Honduras Christmas day 2012

Yesterday I felt like a contestant of The Amazing Race reality travel show. I left Rio Dulce, Guatemala for San Pedro Sula Honduras at 9am and sent a little prayer out that I could make this journey in a single day.

By the way for you travelers out there you should put Rio Dulce on your radar, or maybe you shouldn't, I might want to keep it all to myself.

It's a place of magical waterways, giant bugs, and fuzzy little creatures. The backpackers are thin on the ground and the off the beaten path feel brings the dedicated few even closer together.
Here boat is the main means of transportation, as we sit in the jungle and inch closer to the Caribbean Sea.
From rio Dulce I went to Livingstone, a town that can only be reached by boat and named after the famous explorer David Livingstone. This town has a happy busteling vibe and a mob of folk come rushing at you speaking all different languages grabbing your bag and sending you in some direction all in the hopes of a little propina (tip).

Passed from hand to hand I was bundled onto one of these small crafts and off we went. From there it was what happens when you are off the beaten track and have a poor grasp of the language, you get out of your boat or taxi and you stand around and no one approaches you, no one cares. They may look at you slightly, a very white person in very strange clothes with two back packs strapped to either side of her body not to mention the tattoos, but really they don't care. They are people leading their lives and going about their business. So there I stood for a few minutes at the marina staring. The tourist office was closed so I grabbed a random man, said excuse me and that I needed to go to Honduras. Withen seconds he had me bundled into a strangers car hurtling across town, children and chicken flying out of our path on our way to the border collectivo. If you've heard of chicken buses and always wondered what they were here's a little clip:

After a long day of sweaty travel and multipal cross overs you sometimes find yourself looking like this:

And possibly deserted border crossing like this:

Two boats, two taxies, three chicken buses and 9 hours later I made it to San Pedro Sula, Hondorus, dirty, hungry and alone. 

I love this form of travel, it feels like intense self reliance, but actually it's a more intense form of reliance on others. When was the last time you stopped to help someone traveling that obviously didn't speak the language?