There is no way I will ever be a pirate. The first bit of the subject line is from the former Poet Laurette of the US, Sweet Billy Collins...the pirate part was all me.
HOLA Mis Amigos!!!! Let me bring you up to speed, it has been a long couple of days....
From Caye Caulker, almost paradise, we arrived in Placencia which is undoubtibly PARADISE....it looks just like the Corona commercials, I was miles away from ordinary and I have a nice magenta burn to prove it. Well, the magenta part has receeded to a deep shade of brown...to quote Lisa, I am soooooo hot right now, its not even funny. hahahahaha I haven't been this tan since I was a kid living up at Higgins Lake, but I digress, I was talking about Placencia...okay, Lisa and I spoiled ourselves rotten, and yes Kevin we are dropping a shit load of money...but its still cheaper than anywhere else in the world, so fuck it, we only live once. Placencia was a great couple of days of nothing but sand and surf, until I looked at our car and noticed our front right tire was totally and completely flat. To the rim it be, arrrgh....so that turned life in to a stress level of high altitudes....Garifuna John, a dark man with Bob Marley dreads and a FUCK attitude helped us out. Watching and listening to him try to change our tire, when all we asked for was a jack, was quite possibly the most nerve wracking 45 minutes I have ever spent, again a kid on a bike saved the day...so it was all good. But my ulcer was on fire and so were my legs, standing in the hot sun with a long black skirt is no way to treat your skin when it is the color purple. I fell asleep on my stomach at the hottest part of the day and fried. This always happens to me, always....
Fast foward to the border of Honduras.....Lisa and I paid for a charter to what we thought was a city in Honduras, but hahaha God loves to fck with me, I must crack him up. Picture the look on my face as our guide gestures at our bags and tells us in spanish to get out and wait on the side of the road for some bus that will pick us up. It is pouring down rain, Lisa and I don't have covers for our packs, and we've just paid to enter Honduras to be abandoned and tossed aside like a couple of rags, and what's more is that we paid this man to treat us this way!!!!!!! Plus, we had spoiled ourselves, every where we'd been for the last week every body spoke English, and now we were slammed back to reality with a sounding slap against the proverbial brick wall. We had entered Hell as far as I was concerned...the Chicken bus showed up about 20 mins later, we got on, after a few minutes of trying to figure out where it would take us, Puerto Cortes and then from there we would have to catch a shuttle to San Pedro Sula, dock for the night and then take a bus to La Ceiba, and then finally take the ferry from La Ceiba to Utila....but the bus ride to Puerto Cortes was oh like 3 hours, and then in the rain and the dark we get on the bus to San Pedro, this was after Lisa finally realized we weren't in San Pedro. Because I have the luck of the Irish, we would of course be dropped in the worst section of San Pedro in the dark of night, which is 8 pm down here, and stupidly Lisa and I would take the first room we came to without looking at it first. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, NEVER UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCE DO THIS MORONIC THING!!!!!!!!!!!!! NEVER I SAY, NEVER!!!!!!!! We slept with the light on to keep the cockroaches away, our toilet had no seat, the shower was a pipe coming out of the wall, the walls were cement blocks painted school bus yellow, and we got to listen to people hocking lougies in their shower all night. Doesn't that sound like it was worth the four bucks we paid to sleep here for the night...but hey the perks of the place were my thighs of steel from squating over the no seat toilet. what a pretty picture I just painted...
We had to wait four hours for the bus to La Ceiba, Lisa and I were up and out that joint at a quarter to six. So I've been nervous about Scuba Diving...I have this totally irrational claustorphobic fear going on about the mask and the air sucking that is involved in this aquatic sport when trying to avoid the flippers and fins of the deep, so of course the movie that played in the waiting room was Jaws 2 where the opening scene is two people scuba diving who happen to get ripped to pieces by a great big shark (sigh) I love life. But moving on, we arrived in La Ceiba with no worries, we got our tickets to the Utila Princess, no problem. But the princess turned into warty flipping frog the minute I stepped aboard....this boat, if you could call it that, was a glorified raft. The thing was chalked full of people, and after thirty seconds on the sea, terror and nausea took total control of our defenses and proceeded to keep a tight grip for the next hour and some minutes.
The Caribbean was laughing at our little pissant boat, it tossed our sorry souls about its belly with deep roaring rumbles. In the grand scheme of things we were but a tiny pea in an infinite bowl of aquamarine broth. I sat in my seat back braced to the mesh wall, so of course I was soaked from the crashing waves. My stomach was in knots as I clutched my scarf to my nose to keep the vomit fumes from making me its next victim. The other hand had a death grip to the back of my seat, the white knuckle hold did not relinquish until we were docked. By the end of this jaunt, I had tears streaming from my eyes, and my lip was bleeding as I had been biting it to keep from screaming for my mommy and daddy. The boat never stopped trying to buck its riders off its back, the motion was constant and reminiscent of a jalopy plane flying through a sky of turbulence. Again I was in Hell...had the dock not been piled with horse and dog shit, I would have kissed it.
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