Ross Millard’s Weblog

It’s now been almost three weeks since my last blog entry for a number of reasons, mostly to do with not getting decent net connections to upload my photos so I thought I’d wait but it proved pretty tricky. I am now in Utila, Bay Islands, Honduras kicking back and doing a bit of diving.

I managed to sort out my Spanish lessons at the San Pedro Spanish School and really enjoyed taking them, however I have a long way to go! I did 5 days of 4 hours per day for a really reasonable $53 USD. I had thought about staying with a local family but decided to stay in the hotel with the others guys I was travelling with. My Spanish has definitely improved and I’d like to do some more. San Pedro La Laguna was an easy place to stay; plenty of chilled out bars and lots of good weather to relax. There are several really good places to eat; we even managed to get a full sunday lunch at the Alegre Bar, veggie of course but they still had beef and chicken. Other bars of note were the Freedom bar (really good food here too), Zoola, Buddha Bar, and D’Noz.

An added bonus was that I met up again with Yonatan who I had first met in Tulum; in the meantime he’d headed up into Mexico and then decided to come back down to see us again. Yonatan was planning to stay for one month to improve his spanish and was staying with a family when we left. He’ll still have a couple of weeks to go now.

We also met loads of new people in San Pedro, notably Alexis, Steph, John, and Will who we hung around with for the week. I was rooming in the Casa Elena hotel with Adam and Tom (who we met in Antigua). Tom headed off a few days earlier than us but we met up with him again in Copan, Honduras.

After leaving San Pedro we took a night in Antigua and caught a bus out at 4am the folowing morning, arriving in Copan, Honduras at around 9.30am (or 8.30 am as they have a time difference due to not observing clock changes or something).

Copan ruins were pretty good although, being spoilt with Palenque and Tikal, they weren’t quite as impressive as I thought they might be. I’ve uploaded some photos for you to see. We just spent a couple of nights there before heading straight up to La Ceiba and across to the Bay Islands. We decided on Utila as it is cheaper than Roatan and supposed to be more of a backpacker place. Adam, Tom and I met a Swiss guy, Mike, whilst waiting for the ferry and we have ended up getting a room for four with a/c since the first night in the dorm was just too hot. It’s really quiet here at the moment so we struck a deal on the room. We’re staying in the Cross Creek dive centre which is really good, I highly recommend it.

All the other guys have completed their Open Water diving courses and I took my Rescue Diver course, so only have Dive Master to do now. I actually had to take my course at the Utila Dive Centre as Cross Creek didn’t have an instructor available. The UDC is a really professional operation with a great bunch of people, so I’d like to go back there. I reckon I will come back next year and do the Dive Master and Instructor courses, probably in March as it is supposed to be a good time of year. That gives me a few months to travel around South America first.

Lots of bars here and too much drink at cheap prices! It’s just a shame there aren’t more people. There’s also some really good food here, especially at Dave’s which is within Cross Creek, excellent food for about $5.

I am planning to move on to Nicaragua this weekend, heading to Lake Nicaragua and maybe Leon. I will be travelling with Adam for a while longer as we have the same route.

I’ll try to keep the blog updated a little more regularly from now on!

Oh, and almost forgot, Reading FC seem to be settling in to the Premiership well. Some good results in the last few weeks, especially drawing with Man Utd. Come on URs.

After leaving Caye Caulker I took a bus down to San Ignacio with Adam who I met in Tulum. The idea was to visit the 1000 ft falls and move on. We stayed in a small guesthouse called Max’s Place which was very basic but cheap. Rather than visit the falls as planned we took a tour which included Barton’s Creek, another place called Rio Pools, and Big Rock. The journey out into the jungle was pretty cool, we stopped in an orange grove and picked some fruit to eat later – not sure how legal that was though. The caves at Barton’s Creek were amazing, however the photos inside didn’t come out too well so I haven’t uploaded any of them. Whilst we were there the police turned up and it appears someone was murdered there the day before! The locals seem to go out and drink too much and then settle any arguments by machete. We took the tour with a local guy called David Simpson and he was a great guide to tell us all about the area. Well worth looking up if you go there, he runs David’s Adventure Tours.
Once we’d done the tour there was little else to stay for so we grabbed a taxi the next morning out to the Guatemala border. At the Belize border we had some guy offer to drive us to Flores so before we knew it our bags were in the boot of the car and we jumped in. He drove about 20 metres to the Guatemalan immigration and stopped saying we needed to get our passports stamped a pay an entry fee; being cautious I asked to get my bag out the car rather than risk him driving off with it. He was fine with this and he proved to be a quick, if a little pricey, way for us to get to Flores considering the roads are little more than compacted rock for miles on end.
Flores is a very quaint little town across the causeway from Santa Elena which looks less salubrious. We took an early tour up to Tikal and got some great photos from the top of the temples there. It was so quiet as well which made for a better experience. We saw some amazing wildlife as we trekked through the jungle including spider monkeys, huge spiders, a toucan, other birds, some animals that looked like mongooses (or is that mongeese?); we heard the howler monkeys but didn’t see any. All in all it was a great trip and one of the best ruins that I’ve visited with Palenque coming in a close second. The sheer scale of the site has to be seen to be believed, I think it is over 16 sq km.
Flores doesn’t have much more to offer so we have a bus booked for tonight to take us into Guatemala City, arriving at 6am, and then another bus out to Antigua at 7am. To tell the truth we’re a little worried about the trip because we’d heard a few horror stories about robberies on the night buses. Let’s hope it’s plain sailing and in a little over 13 hours we’re safely in a hostel in Antigua.