Honduras: No Free Rides in Paradise

Laurie Weed's Portfolio Travel Writing Central America Index

January 2006

I’m typing from Granada, Nicaragua, where I’m taking a few Spanish lessons, plotting a course to Costa Rica, and enduring a blazing heat wave by playing intestinal roulette with the addictive coconut popsicles. December’s whirlwind tour of Honduras included a second (failed) attempt at scuba diving (that darn swimming thing again); Christmas in colonial Copan Ruinas; a road trip along part of the gorgeous “Ruta Lenca” (Lenca Trail); and discovering that many of the capital city’s so-called hostels listed in Lonely Planet’s Central America on a Shoestring are actually “hourly” hotels. However, the most memorable travel days for me are often the first ones I spend in a new country, when all expectations are blown to shreds and misadventures are most likely to occur. Arriving in Honduras was no exception.

The day began rather inauspiciously when the 7 a.m. boat from Livingston, Guatemala almost left without me. Since it never occurred to me that the boat would depart 25 minutes early just because all the tickets had been sold, I bought my ticket and walked up the street for a caffeine fix. The boat filled up immediately afterward and the driver threatened to abandon me if I didn’t reappear within 30 seconds. My bags were already on the boat with Colin and I had nothing with me other than a pocketful of spare quetzales. Luckily, my ever-helpful travel buddy was there to save the day, convincing the surly crowd to wait for me by announcing to all that I’d made a desperate dash to the bathroom – a terrible case of diarrhea, you see. I came back well before the scheduled departure time to find the motor running, the boat captain scowling, and several passengers giving me long, knowing looks.

On the brief lancha ride across the bay, we met Javier, an unusually tall, twenty-something dive instructor from Mexico City who was also headed to the Bay Islands. Javier had driven down from Mexico and would reunite with his beloved truck in Puerto Barrios. He was easily persuaded to accommodate two hitchhikers—happy to have some company, he said—and graciously accepted our offer to help out with gas. The bus route Colin and I had planned to take was reputed to be one of the worst yet, involving at least three transfers, the usual border hassle, and a high likelihood of missing the last ferry to the islands, thus requiring an overnight stay in the blaring, extended strip-mall of La Ceiba. And after weeks of rollicking through Guatemala on decrepit chicken buses or being packed into smoking, grinding minivans like pigs to the slaughter, we were elated to upgrade to air-conditioned luxury in Javier’s brand new, double-cab Toyota. We all zoomed off in high spirits, after deciding not to bother stopping for food. After all, we’d be over the border soon and awaiting our ferry to Utila in a couple of hours.

At the border, which was little more than a fly-infested truck stop, Colin and I managed to get our entry stamps without incident—if one discounts Colin’s stepping in a substance so putrid that he had to wash his left shoe in a mud puddle and throw his sock away. We waited by the side of the dirt road for Javier, who returned from the immigration shack almost an hour later looking chagrined. The spanking new truck with foreign plates had caught the head border official’s attention.

“It cost me more than 50 dollars U.S. to get into this damn country,” Javier complained. “The taxes are $25 and I get a receipt for that, but the rest of it is off the record. They actually thought I was a gringo! I nagged the guy for so long that he finally admitted it’s a bribe, but I still have to pay it and on top of THAT, I get to drive his coolie home to the village to pick up the paperwork because they don’t have any customs certificates here for cars. I mean, why keep those at the border control office?”

Javier fumed a bit more, but there is no one to appeal to when the boss is shaking you down. Still, he kept his sense of humor about the whole thing. En route to Costa Rica to teach diving at some of the world’s most beautiful beach resorts, he’d make the money back soon enough, and as he freely divulged (or boasted), he “would have just spent it on women and beer anyway.” I squeezed into the front passenger seat with Colin so the immigration lackey could ride in the back, and we set off into a light rain. The village was a 15-minute detour from the border, and it took another 15 minutes for the guy to find the necessary forms (or to have his lunch—it’s unclear why he was looking for the forms in a local comedor). Then we had to drive him back to the office, of course.

Nearly two hours after actually crossing the frontier, we were at last on our way into Honduras along the semi-paved coastal highway. Our collective spirits rose again, but not for long. Not thirty minutes later, we approached a crude blockade where an especially shifty-looking policeman waved us over. Colin and I exchanged a worried glance, but Javier stayed cool.

“They’ve got nothing on me this time,” he assured us, “I already paid and I have everything I need: tax certificates, customs receipt, immigration, registration…we’ll be out of here in five minutes.”

Not wishing to aggravate the situation, Colin and I kept our gringo faces inside the truck and watched with helpless, growing dismay as Javier, towering over the officious little officer by more than a foot, morphed from confident to apologetic to beseeching. He returned wearing a dark expression and began rifling through all the compartments and cup holders in the front cab.

“I can’t find my license,” he stated calmly, “I think that $)&!@*% at the border might’ve kept it.”

So they had something on him after all. Outside, the grinning cop gave a none-too-subtle high sign to his partner down the road. After a frantic, fruitless search, Javier went back for another pleading conversation with the Central American version of The Law. He reappeared, sans confidence, passport, and registration, and reported that we would have to loop back to the border yet again, retrieve the license, and bring it back here. Of course, there would be another “fine” to pay before he could collect his documents—the amount as yet undisclosed. Jamming the truck into gear and spinning it around in the gravel, our once happy-go-lucky travel companion deadpanned, “I am no longer in a good mood.”

Having traversed the same section of Honduran highway no less than three times in one day, I can say with some authority that the road is not particularly scenic. Although we hardly had time to look around; we were stopped again at every police barricade along the route and we made the last ferry of the day just by a hair. That put us on Utila after dark, where we stood on the pier starving and getting drenched by the storm while lethargic deckhands offloaded our luggage, and garrulous touts thrust soggy dive-shop flyers in our faces. This was not quite how I pictured my first night on a Caribbean island…it had been a long day in paradise, and one of the most expensive free rides on record.

To be continued.