After a sound sleep and a hearty breakfast we were ready to be shown about the capital city of Honduras. Carlos began by taking us to a viewpoint looking out over the city towards the airport. The city sprawls across a valley, reaching and edges and in some of the poorer areas even continuing up the surrounding hillsides.

We also visited the nearby villages of Valle de Angeles and one other that I forget the name of, which were bustling with activity it being Sunday and the villages being popular with Tegucigalpans for day trips. There wasn’t a whole lot to see in these villages but there was a route to the top of one of the hills that surrounds the city, so we drove to the summit to get our second view of the city from above. This lookout point was much more impressive than the first. We also timed our visit very well, arriving just as the sun was setting behind the hilltops on the opposite side of the valley.

We returned to Carlos’ house for dinner and an early night, the walking having taken it out of us. The next morning we got up and Carlos took us into the city centre. As we took a bus into the centre of town we passed by a gun shop, La Armeria. We asked Carlos if it would be possible for us to go intro the firing range and shootsome guns. He said he thought that it would be possible. From that moment on the city tour was just a pre-cursor for what was about to happen next – firing guns.

As we wandered about the streets looking for some food, we bumped into Rivo, the Latvian guy with whom we had spent Christmas at the lake. He had just arrived in town the previous evening and was at a loose end, so we all grabbed some food before catching a bus back to La Armeria.

We went into the shop and Carlos asked if it would be possible for us to go into the range. As you might imagine, the law concerning guns in Nicaragua is a little different from the law in England. Not only was it possible, but within ten minutes of walking in off the street, we had paid our C100 (about £3) each and we were in the firing range armed with a gun and 100 bullets, ready to do some shooting.

As we were getting shown how to load the gun, an old boy walked into the range, made a motion for us to put on our ear protectors, walked behind the safety barrier and unloaded four shots from his pump action shotgun. Then calm as you like, he turned around, gave us a cheery wave and toddled off back out into the shop.

When we had loaded up the gun (Smith and Wesson .22), we each took it in turns to fire four of five rounds at targets ranging from 5m to 20m in distance. I think this was the first time I had ever fired a gun (not including air rifles), and I must admit it is a lot of fun! Between loading and reloading, looking at the targets after we had shot them, taking photos and our individual turns it took us about an hour and a half to fire off all our rounds. Each of us came out with big grins on faces. I think that Carlos – who was originally a bit peeved that we wanted to go to the gunshop instead of walking around the city – came around and was all smiles as we left and caught a bus back to his house.

By this time it was getting to late afternoon, and we all jumped in Carlos car so he could take us to another viewpoint of the city from the surrounding hills. This was again a really good view and we sat there for a while, again watching the sun disappear behind the hilltops before driving back into the city for dinner.

We were leaving the following day and arranged to meetup with Rivo at the bus station around 9am to catch the bus into Nicaragua.

6am. That was the time that the only ferry to mainland Honduras left from Utila. So it was that after 4 hours sleep we found ourselves bleary eyed and wandering the 500m or so to the ferry terminal. We boarded and waited around, and the ferry eventually set sail at about 7am. The delay didn´t really worry me, as I had found myself a comfortable chair and was happily sleeping the time away.

I woke up just in time to see the boat dock in La Ceiba, where we all madfe our way to the bus terminal. After a quick goodbye, Ben and Tom boarded their bus heading off towards Mexico City, splitting up the group for this trip. Ryan, Angus and myself got on our own bus and began the 8 hour trip to Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras.

The breaking up of the group left everyone a little down, and I for one found myself thinking about home and how long it would be before I would see family and friends again. Its a horrible feeling being homesick, for me personally when I miss home I have a feeling of butterflies in my stomach and I start to feel a bit nauseous. Although it doesn´t happen very often I can pretty much tell when I will be homesick, as it usually happends when I am on buses or am tired. I know its nothing to really worry about, so whenever I start to feel like that I try to think about other things, read a book or take a nap.

The feeling of homesickness passed and I was able to pass the trip with a mixture of reading, listening to music, looking out of the window and dozing. After getting on the ferry at 6am, we finally made it to Tegus at about 7pm. We phoned Carlos, the Honduran guy who had offered to put us up for our stay in town. He came and picked us up from the bus station and after dropping our bags off at his place we all went for some much needed dinner. Carlos is studying ot be a civil engineer, and speaks perfect English, in fact it is amazing how well he speaks it considering he has never studied in an English speaking country.

