Guatemala City and Tegucigalpa, Honduras

Oh hi! We got a minibus to Guatemala City, that dropped us off outside our hotel, the one hotel that we really were hoping had a room, so that we didn't have to walk about with our backpacks in this notoriously dodgy place! Fortunately they did have a room, it even had a wrought iron balcony. It was called Hotel Spring and was a beautiful colonial building of giant proportions. It had an open central courtyard as well as an open veranda on the upper floor. It was quite odd to be outside/inside with light pollution and a full moon.

Sadly this is the only photo of the hotel we managed to get. Looking down from the upper floor veranda.


We decided to head to Guatemala City so that we could visit an airline office to change some flights. We started this quest by buying some expensive phone cards and phoning from the hotel lobby. This didn't work out and was like being on a gameshow countdown as the credit ran out. We didn't get anywhere with this, and it was quite frustrating. We managed one email a day with trailfinders, due to the time difference...this added to the suspense!

In between the email conversations with various agents, we ran around Guatemala city, quite literally! We were very conspicuous indeed and inadvertantly drew quite a bit of attention just by being tourists. We visited Parque Central in Zona 1, a vast space with grand buildings on each side, one of which was the Palacio National de Cultura. This was a magnificent building in a pale grey, green stone (similar to the stone we had seen in San Cristobal, Mexico). The Parque Central had the usual activities going on, shoeshine guys, fruit sellers and many people chillaxing and people watching, but it wasn't really ideal or safe for us to hang out, so we enjoyed it in a few flying visits.

We frequented Restaurante Rey Sol, to get some good veggie food and fruit smoothies, we returned here several times and even had our own lovely waitress who let us practice our Spanish on her, with good humour. Our trip across town on a chicken bus, to the airline office was pointless because the office no longer existed and noone could tell us where it had gone! This was the point of the trip to Guatemala city...oh well.

After receiving no news from trailfinders either, the only thing left to do was to sort out our transport out of the city and head straight to Honduras. This involved a chicken bus journey to Zona 9...quite an experience, the bus was hot, noisy, fast and full of fumes. We did some comedy running across main roads to get to the bus company, who then decided that they needed our passports to book our tickets. We didn't have these, so we had to go away again, all the way back to the hotel to get them and repeat the process again. Gutted. This whole process took about an hour each time...hey, you live and learn! We still managed to do this and get back to Rey Sol for the meal of the day, our waitress was concerned that we had nearly missed it!

We caught our taxi the next morning at 4am and got dropped off outside the bus company, with some other lacklustre passengers, only to find that we had booked 'ejecutivo' (executive) seats that were in the front section of the coach, in a mini 'aren't I special' section. How did we manage this?! Somehow over the course of our two visits, I think that 'Hedman Alas' had really seen us coming! Ohmygod! It was hilarious...full on armchair leg-out recliners, pillows and blankets...etc etc.

Wiji's eyes lit up 10 minutes into the journey when the executive section all received a burger king breakfast meal, this was swiftly eaten in the reclining position! This made for a very strange 12 hour journey, sealed in our tourist bus. Fortunately with the aid of the blanket, pillow and recliner I was able to sleep through the mountainous descent on the cliff edge roads...what a bonus. We were fed twice more on the journey with some ducks bread and plastic cheese food and spam-dex sarnies. Nice.

We had to make some 'payments' at the Guatemala/ Honduras border, but weren't required to get off the bus! The border had a lot of 'officials' hanging about. What do these people do? We watched on as they passed paperwork to each other in a relay fashion! We had a pretty sleepy journey in our hermetically sealed section. It was quite uneventful until the last two hours when a male passenger near us was repeatedly and noisily sick into a plastic bag. At this point we really were ready to get off!

We arrived in Tegucigalpa a couple of hours later, as it got dark, and booked ourselves into the Hotel Iberia. This was a bit grubby, but friendly and secure. We headed out into town to find some food, but all we could come up with was Pizza Hut! The last time we had both been in one was back at university in the 90's. Sadly and oddly, things didn't seem to have changed much, even the food...naturally we had to do the salad bar challenge, even that had pink thousand island dressing! We also scraped the barrel by reaching an all time low by visiting Dunkin Donuts for a microwave croissant and coffee (silent scream).

Inglesia los Dolores, just around the corner from the hotel.


One of the streets. Tegucigalpa is surrounded by hills.


Parque Central also called Plaza Morazan, is a domed 18t century cathedral. Nice covert photo!


It really is everywhere, I can't believe it! A brown tasteless fizzy drink, why, oh why is it sooo popular? Its bloody revolting and so hideously global!


A bit like Camden, plenty of places to eat processed chicken here too! A very typical street scene.


We spent some time in an internet cafe trying to sort out our flights, the tension was building now. We got on with some sightseeing and visited the Museo para la Identidad Nacional. That was newly opened in a beautifully restored colonial building. We saw a photography exhibition on Frida Khalo and and exhibition on the history of Honduras. Wiji got to see the ruins of Copan, on a virtual tour in a high tech video room. He was really pleased because it part of it portrayed it with the pigment paints on the exterior of the buildings, how it may have originally looked.

We didn't take very many photo's because we wanted to keep hold of the camera! The lonely Planet warned not to go out of the hotel after dark and not to wander about with a guide book! To us it really didn't seem that bad. It was generally quite friendly and chilled. We were happy though to be heading out of our dual capital city experience and on to Leon in Nicaragua.