La Cieba, Honduras

Nov 21, 2004

Patrick and I went from Chetamul MX through Belize, which is a nice 4 hour ride to cross, even with Patrick poking along at 55 mph, and made it to something of Melchor in Guatemala where we spent the night sitting on the sidewalk in chairs the hotel owner brought out, sampling one can or bottle of each local beer and watching the town slowly pass by on the muddy dirt road.

The next day, Patrick and I rode to Tikal and saw the ruins. There were also a couple of monkeys, and like the ruins at Tutum where everyone wanted to photograph the iguanas and ignore the ruins, the monkeys were pretty exciting to the thronging masses.

From Tekal we decided to head to Guatemala city, but somewhere along the way I lost Patrick and ended up spending the night in Rio Dulce, Guatemala at a small roadside hotel and restaurant with a wonderful family atmosphere. There were porno movies on television, and in the morning the owner's son was chasing a chicken through the grounds. As I left I saw the special of the day was chicken. The road from Tikal to Rio Dulce was absolutely breathtaking, through the jungle, in great shape, and up and down a lot of mountains.

This morning I got up and decided to cross the border into Honduras, but it being a Sunday, all the copiers in Honduras were closed. So I had to take all my paperwork back to Guatemala and get 3 copies made of the paperwork the agent had filled out. Don´t ask why, it makes no sense, nor does it make sense that a Government agency would lack copiers, but there you have it. A lot of people have had problems crossing into Honduras, but other than the fact that the country has yet to invest in a copier, it was no harder and took no longer than any other country. The customs and immigration agents on the Guatemala side of the border are evidently accustomed to people returning to make copies, they waved me through without a thought.

So far the worst road I have encountered was the one from the Honduran border about 30 miles in. Honduras has a lot of water, and most of it is on that road. Fortunately, there are plenty of holes to hold it, and I did a couple of water crossings, and crossed over a bridge that had a couple of boards on it on either side where you were supposed to keep your tires. There were also a lot of bridges with a thin metal covering that was occasionally missing in spots.