Sunday, July 11, 2010Today 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).
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