Santa Rosa de Copan

Trip Start Sep 11, 2008
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Trip End Jun 05, 2009


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Where I stayed
El Castillo

Flag of Honduras  ,
Thursday, March 5, 2009

We got the ferry from Roatan then a bus to Tela down the coast and spent a night there before catching 2 more buses to Santa Rosa de Copan. The one from San Pedro Sula was supposed to be a luxury bus but was the same as the rest and when it went over a speedbump coming out of the terminal the suspension made a massive crack. After a quick examination by a 10 year old boy, the "cobrador" who collects the fares, the 80 year old driver decided it was safe to continue without leaving his seat. We arrived after a long slow journey, jumped in a cab to the cheapest hostel in the Lonely Planet which describes it as pretty nice. The driver had no idea where it was and drove round asking the whole town. He spoke good English learned completely from movies and was really cool and got us there in the end. The hotel wasnīt cool though, far from it, the bloody Lonely Planet has had us going to crap hotels and look for post offices and other things in completely the wrong side of towns so many times now. So we walked to another, El Castillo, which had an ensuite bathroom, hot water and cable TV for the same price. Sweet. It got so cold at night there we had to sleep in our clothes as you only get a sheet and maybe a thin blanket in most Central American hotels, even at altidude like this.
We walked down the big hill to a coffee processing plant which makes all the coffee you see in Honduras in little hessien bags, Cafe de Copan. The Lonely Planet says they do tours but the security guard with his shotgun looked at us like we were a bit mad but let us in anyway. A friendly guy came out of the office and showed us round for free, it was just 2 small rooms and 5 staff anyway but he gave us the lowdown on coffee production and we saw the roasting machine and grinders in action. Its such a tiny plant considering the coffee is everywhere. I bought some of their top notch stuff from the office and rather than give me a bag from in there they went and got me one that had just been roasted and ground. Itīs damn good but I still havenīt found anything to rival Vietnamese coffee.
Even better than the coffee tour was the Flor de Copan cigar factory. They do actually do tours there and it was brilliant. We got to see all the stages from the leaves coming in to be stored and matured to packaging the cigars, including deveining, curing in a huge oven, selection of the middle bits and the outsides and of course the rolling. The make tons of different brands there, all by hand and 1000 people work there. The rolling and packaging rooms contain literally tens of thousands of cigars from the small ones to the one I wanted to buy, the massive El Presidente size. I decided I was defo gonna take up smoking huge cigars but as I write this nearly 2 weeks later I still havenīt had one. There wasnīt a shop on site and they directed us to their recommened shop in town but the cigars werenīt cheap enough for my measly budget. I donīt have room for 20 Fidel Castro sized cigars in my rucksack anyway. We werenīt allowed to take our camera into the factory so we donīt have any photos either of one of the most interesting bits of our trip. At night it got cold, we had forgotten what cold was and slept in our clothes.
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