Tackling the Globe…

I should have know it was going to be a bad day when I woke up to my alarm at 4:30am in Guat City, only to find my glasses frames nearly bent in half on the floor. Yes, in retrospect, I should have just gone back to bed.

It took a bus ride then four flights through three countries–Guatemala, El Salvador, mainland Honduras–to deposit us on the island of Roatan, a distance that couldn’t have been more than 300 miles as the crow flies. But to get there, we had to backtrack, flying from Guatemala City to San Salvador to San Pedro Sula to La Ceiba, then finally on to the Bay Islands. Ironically, none of the legs lasted longer than half an hour, but when you’ve been up since long before the sun and have an hour layover in each stop, that still makes for one looooong morning.

So naturally something would go wrong, right? Surprisingly, all of our legs went like clockwork, and we made each one with time to spare, but SVV totally called that that was a lot of flights to count on our luggage arriving with us (plus we were flying TakeAChanceAirways, which doesn’t have the world’s greatest track record, despite our previous positive experience with them). So smart guy that he is, SVV instructed me to pack the essentials–bikini, mask, snorkel, book–in my carry-on, in case we had to wait a couple hours to get our stuff. We didn’t want to lose any precious dive time. Again ironically, I failed to add a change of clothes, toothbrush or even a pair of panties.

So when our flight landed in the tiny one-gate airport of Roatan, and the 50 or so passenger were herded to the baggage claim, we were all a bit miffed with a mere 10 pieces of luggage emerged. Apparently, they had left the other 70ish bags, many of which included thousands of dollars worth of dive gear as Roatan predominantly attracts those who live and breathe SCUBA, on the tarmac in La Ceiba. (Yes, Slynnro and Teej, here’s where you insert “told ya so.”)

What’s even worse is that in La Ceiba an American woman saw employees of the airline was removing her bags and many others. When she relayed this information to the flight crew, they told her she was lying, that that wasn’t her bag (even though everyone staying at Anthony’s Key in Roatan had their bags marked with glaringly obvious lime green tags).

“I think I know my own luggage!” she said, rightfully huffy, pointing to the cart of bags that was rapidly gaining distance from our parked aircraft. A couple from Daytona, who we would end up spending the week with, saw their dive gear vanish, as well, but again, TACA ignored all complaints.

So we arrived at Anthony’s Key, sans luggage. They told us it might be brought to us later that afternoon. Since I did have my bikini and we were on a tropical island, I normally wouldn’t have been too put out by not having my things, but you see we had been in a very hippie area of Guatemala in a very shoddy hostel-like hotel and walked away with bites from head to toe. We were afraid the place might have had fleas–or worse, bedbugs–so we wanted to scorch everything before wearing it again, then send it off the launder. As we only had the clothes on our body and an extra shirt of SVV’s, this didn’t leave much to wear. We covered the clothes we did have in 100% deet, then soaked them in scalding water for an afternoon. I didn’t want to rewear my multi-layered dress until it had been washed, so that left me with a white bathing suit and lime green golf shirt of Scott’s. To wear everywhere, including meals. And our luggage didn’t arrive for two days. Awesome.

Then there was the monsoon we were welcomed with–before you get jealous about our 2.5 weeks away in the tropical rainforest, take a minute to view this:

Monsoon in Honduras from krysleigh on Vimeo.

It didn’t stop until well after we were back on U.S. soil. Considering we each had one shirt in our possession and nothing dry to change into, this didn’t make for the most pleasant week in Honduras. Nor did it leave us much to do, as the “resort” was devoid of any sort of entertainment–TV, Internet, the works. It was cold, rainy and disgusting, and I began to wander why we picked Central America during the tail end of rainy season for our first real vacation in two years.

I knew I should have just gone back to bed.

*Written on Saturday, Oct. 18.