Honduras: 17 hours later...

There's nothing quite like crashing in bed at 1 a.m. after indulging at a wine-and-cheese engagement party, only to have to wake up at 4:30 a.m. to finish packing and get yourself to the airport. But I've never been one for an adequate night's sleep before a flight anyway.

When my cell phone alarm starting bleeping ominously this morning, I barrel-rolled out of bed, shoved some toiletries into my backpack, put on my embarrassingly gringo-esque weatherproof cargo pants and disintegrating tennis shoes and stumbled into the elevator. Fortunately my friend Azul and her boyfriend Salvador had offered to give me a ride, so I hopped in their backseat and passed back out for a bit. I made it to the gate just a few minutes before boarding time and settled into my seat on the plane to Panama City, which touched down at 11 a.m. - precisely 10 minutes before my connecting flight to Tegucigalpa was to take off. Somehow I managed to sprint across the airport to my gate and thrust my boarding pass at the airport lady just before they closed the door. A few of my fellow passengers stared nervously as I walked down the aisle panting heavily and smiling like I'd just won a million bucks.

Once I landed in Tegucigalpa, I paid a gummy old man in the parking lot $1 to find me a safe street taxi (is that an oxymoron?) to take me to the nearest bus station. Once the 2 p.m. bus to San Pedro Sula rolled into the one-company station at 2:30, we headed 4.5 hours northwest to Honduras' economic capital and third largest city. From there, Oscar, a taxi driver hired by the hostel I'm staying at, picked me up at the food court and took me to my dwelling place. Along the way, he assured me that Matt would find another girlfriend while he's away on Warped Tour. I countered that that would be impossible, as I'm (clearly) the best woman (girl?) to ever exist. He begged to differ, then laughed again at my imminent heartbreak and despair. I tried to impress him with my "...but I live in Mexico City!" line, but he countered that by saying that he hated Mexicans because all they do is kill, fight, do drugs and kill some more. All 100 million of them.

The hostel is a cozy place, and functional WiFi is possibly the hugest plus (besides free transportation to/from the bus station). As soon as Oscar dropped me off, I headed out into the well-lit middle class suburb where I'm at in search of dinner. I came across a three-story shopping mall and swung by the Sushi Itto to get some Japanese franchise goodness. I might've thought I was still in Mexico if all the waiters weren't wearing Honduran soccer jerseys and speaking in a Central American accent.

Tonight it's early to bed. Tomorrow it's early to rise and a crappy combi bus ride to Omoa.

Honduras: Pre-departure ranting

It's 9:30 a.m. on Thursday, June 17. This time tomorrow, I'll be making a layover in Panama City on my way to Tegucigalpa. In most of my traveling experiences, some pre-trip planning is required, but concrete itineraries are tough to pin down when you don't know what to expect or what you'll find. Although I generally get stressed in the days or hours leading up to the trip, I eventually find a way to relax (I call this way "wine"). Point being, I'm in the stressed out part of my trip.

The irony here is that I'm writing for a travel company that's geared toward 40 to 50-year-olds with steady incomes and presumably ample savings. As for me, my last year's income didn't reach the U.S. poverty line - which, strangely, put me on par with most middle-class Mexican heads of families. When I'm not being graciously afforded a free night's stay in a hotel or (hopefully...please God hopefully) on a packaged tour, I'll be traveling like a smelly hippie backpacker with a limited budget and three changes of clothes.

I've mapped out my itinerary for the first three cities along my Caribbean coastal route, but I didn't realize until now that just getting to the coast could be tricky in itself. After flying into the capital city's airport, I'll need to take a cab or a "colectivo" to the bus station in Comayagüela, a notoriously dangerous district in Tegucigalpa (yay!) From there, a 4.5-hour bus to San Pedro Sula, where I'll be spending the night in a hostel before taking a bus to Omoa and beginning my journey.

Money-wise, it's good that my schedule is restricted by my already-booked trip home to Ohio on July 15. I'm heading back out of Tegucigalpa on July 13, so I need to cover as much as I possibly can in this time frame. Dysentery, malaria or any other time-consuming illness is not an option, as I can't afford to lose any days (that and I don't want to get malaria).

It's now 9:50 a.m. Is it too early to start on that wine?

The magical town of Chipilo

Paul and I decided last weekend to take advantage of the sunny Sunday and set off on one last Mexican adventure before I head off for six weeks - four in Honduras, and two in the exotic state of Ohio. He'd heard about this strange little town just south of Puebla city where the residents are descendants of Venetian farmers who were invited by then-dictator Porfirio Díaz to get up out of their Italian poverty and come make some cheese in Mexico.

