Bryn and Geoff's Irresponsible Adventure

After Copan, we made our way to Roatan in the Bay Islands and were treated to the Honduran portion of Central America´s impressive coral reef.

And in a strange testament to how small the world really is, our Roatan flat adjoined that of Richelle, Albi and Walker Huff, who once lived less than four blocks from us in Greenpoint, Brooklyn and have since moved to Minneapolis. Great folks and we really enjoyed eating, chatting and hanging out with them on our communal porch space.

In Roatan, I succeeded in not panicking on my first SCUBA dive (Geoff´s third) and we saw some interesting sea life though we´ve both admitted that we prefer snorkeling so far, especially since we swam with an amazing variety of tropical fish in a portion of the reef less than 25 yards from shore.

A view of a Roatan sunset:

After a few trying travel days that claimed a pocket knife (stolen in the airport) and a pair of jeans (ripped in a taxi), we made our way from Teguchigalpa with its thickets of razor wire and metal bar to the surprisingly arid and cactus-dotted north of Nicaragua.

Our introduction to the country was a bit bumpy - literally. After three hours of our "express" bus careening across an unpaved road to avoid the largest potholes, seemingly picking up anyone wandering along the roadside, nearly hitting a horse and almost claiming the foot of the vendor who had just sold us lard and pineapple-flavored cookies, we made our way past an impressive line of volcanoes and entered the city of Leon.

The colonial city and Sandinista stronghold is fascinating, with anti-U.S.A. murals, war memorials and bullet-scarred buildings, plenty of university students, beautiful but somewhat neglected old churches and Central America´s largest cathedral:

As in Copan, the city seems determined not to let anyone sleep in, with a jarring air-raid siren that sounds every morning at 7 a.m. Tradition, supposedly.

At a riveting but bizarre museum in the ruins of a notorious jail, our guide told us about the brutalities of Nicaragua´s Somoza dynasty, with some frank depictions of the types of torture practiced there by National Guardsmen under the dictator´s orders and newspaper photos of some of the many Leon residents who were killed or simply disappeared during the country´s civil war in the late ´70s.

Housed in the same building, however, are other rooms containing a hodge-podge of dioramas depicting Leon´s local legends, like the golden crab, haunted oxcart (complete with lit-up skulls, scary sounds and stuffed oxen) and the headless priest - actually a good guy who was a champion of the indigenous people but was beheaded by the Spanish and now wanders the streets, or at least in the stories told to scare misbehaving children. The same legends are also shown in mosaic form in the museum´s courtyard.

Here´s the haunted oxcart:

None of the legends, however, can compare with that of the local woman who was so ugly she couldn´t find a date, even after showing off her ample bosom - and yes, this is also lovingly depicted in the museum.