We made it!! We got in late last night and are staying at the Los Mollinos B&B which is owned and run by Blanca and Luis. It's located about 10 minutes away from downtown San Pedro Sula, and about 4 blocks from the City Mall. This morning after breakfast, Luis drove us downtown so we could see the few sites and also exchange some of our money. He speaks very broken English, and Chris speaks even more broken Spanish, but between using lots of hand gestures and looking up words in our phrasebook, we were able to understand that he wasn't taking us to any old currency exchange, but to the 'black exchange'. We assume he meant black market exchange.
As we were driving down the main drag, we turned an inconspicuous corner and saw probably 10 guys standing up and down the street with huge wads of Lempira (Honduran Money) shouting to all the passer-by's. Luis drove to the end of the block and found someone he seemed to know, did some shouting, and some quick math, showed us a calculator with a figure on it, and this guy threw a handful of Lempira into the car for us to count, took our US dollars, and was off. Chris and I looked at eachother and just shrugged hoping we hadn't been totally ripped off (We checked the exchange rate at a bank later and found that we had made a few extra Lempira in the shady dealings).
After we had some Lempira, we had to spend it. So we went to a hotel for lunch and our first Honduran beers.
As we were driving down the main drag, we turned an inconspicuous corner and saw probably 10 guys standing up and down the street with huge wads of Lempira (Honduran Money) shouting to all the passer-by's. Luis drove to the end of the block and found someone he seemed to know, did some shouting, and some quick math, showed us a calculator with a figure on it, and this guy threw a handful of Lempira into the car for us to count, took our US dollars, and was off. Chris and I looked at eachother and just shrugged hoping we hadn't been totally ripped off (We checked the exchange rate at a bank later and found that we had made a few extra Lempira in the shady dealings).
After we had some Lempira, we had to spend it. So we went to a hotel for lunch and our first Honduran beers.
After lunch we meandered back to the B&B, sweating like we've never sweat before. Yesterday was a record high in San Pedro Sula - Luis said it got to 40C (~110F). We decided to try to cool off so we went to El Museo Natural, which was more like a compilation of 5th grade science fair projects than a Natural History museum. There were lots of laminated posters, animals in jars of formaldehyde, LEGO dioramas, black lights, and toys... yes toys. Got to keep the kids interested I guess. To top it off it wasn't air conditioned, and at this point we could hardly focus on anything anyway.
We made our way home and now are relaxing in our A/C room. Tomorrow morning we're starting a long, multi leg journey to Belize that is guaranteed to provide interesting stories.
1 comment:
Glad the trip there went well and you already have black market connections. Enjoy the old buses with no a/c on your travels to Belize...
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