We chatted for a few hours about a whole range of subjects. Carlos is an intelligent guy, and he was very keen to get a viewpoint of how Europeans think and what the general stance is on political and social issues. The night soon got pretty late, and tired from our boat and bus journeys, we hit the sack so as to be ready for Carlos´ guided tour of Tegus in the morning.

The problem with impromptu drinking is the inevitable hangover. Lately I have been suffering from pretty bad hangovers and I am not sure why. Still, even though I had a hangover the Caribbean still beats going to work!

Ben and Angus had finished their Open Water course the day before and as part of their package were given two free fun dives. We all signed up to go out together in the afternoon, which was just as well because when we woke up, there was a storm blowing and the dives for the morning were cancelled. The afternoon dives were slightly in jeopardy but around noon the weather eased off and we made it out at around one pm.

The two dives were really good, and it was made especially good by the fact I was doing it with mates, rather than strangers. The rains hadn´t affected visibility in the slightest, and we saw some more wonderful marine life. After the two 45 minute dives we surfaced to heavy rain and a bitingly cold wind. In actual fact it probably wasn´t that cold, but having been in the water for an hour and a half, made us all a bit cold anyway, and being on a speedboat with the cold waves splashing over us only expanded that feeling. Probably one of the last things I expected to happen in the Caribbean was to shiver with cold!

It was to be the last evening together for the Black Rats, as Ben and Tom were heading back towards Mexico City in the morning to catch their flight home on the 15th Jan. As it was the final night, and as it was a Friday, a bottle of rum was purchased, and a bottle of rum was drank. We all had a good laugh and a reminice about the trip and things that have happened so far, before rolling back into the digs at about 2am, ready to catch the ferry in the morning.

It was a reasonably early start, up at seven to meet with the other folk who were due to go out diving that morning. As it was to be first dive after getting my PADI cert I was a bit nervous, but I soon forgot that when I realised I remembered how to set my stuff up after all!

It was another perfect Caribbean morning without a cloud in the sky and as the boat set out I was in high spirits. Nothing happened to change this throughout the two dives as everything went swimmingly. As soon as I got into the water, put on my goggles and looked under the water I could see the amazing difference between Lake Atitlan and Utila. Visibility was about 6 times better and the marine life was obviously evident. We dropped to a depth of aout 18m where there were some incredible tropical fish and coral. The fish swam nonchantly around us, seemingly unphased by the ungainly 6 people gawking at them blowing thousands of bubbles into the water.

After 45 minutes we surfaced, changed our air tanks, got back into the boat and were taken to a differnet dive site, known as Airport Caves. This dive was slightly shallower at 12m but was equally as good for the marinbe life, and it also inclded some swim throughs in caves. The fish of the day was a barracuda, which was in one of the caves, lying in wait for a smaller fish to swim by so it could catch it for lunch.

The diving finished at about 1pm and after filling out dive log books and putting the equipment away, I was well and truly ready for food and sunshine, so I got myself some lunch and sat on the jetty reading my latest book, The Hobbit.

The evening came around & three of us decided to have a bit of an impromptu drink, so we bought a bottle of rum between us and polished it off before going to a few bars. The problem with impromptu drinking I have always found is the lack of other people who share in your idea, hence the bars are rarely full. We faced the same problem on this occasion, but we still managed to have a good evening.

In times gone by there were apparently two boats that ferried passengers across from mainland Honduras to Utila in the Bay Islands, and this competition had helped to keep the price of a ticket down. When we arrived at the dock for the ferries, we found out that one of these two boats was currently in the dry dock for refurbishment. As a result the opportunist owner of the boat that was still in operation had doubled the price of the crossing.

Naturally this didn´t please anyone (except the owner of the ferry) & for a moment I did consider changing my plans and not going to the Bay Islands at all. I thought about it and realised that one of my main reasons for coming to this part of the world was to visit these islands, and it would be a shame to miss them for the sake of £25 or so. Therefore I succumbed to the opportunist forces of supply and demand, bought my ticket and climbed aboard.

I never normally get seasick, however my on this occasion the choppy waters made me feel a little queasy. The 1 1/2 hr crossing was a bit of a chore, but I never reached the point where I actually thought that I would be sick. I welcomed our arrival in Utila for two reasons, firstly to get off that damned boat, but secondly because it was immediately obvious that these islands were the Caribbean, due to the turquiose waters and palm trees swaying in the breeze.

