The Ferry Ride from Hell

I have mentioned the “ferry ride from Hell” already so some of you may know a bit about it but I couldn’t really not include it in my reflections on transportation!  When arriving in Honduras you receive a 90 day visa.  At the end of the 90 days you must leave Honduras for a few days, then you receive another 90 day visa upon your return.  It’s sort of crazy because there are a ton of volunteers down there working like Aaron and they all have to leave every 90 days.  You would think that the government could make some accommodation but they haven’t.  We had to go through customs upon leaving Honduras and returning and clearly these officials know what’s going on.  They can see from Aaron’s passport that he’s left and returned a number of times but I guess they accept that it’s part of the system. At any rate, this gave us a great excuse to pop over to Belize for a few days!

I knew from Aaron that this wasn’t going to be a typical ferry ride but I have to admit to being someone taken aback when I saw the boat.  It wasn’t exactly what I would call a ferry and the thought of three hours on it wasn’t particularly appealing.  All I could think of was the horror stories you hear of ferries crammed with people capsizing.  However it was the only way to get from Honduras to Belize so I didn’t have a lot of choice.  They told us to be there at 9:00 but we ended up not boarding until almost noon.  During that time someone arrived with gas to fill the boat up.  They arrived in a pick-up truck with big tanks in the back and used a hose to siphon gas from the tanks on the truck to the tanks in the boat.

When it was time to board unfortunately we ended up at the front of the boat.  There was no cushioning behind us, only a cushion to sit on.  We were sitting with a group of about 8 medical school students on vacation from Scotland.  All started out well.  It was rough and the ferry was bounding over the waves but for a bit we all joked about it.  I said that you wait in line for an hour for a roller coaster and then it’s over in three minutes so we should just consider this one long roller coaster ride.  As we continued, though, we were getting banged around more and more.  Because we had no padding behind us, we were getting thrown against the back of the seat.  I was trying to brace myself with one arm but literally thought my shoulder might get broken so finally tried to just hold onto the seat.  I can’t describe how bad it was.  People were literally screaming in pain with each pounding on the waves.  One of the medical students crawled to her luggage and dug out sea sick medicine which we passed around.  Unfortunately it was too late for most of us! 

Then to add to the misery the engine kicked out a number of times.  This had the benefit of giving us a reprieve from being thrown around but just sitting sloshing in the open sea doesn’t do much for people who are already sea sick!  Aaron said that once when he was on it they had to wait 3 hours until another boat came and got them. Fortunately that didn’t happen to us. During one of these lulls I pushed my way to the back of the boat and found another seat.  No one seemed to be interested in letting me in but I threatened to throw up on them and they made room for me.  The back was definitely better.  As we were pulling into the dock I said to the girl next to me, “I generally always say thank you when I get off of a ride but …..” and she said, “Don’t you dare thank them!”  The whole way there all I could think was that I had to do this again on the return.  We even briefly considered flying back but it just wasn’t practical.  Fortunately we took the ferry back from a different location which was a shorter ride with less time over the open sea.  I carefully staked out a seat at the back and it was a totally different experience.  I commented to Aaron that I didn’t think that boat would be licensed in the US and he agreed!