Honduras

Hey guys,

sorry we havent been in touch for a while-we have been super busy! well where to start...

after the longest journey ever here through Nicaragua and Honduras we arrived last Friday in Utila island off mainland Honduras - where all the pirates used to live! We travelled on a really nice coach -for 14 hrs-yeah we know-up to San Pedro Sula in the north east coast of Honduras and stopped there for one night in a hotel that was a cross between a jailhouse and hospital-nice!then in the morning somehow we negociated our way through the markets to the bus depot and got another bus which took a further 4 hrs to the port of La Ceiba!!we then had to wait for the Utila Princess to pick us up and we sailed off to Utila at 4pm.

We arrived at about 6pm and were imediately deluged by millions of dive school reps all wanting us to stay at their dive school-we cut our losses and headed to the cafe to decide!after a trawl around most of Utila complete with heavy backpacks in the heat we found a place to stay-we were rescued by what have turned out to be our guardian angels in central america-taz and monty from the uk who also helped us in nicaragua!!our dive school is called underwater vision and is right on the quayside with its own boat and dock and the rooms are 2pound a night not bad!!

the next morning we signed straight up for our open water diver PADI course after an overlay from Tatiana our teacher-she was a fantastic teacher originally from equador and she can speak spanish,english,portugese and french fluently! we checked out the amazing beach after that on the west coast and couldnt believe our luck this place is beautiful-so far we've been here nearly 2 weeks!! the sand is white and the sea crystal blue with tropical fish and everyday its been blazing hot!

at the weekend we had a social with the other divers lets just say the local rum is indeed very good stuff! our class mates are all really nice people, we were in class with Ryan from Canada who played the guitar, Christie from the US, Mark from Ireland, Russ from Oz, crazy Anna trainee police officer from Sweden, Mariah from Denmark and Johannes and Katrina from Germany.

unfortunately tho our long travelling caught up with us the following day and we were very ill for most of the weekend which was rubbish because we had such a good first night but then had about 200 pages to study on diving and physics by monday afternoon and we only had one small fan in our bedroom!!

Diving turned out to be really fun, Claire was a bit nervous to start with but she got over it and apparently we were really good dive buddies according to the divemasters!for every dive we got to ride out on board the Captain Josh to our dive sites and saw alot of the surrounding robinson crusoe stylee cayes around here which are just blissful. one is host to the famous sunjam party which takes place this weekend on the island sob sob! so far we've done 8 dives, 6 of which were on the reef surrounding Utila and we even saw a wreck the saturday just gone!! underwater it looks just as films on tv of it and we saw some amazing tropical fish including a big squashy sea cucumber and a giant lobster!

the course lasted a week and we passed all our exams so we are now certified to dive to 18metres -30ft!so any of you fellow divers who want to venture into the deep we're on... (not sure how the british version wil fair in comparison though!)

our last dive was saturday which was also the carnival on utila we were lucky enough to see it start because we were on the far end beach sunbathing...and we even got interviewed for Honduran tv-tele cuatro!!they really know how to do carnivals here-this one lasted a whole week and involved lots of street parties and lots of reggaeton we love it!! the festivities culminated on sat with the parade where they decked out all the minivans and golf buggies that they drive here with banana leaves and streamers and there were plastic beads everywhere, little girls shaking their stuff and boys on top of stacks of speakers MCing along to the musica!

People here speak with a really cool creole caribean accent and a mixture of spanish too so its sometimes hard to know which language to use!

since then we've basically been sunning ourselves on various locations around the island and eating banana bread which is absolutely amazing-claire could live on it its actually replaced chocolate!today we had a little adventure and hired out bicycles to ride around the island...in theory-but as we couldnt seem to find anything that we wanted to reach we joined our Danish friends on the beach did some swimming on the deck at the dive school then headed to the iguana station where a german expert showed us round their breeding programme for the endangered spiny tailed iguana that's only found on Utila Island. It was really interesting and actually quite sad because the locals like to poach and eat them and americans keep buying the mangrove swamps where they live to build houses on!!!..we left them a nice tip.

Plans from here onwards...our last full day will be tomorrow as we are flying on wednesday to Belize City direct from Utila in one of those tiny little aeroplanes which should be an experience! we will spend a few days there seeing the city and hopefully checking out their famous zoo with the jaguars and then we are back on a bus to Mexico where we hope to head to Tulum on the Yucatan Peninsula which is renowned for its Maya sites which should be interesting. Then we are heading off to Cancun to fly to Mexico city for a few days; then its vamos home to you guys in approximately two weeks-if Victoria's right lol!!

hope you are all well and still enjoying the sun-we've missed the hottest summer ever by the sound of it!!

Besos y abrazos (hugs and kisses)

Claire and Victoria XXXXXxx

PS girls back home keep us updated on the goss and Victoria is still in search of a Lost update Jo or Claire!!! XXX