Utila is famous for having some world class scuba diving sites, as well as for having some of the cheapest dive courses in the world. There are a lot of schools to choose from and competition between them is tough. As we disembarked from the ferry we were bombarded with hawkers trying to convince us that theirs was the premier dive school.

It is difficult to make up ones mind on an empty stomach, so we went to grab some lunch while deciding which company would get our hard earned cash. We made our choice, Altons Dive Shop, based on their facilities (cool jetty to chill on) and instructors. Ben and Angus signed up for their PADI Open Water course and began to read their book and take in the info, while Tom, Ryan and I simply soaked up the sun on the jetty until sunset when we all went out for dinner, followed by an early night.

I planned to do my first dives on Utila on the Wednesday, which left me with nothing to do on Tuesday bar chill out, read and soak up the Caribbean atmosphere. In the morning we wanted to find a beach so we walked for about 30 minutes, eventually spotting a deserted beach on the other side of a the bay. It appeared to only be accesible by swimming across the bay, which we did. We were correct, it was in fact deserted, unless you had a boat (or were willing to sim across!) it was pretty inaccesible. We stayed there, competely alone, for the morning and early part of the afternoon before heading back to the main town for lunch and some time on the jetty at Altons, where I read & generally chilled out before having another early night ready for my dives in the morning.

New Years Day is a public holiday in Honduras and as such the boats to Utila were not running. We were therefore forced to spend a day in La Ceiba. It wasn´t much of a scenic town, and one of us being much in the mood to lay on the beach we went to the local shopping centre, ordered fast food and went to the cinema.

That shopping centre is probably the first one I have been into since leaving England, and to be honest it was set out in exactly the same format as those in the UK, the main differences being the latino faces and the different shop names. Groups of teenagers were hanging out, girls were dressed up and it was packed. Really packed actually. There was a huge amount of people in the centre, about as busy as the UK gets during the final Saturday before Christmas.

To escpae the crowds we went and watched Kong at the cinema (played in English, with Spanish subtitles). The problem with seeing films that are subtitled into the local language is that the locals don´t feel the need to listen to the words, only read the screen. As a result they see no problem in chatting amongst themselves or even to their mates on their mobile phones. When the person sitting next to you is chatting away on their mobile phone it does become reasonably annoying, especially when they shout in order to be heard over the noise of the film. This happened a lot. Another annoying thing was the hoardes of kids who decided not to watch the film, but to run around the cinema screaming at the top of their voices and jumping over the seats, and everyone sat in them.

At first it took a while to shut the disturbances from my mind and concentrate on the film, but after an hour of it, the background noise kind of drifts into, well, into the background!

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.

After an indifferent nights´ sleep I woke up early with no real plans for the day. I had a few problems getting hold of cash, so I was forced to change up my emergency dollar fund of $30 until I could get to a bigger bank in a bigger town.

Trying to maintain a tight budget I sampled some comida corriente, which is a typical Honduran set-menu of chicken, salad, fried banana chips and tortillas for 30 Limpiras (30L=£1). It was actually pretty good, in fact probably better than most of the sea front restuarants, and it set me up for an afternoon of swimming in the Caribbean sea and exploring an old fort. As a strategically located town, Omoa once had the responsibility of defending the Spanish colonies from the onslaught of the British pirates, hence the fort was constructed. When it was first built the fort stood on the shore of the Caribbean sea. Nowadays it stand well inland as a result of the sea having receded over the years.

In October 1779 the good old Britsh forces occupied the fort and held it for a short while until the Spanish had gathered enough men to retake it. Just as the Spanish were preparing their final attack the British slipped away under cover of darkness, taking all the valuables from within the fort onto their ships!

The mosquitoes in the part of the world are a little bit of a problem, especially during sunrise and sunset. At sunset after unsuccessfully attempting to deprive them of blood a-la-Roy, I ventured out for my own dinner with the lads. As we ate, a cool Honduran dude asked if he could join us and we began chatting. He came from the capital of Honduras, Tegucigalpa, and invited us to stay at his house if we were headed that way. It sounded like a good offer so we agreed and swapped email addresses, and tentatively arranged to meet up the following weekend.