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.