A slice of Italy in the heart of Mexico? Pues, vamos!

One 2-hour bus ride to Puebla later, we took an unexpectedly long ride into the town of Chipilo on a rickety, bouncy "pesero," the gray boxy buses from what is likely the 1970's and that chug puffs of sour-smelling toxins as they speed down streets and break suddenly for the ubiquitous speed bump. The pesero driver dropped us off at an Oxxo convenience store along the highway, and a nice young couple pointed us down a wide muddy alley, up around a corner and onto a road, then past a couple houses before we stopped upon a yellow-and-red cathedral. In many Mexican plazas and Italian piazzas, the largest church signifies the city center, a core from which life disperses infinitely outward. I really had to pee, so there was no time for questions such as "Where is the rest of the town?" or "Uh...is this it?"

We crossed the two-lane street in front of the church and zipped into the Italian Coffee Company café, a natural franchise selection for an Italian sister city, right? After nature ran its course, we zipped back across the street and headed right of the church and into an Italian restaurant recommended by the ICC barista. As I twirled my packaged pasta and tuna combo, and as Paul happily peeled rabbit meat from its little twig legs, we struck up conversation with the waitress. I'd read about "el centro" on my brief Google investigation earlier that morning, where all the young kids get together on Sunday afternoons, so I inquired - where is it? "It's here...this is the 'centro,'" she replied, bemused. A church, thoroughfare and a strip mall of six restaurants.

Would we have the time to explore it all in just one afternoon?

The waitress recommended us a great cheese shop within walking distance, so we took off down a very nondescript road. There were one-story houses, some painted in bright colors like any decent Mexican pueblo. There was a mystery pile of dirt and trash. When we came across signs for "Quesos de Luis," we followed the arrows around the corner and into a barn, where big mama cows and little lady cows munched happily at a trough. Our presence inspired no concern among the farmers there, so eventually we had to ask where the store was. We pushed past a plain white door and met Luis, who offered us manchego, quesillo (like string cheese) and natilla (creamy dessert goodness) from behind his refrigerated counter. Luis had fair skin, blue eyes and sandy blond hair. He responded with "chi" instead of "sí" and gave us a look like "Why in the Pope's name are you in Chipilo?" We polished off a cup of natilla back out in the barn amongst the poop-covered cows, then went off in search of our next discovery as the rain clouds rolled in.

Next up was "La Nave Italia," another cheese shop that also sold cured meats, homemade pastas, gelato and olive oil. [Ignore that four-year-old time stamp].

The lady who runs La Nave was another Venetian-looking blondie who was kind enough to humor my request to speak in her Venetian dialect. She rambled off a few things in her Italian-Spanish tongue, and explained that most of the town's 4,000 residents only speak Spanish to outsiders (i.e. us). Paul and I only ever saw menus, signs and church programs written in Spanish, but I never got to ask if the dialect had a written form as well.

Next on the guide book-worthy agenda was a glass of wine at the town's second Italian restaurant as we waited out the rain storm. Young Eurotrashy waiters took our order and swept up the fly carcasses on the floor. The town had a lot of flies, which is probably natural for a farming town, but when this restaurant tried to fumigate its interiors, it just made the flies a little, well, retarded. Either that or the flies genuinely enjoy spinning on their backs in endless circles like someone about to whop a piñata in half. The waiters said that they'd be cheering for Italy - not Mexico - in the World Cup, and when Paul told them that I'm Italian, one flour-covered man started speaking to me in Italian. Then I hung my head in shame and clarified, "sólo de ascendencia" ("only by descent"). This happens a lot.

We wandered around for about 10 more minutes trying to find some other gem when the pesero back into Puebla stopped in front of the church. Assuming that we'd seen all there was to see, we hopped on and headed back home.

