Departamento de Cortés

100L = £3. $ also widely accepted.

We had a restless sleep in the sweatbox of a room that is the Tica Bus hotel, helped eventually by pouring rain and a thunderstorm which cooled us down.

We dragged our weary bodies and got on the 5:30am Tica Bus ($41), our first proper long-distance bus in a while. Not as nice as the SA buses (no food / blankets etc) but a great improvement on the chicken buses of late. We both promptly fell back asleep for 3 hours, crossed the border with no issues (the bus people did the passports) and fell back asleep for another 4 hours.

Honduras is far more mountainous than Nicaragua so we were soon back to crawling along winding roads. At 4:30pm we got off the bus at La Guama, which is little more than a layby with a couple of shops. We didn't have to wait for long to get a chicken bus to Peña Blanca (15 mins, 15L) and then a minivan to our hostel (5 mins, 5L).

We checked into D&D Brewery ($17.50), chosen because it broke up our journey nicely and is a brewery. It is situated near the  large Lake Yojoa and the open-air bar / restaurant has a bonfire and is nicely lit making us feel like we are in the jungle again. In fact a rather large, jumping spider greeted us as we opened our door, eek! Compared to our bed in the chocolate hotel, this one is tiny! Barely bigger than a single bed. And no towels. Not overly impressed, but then it's cheap.

We had dinner of veggie burritos and tacos and chocolate cake - bland and overpriced. Anna started her beer drinking but was most annoyed that from the menu of 42 beers, there were only a handful available :( Apparently it was fully stocked the night before and a large group had wiped it out! It started to rain shortly after we sat down - luckily it's covered, but it was cold and I had to put on my fleece and trousers for the first time in ages!!! There were a lot of smokers and some noisy screaming children which ruined the ambience somewhat.

Anna had 4 beers which enabled me to thrash her at chess, draughts and scrabble! At 9pm they stopped serving, which seemed ridiculously early. It was still raining when we went up to bed and the rain made a horrendous, erratic noise on this roof, so much so I had to put earplugs in.Läs mer