Another great country. We have hardly been on our own for the last few weeks as Kate from Granada has been with us since then and we managed to pick up some more people too. After leaving the capital, Kate, Sarah & I took the long bus ride to Tela on the north, Atlantic coast. Here we decided to do a tour into the nearby national park where we could visit a Garifuna village & explore the mangroves and laguna. The Garifuna were originally African slaves that the Brits shipped onto the Bay Islands off Honduras but they prospered there and now live all along the north coast and retain some of their culture and traditions. The village was very basic and was almost wiped out during Hurricane Mitch in 1998 which destroyed much of the area. It also brought in locusts with a plague that killed off almost all the palm trees - a huge source of income for the locals. Everywhere you see just the trunks of the dead trees with no heads as they can't grow the leaves & coconuts. We set off on the tour with our guides, Josue & Capitan Blackbeard! It started off being quite amusing as Josue put on his only CD and it turned out to be Ace of Base which surely no-one else has listened to since 1993! So we sang along enthusiastically until we realised that he really did mean only CD and after the 10th (I'm not exaggerating) rendition of "All that she wants" we had lost most of our enthusiasm and were beginning to think the tour might not be so fun after all. The village was interesting and we then took a boat out into the mangroves which were not particularly until we saw a crocodile which luckily made the whole thing worthwhile. Only it's head was out of the water but it was massive and cool to see. After another hour of Ace of Base on the way back to the hotel we were ready not to see Josue & Capitan Blackbeard again but no such luck as they turned up outside our hotel later on insisting we go for a drink with them. Reluctantly we agreed and managed to accost a group of students from Manchester that we had met 2 minutes earlier to come with us. Eventually the locals left us alone and we got on well enough with the Manchester lot to persuade 3 of them to come on a road trip with us the next day! The north coast of the country is difficult to explore by bus as they take so long so it was fun to have a few days of indepent travel. We hired a huge 4x4 with blacked-out windows and set off along the coast with Kate driving the 6 of us. Although the trip was fairly uneventful it was really fun and we enjoyed visiting all the villages along the coast including a much prettier Garifuna one. Unfortunately, Sarah was ill for a few days but that did lead to an amusing visit to the doctor. He had obviously not had any patients in at least 6 months and was very overexcited to be treating Sarah as he used almost every implement he could find on her and even offered her a blood test or some unknown injection that he would administer himself even though he "didn't really like giving injections when the nurse wasn't around". Finally he diagnosed dengue fever!! We're 99.9% sure it was flu but didn't want to disappoint him so we nodded along, bought some paracetamol and left as soon as possible. She is now fully recovered! Next we went to the Bay Islands which we had heard had some of the best and cheapest diving in the world and we were not disappointed. We decided to do our advanced open water course which included 5 dives - deep dive to 30m, navigation dive, buoancy test, wreck dive & night dive. All were brilliant and we then stayed on to do 6 "fun dives". Again they were amazing with the most incredible probably being one on the continental shelf. We went down to 30 metres and still below us could see nothing but darkness as the huge coral wall goes on for 1000's of metres. It really made me feel very small and I felt like I was in a David Attenborough programme exploring the deep blue! We were really hopping to see a whale shark as they are often spotted in the area and you can dive with them but sadly we didn't although we saw plenty of other creatures including stingrays, barracuda, turtles, octopus, eels and loads of fish. It was very hard to leave but depsite the cheap cost of diving, it was adding up and after a week we forced ourselves on to the ferry. We are now in Copan just on the border with Guatemala. It's a very pretty town and home to some major Mayan ruins which we visited today. Tomorrow we head to Guatemala, our penultimate country. xx