Two documentaries/Shameless self-promotion

Two in-the-works documentaries that I'm indirectly and directly involved in:

The first is a feature-length film that Matt has been working on for the past few months. This past January, he spent nearly two weeks climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania with a film crew, an army of Tanzanian porters and two physically challenged athletes - Tara, an amputee with a prosthetic leg, and Erica, who became the first female paraplegic to summit the mountain. The production was organized by and made for the Challenged Athletes Foundation out of San Diego, and they'll premiere the documentary in California and Ohio in May. A full trailer and more info can be found at http://throughtheroofmovie.com/

The second is a short project Matt and I are working on to submit to the ViewChange Online Film Contest, which seeks documentaries reporting how international projects are working to complete any of the UN Millennium Development Goals to eradicate poverty. Once films are submitted, viewers will have the chance to vote for their favorite video from late April to early August. Naturally, I will send you a link where you can vote for OUR video, be it the best or otherwise :) We've selected maternal mortality as the topic of our documentary, as nearly 60 maternal deaths in 100,000 live births occur each year (compared with around 5 in the United States and in Canada). The kicker, however, is that more than 80% of these deaths are very preventable, meaning the woman probably wouldn't have died if she didn't live in Middle-of-Absolutely-Nowhere, México.

To fill you in a bit on the project, last weekend, the two of us traveled to San Cristóbal de las Casas, a beautiful colonial town in the southeastern state of Chiapas (and 3 hours from the Guatemala border). From there, we teamed up with Merit, the local director for Kinal Antzetik, an NGO that promotes maternal health in indigenous communities. She took us on a 2-hour, bumpy, swerving taxi and pickup truck ride to the small community of Carmen Zacatal, where we met with around 10 traditional midwives in the three-room, one-floor concrete home of one of the midwives. Through interviews we learned that these women are essentially the lifeline for pregnant women out there. A proper clinic is hours away, and many times families have to pay a hefty sum to hitch a ride. Other times, über-traditional husbands won't let the women leave the house, especially if it means a strange man will be searching her most intimate of regions. Most of the time, the midwives aren't paid for their work, but they do it anyway because they feel their profession is a God-sent calling.

However, groups like the one Merit works with - and midwives themselves - over the past few years have greatly improved the training and education of midwives through workshops and classes. This way, they can better attend to the women at home and also recognize warning signs, particularly those that require hospital care. Organizations are also working with hospitals to better incorporate indigenous patients and midwives, as many of these women are often turned away based on lingering discrimination and/or an overly-swamped staff and/or under-qualified doctors. The midwives in Carmen Zacatal in recent years have actually reduced maternal mortality to zero, as they very proudly stated.

The women were also very happy to have us follow them on their rounds, which meant us walking into a one-room house with a camera and boom pole and watching the midwife jostle around the patient's fetus from the outside. We even saw the baby's head as the midwife repositioned the body to make sure the niño exited the right way when nine months hit. Of the three mothers whose belly-massages we witnessed, all were my age (24) or younger, and all had two other children. There's nothing really alarming about this from a health perspective, it's just weird for me, as my situation dictates that I can hardly care for more than two houseplants, let alone a human being.

The rest of the trip was very laid back; we interviewed two experts on Saturday and formally interviewed Merit on Sunday. I was hoping to get footage of a house in San Cristobal where women can go to give birth in the care of midwives, but no one was there on Monday. So, instead I just decided to get a stomach virus and mope around town miserably all day until our 8:50 p.m. flight. Next stop on the UN documentary road trip is Guerrero, where hopefully we'll be able to show how traditional midwives and modern hospitals are working collectively to combat maternal mortality.

What happens without CVS

I lament to inform you all that I've developed an ouchy cold sore (it's not herpes!!) on the inside of my lip. In the U.S., I would simply walk or drive down to the nearby CVS and grab some fancy Blistex from off the shelves. In Mexico, I walked to the closest pharmacy and showed the lady behind the counter the a list of the main ingredients in said fancy Blistex. She produced some major cold sore ointment, but then told me I couldn't use it on my gums. Fortunately, the people in line behind me suggested I apply sodium bicarbonate (or baking soda, for idiotas like me) directly to the wound. I was then instructed to some weird little sub-pharmacy within the pharmacy where you can buy raw ingredients (perfect for any residential meth lab!). For 10 pesos (80 cents), this was Mexico's answer to the no-Blistex solution:

(Not so) Tropical Tryst

...bueno, it wasn't really a tryst since I went by myself, but that's the only alliteration I could come up with for the time being. The weekend of Valentine's Day, I decided to travel solo (for the first time) up to Xalapa, in the Caribbean state of Veracruz and about 4.5 hours northeast of Mexico City. A co-worker of mine had lived there for a year while studying, and another friend had also explored the area by himself a few months earlier, so I figured it'd be worth a shot to escape the weekend doldrums.

