Life's A Beach

As I write, there is officially less than 24 hours until travelling is over, Amy and I are back in Candelaria and life returns not to normal but as close as it gets.

Our last week has been spent resting up before getting back to work. From Lake Atitlan we returned to Antigua for one night before getting a 2am shuttle down to El Tunco in El Salvador. El Salvador wasn't on our original plans but we decided to skip Semuc Champey in Guatemala (a controversial decision among other travellers) to give us time to tick off another country. It was only the four girls that headed down to Honduras' neighbour as the boys decided they wanted to visit some of the other projects instead. 

We arrived in the lazy, two street beach town of El Tunco at 8am and began as we meant to go on. It was a gruelling three days of sleeping, reading and not much else, either by the pool or on the beach. 

Amy and I did manage to pull ourselves off the sun loungers one morning to get a surf lesson though I might have been better staying where I was. With one previous two hour lesson under my belt from Costa Rica last year, I thought it would all come back to me. I was wrong. Along with lacking the natural rhythm to be a salsa dancer, I do not possess the balance to be a surfer. Amy however was a natural!

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Look at her go!

We were sent off with one of the best sunsets we've seen as we prepared for leaving at 4am. Our aim was to get all the way from El Tunco on the Pacific coast of El Salvador to Tela on the Caribbean coast of Honduras. It was a long day that lasted 17 hours and took 5 buses and a border crossing but we did it. 

There was a massive meet up planned of 15 out of our now 21 volunteers (our 8 month volunteers arrived last week and made the trek over) for Saturday night. As it was Tomala and Candelaria's first time in Tela we got to experience the gorgeous beach and interesting nightlife of Tela while being amazed at how Eilidh and Sophie get anything done here in the heat! Thanks to Amy we even had a bit of excitement when we got back in the early hours of the morning when the kitchen tap/pipe came off the wall and we had to deal with a rapidly flooding house! 

And then it was over. Amy and I travelled back to San Pedro on Sunday with Jesse and Lucy as well as our 8 monthers, Norome and Eva whose project is on our side, close to Tomala. Our last night is being spent back in Gracias, our home away from home, relaxing and getting ready to return to Candelaria tomorrow. 

It has been the perfect way to end our travels, relaxing and easing ourselves back into Honduras so we can go back with lots of energy to throw into our work. And we hope to have lots of it when we return!