La Ceiba

Getting There

We travelled from Placencia, Belize to La Ceiba, Honduras. It wasn't the most pleasant journey and I blogged about it in slightly more detail here.

Where we stayed

We stayed at the 1877 hostel in a private dorm room with a shared bathroom. The hostel had a nice atmosphere and great communal areas.

Journal

We arrived at 1877 hostel in La Ceiba just as it had gone dark. It had been an extremely cramped taxi journey as there were 5 of us plus the driver and everyone had their large bags too. My leg had lost feeling a couple of times despite trying my best to move every now and then. We were dropped off at the hostel which seemed to be locked up (which didn't bode well), however it was quickly opened by someone who must have seen us pull up outside. We parted with our 35USD each and wished the taxi driver luck as he had to drive all the way back for four hours to Porto Cortez. We didn't envy him!

We checked in to the hostel where Kate and I got a room with a double bed, and a bunk bed, which luckily wasn't taken. We also had a shared bathroom with a co-joining room. You had to lock doors on both sides to lock the room, and then remember to unlock the opposite side too so you didn't lock the other room out. We almost forgot at least a couple of times! We showered and then tried to decide what to have for dinner. It was dark and we didn't really want to go walking around the area especially after all the stories about Honduras having very high crime rates.

We saw on Google maps that there was a Pizza Hut just around the corner so we decided to take a look. The area around the hostel was made up of shopping centres and their carparks, and seemed to actually be reasonably safe and well lit. It was pretty much a minute walk and we ordered a pizza to take away so we could have it back in the room and catch up with some blogging. You'll be glad to know that Pizza Hut was the same as everywhere else, it's actually nice to buy from there because they're more likely to have good hygiene standards!

Day 1

In the morning we packed our bags and I ran round to the supermarket to grab some apples and some cereal bars for breakfast. There were about nine other people in the hostel who were planning on heading to Utila so when a taxi showed up we needed to order a few more and even then we ended up getting four people in the back and the boot of the taxi barely shut. Kate looked out the back window to make sure she didn't see her bags flying out on to the road.

It was about a fifteen minute drive to the dock where the Utila Dream ferry was leaving at 9am. As there was a Carnival on at Utila that day the dock was crazy busy and everyone was scrambling to buy tickets and get on the boat. We joined a queue, changed queue a few times, had a stress as we thought we were going to miss the boat, got our tickets and put our bags in to baggage handling. The tickets were 25USD or 575L. Luckily the boat seemed to wait for everybody to buy tickets and get on (which doesn't happen when you buy tickets back! They shut the ticket booths 10 minutes prior to leaving.