Saturday morning began with a 6 hour bus ride to Xalapa, as severe flooding in the State of Mexico from heavy rains several days earlier had basically made a lake in the middle of the highway. As we crossed into Veracruz, the hills became greener and the skies foggy. At first, I was hoping they were low-lying clouds because I was in a mystical, tropical cloud forest (!!). But, once the rain picked up, I realized it was just airborne gloom. When I stepped off the bus at the station around 3 p.m., the weather was in the high 50s with a 24-hour drizzle. I realize this doesn't sound nearly as bad as, oh, say 2 feet of snow, but I was expecting to be carried off on a Banana Boat or something. My plan for the day was just to walk around in the sunshine while soaking in some colonial charm, which is what I did, but with a raincoat and soaked tennis shoes instead. After searching around for the hostel, I finally found it, paid my 150 pesos and set down my pack. Then I rushed in a cab to reach the Xalapa Anthropology Museum before it closed. I observed Olmec monoliths and other unearthed goodies, including slanted and flattened skulls (which, I'm told, looked hot 2,000 years ago).

After walking through the plazas and narrow brick streets while ungracefully holding a giant sandwich and cup of coffee, I came back to the hostel for a power nap. My dormmates were three very nice girls from Quebec all on separate travels throughout Mexico. Later, I searched around the hostel for some Lonely Planet-recommended bars, which ended up being either closed or hidden. Instead, I found a big bar-restaurant replete with plenty of red-and-white, heart-shaped balloon sculptures and a cover band. Sipping some wine and reading a novel by Gabriel Garcia Márquez, all in all I had a decent evening alone.

The next morning, I woke up early to gulp down some free hostel coffee and a jam-smothered croissant, then I hopped on a street bus to a stop where I could catch a ride to Xico, a quiet town 20 minutes away that features waterfalls and coffee farms. However, once getting to the bus stop I realized I'd left my cell phone on my bed, so I had to go back, retrieve it, and repeat all steps listed above. It was still a tad chilly, but fortunately Sunday was dry and relatively sunny.

After hopping off the bus at Xico's main cathedral and stumbling around through the streets, I hitched a ride on the back of a motorcycle from a woman who works in Xalapa as a photojournalist. She took me to the trailhead, which I happy-go-luckily wandered down for an hour, picking ripe red coffee beans off the plants and dodging the occasional car that raced past me. Then I followed some muddy trails to the tall and thunderous Texolo waterfall, and further down to the much smaller Monjas waterfall. On my way back to the park entrance, I stopped to buy some macadamia nuts from a local coffee farmer who was selling fresh grounds from a styrofoam cooler resting in a wheelbarrow. As he smashed each individual nut with his hammer against the concrete, he went on to explain how he often gave marriage advice to young people and families in the community. For women, it's most important to pick a man who doesn't drink, smoke pot or cheat. For men, it's vital to find a woman who will run the house well and also not cheat.

Once back inside Xico, I sampled a few cough syrup-size plastic cups of "torito," the local variety of wine that still leaves me questioning if there are actually any grapes in it. With a near-empty stomach and seven samples down the hatch, I felt the need to purchase a 1.5-liter bottle of berry-flavored torito (which I have still yet to open). I grabbed a bus to Coatepec, an even quieter town halfway between Xico and Xalapa, and ate a tasty cheese enchilada lunch around the courtyard at a very charming (yet utterly empty) restaurant, where I also bought some organically grown coffee to take back home. After wandering through the plaza and perusing the artisan market, I was disheartened to see the small, souvenir-size bottles of torito that I could've bought instead. I was also impressed at my resistance when faced with coffee and cocoa treats of all stretches of the imagination. Back in Xalapa, I made a loop around Los Lagos, a manmade lake where families go to rollerblade, teenagers go to make out and creepy foreigners go to stroll. By 5:30, I was on a warm and dry coach bus home to D.F.

Condesa Market of Wonders

I had always been meaning to check out the Tuesday market in Condesa, but, like many other things (i.e. buying a bike and expanding my Spanish vocabulary), it had yet to come to fruition - until this afternoon. I needed a bunch of fruits and veggies for a little fiesta I'm hosting to welcome back my friends Nick and Emily, who reported from Haiti for the Wall Street Journal and as a freelancer, respectively, and Grant, who's heading there on Thursday to cover for various outlets. I decided that rather than buy the overpriced and gross produce from the Sumesa grocery store nearby, I'd take advantage of the half-hour break before I needed to zip on over to the office.

It was magical.

If I had had more than a mere 20 minutes to spend there, I probably would've stayed for hours, stolen my rent money back from Paul and bought everything within site. Fortunately, someone else has already spoken for this market, so read more on Mark Bittman's blog.