Honduras Thoughts and Highlights

I’m still in the process of defining my trip, but, for now, here are a few memories:

Copan

A small town, heavy on tourism, built next to an ancient Mayan city. The temples there aren’t as large or as numerous as those in Tikal, where I visited last year, but the architecture and the presentation of the sight are more interesting in Copan. Another thing I liked better about Copan is that they don’t try very hard to sell you on the idea that you're in a spiritual place. The tourist information is more honest: You are standing on ground that was once decimated by the ancient Mayan life-style—and the Mayans paid a heavy price for their irresponsibility. By not taking care of the land that took care of them, they were nearly wiped out—and the jungle they took for granted reclaimed their temples and their homes for itself, tree roots embedded firmly into the mortar they used for construction and the forest terrain burying every inch of their once proud and highly developed civilization.

Copan doesn't bear witness to the greatness of a civilization but to the greatness of the jungle.

The town itself, though a little too touristy for my taste, grew on me in spite of the numerous difficulties I had while there, difficulties which included stomach trouble and a major hassle trying to obtain money after losing my debit card. What made the visit worthwhile was my homestay. My host mother was so generous and trusting that she offered to let me use her credit card for the duration of my trip and bring it back when I was finished. She wrote down her pin number for me. And the two young boys were a hoot. The oldest surprised me with a big hug after coming home from my first day of Spanish classes (I had known him for a day), and the youngest would shout my name all day long. One day he was playing with a sword, and I asked him in Spanish “What’s that?” He thought for a second, put the sword between his legs and said, “Un Caballo.” A horse. It was cute. I’ll miss them.

La Ceiba

The Night Club.

I’ve been in packed houses before, but nothing like this. You could barely move and there was no AC. Still, it was fun. I danced most of the night with a local woman named Carla. I think my Spanish must be getting a bit better, because I met and befriended a lot of locals on this trip.

Los Ex-Patriates

The owner of the Ex-Patriates bar is a 50 – 65 year old gringo who, though he’s lived in Honduras for ten years now, speaks at best maybe ten words of Spanish. One night he was there at the bar with a gorgeous 20 year old Honduran woman trying to explain the Fourth of July fireworks: “It’s like … boom. Like … like Feliz Navidad.” Apparently they light fireworks at Christmas time in Honduras. Amazingly, the woman seemed to, or pretended to, understand everything he said.

The same night another old gringo walked in, this one also with a gorgeous younger woman, only, in this case, the woman looked like a prostitute. I was talking to the bartender when the gringo walked up, or strutted up to us, said: “I’m so-and-so from the Caribbean. I’m here with my la-dy” He stood up tall and proud as he said it, then slammed 500 limps on the bar. “Pay it!” He then walked back to his extremely unhappy-looking “la-dy” as the bartender and I rolled our eyes at each other. Real life can parody itself better than any fiction.

Cayos Cochinos

Just before leaving La Ceiba, I paid eighty bucks—a fortune in Honduras—to spend the night on my own private island along the corral reef. Actually, I wasn’t alone. I was with four young ladies from Britain and Holland. Even better. We made a little camp fire on the beach and talked late into the night, but the best part of the stay, and what made it worth the eighty bucks, was the snorkeling. Snorkeling along the corral reef is like seeing the Grand Canyon underwater, only with more colors and with live animals who swim alongside you and occasionally turn to stare you straight in the face. It was quite literally like passing into another world.

Trujillo

The most beautiful town I stayed in, if you don’t count the jungle. It’s flanked by an impressive forest-covered mountain on one side and the beach on the other. By all rights, it should be a tourist mecca, but the locals are a bit too laid back to make it happen. The Cruise Ship Industry offered to make Trujillo a stop on their tours if the town built a port and improved the sewer system, for which the Cruise Industry provided the money. The money, though, was quickly laundered away and so Trujillo remains the same sleepy laid back town it’s been, apparently, for quite some time.

La Casa Kiwi

The hostel I stayed in the first three nights in Trujillo. I was able to do some more snorkeling there. We weren’t directly on the reef, so the snorkeling wasn’t as awe-inspiring, but I was able to swim out to an old shipwreck site, where I jumped over the side and swam around inside the hull, watching schools of fish go in and out of the hatches. Among the fish I saw were barricudas, jellyfish, and stingrays.

