Havana, Cuba 1 / 3

Wow. It has been such a long time since we updated the blog the last time, and yet so much has happened that I have to break the next blog entry into three pieces - just to make some sense. Right now we are in Havana, Cuba already, but I will start the story from the day I wrote the last entry.

At the time when I was writing the last blog entry, we were on the northern coast of Honduras in the city of La Ceiba, waiting to catch a ferry to the Bay Islands. Our trip to the islands was funny. If someone has ever watched the TV show Lost, one would know that sometimes islands can spell a curse on someone.

At least that's how we felt, because many things just didn't work well for us there. Besides the spell, we learned that although guidebooks are really useful, they cannot be always trusted. The first time our book created a funny situation was right after our last blog entry. We went to stay in a neighbourhood that was described as the party district of La Ceiba, but apparently the authors have a different sense of partying than we have. We went to eat in a restaurant in La Ceiba, and right after placing our order we noticed that the restaurant's clientele was mainly old American men and Honduran teenage prostitutes.

Next morning we left to Roatan, and noticed that the island is really expensive, and all the cheap hostels are much more expensive than what mentioned in our book. But still we managed to get a good deal. A dormbed in a hostel that is right on a beautiful beach, and we would only have to pay 10 dollars (yes, they use US dollars also on Roatan...) per night because we sleep on a same bed. Perfect!

But cheap prices often have some negative sides... The temperature on Roatan was really hot and humid, and our fan didn't really work and made awful sound so we couldn't really sleep well. The place was really dirty, so although we had our own kitchen we didn't really want to cook there, and our bathroom was full of our roommates' hair. And besides being hairy, our roommates liked to smoke weed in our living room instead of doing it while watching the beautiful sky outside our apartment.

Don't get us wrong, the island was stunningly beautiful and the white sand beaches were amazing. We did some snorkeling and one day we rented a scooter and drove aroung the beautiful island. It was just really hard to enjoy all of this while being so amazingly tired after not really sleeping at all. Our budget is also pretty tight at the moment (thanks for the fact that there really is no jobs waiting for us back in Finland), and it was really annoying to always look for the cheapest prices around the island. And Michelle also had some funny health problems on the island. She was constantly attacked by mosquitoes and sandflies that were all over the place - as usual, they left me pretty much alone. And the final straw was when Michelle burned her leg really nastily on the exhaust pipe of our scooter when we were driving.

After all these struggles and some nice moments in the Caribbean sun, we decided to leave the island earlier than we thought. Read the next chapter to know what happened next.