Honduras: Home at last

FYI, sand fly bites are delightfully itchy and unsightly

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Ahh, the ripe hour of 2 a.m. Such a wonderful time to stash my life away into a backpack and grab a ride to the bus station. I actually got there before it opened, but the guards let me slouch on one of the cushioned seats in the lobby and watch some weird, weird movie about a fictional high-profile kidnapping in Mexico City. It's like the guards knew I was heading home and wanted to send me off just right. Solitary grandmothers and Garífuna families slowly filed in for the 3:30 bus, which meant we all got to enjoy the soft core porn scene between the sexy kidnapped lady and her brawny, gentle captor. That'll wake you up.

We passed through heavy construction but made our way into Tegucigalpa by 10:30, giving me ample time to catch my flight. On the way to the airport, the cab driver assured me that all flights had been canceled for days. I said "Hmm, I didn't get an e-mail yesterday from Taca so let's keep on keeping on." Ten minutes of silence later, he giggled to himself and noted that not even a single aircraft had flown overhead that day. We pull up to the airport, and everyone is unloaded suitcases and grasping boarding passes and passports - life as usual. After eavesdropping and eventually asking, I concluded that an unscheduled construction project was underway earlier that morning, so they temporarily shut down the airport while they figured out what to do. Not as exciting as the rumors I'd heard that someone had brought weapons into the airport. Booooring.

I spent my last L17 on a coffee, excited that I managed to leave Honduras without annoying change in a foreign currency. Then, to my obvious delight, I learned there was a $37 airport fee for international flights. You had to pay in dollars, and they didn't accept credit cards. Oh, and the ATMs (despite their lying screens) don't carry dollars either. So I had to withdraw lempiras, walk over to a currency changer with a fanny pack full of bills and get $42 back. Naturally, half of my change at the fee booth was in lempiras, so I bought some poundcake to spite them all.

On the flight home, I sat next to the regional coordinator of the United Nations Development Program, so he had a lot of fascinating insight on Latin America and all its woes. By the grace of Dios, I zipped through immigration and customs in D.F. and grabbed one of the first taxis out of the airport. I got to the apartment at 1:30 a.m. on Wednesday and passed out on the futon (was renting out my room) only to wake up at 7 a.m. and start the first of several months spent on the guide. Then on Thursday, I flew home to Ohio for 2 weeks. Never a dull moment!

El Fin.

The mighty Río Plátano in the heart of the reserve.

Honduras: La Mosquitia Day 5

Monday, July 12, 2010

Carlos graciously woke me up at 2:30 a.m. to catch my boat to Batalla. The water taxi, however, took its precious time in arriving, so I nearly hyperventilated with stress while waiting on the riverbank in the pitch black. Eventually, the owner of the ecolodge emerged from her room to wake up a young man (perhaps her cousin?) to run to the property next door and tell the captain (also a cousin?) to get a move on. Grumpily he rolled up on the shore at 3:30 and hurried me onto the boat, in what I'm guessing was his sassy response for my previously sassy response to getting stood up. Stupid men.

We shuttled around the lagoon for about 2 hours with only the moon and powerful flashlights to guide us as we picked up nearly a dozen passengers on the way to Batalla. Macjeck (a genuine Polish name, and sadly, not spelled "Magic" like it sounds) came to greet me at the truck depot. They had already negotiated with a driver - 250 lempiras for the 3 to ride in the back, and L350 for me to ride up front (this time not on the lap of a creepy Honduran molester). The driver had discovered the annoyingly repetitious sounds of Mexican "banda" music , and proceeded to play two CDs over and over again at an ear splitting volume the entire 5-hour ride back.

The heavy rains meant that our maniac beach driving was interrupted by a newly formed lagoon, so all the trucks had to wait in line as we boarded a raft one at a time and made it to the other side. I spotted the driver L100 to pay for the raft, expecting to recuperate my donation later.When we finally reached Tocoa, however, confusion ensued. I asked the truck driver to drop me off at the Cotuc bus station - yes, I knew that this bus takes longer than other lines, but I also knew that it cost a lot less. As we whizzed past the indicated bus stop, he ignored my complaints and proceeded to drop me off at the more expensive line with everyone else. He was in a mad dash to get to the central market, so he all but chucked me and my pack out of the truck cab. In this crazy exchange for my change, in which I should have received L350 back (as I'd already paid L100), I got L250 back, as I would have if I'd never paid the raft fee. I yelled at him a lot in Spanish - "Pero ya te di 100 lempiras!!" ("But I already gave you 100!!") - but since I'm basically a 7-year-old when it comes to math, I couldn't quite figure out what amount I should be getting back.

