The landscape and the living standards changed completely and instantly upon entering Honduras.  The land that we were now on is Dole Pineapple country.  We saw miles and miles of pineapple, banana, and other foreign-owned fruit plantations.  Our guide book says that Honduras is the second poorest Central American country after Nicaragua.  Other than the pitiful quality of the roads, I never saw any evidence that Honduras could be poorer than Guatemala.  Most Honduran homes that I could see are concrete with clean little yards, the cities are full of nice cars, and young women are not all carrying babies.

Our first stop was in a very small fishing village called Omoa.  ...  There was nothing much to do in town other than watch the fisherman clean their catches in the mornings, swim a little at the small beach, and enjoy the seafood.  The restaurants served up giant portions of fresh grilled fish marinated in vegetables.  Shannon and I could eat a very large meal for $8 together.  I could have stayed just to enjoy the food, by far the best since Mexico.  But after a few days and several thousand bug bites from the flea-like sand flies, we decided to go to the island of Utila.

Utila is touted as the cheapest place in the world to receive a diving certification, and, therefore, is packed with backpackers living on a budget like us. Our dive shop offered us a double room on the water for $8 per night. We stayed a week, and I dove on four days. The coral reefs are nice and the fish plentiful. My highlights were seeing a spotted eagle-ray who was swooping around trying to remove a fish that had attached itself to the his underside, and a sea turtle munching on a bed of coral. The afternoons were unforgivingly hot, and we were punished if we tried to do anything other than lay on the hammocks on the hotel pier or hide out in the air-conditioned Internet cafe. The sand flies continued to be relentless, and we learned to lather up in Deepwoods Off! before going out in the evenings.

The Island locals are mostly English descendants from the days that the UK governed the Bay Islands. Spanish is now the official language, but most of the locals speak a form of Creole among themselves that I am told is a form of heavily accented English with a bit of Afrikaans. For me, it comes across sounding like a strong Irish accent. Like Belize and Livingston, most residents are tri-lingual, speaking Spanish, English, and Creole, but the Bay Islands Creole is completely different from what we heard in Belize, where they added in many more Spanish words.

We left the island for the mainland city of La Ceiba, where we booked a river rafting tour for the next day. This was my first rafting experience, and I loved it! Our guide gave us a brief training on how to float if we fall out, how to pull our partner back into the boat, and how to row forward or back at his commands. He told us that the very first set of rapids that we went down were a Class IV on a scale of 1 to 5. We had a couple of drops of about 6 feet each, in which Shannon and I just ducked down inside the boat while our guide controlled the boat. After that, the rapids were classed as II and III for which we sat up on the side of the inflatable raft and rowed as commanded taking the rapids forward and backward. At the end, the guide decided to add a little more excitement to my trip and sent my corner of the boat up on a rock so that I would pop out into the water. After some hesitation, Shannon pulled me back in as we had learned in practice. The guide was in complete control of the boat and purposefully chose a safe place for me to fall.

For a last stop in Honduras, we went to the Spanish colonial town of Copan, which was rumored to be a bit cooler than the coast due to its altitude. I visited more Mayan ruins with a well-preserved ball court and many stelaes with ancient hieroglyphics describing the dynasty of Smoke Jaguar. It was cooler, but still hot ,so after a few days, we decided to make the big jump to South America.