Honduras: Puerto Cortés

Somehow I’ve already spent $100 in my first two days on hostels, meals and bus trips. No individual purchase has ever topped 20 bucks, and my most expensive meal was the equivalent of $6. I suppose my goal of spending only $500 on this 3.5-week excursion is now near impossible. Fortunately I have several free stays at hotels up ahead of me, but some nights are still just a series of question marks on my computer calendar. Le sigh.

I had originally scheduled today to be a tour of Omoa, but after realizing I’d seen the whole town in one afternoon, I turned my overnight stay in Puerto Cortés into a day trip, and tomorrow I’ll be writing a bit and then spending the night again in San Pedro Sula so I can take an early bus to Tela. I’m really happy about the day trip decision, by the way. While Puerto Cortés – the biggest port in Central America, wow! – encompasses a lot of land, very little of it is suitable for foreign tourists. Cieneguita and the Coca Cola municipal beach (yes, that’s its real name) are by far the nicest. I, however, started in Travesia, a Garífuna beach to the east of the town center.

I followed signs to the Hotel Costa Azul, which I’d heard was the nicest lodging in the area. After walking down a very long, very empty, very shade-free dirt road, I turned left at the beach and stumbled across a rusty sign reading “Costa Azul.” There was no hotel to be found, just a dingy abandoned shack and a beach filled with branches and trash (turns out the hotel had moved to another beach. Turns out I’d even written all of that down before leaving in the morning). It was incredibly humid and sunny, so I figured this part was a lost cause and it’d be best to get on with my bad self. After walking along a parallel road back to where the city bus had dropped me off, a Garífuna man in what is the definition of “jalopy” drove by and stuck his head out the window. I figured he was just getting a good look at my hot cargo shorts, but then he turned around, passed me again and reversed. Super creepy. Now that I’ve got you thinking I was violated, the man ended up explaining that he lived in New York for most of his life but had returned recently to live in his hometown (for “being a badass,” he said), and that he had never seen a gringa walking alone by herself in these parts. Oops. He gave me a ride in his beat-up sauna to the central bus stop and told me to take the Coptul (so the yellow school buses have names?) line west to Coca Cola.

Somewhere along the way I’d lost my pen, but when I tried to steal one from the receptionist at every hotel I visited, she always reminded me to give it back. On my exit out of Coca Cola, I stopped at an ATM to take advantage of it (Omoa has none) and grab a nutritious lunch of trail mix. I finally snagged a pen at a restaurant on a dock in Cieneguita from the waiter as I was drinking an icy cold Balena beer with the owner. He’d studied in Puebla (east of Mexico City) for six years, and had perfected his snobby “fresa” accent to the tee. This “chilangringa” was impressed. When we tired of each other, I took a Coptul ride back to Omoa, where I immediately crawled into a patio hammock at my hostel and rocked until mosquitoes got my neck. Dinner was an astoundingly large plate of pasta with a mysterious red seafood-esque sauce. Yum!

Can’t wait to see what’s on tonight!