After more than a week of scuba diving and topping up my suntan on the Honduran bay island of Utila, it feels good to be on the move again, as I travel by bus down through the mainland to Leon, my first intended destination in Nicaragua.
I can only hope that I arrive in one piece, having already come to the conclusion that Honduran bus drivers are by far the most recklessly dangerous that I have come across thus far on my travels through Central America. Last week I enjoyed a white knunckle ride across from Copan Ruinas across Honduras to La Ceiba, as the driver at his lunch (which involved both a plate and a knife & fork) as he drove the bus around sharp bends on high mountain roads, sometimes on two wheels. Today, I discovered that driver was actually the Honduran bus driving equivalent of Driving Miss Daisy.
On the bus journey from La Ceiba to San Pedro Sula this morning, I watched as the driver drove nose to tail at about 70 mph behind a petrol tanker ,and quietly presumed he must suffer from longsightedness as the explanation why he could not read the 'DANGEROUS - HIGHLY FLAMMABLE. PLEASE KEEP DISTANCE' warning about ten inches in front of his nose as he waited impatiently behind the petrol tanker for the first (inopportune) opportunity to overtake.
Overtaking is where most of the recklessness occurs on the roads of Honduras, I noted on my bus this afternoon from San Pedro Sula down to Tegucigalpa, as I watched the driver overtake other motorists on blind corners whilst writing text messages on his mobile phone. The etiquette on the roads of Honduras is to sound your horn as you begin an overtaking maneouvre, so the vehicle you want to get past slows down to give you time to get in front of it just before the vehicle coming the other way hits you, or at the very least to move over to the side a little bit so that three vehicles can fit on the two lane road.
This etiquette worked well several times today in avoiding several high-speed head-on collisions, but on the downside, the constant sounding of the horn meant little sleep for the hungover extranjero trying to catch up on the little shuteye he got the previous night between celebrating his recently acquired PADI Rescue Diver certification, and getting up at the ungodly hour of 5AM this morning to catch a ferry from Utila.
Instead I sit awake, rolling with the swerves, bucking against the last-minute hand braking, and wondering. Wondering if fatal bus accidents happen a lot in Honduras. Wondering if the bus companies in Honduras know their employees are recklessly endangering the lives of passengers on a daily basis. Wondering if I will get to Nicaragua tomorrow in one piece without having to put my recently attained skills in Emergency First Aid into practice somewhere between Tegucigalpa and León.
