Sleeping it off in Tela

So it's back to Honduras then. After some busy nights in Placencia - there was a Garifuna festival going on in Belize - with people we got to know from the sailboat and out on the town, we decided it best to stop in Tela to rest. Glad I didn't stay all the way till the morning, when they had a re-enactment of the Garifuna arriving on the beach on their boats, already felt rather unsteady as it was :p The 3-4 hour powerboat ride over to Puerto Cortes was a rollercoaster, with very rough seas after a few days of rowdy weather. The trip over also included a few very interesting border procedures, eg. the Belizean side immigration took place over the hood of a Toyota pickup truck, and in Cortes our passports were taken some 5km away from the harbor to the immigration office downtown and we had to go after them.

After arriving in Cortes, a horde of taxi drivers started to hustle people to go to the usual spots - La Ceiba for most people, and we hopped on as well. Getting off in halfway in Tela was a relief since it was already getting dark after a good 8 hours of travel and all the others still had a good 2 hours to reach La Ceiba where they'd have to stay overnight since the last boat to Utila had already gone.

After a week of staying in quite low key accommodation, we splurged a bit and grabbed a upmarket hotel at 30ish USD a night with cable tv and hot showers, and just spent a few days napping and watching movies and CNN. Tela is supposed to have a Garifuna Museum, and while we looked for it for a while, we couldn't locate it anywhere. Oh well. There was a few national parks around, too, but the weather was quite uncertain with occasional heavy showers and we didn't feel like risking getting soaked in the middle of nowhere. So for the most part of our waking hours we'd just walk the town and climb up on a small hilltop to watch the view over the bay. A relaxed beach destination, Tela seems to be mostly favored by the domestic tourists, and this seems to be a real quiet time to be here.

On the latter night we splurged a tad more and hit the town's fanciest restaurant Ceasar's Mariscos for some fresh local fish dinner. Not too bad at 10 USD a pop. Budgetwise it's nice to be out of Belize again. Been talking to a few dive shops on Utila through email, trying to work out a nice deal on dive packages and accommodation that they often bundle in the price. Looking good so far, and tomorrow we're going over.