They sped away and I defiantly walked 15 minutes down the dusty highway to reach the one-room "station" for the cheaper bus line. As I peeled back the lid on my last can of tuna, I realized that I wound up paying L450 instead of L350. This means I lost $5, which isn't very much, but I was so furious that I was too stupid to figure this out on my own, that I hyperventilated once more as I shoved flaky bits of mush into my mouth. I decided that in the way that some travelers carry a pocket Spanish dictionary with them to foreign countries, I should carry a pocket calculator. I left my bag in the bus station and paced alongside the highway trying to talk myself down from the proverbial ledge.

The bus came 1.5 hours later and dropped me off almost directly in front of the La Moskitia Ecoaventuras office in La Ceiba. I hung my smelly, moldy clothes up to dry on the line in the back and showered off the stench of swampy rainforest. Then I walked a ways to an expat restaurant for a celebratory, end-of-the-road dinner (which involved a large piece of carrot cake and beer). Customers can make free calls to the U.S., so I let my loved ones know I was still alive before attempting a superficial amount of work on my first guidebook chapter. I stared warily at a group of 30-something American expats who either brought their newborns to dinner or talked incessantly about them. I thought, "Please, God! Not me! Not yet!"

I leave you kind folks with a video clip I took during the truck ride on the beach. I hope it makes you nauseous just looking at it.

Honduras: La Mosquitia Day 4

Sunday, July 11, 2010

Today was not nearly as tragic as the twilight downpour might've implied. The river rose drastically and took lots of branches and grass with it, but since we were traveling downstream, it didn't affect us much. Light rains in the early morning thankfully switched to clearer skies, which created an amazing landscape as we passed through swampy canals out to Laguna de Ibans. Of course, all of our cameras were stowed away in dry sacks (picture to the right is from the way to Las Marías, but you get the idea). Spindly roots in the mangrove channels reflected off the river like a mesmerizing pattern of zigzags. Glassy waters on the lagoon perfectly mirrored the distant mountain range and the puffy white clouds above. For the first time in a while, we were dry, warm and able to look out from under the tarp to see the impressive biosphere before us.

When we returned to Raista around 2 p.m., I was desperately eager to hang my soppy clothes out to dry, to shower and to eat something other than tortillas and oily, orange-y tuna. Team Hippie instead carried on to the neighboring Miskito village of Belén to catch the World Cup finals. I don't particularly care for televised sports, but I had been following the "Mundial" as closely as I could throughout my Honduras trip, and even earlier on before I left Mexico. It gave me some semblance of normalcy, plus it was a good excuse for forced bonding with the strangers around me (like the beer-guzzling Germans in Guanaja at 8 a.m., for example). So, after getting back to the ecolodge, I was sufficiently envious of my traveling counterparts for watching Spain claim victory over the Netherlands. That, and I had literally nothing to do except sleep in a hammock, sleep in my bed and foster a lingering cold.

For reasons unknown to me, I skipped out on dinner and instead slammed the remaining crumbs in my sorry bag of shelf-stable granola. Later I watched the lobster-diver-studying anthropologist and Carlos, an NGO worker with Rainforest Alliance, eat some green chicken soup. Carlos was very interesting to listen to, especially when he talked about Tío Mike, or Honduras' version of Mexico's billionaire businessman Carlos Slim, about an alliance of 11 Arab families who essentially run politics in the country (according to Carlos), and about the presidential coup in 2009. Who knew?

My three compatriots headed from Belén to Batalla, the Garífuna town where the pickup trucks dropped us off, as to avoid waking up at 2:30 a.m. to catch a water taxi to the truck depot (which, by the way, is a great time to wake up).

Honduras: La Mosquitia Day 3

Saturday, July 10, 2010

I blame the chunky glue milk for my early morning stomach "issues," which is ever more pleasant when squatting over a crooked toilet. My intestines pulled themselves together, however, and in the late morning my guide, Julio, came to pick me up. We trekked through muddy paths and light rains until it became evident that my old running shoes just wouldn't do. So we stopped by a house so that a teenage boy could remove his tall rubber boots, hand them to me and slip into an old pair of Crocs. I felt pretty bad, but just for a second. His boots were great.

