Tim Leffel’s Cheapest Destinations

Prices in Honduras

Time for another up-to-date rundown on prices for travelers, this time for Honduras. I was only there for a week and spent a fair bit of that in swanky hotels on assignment and moving around with a driver, so no info here on the price for a chicken bus from Tegucigalpa to San Pedro Sula.

I’ve been preaching the benefits of traveling to Latin America ever since the dollar started dropping a few years ago and I felt so strongly about the wisdom of going to this region that I co-wrote Traveler’s Tool Kit: Mexico and Central America. If you’re still on the fence about heading to Central America, I’ve got three words for you: cheap, cheap, cheap.

That’s Honduras when it comes to prices for travelers. Exhibit A is the first photo here, which could easily be the prices in dollars at a café in Paris, London, or Oslo these days. Instead it shows pastry prices in lempiras at a gringo-owned traveler café in Copan Ruinas town. How many lempiras to the dollar? 19. Yes, 19, making these freshly baked goodies all of 53 cents.

Exhibit B was going to be from the same town, a photo of the room service menu at Hotel Marina Copan. But it wasn’t readable when I shrunk it down. So I’ll just tell you that at 19 to the dollar, the most expensive breakfast on the menu is the “Famous American” at less than six bucks. (I’m not sure what a “famous American” breakfast would be, but I assume it’s fattening.) A mixed omelette is a shade over $4. I had a comida corrida lunch at the local market. Fried chicken, vegetable soup, rice beans, potato salad, tortillas, and a soda-it was 44 lempiras, or $2.30. I gave the cook’s daughter 50 lempiras and told her to keep the change. Big spender I am.

Here goes:

Domestic beer in a bar - $1.25 to $2
Domestic beer in a store - 40 to 60 cents
Pina colada or rum punch - $1.50 to $3
Drink of 18-year Flor de Cana rum in a bar - $3 to $4
Mangoes the size of a grapefruit - 20 to 30 cents each
Fresh pineapple, chopped up for you - 35 cents
Standard double at most expensive hotel in Copan Ruinas - $90
Basic double with hot water in same - $3 to $20
Standard double at most expensive hotel in Gracias - $35
Basic double with A/C in Utila - $8 to $20
5-day open water PADI scuba course in Utila - $179
Fresh coconut with a straw stuck in it - 30 to 50 cents
5-gallon container of bottled water - $1.20
Cup of great coffee at the SPS airport - 90 cents
Mango licuado (mango, ice, and milk mixed in a blender) - 75 cents to $1.50
Shuttle from Copan to Antigua (Guatemala) - $12
One hour in an Internet café - 50 to 85 cents

Related posts:
Prices in Panama
Prices in the Czech Republic
Prices in Hungary

Roatan versus Belize

Time for a face-off. If you want to travel to somewhere along the world’s second-longest reef, Belize or Roatan, Honduras?

When divers talk about Belize, they get all misty-eyed and start daydreaming about their last trip there. When anyone else who has been there talks about it, they say something to the effect of “too bad about the beaches.”

What they mean is, there hardly are any beaches. Unless you have a boat at your disposal or are staying at some private island resort well away from the shore and built-up Ambergris Caye that is.

I thought I might find a bit of the same in Roatan, but it’s a very different story here. I’ve been running around reviewing hotels for an assignment and of the six I visited on different parts of the island, five had great beaches. One had just a small beach, but I got to swim with their dolphins in a huge enclosure in the sea and kayak around their own little islet so that makes up for it—you can’t do those things just anywhere.

Here are two photos facing different directions on the most popular beach, an area with the unimaginative name of West Bay. Happy hour from 4 to 7 at the beach bars, the tallest building is three stories, and you can go snorkeling right off the shore. It’s only really crowded when the cruise ships dock nearby (more on that later). The powdery sand is postcard perfect, though apparently some people don’t get along well with the sand flies. I didn’t get one bite, but if you attract bugs you will need a steady supply of cactus juice.

The other main drawback is that Roatan is a very long, spread out, decentralized island, so there’s no chilled out, pedestrian-friendly spot with reasonable beach huts like Caye Caulker in Belize. Once people get to their hotel, they tend to stay put as going out to dinner would require a major excursion in a car. The only town of any size is called Coxen Hole and you can get a sense of what it’s like from its nicknames with the expats: “coxen sucker hole” and just plain “sh*t hole.” Of course this is where the now-expanding cruise ship terminal is, which shows once again that people who travel on huge ships continually see the worst of what an island has to offer.

There’s a Monkey on My Back

I’m in Roatan, Honduras and that’s all for now.

Strip Passport, Bogus Energy Fields, and Traveling Tribesmen

Yes indeed, those random unrelated phrases mean it’s time for a new issue of Perceptive Travel. Follow this link to get right to it: Perceptive Travel May/June ‘08.

The strip passport reference has to be experienced in full to be understood, so check out the great story from Edward Readicker-Henderson. The energy fields are (maybe) in Sedona, Arizona, in a story from Laurie Gough. The third one is from my new co-author Rob Sangster, who wrote beside me on the pages of Transitions Abroad magazine for years before we did a book together.

There are two more features though. A look at the Olympic torch relay fiasco by Tibet guidebook author Michael Buckley, as well as “Lessons Learned in the Wales Countryside,” by Amy Rosen. Amy once wrote a story about How to Build an Igloo at 40 Below and it won so many awards she told me to stop mentioning them. It was getting embarrassing.

I took on both the book reviews and world music reviews this time. That can be a lot of work, but I’ve found that doing that occasionally forces me to actually finish one of the six books I always seem to have on my nightstand and it makes me listen to new music even when I don’t feel like it. Sometimes I discover great stuff that way, like the desert rockers Toumast. Go check it out.

Tourist Traps to Avoid

You know the scene. You visit one of those “must see” places in every guidebook and travel article and…”Holy crap! Is this a rock festival or Trevi Fountain?This article, Tourist Traps to Avoid, hits some of the worst: the Great Pyramids of Giza, Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, Picadilly Circus in London, and Times Square in New York. Bruce Northam, who has written a few stories for Perceptive Travel (including this desert survival article) sums it up with a nice quote. “Because when you find the real thing, it’s beautiful, genuine, unscripted and inexpensive. People get conned into thinking they need the package vacation, but that’s just limited imagination.”

I must disclose, however, that the link above sends you to ForbesTraveler.com, which gets my vote as the most annoying corporate travel website on the planet. It’s like the TV screens in the movie Idiocracy, bombarding you with ads from every direction. This is the best we can do with more bandwidth–irritate people to death to squeeze out more pennies per page view? Careful where you put that mouse boys and girls!

Add your vote for the worst tourist trap (or the most annoying ad bombardment vehicle) below.
[Flickr photo from roving gastronome Zora O’Neill, who shot this in Giza while researching a guidebook]