Casa Kiwi is a bit remote, so at night I would congregate in the hotel bar with the owner and the other five guests to drink and play pool. Nothing else I could do, and nothing else I really wanted to do.

My Morning Routine

I fell into a nice little routine in Trujillo, which started with coffee and an ice cream at a downtown hotel. The coffee in Honduras sucks. You wouldn’t think so, since you’re surrounded by coffee plantations, but they make it super strong and without any flavoring save a half a cup or so of sugar. What did taste good, though, was the coffee-flavored ice cream they sold next to the hotel. So I took to buying a cup of coffee which I would mix with my ice cream to improve the flavor. After finishing my coffee and my writing, I would go down to the beach and drink dollar mimosas while swimming and reading the newspaper. Not a bad way to start the day.

Raw Sewage

It was in Trujillo that, thanks to the knowledge of some Peace Corps volunteers, I learned that the strange looking mud I sometimes had to pass through in my sandals was exactly what I thought it was.

Olancho (the so-called ‘Wild East’ of Honduras)

I arrived in a little town called Catacama, the second largest town in Olancho but not very large, with maybe a thousand inhabitants and absolutely no tourists. I showed up at one of the two hotels in town and, after hearing the price for a single bed, asked the old woman who I presumed was the owner whether I could have a look at the room—which was about five feet away and already open. “No,” she said, without explanation. Eventually, after a few more pleas, she consented, and the room turned out to be great—probably the best I stayed in my entire trip. I think I was the only guest, too. I wonder why.

They have some caves outside town that were discovered in 1996. Inside the caves are two chambers full of bones, which, due to the calcite, glow in the dark. The bones were analyzed and dated back to 1500 BC. Unfortunately, though, as I didn’t find out until I got there, the bones are closed off to the public and all you can see are replicas in the museum. Still, I had a pleasant adventure hitch-hiking my way to the site.

The Howler Monkeys

I met a guy who owns a large farm outside of town, which he agreed to take me to visit. While there, I got to actually climb around with the dozens of howler monkeys who live there in the trees by the river. It was amazing. Afterwards, on horseback, we followed a school of parrots to the edge of the property.

The next day, when the same guy gave me a ride to the base of the mountain where I’d be hiking into the jungle, he was sure that the most memorable part of my visit to his farm was feeding cookies to the cows.

Hiking in the Rain Forest

My travel book said that I might be able to find a guide by inquiring at the town information office, but the office was closed and would remain so for several days, so, instead, a local fixed me up with a friend of his and I paid way more than I should have for what turned out to be a less than qualified hiking guide.

The first day, after getting a late start, we hiked to a house in the mountains, not too far out of civilization, where my guide had some relatives. Jose, my guide, didn’t tell me much about the rain forest along the way, but he told me an awful lot about himself, including his secret for staying young and fit, which was to conserve his sperm. Only once every eleven days, he told me, and only with one woman (a comment he later had to amend after confessing to a long affair with a woman half his age). He also claimed to be a Shaman, one whose powers came from Jesus Christ and the Catholic Church, and an “hombre muy raro” who didn’t care about money. When I suggested that he prove his exceptionality by providing me his services for free or at a discount, he quickly changed the subject. “I’ve fathered twenty one kids,” he told me.

There was a moment after we arrived at the house that I’ll never forget. I was sitting on the house patio, tired but endorphin-drunk from the day’s hike, watching and listening to these two older guys in Cowboy hats as they sipped coffee and talked politics. A candle against the wall behind them lit their backsides but left their fronts in dark silhouette. Further out: a night sky covered in stars, as many as I have ever seen, and a forest full of fireflies.

The next day we took mules until we arrived near the peak of the mountain, just before the trail ended. Jose said that we had to leave the mules with the boy who had accompanied us for that day’s leg of the journey, because the upcoming part of the forest was sacred,. We were in the heart of the jungle now, and mules were not allowed. I wanted to believe that it had something to do with a prohibition of one animal making the other into a beast of burden, so to speak, but Jose didn’t accept my romantic Westernized explanation. He said that the mules might eat part of the forest, something all animals in the forest do, and something far less damaging, it seemed to me, than hacking the forest with a machete as my guide was prone to do throughout our hike. Still, after hearing a bit more about the rare and exceptional qualities of my Shaman guide Jose, we continued our journey, arriving about an hour later at a small hut which Jose claimed to own. What he didn’t own, though, was a key to the lock on the door, so he chopped the door down to get us inside. We spent the night there, in a cloud of smoke that Jose created to keep the mosquitoes out.

