Lucky me

I'm sort of legendary for my freakish bad luck. Things happen to me that just don't happen to normal people. So my experience getting to Honduras was quite a pleasant surprise. We took a bus from Granada to Managua, booked a hostel, then took a bus to Leon for the day. The girls I was traveling with were going to Honduras, but only as far as the capital. We booked a bus out the next morning. I continued on to San Pedro Sula, a few hours further north. We said an awkward farewell on the bus, and then I felt suddenly very alone.

I wanted to get to La Ceiba, on the coast, which is where to catch the ferry to where I am now. The bus ride from San Pedro Sula to La Ceiba takes a few hours. I would be arriving in SPS around dinner time, so my window of opportunity to find a bus was small. I would have to take a cab from the bus station into town and then find the right bus line for the trip. According to the map in my travel guide bus stations are all over town. So I was resigned to staying the night in SPS, making arrangements, and leaving the next morning.

A Belgian girl on the bus was getting off in SPS but heading in the opposite direction, to the Mayan ruins in Copan. We discussed sharing a taxi into town and I started considering how to get the cute Belgian girl to invite me along to Copan.

So imagine my shock when we arrive at the bus station in SPS to discover it's the size of a small airport. Hundreds of buses on two levels. My heart sank. It was boing to be a daunting task figuring out where to go. While I was waiting outside the bus for my backpack to be unloaded I heard a guy yelling "La Ceiba!"

The bus I needed was parked next to the one I had just arrived in. And it was leaving in five minutes. What an incredible stroke of luck. I rode on a luxury bus in a fully reclining seat, with complimentary beverage and snack service, in air conditioning so cold I needed two blankets, watching Terminator 3. For $14US. Hardcore backpackers would be aghast that I spent that much for a bus in Central America, but boy oh boy was it worth it.

(By way of comparison, neither of my flights from the US to Nicaragua had a snack or movie.)

I woke up at 3 a.m. in Managua to catch the bus that morning. (For some reason all buses in Central America seem to leave at 4 or 5 a.m.) After three bus rides and a taxi it was about 9 p.m. and I was dead. I figured I'd get up the next morning and get my bearings.

I met an American girl at the hostel and asked her if she was coming or going from the islands. She said she and her friend were heading to the ferry and had a cab on the way to pick them up and, oh, would I like to tag along? 10 minutes later I was on my way to the dock.

Sorry no pix with this post. I'll do better next time.

Day 1

Today was the first day of what I hope to be a year-long backpacking trip. I'm posting this from my first stop, in Granada, Nicaragua. I'm pretty zonked from a crazy couple of weeks and a long day of traveling. I was still making arrangements while I was sitting at the airport in Miami, canceling car insurance, canceling my celphone service and whatnot. But already I have a pretty amazing story that I can't help but see as a good omen.

The trip went surprisingly smoothly, aside from a mysterious hour-plus delay after we boarded the plane for Managua. I planned on taking a taxi from the airport to the bus station and then the bus to Granada. But since I was tired, running late and anxious to get where I was going before dark, when a taxi driver offered to drive me from the airport to Granada I accepted. It cost much more than a bus ride, but the convenience factor was huge.

I had booked a hostel in Granada online and written down the address. When we got to the city he couldn't find it. And no one seemed to know where it was. So we drove around for a little while, but we found it. It was only when I got to my room and emptied my pockets that I realized my celphone had fallen out in his cab.

Oh well. I'm not going to use it for a year anyway, so while it's a nice phone, not a big loss in the grand scheme.

A little later I was talking to a couple fellow gringos, one of whom is a Peace Corps volunteer here and thus fluent in Spanish, when an employee of the hostel told him he had just gotten a phone call from a taxi driver wondering if anyone in the hostel had lost a celphone!

A taxi driver -- never mind the country -- who calls a hostel trying to find the owner of a lost celphone?! It's a Treo, which costs several hundred dollars if you buy it retail. In the western hemisphere only Haiti is a poorer country than Nicaragua so Javier (the driver) probably could have sold it for a small fortune. I'm flabbergasted. The Peace Corps guy has lived in Latin America for six years and has never heard of anything like it. So I told him I'd pay him the fare again if he drives back with it tomorrow. It's about a 45 minute drive...

It's going to be a good trip.