One boat, four buses and one beautiful beach town - Tela, Honduras

From Livingston, we took a 7:30AM lancha (colectivo mini ferry) to Puerto Barrios for 30Q each, or $4. It´s a beautiful ride! We were the only tourists in the lancha, which was a nice change...

Then a 45 minute colectivo bus to the Honduran border - we were the only gringos in the mini van. . Immigration was easy and cost $3 US each to enter Honduras (no exit fee for Guate..) No one seemed to care that we were at the border (we were the only ones there,) and we had to actually seek out someone to issue our visa. We could have easily just walked across the border and gotten on a bus without speaking to anyone, but that seemed a bad idea...
The only bus we could find after the border was a chicken bus - which they hadn´t bothered to repaint from the American school yellow. It diverted into small dirt roads to seek passengers in each passing village, so the 90 minute ride was more like 2 hours. Get a directo, if you can instead...We did get to Puerto Cortes just fine, though, where we went and got iced coffees from Espresso Americano, which seems to be a Honduran version of Starbucks. We really needed to escape the Honduran heat, though, and the place was air conditioned!

After the coffee break, we got a directo, air-conditioned mini van to San Pedro Sula for 35 Limpiras ($2) each. Luxury!
Finally, from San Pedro Sula, we got another directo to Tela, for 65 Limpiras each ($3.75). The mini van dropped us at the Tela bus terminal, which was great. It was a large Pullman-style bus and a comfortable 90 minute ride. The bus left 5 minutes early, and we almost missed it after finding a quick lunch.

Once in Tela, we wandered with our packs looking at hotels for an hour or so, finally settling on Hotel Rio Mar, which is no frills, but the rooms are fairly large with private bath with cold shower. (No need for hot water here, it´s WAY too hot outside.) We were lucky, and ran into the owner, Senor Sherwood, at his neighboring, luxury hotel, and he offered us a discounted rate of only $14 for the more downscale, beach-front hotel, which ended up being the best deal in town.

Tela is a great, chill, town, with a mixed population of Latino and Garifuna populations. The beaches are lovely, the water nice to swim in, and some interesting day trips to be done to local Garifuna villages or the bio-reserves, etc. Looks like we´ll stay a few days. La Ceiba and the Bay Islands are only a few hours away, so Erik will likely take off for a few days diving at some point. Life here is slow and good!