Day 4 & 5 - Tegucigalpa Honduras

Hi there,
It's Monday morning and we arrived in Tegucigalpa yesterday afternoon after a rather convoluted flight from Houston which had a few delays due to bad weather here. Arrived at about 3pm instead of mid day. Bit of a culture shock for the team here as it's pretty third-world and we were met with children begging as soon as we were out of the airport. No one's cell phones work but the hotel has intermittent (grrr!!) wireless internet to our room for US$10/day so we can keep in touch at least via email.

I loved our time in Houston and I've changed my view of Americans. Everyone was exceedingly friendly, gracious and all-round nice to us. No loud brashness there! Food was amazing - everything is super size - gotta watch that waist line! We all noticed how big their vehicles are in Texas. About 25% of the traffic are huge utes. We're talking huge Ford F150, F250, and even some F350 pickups etc - mostly with a driver only aboard. A few hummers then the rest are pretty normal cars - mixture of American and Japanese. Gas is $2.95/gallon (about 65c a litre).

Apart from the team trainings we visited a couple of massive shopping malls and the highlight for me was half a day's visit to NASA which was fascinating. I would loved to have stayed there all day but we only had three hours to spare.

I've been really enjoying getting stuck into my photography. Taekwondo has been an opportunity to work on photographing people and I'm loving it (some favourite shots attached (will be posted later today ed:nb).

If you are interesting in seeing more photos or reading more about the trip, visit this page. It's updated by the team webmaster back in NZ each day. https://members.itkd.co.nz/events/tournaments/juniorworlds2006/inews.html

We've got three days here to do some exploring between training sessions for the team before the tournament starts.

Cheers for now.
Doug

On board Flight 756Y from Houston to Tegucigalpa

Diverted and on the ground waiting for weather to clear

Arrived at Honduras. Loading our suitcases into the bus

Not quite the bus standard we had in the USA

On the way to the hotel

It's obviously poor.

Arrived at our Hotel eventually. Our rooms are great.