The 20-minute hike continued to a second boat landing on the Río Plátano. Two young men were waiting for us there - they were my pipante pushers. A pipante is a narrow dugout canoe that is pushed upstream by driving long wooden poles into the riverbed and propelling forward. The river is especially thick and choppy during the rainy season, which I presume sucked more for the boat pushers than for me, who sat idly on a bench while thinking "Another boat ride?" My guides pushed upstream through rapids before pulling over on the side of the river for Julio and I to disembark. We hiked through the thick of the rainforest for about an hour as Julio slashed his machete right and left with no particular reason. This sounds horribly stereotypical, but my previous suspicions that Julio was gay were reaffirmed by the dainty flick of his wrist as he chopped at a leaf here and swooshed at some branches there. Dainty and machete are a hilarious combination, by the way. More importantly, the rainforest is astoundingly beautiful. So many shades of green never imagined cram themselves into a mural of leaves, vines and tree trunks. Benches covered in moss and a condemned observation tower offered a reminder of previous tourism initiatives that had gone by the way side. As you've probably gathered by now, getting out here is a long and arduous journey, so it takes a lot of time, money and manpower to do absolutely anything productive. Which is why I assume that upkeep and repairs just never happened.

During our trek, Julio explained that I was his second hike in the last few years. About a year ago, he came down with a life-threatening illness and could barely function or leave the house. His family hauled him all the way to San Pedro Sula, on the opposite side of the country, to seek professional medical care, but not even the doctors there could figure it out. He returned home, condemned to die, until a local medicine man prepared him an elixir, which promptly cured Julio of all his illnesses. Turns out, according to Julio, than an indigenous man had looked at Julio and cursed him because the indigenous man was jealous and envious. The elixir lifted the curse. Who am I to say what's real and what's not, but it's interesting to me that something I consider completely ludicrous is a convincing and adequate explanation to another.

The hike reached a dead end and we turned back around to find the pipante. One more hour upstream, and we finally reached the mighty, grandiose, imposing, impressive, awe-inspiring Walpaulbansirpe petroglyphs.

Clearly I am just kidding. Look at this thing. It is a rock. A rock. One. It took us like 2 hours to get here. And yet it is the biggest tourist attraction of Las Marías (not even I tried to dispute that fact in the guide). The rock carving is at least 1,000 years old and the civilization who left such traces is unknown. But you know what? Teotihuacán was built by an unknown civilization before the Aztecs rolled up and did some remodeling. Take that, Honduras. By the way, this photo is slightly crooked because the main screen on my camera is broken, so you have to look through the old-school view thingy to take a picture. Except Julio decided to look through the tiny, centimeter-wide view thingy from a distance. He did pretty well despite the fact, I must say.

The area around the rock is usually a nice sandy beach area where you can relax, picnic and enjoy some time out of the boat. But all that rain had flooded the beach, so my 3 guides and I sat around on the rocks for a while fulfilling this scheduled recess in the itinerary. Julio said it was his birthday that day, so we sang various rounds of "Happy Birthday" in English and Spanish to him. It was delightfully awkward, but I loved it. I then tried to sing him "Las Mañanitas," the Mexican birthday song, before realizing I only know about three verses, and not in order.

Riding back was a far easier ride (for the guides, it was the same for sedentary ole me). Julio took to the front of the boat with a short paddle for guiding, while one of the guides did some occasional pushing in the back. We stopped at another random person's house on the riverbank so I could eat some more tortilla and tuna slop and also muddy up the kitchen floor. I took a splashy bucket shower when I got back, then hung my soggy clothes up to dry on the balcony banisters and went to bed at 9 p.m. Matt would've been proud.

Crashing thunder and ominous lightning brought in another monsoon with heavy winds. I dreamed that I was walking in a creek until I awoke at 2 a.m. and realized that rain was pouring in from my open, screenless window and sprinkling my feet. I rushed out to the balcony and saw that not only was my clothing soaked, but some of it had fallen off into a mud pit below. I ventured out into the rain anyway to salvage the renegade articles of my 7-item wardrobe before heading back to bed and thinking "tomorrow is going to suck."

