Our Honduras Story - Trip to Honduras 2008

The rainy season which ensues around the 1st of November greatly slows down any construction on completion efforts. If you build a home in a country where there is an extended rainy season you will need to work your construction schedule around this time. We had originally planned for construction to be done well before this time, but with the electrical delays....

The electricity was done in late October and most of the corrections to the villa completed. Our villa had been basically finished in the end of June 2008.

We went to Honduras in first of November 2008 and we stayed (or camped out in our new guest villa). We had hot water and electricity, but no appliances or furniture. We went down to take possession of the villa and to buy appliances to have delivered and installed.

We flew into San Pedro Sula in the evening and got to or room and readied ourselves for the adventure of the next day. The plan was to buy a bed in San Pedro Sula, set it up for delivery for that day and then drive onto La Ceiba. As they always say about the best laid plans...we found the bed we wanted to buy and started trying to get a delivery set within a couple of hours. It sounded like it was not a problem at first, but then the way of doing business in Honduras started to slowly sink in.

If you ask if someone can do something for you the response will always be something close to, yes, no problem, no problem (Sí, sí, no hay problema, no hay problema). Well the problem is not there willingness to help you it is in their ability to accomplish whatever it may be that you have asked. It is considered very rude in their culture to tell someone that they cannot or will not help you do something for you. We have now learned to not take things quite at face value. It saves a lot of time to know how things work!

As a result we wasted the rest of the day waiting for the bed to be delivered from the warehouse to the store where we would hopefully have a truck waiting to deliver it to La Ceiba. Long story, short we ended up staying an extra night in San Pedro Sula.

We woke up the next morning to pouring rain; the rainy season had started right on schedule and continued to rain for the rest of our trip. The bed we had purchased had been delivered to the store, but the problem with the delivery was still persisting. We finally went and bought blue plastic tarps and rope at the closest hardware store (ferretería) and tied the bed to the top of our rental SUV and started off for La Ceiba. We drove 90 miles in a cloud burst and got to our villa and unpacked our nicely dry and intact bed. Yeah!

This is quite an accomplishment that we are not only there with a bed, but we are moving it into our wonderful new guest villa that we are seeing for the first time. It is beautiful and has been freshly cleaned for our arrival. We walk through opening every cabinet and turning on every light, etc. We are thrilled, although we find a few small things that still need to be fixed, light switches that didn't go to anything being the main culprit.

Buying Appliances and Furniture and getting them delivered!

We successfully purchase and have delivered over the next few days all the appliances and some furniture, dining room set, two barstools, and couch and loveseat for the living room. The bulk of these items were delivered about 8:30 pm at night in the middle of a cloud burst, but delivered none the less.

The cloud burst is a wonder to me as we live in high desert in the U.S. and we simply do not have this kind of rain. We can have the occasional cloud burst so to speak, but it is momentary in length. In Honduras this kind of rain can be prolonged and consistent over hours of time. It amazes me; the sound of the rain on the leaves of the trees is like nothing I've heard before. I love it, although maybe not while having a truck load of furniture and appliances delivered!

We feel very pleased with our purchases and ourselves as it was quite the process to not only find the desired items, but to negotiate the price and the delivery. We had some help with the delivery being scheduled from our arquitecto as he knows everyone and has great influence in getting things done. We remain so thankful to him for his time and help.

In my next article in this series I will take up the story of furnishing the villa via shipping from the U. S. This will be a good one for anyone who needs to know about shipping to Honduras or other oversea shipping.