So remember that one time...

El Salvador: a much needed five day break from school and children, turned into one of our biggest adventures to date and I shall try and recount it all (minus the boring stuff) so…here goes.

Making friends everywhere we go

We got our residency cards on Tuesday after school, as we travelled to Santa Barbara. Now this may seem unrelated to our El Salvadorian adventure but, had we not received these cards we would not have been allowed out of the country. So firstly..Yay for residency cards!

Bags of nuts that we paid an extortionate amount for

We made our way to San Salvador on our trusted chicken buses all the way from San Pedro Sula. A decision that saved us about $30 and didn’t take much longer either so win win!

The next day we decided, after much deliberation and advice from a reliable source (a guy we met in a bar) to rent a car… in central America…

 FAMILY ROAD TRIP

At every junction that whole car shouted “right hand side of the road, very important, right hand side of the road, very important!!” El Salvador, considering it’s in Central America has really good AND well sign posted roads – who knew- so driving around on the wrong side of the road was surprisingly easy and enjoyable. Me and Kate shared the driving responsibilities and were elected interchangeable parents, Erin was the oldest, Ellen middle child and Nicole/Michigan was named the youngest child despite being the oldest.

Kids misbehaving in the back

"I'm glad your eyes are still on the road in this picture"

Famalam

We arrived first in El Tunco, a beautiful beach and set up camp in Hotel Pupa. The next day we woke up early for a surf lesson which was awesome, some of us were slightly better than others but everyone had fun. It was made even better by returning to find a guy we called Pocahontas wearing Kate’s bag which she had misplaced the night before - what a wonderfully strange man!

Then we went for a waterfall hike, feeling slightly worse for wear.

Under the Waterfall

Me flying

Erin flying

I drove to Ataco, the highest town on the Routa De Las Flores, which was a beautiful drive with some close shaves when we went through tunnels with bad car lights and sunglasses on, but we got there eventually! Although we had been in El Salvador for 2 and a half days we were yet to try the staple of papusas, but I was glad we waited until Apaco because they were amazing..

Ataco had some beautiful street art and was the best of the towns on the Routa De Las Flores. We drove back to San Salvador stopping at the other towns along the way, and driving was definitely the best way to do it, buses would not have been fun.

We got back to San Salvador and the car rental place with minutes to spare and they didn’t even charge us for the extra time that we had out car, what lovely people.

Pocahontas (our cars) numberplate 

The journey home deserves a separate blog post of its own, but…here it is…

The journey began at 6am with a taxi man refusing to take five of us in his taxi because he was worried he would get a ticket…10 minutes of refusing to exit the car and a promise of an extra $2 later we were off… We found our desired chicken bus to the border and all was well, or so we thought.

Two hours into the three hour journey the bus gave up and its contents spilled out onto the road. We were stranded. Great. After laughing about the situation for a while we decided we should probably do something, and walked away from the large group of people and tried our luck at hitchhiking… now hitchhiking in central America seems like a dangerous prospect but when you have no other choice, and in the situation you don’t really think about the danger aspect, you think about how much trouble you will be in if you don’t catch that last bus home and make it back to school tomorrow!

Proof that we are not built for Central America. In the bathrooms at the border. 

Someone pulled over and offered to take us 5km of our 59km journey, which we gladly accepted and then walked for a bit longer. After giving up hope I stuck out my thumb to a humongous lorry who – thank who ever is up there – pulled over for us. We pilled into his cabin; four of us on his bed and one up front and he drove us all the way to the border. THEN waited for us to go through the pain in the rear end, that was immigration, and THEN continued to take us to Santa Rosa which was where we needed to be…such a wonderful, wonderful man! We said goodbye to him, Ellen and Erin, and caught out last bus to the Desvio. We had missed our last bus home home, to La Union but Edgar, an 11^th grader would be coming through to pick us up. The issue was that Edgar was in Gracias at the time, and under new law, any town with a jail does not have phone signal…good one Honduras! So we were stranded.

Sleeping in the back of Antonio's lorry compartment 

The three of us then got ripped off by a guy who said he was going to La Union, but was actually only going to Lapaera…the first dishonest person we met on our whole journey. So we just had to sit and wait… two balleadas later I got a call from Edgar “MISS WHERE ARE YOU?” “Okay, we’ll be there in 10 minutes!” 10 Honduran minutes later (20) we were saved and piled into the back of his car, bags and Nicole sprawled everywhere.. 