Honduras: La Mosquitia Day 2

Friday, July 9, 2010

I finally got to wake up after the 5:30 sunrise today. Following a hearty breakfast with awful instant coffee in the comedor, my foreign companions began a relentless negotiation with my boat driver for their fare for the Las Marías ride. (I had to pay for transportation in/out of La Mosquitia and meals, but my internal boat fares, hotel and guide fees were all taken care of by the national tourism institute - sweet!). This incessant haggling was apparently a knee-jerk reaction for them anytime money came up. It was mildly annoying, especially when you consider that the $5 you're bartering with is literally the driver's only salary for the day.

Guide books (and now mine) will warn you against traveling to the rainforest during the rainy season. That's because if you take a 6-hour boat ride up the mighty Río Plátano into the heart of the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve, you will undoubtedly get poured on. On our narrow little cayuko, we were completely exposed to the elements. Plastic tarps covered our packs, and eventually we used one to cover us as well, despite the smells of mud, burned trash and manure. I had a rain jacket on, but even that started leaking.

Before the monsoon, we stopped to run some errands with the driver. He was picking up a load of homemade cheese and milk for his neighbors in Las Marías. I had a sip of the homemade milk, and it tasted a bit like drinking chunky glue. Mmmm. We stopped again to "dine" in the kitchen of a man who lived alone on the riverbanks. I packed a lunch of corn tortilla and canned tuna with veggies. It all fell apart into one giant tuna mess which I slopped up with my hands before getting charged by a goat near the latrines. Fortunately a neighbor was nearby to beat it in the head with an umbrella before he could get to me.

The rain had mostly stopped when we reached Las Marías, a Miskito and Pech community of 100 families that is increasingly attracting more ecotourists for its access to great hiking and the Walpaulbansirpe petroglyphs (or rock carvings). Within minutes of our arrival, a flock of local artisans came up to visit us and show off their bracelets, pouches and wall hangings made from dyed bark fibers. We bought bracelets from one lady before five others showed up with the same products. One woman even had ojo de venado, or BUCKEYES! Rainforest buckeyes look a little different than ones from O-H-I-O, but I still brimmed with joy nonetheless. The Polish boys then went off to join an incredibly muddy game of fútbol with the local boys while I played the part of proud soccer mom on the sidelines.

The sacaguías, or head guide in Las Marías, then paid us a visit to determine which trips we'd be making so he could trek around the village and find the appropriate guides. Around 150 men and women have been trained as guides by international NGOs to provide an economic alternative to the underdeveloped town, which is great, but my guide on Saturday said I was his second client for the year.

Dinner involved traditional Honduran fare of rice, beans, cheese, egg (in place of chicken) and fried plantain chips. The lodge was nice, but still can't rival the one in Raista. Namely because the shared bathrooms was one latrine divided into two parts: the first was a small toilet without a seat and with bucket flush, and the second had a concrete floor and giant tub of rainwater with small buckets for bathing. It takes a lot of rainwater to wash this fro, let me tell you. Mosquitoes and other bugs dive-bombed into my netting for most of the night, which was lovely.

Honduras: La Mosquitia Day 1

Well, it is now almost two months to the day since I began my ventures into La Mosquitia, "Honduras' side of the Mosquito Coast, an expanse of rainforest and indigenous societies shared with neighboring Nicaragua," according to my author self. (In the previous post I wrote 'Moskito Coast.' There are variety of ways to spell it, but in the guide I used 'qui.')

Thursday, July 8, 2010

This last leg of my Honduras venture was by far the most stressful part - mostly because I didn't figure it out until the day before. After returning to La Ceiba from Utila on the 6:20 a.m. ferry, I settled the score with the kind benefactors at the Honduran Institute of Tourism and prepared for an even earlier wakeup call - 3 a.m.

(There are two ways to get to La Mosquitia: take a 50-minute flight to Brus Laguna, or a day-long truck taxi to Batalla. The latter was the cheapest option, so naturally, by truck I traveled).

A yellow schoolbus dropped me off in the town of Tocoa, about 2 hours outside of La Ceiba and 1 hour to Trujillo. We stopped along the highway, where a group of pickup trucks anxiously waited to call dibs on us. The tour operator I traveled with had given me a specific name to ask for, so when I asked one of the drivers if he knew where Señor So-and-So was, he said, "It's me!" I thought, "Wow, that was easy!" We drove into the central market, where we waited for other passengers and packages to fill the truck beds until they piled to dangerously high levels. About an hour of lingering later, another man revealed that he was, in fact, Señor So-and-So, and that my driver was, in fact, not. The second guy was actually working for Señor SAS but introduced himself as such anyway. Regardless, I stayed put, because we were all heading to the same place anyway. Both later insisted that I follow a pack of white hippies and speak to them in English to try and lure them into our trucks (more on the foreigners later).

