Utila, Honduras - San Jose, Costa Rica [3 days, 670 miles]

Overly ambitious plans to catch a 6.20am ferry to the mainland from Utila were thwarted by a crippling hangover, evidence of a leaving party lasting well into the early hours of the morning.  Eventually up and partially functioning by midday, we blearily packed our gear, grabbed some food - yuck, no food, feel sick, just Gatorade please - said final goodbyes and headed off to the mainland.  A rolling ferry journey did approximately nothing to aid recovery and so after a rather limp 100 miles we stopped at a convenient hotel for the night - well done guys...felt great to be riding again tho! Assuaging our guilty consciences with a 7.30am start, we headed directly for the Honduras-Nicaragua border, aiming to get as far into Nicaragua as possible.  It feels fantastic to be riding again after being cooped up on a tiny island - being part of the journey, feeling the wind whistling past, dodging (or not) potholes, making overtakes and getting bathed in diesel - Honduras is a mass of smells - the warm roasting smell of coffee, the British-American waft of tobacco, the sickly-sweet scent of sugar cane...even the damp-earth smell as we rode through scattered showers. What wasn't great was the horrific aftermath of a fatal bus and car accident - not a particularly pleasant sight as we rounded a corner - really brings home the fact that the roads aren't the safest in the world and that nipping past lorries on corners does have some inherent risks...seem to have been alright for the last few thousand miles tho...! After lunch at a traditional Honduran restaurant (I had a Philly Steak sandwich) and a very interesting chat with a local about the bikes and the trip - dreading another halting spanish conversation, we apprehensively turned to chat to him and discovered he spoke perfect english - we made the border in another 100 miles of smooth Honduran roads, winding gently through red-soiled hills.  After probably the easiest (and cheapest) border crossing yet - including avoiding getting fleeced by the damn cambio guys - sweet - we found ourselves, somewhat bewilderedly, in Nicaragua...seemed far too easy, but gift horses and mouths and all that... Luck seemed to take a turn for the damper after the next few miles, resulting in a hell-for leather race for Managua before we got saturated.  Sadly, we lost, and crawled into a very nice hotel absolutely, completely and comprehensively saturated - boots squelchingly full of water, jackets and pants (not the american kind) soaking and water dribbling uncomfortably down necks.  Ah, the joys of bike travel.  Superb bargaining skills by Matt dropped the cost of the room by 30%, we laid the gear out round the room to dry (it smelt really bad) and crashed out ready for another early start the next day - not before Will had used up all the hot water though (git). Once out of Managua, we started on the run south through Nicaragua to the Costa Rica border - sad that we haven't got more time to spend in the country really - seems a real shame to belt through it at such a ridiculous rate of knots.  I guess that's the price you pay for lying on beaches for days on end :-) An overcast sky and worries about another soaking detracted somewhat from what should have been spectacular views of Largo de Nicaragua as we approached the Costa Rican border.  Another straightforward border crossing into Costa Rica put us on the road to San Jose - yes, we do know the way there - and an encore performance of the soaking from the previous night - oh joy.  A ridiculously expensive hotel - top quality steak, cold beer and..a BATH!  A BATH!  Brilliant! - was home for the night as we attempted to dry out on the outskirts of San Jose that evening.  Getting soaked on a bike is probably the most demoralising experience ever - there is nothing you can do when you're forty miles from a hotel and the water is dribbling down your neck and seeping through your jeans...nasty! The next day got us into San Jose proper, looking for the only hostel mentioned in our up-to-date 1997 guidebook.  Finding it proved surprisingly easy (despite warnings from a man on the street that the city wasn't safe for us!) but it sadly had an atmosphere approximately equivalent to that of the moon, so we dumped our stinking kit in a private room, locked it away and forgot about it for the evening as we checked into a more "hip" hostel a few blocks away. We're staying in Costa Rica for the next couple of weeks, so hopefully the next update will have SLIGHTLY more detail about the place...apart from the fact that San Jose is cursed with rain every damn day at 4pm (guess it is the rainy season tho), we haven't found out a great deal yet...!

In case you were wondering...

...yes, we WERE at the airport today whilst this was happening...we watched it on TV as we were too lazy to walk outside and see it live... :-)

Utila [7 days, not many miles]

Utila is a fantastic place, a small island about an hour north of the Honduran coast. Renowned for the scuba diving (apparently still the cheapest place to learn!) there are no proper roads or traffic signals...bars perched on wooden pilings reach out into the crescent-shaped bay, and the entire place seems to have an air of calm about it...life definitely slows down here. The native language is an english creole, on first hearing sounding perfectly understandable but one rapidly realises that it's not. Nearly all of the island's economy depends on the diving industry - there are tens of dive shops, fifty or more excellent dive sites and the clearest blue waters I've ever seen - all the cafes and bars have at least one student poring intently over a PADI manual! It seems like a lot of people get stuck here, drawn by the diving, nightlife and atmosphere...many people we spoke to seem to spend far more than their intended week or so on the island!  We'd indavertently arrived on the island on THE biggest party weekend of the year - the SunJam party was scheduled the day after we arrived - so, tickets in hand, we headed out to join 1500 others on a tiny private cay for a huge dance party - brilliant. Very messy and great fun - recommended! The island 's population dwindled noticeably after the party weeked - a very nice change, as it had been a bit hectic!  Going on the recommendations of a couple of Canadian guys in Antigua, signed up with Captain Morgan's Dive School (really friendly shop and smaller than many of the others) and moved out to a local cay for a couple of nights. Much smaller than the main island, the cay is a small coral islet festooned with rickety wooden houses, a couple of tiny restaurants and a dive hotel. This means that going snorkelling in the morning involves getting out of bed, grabbing fins and mask, and jumping off the jetty 20 metres outside the front door - it's a hard life.  After a quick scuba review (neither of us had dived sufficiently recently) we were allowed to dive, and notched up a few turtles, moray eels and drumfish (doesn't look anything like a drum). Sadly, a re-perforated eardrum by Matt (nice one) meant diving was off the menu for a few months - back to the mainland for nightlife then.  It's bizarre how fast time passes in a place like this...it's so easy to get stuck here. People are always "trying" (and failing!) to leave...it's quite funny when they admit their grand tour of Central America has been spent entirely in Utila. Definitely worth a visit though - maybe a return trip when the ear's fixed..!  Sadly we can't stay any loger, as we're due in Costa Rica on the 21st August. We ship out tomorrow morning, booked on the first (6.20am!!) ferry to the mainland...apparently early starts are good for the soul...