Next day, we headed into the thick of the jungle. The trail had ended, so we had to machete-cut our own path, moving about a hundred feet every thirty minutes. We were trying to make our way to a cave that was less than three hundred feet from our campsite, but we never made it. Jose explained the failure by claiming that the caves probably didn’t want to be found, no doubt because of my gringo unworthiness, and instead we headed for the peak of La Picucha, the highest point in Olancho. Five or six times, Jose stopped, looking confused. “I have to concentrate for a minute,” he would say. “I need to think.” Believe me, the jungle is no place to get lost. Unlike wilderness areas in the States, the Jungles are so thick and so wet and slippery that being even a few hundred feet off course could be disastrous. So I was getting worried. We had hiked for over seven hours, our sleeping supplies were back at the base camp, and it was getting dark. Jose clearly was a little concerned as well, so we turned around, the peak no where in sight, and started to make our way back. Whether it was dumb luck or the fact that my guide knew the forest a little better than I thought, we did, in less than two hours, find our way back to the base-camp, where we settled in for a much deserved rest.

Jose had promised to take me at least to the caves the following day, but, when dawn broke, he announced that we were heading back. Though I hadn’t got to see either of the two things I had paid him to show me—the caves and the peak—I didn’t complain. I was ready to leave.

Going down was much faster, but, due to the slipperiness and the pounding on the knees, much more difficult. Plus, it didn’t help that I fell into the river trying to jump from one rock to another to avoid getting my feet wet.

After we got back into town, Jose announced that I owed another five hundred limps, about 25 dollars. Apparently, to him, a day occurred with each sunrise rather than a twenty four hour period. I told him I wouldn’t pay, especially since I hadn’t seen anything he had promised to show me and I was paying way more than the going rate to begin with. Unfortunately, though, my hiking boots, which I had traded for waders after falling into the river, were in his bag. So I wound up paying twenty five extra dollars to get my shoes back.

Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula

Didn’t spend much time in either place. They’re both big cities, and, since I live in a big city, I prefer to vacation in smaller towns and the countryside. Still, I was surprised, as I was throughout Honduras, at how friendly the people were. Once, for example, in Trujillo, I came upon three guys smoking pot on the beach, and I asked them if they knew where the Spanish School was. Long pause. After a minute or two, an old guy of about fifty years of age, slowly rose up, shook off his pot-induced ease, and proceeded to walk me five blocks to where he thought the school was. When that wasn’t it, he walked me another four blocks to another destination, failing again. So he then called a friend who gave me directions (which turned out to be wrong, but still…). This kind of thing happened on a daily basis, even in the big cities.

Traveling always makes me more aware of my mortality, but especially so in Honduras. My last night in San Pedro Sula, or in Honduras for that matter, I saw a dead body on television. The dead man had been hit in the head, and half of his face had swollen up like a balloon, and flies swarmed around the bluish-colored, water-soaked flesh of his body. This kind of imagery isn’t unusual in Honduras. It’s ubiquitous. Earlier that day, on the front page of the newspaper, I had seen the photo of a nine-year old girl who had been killed in an auto accident. Her face was shown buried in a mound of mud and grass that must have been pushed up by the impact of her body. The mangled wreckage is right behind her and beyond that a crowd of onlookers and police.

One night I woke up from a dream in which my family had, for some reason, traveled to a foreign country for a loved one’s funeral and I had wandered off to mourn in private. The dream itself isn’t really that significant. But it evoked in me a feeling of sadness like I have never experienced in my life. And it wasn’t a sadness that could be satisfied, either. It was something intrinsic to life. Not something that made life into a tragedy but a profound and inescapable sadness nonetheless. I could not cry hard enough to express it. Even now, I can’t shake it. Honduras has changed me.