My fellow passengers were quite a colorful bunch. The first I met was a tall, pot-bellied Idahoan with a perpetual smile and ruddy face. Not even five minutes from introduction, he explained that he was in Honduras scouting out potential properties to buy because, he said unironically, that in 2011 that United States would collapse into a police state and all its citizens would be forced into Nazi-like concentration camps. I think he took my incredulous expression as belief and fear, so when I said, "Oh," he exclaimed, "I KNOW!!!" Despite my belief that he was the worst of all hick farmers, he was a financial trader. His client was the other man in the truck, who was helping Mr. Apocalypse look for land while dishing out racist comments on Obama and complaining about the government wanting to touch his money.

The third man was No. 2's Honduran friend and their fixer for the trip. Unfortunately I had the displeasure of sitting on his lap for the entire 6-hour trip from Tocoa to Batalla, which involved the driver speeding as fast as possible, flying over potholes and speed bumps before ultimately zigzagging across the beach once the highway ended. Things got really weird when lightly stroked my shin and stated that, "Yo quiero una gringa" ("I want an American girl"), and I had to fight back to urge to punch him/vomit on him/cry. Sexual harassment aside, at least I wasn't riding in the bed of the truck on a wood plank, with the only safety belt being the grip of your hands. It would have also sucked to have been the 3-year-old child whose mother sent him without a chaperone, and who laid down on a pile of packages for the entire ride.

We ended at a boat landing in the tiny Garífuna town of Batalla. I forked over L500 (or $10) and, this time, I actually found the boat driver assigned to me by the tour company. About half an hour later, enough time for me to pee in a roofless latrine and gather my gear, my motley crew and I boarded onto a cayuko, a motorized canoe with removable wood benches and a propensity to threaten to tip over. Two more glorious sedentary hours later, we arrived at the indigenous Miskito village of Raista in the Laguna de Ibans. The town has a few jungle hikes in the area, but since I arrived in the late afternoon, I settled for lingering around the Ecolodge - considered one of the best in the entire Mosquitia region, and I agree. The lodge is built from wood planks, has a thatched palm roof and stands on stilts. Each room has a private nook of the shared wraparound balcony and - the kicker - modern bathrooms. The L-shaped strip of rooms is attached by a small footbridge to the shared facilities, which have private stalls for clean toilets that flush AND have seat covers, real sinks with soap and wall mirrors, plus private stalls for cold-water showers. This is paradise. The rooms were very cozy too, and the mosquito netting managed to fulfill some previously unknown princess fantasy of mine.

In retrospect, bringing a book (or any kind of reading material) would've been a great idea for an area with no electricity and limited activities. Instead, I just stared into space and later took a walk through "town." The single dirt path led me past a jumble of similar-looking wood plank homes on stilts, roaming cattle and poopy chickens, a mango farm and a couple of contradictions. La Mosquitia is heralded as some Neolithic society 100% removed from the modern world. It is certainly a world away from what I call home, but still, plastic Coke bottles and empty foil chip bags littered the path just like any decent town in Latin America. A flat screen TV flashed images of raunchy music videos from inside a dilapidated, one-room house as a weathered old man in a dirty tank top watched from his seat on a hammock. A motorcycle even zipped past me and the cows at one point.

In the past couple of decades, La Mosquitia has become a prime drop spot for South American drug runners moving their goods up north. The region is largely autonomous, and so spread out and vastly unmonitored that it's fairly easy to get in and get out. I wondered if the unusually bizarre luxuries like the TVs and motorcycles that I saw could have anything to do with it.

Finally, it was time for dinner in the comedor, or informal dining setting. I shared a surprisingly tasty meal of spaghetti with black beans with an anthropology student, who is in Raista for a year to study lobster divers for her dissertation, and a traveling family from Oklahoma, who apparently go to awesome places together every summer break. I also ran into the white hippies again - two Polish men and a Chilean lady, all in their late 20's - and we arranged for them to join my 6-hour boat ride to Las Marías. Back in my room, the complimentary matches were too damp to light, so I laid in the dark for a while before I forgot about the roaches crawling on the ground below.