves) were inhabited by Garífuna slaves forcibly settled there - and left for dead - by the British following an uprising on the Caribbean island of St Vincent.

We actually arrived in the evening of New Year's Eve and checked into the cheapest hostel on the island. Valerie herself was from Chicago but Another long Danish lesson. Well, you never know when it might come in handy.Toke - a piss-funny Dane - remained convinced she was from England really given her quite indescribable roughness (well, I say indescribable, but if I was in a corner, the words alcohic, smelly and outrageously lazy could begin to convey the point)

Anyway, this ol' girl was a stinker, and I she'd worked 'hard' modelling the joint on herself. If I didn't catch malaria or worse there then I must be pretty tough. A few blatantly-inside-job robbery scare stories later and we were all ready for a hasty departure...

New Year's itself was spent largely roaming the town of West End's strip and seeing how drunk we could get in about twelve hours - after all the day only comes around once a year...

Once that was all taken care of we set about booking the diving course. Another Danish connection led us to Tyll's dive school though our actual teacher, sorry I mean Divemaster, was Austrian. (Nice guy but if you hail from the birthplace of the Third Reich's ideology and your surname's Hirzer, you've gotta ask your parents what they were playing at calling you Adolf...)

The course lasted four days and included two enclosed-water dives (at the beach), four open-water dives and about a million videos. The penultimate day was pretty heavy-going and by the end of it I was all getting a bit sick of coral and fish but the beauty of the last day's 60ft dive astonished us all. Before leaving Roatán, I went over to the small town of Punta Gorda for a local's birthday party. Afterwards I got back on the boat to the mainland to make my way towards Nicaragua.

Ended up spending three dull nights in Tegucigalpa (the world's shittest capital city?) while the girls tried to monkey about with their return flights at the only Air France office this side of Costa Rica. Unbelievably little to report here - watched a couple of films, marvelled at an entire city closing down by 10pm on a Saturday night, failed quite to make it to nearby national park etc etc. But soon enough things were as sorted as they were ever going to be with the girls' flights and we got going to Nicaragua, which I'd only heard good things about from everyone who'd been there.