Day 103 - Saturday 31st December 2005

Although the village of Omoa was chilled and very pretty, it seemed a little too quiet a place to spend New Year´s Eve. Therefore after a quick breakfast we caught a serires of buses to the town of La Ceiba. This actually took the majority of the day, as we eventually arrived at about 6pm.

On the way we passed through San Pedro Sula which is the second largest city in Honduras. We had to change buses here and as we were dropped off in what seemed to be Chinatown, we decided to have some Chinese food for lunch. After finding a suitable restuarant and ordering, we were each presented with a bowl of fried rice that resembeled some of the volcanoes I had climbed in Guatemala! The mountainous volume of rice proved too much and a lot of food was wasted, but it provided the sustenance to get us through the last leg of the journey, the 3 hour bus trip from San Pedro to La Ceiba.

The town of La Ceiba is mainly on the gringo trail as a jump off point for the Bay Islands, hence tourists do not generally remain in town for more than a few days. It seemed that most of the gringos had arrived the day before and caught the ferry to Utila for New Year, and so when we arrived we were the only people in our hostel.

Looking forward to an evening of partying with the locals we stocked up on Bacardi, ice, cups and mixer for the bargain price of L60 each and went back to the hostel to make a start on the evenings´ festivities. While we were away an El Salvadorean guy had arrived and we invited him to join us in our mission to polish off the booze. On meeting him he seemed a pretty sound guy, but after one drink he became loud and annoying, after two he threw up and after 2 1/2 he was sound asleep. During his 2 1/2 drinks he became increasingly camp and began to flirt with Ryan and he even threw a few sissy fits when he felt he wasn´t the centre of attention. My patience with him soon wore thin and I ended up ignoring the lad as he was really doing my head in.

At about 11pm we made it out after finishing the Bacardi (and setting off a shitload of fireworks). We headed straight for a club but when we got there we found out that Hondurans spend the new year with their familes, only venturing out at about 1am. Therefore we found ourselves bringing in 2006 in a tin shed bar with the local alcoholics!

At 1am we went to the club, which got pretty packed with lots of nice looking Honduran girls shaking their asses, but to our chagrin they were not even remotely interested in us tourists. Although they were friendly enough, romance was never on the cards to bring in the new year.