Rolo on Tour

Some time passed since I posted the last blog entry (Meanwhile I have not been totally lazy, as I have added now the map features to the blog.), so this one will be about the two weeks I spent in Honduras.

Copán was the first place in Honduras I visited. There you can find the most southern mayan ruins and as there is not much else to do, I went there. For me it was not that spectacular, but I have to add that I have of course seen many other mayan ruins before. Also the entry fee was quite expensive, that is probably why those beautiful parrots prefer to stay outside of it ;-).

From Copán I made my way to the island of Utila in order to do my PADI Open Water Dive Course there. The place is known to be a good and very cheap place to do it, so I gave it a try. In order to get the license you have to watch some videos, do some homework, answer some quizzes and some final exam. But of course you also do a lot of exercises above and under water. At the beginning those are really simple ones at 1 meter below surface, but at the end you are doing more complex ones at a maximum depth of 18 metres. Unfortunately throughout the whole course I had some problems, not doing those exercises, but equalizing my ears.
The day after finishing the course happened to be my birthday, so as a present to myself I scheduled my fun dives (2 free dives you got included after the course) on this day. Unluckily my ear problems persisted and moreover I got a little bit seasick on the boat so this was not as much fun as I hoped.

The course itself was very well organized and there was always some helper around if you had a problem. Especially for me that was a good thing, so whenever my ear started to cause problems, I had my ¨private tutor¨ from Holland around, who does not happen to be on the following group picture:

Helpers and students surrounding our instructor Fernando

Afterwards I backtracked to Copán to relax a little from the course. Now you might wonder why I don´t relax on this caribbean island instead. The reason for that is that you can´t do anything besides diving there and everything there evolves around that topic.
In Copán I thought about what to do next: Going back to Guatemala or head to Nicaragua next, which is what I did after some days of curing a minor case of food poisoning. Besides that I was very happy to witness Roger Federer winning the ATP masters cup in an impressive manner including beating his major rival Rafa Nadal convincingly in the finals. The other big sports event of the last week the ¨clásico¨between Barca and Real I missed though, as I visited some hot springs nearby Copán. I have to say I was very surprised how many of the people around that area were interested in that game and and how many of them had shirts of either of the two teams!
Two bus marathons later (which included one night in Tegucigalpa and feeled like sleeping on the highway plus an adventurous Tuk-Tuk-ride across the border) I managed to enter country number 4 on this trip, Nicaragua, which directly brings me to the next topic:

As I have spent now quite a lot of time in buses, especially within the last week, I thought I´d write some thoughts about that down now:

When going by bus here, first of all, you have to stop thinking about some things like „Damn, I don´t have a seatbelt!“. Most of the time you won´t have one, so you should stop worrying or not travel to this part of the world overall.

Secondly you should not watch the road. It just drives you crazy. Why? Because the bus drivers here have some kind of suicide mentality regarding their passing maneuvers. Some kind of advice like „Don´t try to overtake another car ahead of a turn or a hill!“ is unheard of over here. So you just relax and hope that „he knows what he is doing“, as you can´t do anything about it anyway.

Another point: You can´t expect to have a comfortable seat. Most people are very small here (especially in Guatemala) and the buses are built for them. In Mexico the buses are more comfortable, but many of them have the disadvantage that they turn into a „Fridge on Wheels“, as they would turn on the airconditioning on full power all the time – no matter what the actual temperature was. But I knew of this before, so that did not cause that big of a problem, still I cannot understand it, nor does anybody I met over there.

So let´s say you have managed to find some kind of position you are trying to get some sleep (which has been impossible for me so far, I really envy those people who can sleep in a bus). Then (especially in Mexico!) there is another obstacle you have to pass: Speed bumps (called „topes“ in Mexico). It is really ridiculous how many of those are around. I remember passing a village with 10 house along a road of length of 500 metres, where there were different 5 speed bumps. The speed bump building industry must have a big lobby there I suppose 😉 What those speed bumps also do is, they make the drivers go in the spaces between the bumps even faster, as they know that soon they have to hit the brakes again for the next speed bump, so they want to get back that lost time. And for the cars it can´t be too good either, so there can surely be some better way than that.

One really nice thing about going by bus here is the service. Although it can be very annoying that the bus deliberately stops to pick up and drop off passengers, this also involves that it is always full of people who want to sell their stuff: cookies, water, softdrinks, chips, newspapers and so on. Moreover their products are quite affordable. (This of course is quite logical as there is much competition among them as there is lots of them. Compare this to the service in a plane, where there is only one supplier offering food and drinks: the airline.)

So let´s turn to the plastic bags: When you spend some days over here, you will notice pretty fast that everything comes with a plastic bag. (On top of that I lately discovered that some drinks are actually served in plastic bags. Edit(4.3.2011): Fries, salsa and ice cream as well. Bon appetit!) I once saw in a bakery how somebody bought 10 donuts. Well each donut then got its own plastic bag and all of them where then of course put into another plastic bag. So where do these plastic bags end up? The mentality for many people seems to be: „Mother Nature will solve that problem for me“, so some places have really big problems with all the garbage. Especially signs like „No tire la basura“ (Don´t throw any trash here) seem to be understood as a challenge to do the contrary.
Everytime I buy something now I really have to be quick to tell the vendors that I don´t need a plastic bag; so this is my small part in fighting against pollution…

(*)BWRAF: BCD, Weights, Releases, Air, Final Okay is an abbreviation for a security check you have to do before each dive you are doing.
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