Antigua Guatemala - Utila [2 days, ~900 miles]

The godforsaken hour of 5am saw us loading the bikes and heading out of Antigua, very sorry to leave such a fantastic place - it's rather disheartening when you realise that you're leaving somewhere and there's a very good chance you won't see it again. We were aiming for our longest ride yet, a 600-mile epic that would get us to the Honduran border at about midday and then to La Ceiba for the ferry to Utila. Waving goodbye to Lette (the hostel manageress) and her son, we climbed up toward Guatemala City, the GPS managing to get us comprehensively lost yet again (must be something wrong with it) in the labyrinth of circuitous one-way streets.  An hour or so of bad spanish later, we found the north-eastern route towards Puerto Barrios and escaped Guatemala City for the final time. The road out was well-surfaced and empty (no-one else seems to be daft enough to be up at 6am) and was a pleasure to ride as we wound up through the hills surrounding Guatamala City, recognising a fair amount of the route from the ride down to Antigua a few days previously.  Not having ridden for a fair few days seemed to have magically increased our ability to withstand saddle sore-ness...we'd covered a fraction over 200 miles when we reached signs for the Honduran border and cunningly stopped for petrol. Our overall average speed seems to be about 40mph, which seems ridiculously low until one realises that that accounts for all the stop-start town riding - either way, we were well pleased with making the border around lunchtime, giving us a decent chance of getting to La Ceiba that evening and then the early 9.30am ferry to Utila for a few days' diving.  Where was I? Ah yes - petrol - well, it was all going fine, our standard spanish mime getting us two full tanks of Premium. Will got out his wallet to pay for the fuel with the few remaining quetzales - or rather, would have done, had he not left money, wallet, import documents and passport in Antigua, still carefully stashed under his pillow. Oops.  After Will had spent an hour or so sitting on the petrol station floor tearing his hair out, we realised there really wasn't any option but to turn around and head back. Every other possibility - FedEx, putting the docs on a bus, taking a bus back to Antigua - didn't really seem like the best idea - so we turned tail and headed back to the joys of Guatemala City and Antigua, moving at a blistering pace to try and get back to Antigua and then back towards Puerto Barrios (again!) before it got dark. We made Antigua in record time, slicing through the Guatemala City traffic with ease and pulling up outside the hostel at about 5pm. Lette, the hostel manageress, seemed even more upset than Will as she handed over the wallet. Another two hours of fast riding got us 75miles past Guatemala City, at which point darkness and tiredness won and we pulled into a motel for the night near Rio Honda. Suprisingly, it had a swimming pool, even tho it was in the middle of nowhere - about time our luck changed! - and we piled into bed, aching from the 800+km ride.  A pleasant 4am start saw us back on the road and heading for the border near Puerto Barrios, Matt deciding to pretend he was back in the UK and ride on the left for a few hundred metres until kindly reminded by Will. Exiting the Guatemalan border was simple, so we decided to complicate matters by changing some money with the ubiqitous "cambio" guys. We were so pleased with having bargained a decent exchange rate that we failed to notice the guy palm one of the notes we'd handed him, claiming that we hadn't given him enough cash...lesson learnt - count the cash into his hand next time.  Honduran entry proved slightly more complex, the border offical having a magic sixth sense as to how much money we had on us and charging us pretty much all of it to get the bikes into the country. Annoyingly, the sums involved are insigificant on the grand scale of things...but when you're stuck in a ramshackle border town with no ATM within fifty miles, you notice every penny! Two hours sweating in the muggy heat of a muddy village, waiting for an ancient photocopier to wheeze through copies of seemingly every document we posses, watching baskets of chickens swelter in the midday sun whilst rusty Toyota pickups sloshed past in the stagnant muddy puddles...made us glad we had our own transport when we finally got the permits sorted and rolled out past a group of backpackers forlornly waiting for a bus out.  True to form, the roads out of the border town were atrocious, foot-deep potholes posing no problems at all bar trying to work out which would be best for an action photo. Bikes suitably caked and filthy, we followed the dirt track out for a few miles, through the leafy Honduran scenery and out onto a new main road. Realising that we could probably still make the last ferry of the day out to Utila, we wound the XTs up to a decent cruising speed and blitzed across to La Ceiba, doing the whole run at about 60-70mph bar one GPS failure in San Pedro Sula (GPS always seems to go wrong in towns...).  A private police escort (we were lost) to the ferry port suggested we were doing OK, until we realised we hadn't got nearly enough cash for the ferry out to Utila. Gutted. Thankfully, our radiant good looks and charm convinced two lovely Australian backpackers to lend us the money for the ferry over - nice! - so, tired, sticky and thoroughly exhausted, we arrived in Utila only a few hours and 450 extra miles later than planned - not bad!