Man, am I bushed

We have travelled half way across Central America in the last couple of days it seems. We left Copan two days ago. Yesterday we took one bus to a place called San Pedro Sula up near the Carribean coast of Honduras. It is the second largest city in Honduras. It has this strange bus station that is like a small airport. It has and arrivals area and a departures area with a huge food court and shops in between. Each of the bus companies has their own departure lounge. You have to figure out who goes where you want and find their lounge on the departure level. Apparently this bus station is several km out of town....weird...

We had breakfast in the super bus station. I had woken when the power failed and my CPAP machine stopped working at about 2.25 am. I never really got back to sleep and gave up totally by about 5ish. Charles was awake by then and we had no water for a shower (or even to flush the toilet...gross) so we just took off from Copan on 6 am bus. Of course nothing was open at that time but we were in San Pedro Sula by about 9.30. Our next bus was supposed to leave around 11, which morphed into 11.45 of course. We got a couple of km down the road when the bus broke. Everybody off and waiting by the side of the road....they had a new bus pretty quickly, probably because we hadn t gone very far. Unfortunately the new bus had about 10 seats less than our old (formerly full) bus....with what was supposed to be a 4 hour trip ahead. Charles had befriended a 15 year old boy who saved him a seat, but I didn t get one. After about 1/2 hour, the man from the boys party, whose relationship we never determined, gave me his seat. He shared with the woman in their party off and on for the rest of the trip. She was the older sister of Charles new friend and had a toddler. I played with him quite a lot. He was fascinated by the reflection of the sun off my watch face onto the seat in front of us. I could move it around and he was like a cat with a laser pointer. After the sun had moved, I remembered I had a turtle light from MEC so I gave it too him. Kids love flashing lights and buttons to push so he was amused for ages with that. Needless to say the four hour trip took more that 5 and we arrived in Tegucigalpa just after dark. Charles thinks I am silly when I believe the guidebook about unsafe areas but I made him take a taxi to the area the book suggested was safer to stay. The hotel was full so we had to walk about a mile to the next one in the book. We stopped at one in between but I refused to stay because it had the filthiest carpet I have ever seen.

This morning we got up and headed across the border into Nicaragua. We are now in Matagalpa, which is near where my friend Ruth picked coffee just after the war here. It took us a taxi and 5 buses for a total of 11 hours to get here. I am staying two nights. I won t get on a long bus for anything tomorrow. There is a coffee plantation with lots of nature trails a few km from here and I am hoping to go explore tomorrow.