And so concludes our adventure, we got home at 8, having been travelling since 6, safe to say it was one of the longest, but most memorable days of our time here so far.. A perfect way to mark out seventh month in Honduras…. SEVENTH!!!

Redeeming quality of the day, watching the sunset in Lapaera as we waited for Edgar

Fiesta Típica

No time for words, just look,

 

The Normal Size

Family Photo! All the girls together!

Christmas Break

Christmas was incredible, and I wanted a blog post that did it justice, school has also been crazy since we’ve been back (a month already) which is why it has taken me so long to write...

Christmas…where to begin? I expect most people, myself included would suggest at the beginning…so here goes.

We dropped our Americans at San Pedro airport, and our subtle trio of two white girls and a Japanese man (Me, Kate and Yoshi) set off for Tela. It was weird saying goodbye to people who we see each and every single day, even though the goodbye was only for two and a half weeks…

A day in Tela consisted of Ran Beys - Honduras knock off Ray Bans - Kate ripping her shorts and having toborrow a pin from a random woman who we met in the taxi and fish! The heat in Tela was very welcome having spent the last week or so in relative cold up in the mountains, and the Garifuna village of Miami was an interesting and beautiful day trip.

 Our time in La Ceiba was purely out of necessity as it’s not a very nice place. We went from the bus, to the hostel, to a restaurant and back to bed. Our few hours there was plenty of time to realise we didn’t want to go back there again.

In the morning we caught out ferry to Utila…known as the vomit comet we were very happy to get off without suffering like many others on the ferry. We only spent 5 days on the beautiful, beautiful Caribbean island of Utila (not enough) but it was definitely our favourite few days of the whole vacation (yes I said vacation) They were spent diving, sunning it up and behaving like everyone else in the world our age…which was a welcome break from having to be the responsible teachers we are every other day of this year!  T-shirts were won, friendships were formed and lots of interesting people were found. It was nice to not be the token white people for a change, but on the other hand it was strange to see soo many white people in one place, and still – technically – be in Honduras. Seeing our Hondie family of volunteers was also wonderful!

 

Christmas day was marvellous, we had two dives and the - not so wonderful – exam, and completed our Open Water Diving course in time to celebrate with the rest of Underwater vision! If you go to Utila stay and dive at Underwater, That’s an order! 40 or so people brought either food or wine, dressed respectfully, - which meant guys had to wear a shirt - and spent Christmas together as one big multinational family. It was amazing! We were very sad to leave..but we had a bus booked from Ceiba to Antigua the next day, so unfortunately when we said ‘we’re leaving tomorrow’ we actually had too… (Watch the Utila Video on Youtube)

Guatemala is such a beautifully colourful country.. we divided our time between Lago Atitlan and Antigua and loved both equally… again meeting some amazingly interesting people, including one woman who did a  project Trust gap year back in 1986! Her husband told us about how she never shut up about the experience, and it was wonderful to hear someone other than Kate and I describe their year as the most rewarding experience of their lives…which is exactly how we feel already… A lot of money was spent but we were on holiday so who cares!!

On our way back we caught up with Erin and Ellen in Gracias which was lovely, relaxed and a perfect way to celebrate Ellen’s 18^th birthday! We went to the other hot springs in Gracias, the ones we had not visited before (there was a reason for this) These pools were full of Hondurans and only Hondurans.. we were stared at and gawked at, and this was a definite sign that we were back home!

(Us in Antigua, Guatemala: The Cross on the Hill)

I won’t bore you with anymore ins and outs of the trip..there were lots of buses and long journeys but we had an amazing time…not necessarily a relaxing one but we had fun! 

Who knew it could get cold in Honduras??

 We did, but we never anticipated this kind of weather. In school we were as many layers as physically possible, woolly socks under school shoes, cardigans, jumpers, scarves and even gloves and we’re still cold! Perdomo (our director) has had the wonderful idea of putting the coffee 'keeper warmer' in the office now though so at least we have that to warm us up and keep us going through the day! Although this is a slight contribution to my new found addiction to coffee….

(Darwin capturing exactly how cold it is)

At night we both have 3 blankets and sleep in Pyjamas and hoodies and again, woolly socks, trying to make sure that no skin is out to the elements.

It’s not that it’s freezing here, and in comparison to home it’s ‘warm’ it’s just that the temperature inside a house, is the same as it is outside so the only way to be warm is to go in the shower…and even that’s been dodgy the last couple of days…the sun has started to emerge again now though so hopefully ‘winter will be over with soon’

If the future La Union volunteers ever find this blog…please, please please take head of my warnings and remember to BRING WARM CLOTHING!