Re-Post of my Honduras Adventure

I was wrong, Honduras is not a dream come true...
... Syracuse is a nightmare I just woke up from!


Thursday 3/6 -
I almost stayed up all of Wednesday night out of excitement and glee. We ended up being late to the bus a bit anyway, because I was so flustered. The airports are a blur of bland colors and grumpy rich women. My first step off of the plan in Honduras was amazing. The sky was clear and the heat hit me like a wall. I was terribly over dressed and at loose ends for a bit, but it worked out alright after a few minutes when I got my pants off. Fito arrived just as we did, and we had the chance to go to the bathroom and change some dollars for Lempiras while he picked up his checked luggage. We took a big tour bus from the San Pedro Sula airport to Hotel Sherwood in Tela. On the way we drove through El Progresso, 'town of shopping' according to Teddy. He told us that we would return there on our way to Copan at the end of the trip. Everything seemed so luscious and hot to me. The mountains are steep and immediate in that part of Honduras. There was slash and burn farming taking place in the river valley we were driving through, and bananas wrapped in plastic to keep in the fungicide. We passed a horse and cart on the highway. Everyone's houses are in little compounds with low concrete walls and high fences around them. It's hard to tell what they're keeping in or out. Everything is so green! There are not many broad-leaf forests in Honduras, Ted told us as we drove along. One of the reasons that houses are fenced in is that three years of squatting on a plot of land gives you land rights for that place. There are Pepsi adds everywhere. The streets of Tela were not designed for a big tour bus. I would be a little surprised if they were designed at all.
8:30 PM (after Jill face-planted in the ocean), Hotel Sherwood, Tela. I'm in paradise! On an 88 degree day, the ocean in warmer than the breeze! There are green coconut trees and tropical pines swaying in the balmy wind and a one-man band playing the keyboard and guitar perfectly in complement to the surf. Doug and I are chilling in my room for a bit before bed. I'm rooming with Sarah. She's so awesome. Hooray for girls without body taboos! There's a computer where I could log in to life, but who wants that? I did use it to find out what time sunrise is, so I can get up and see it. If Sarah doesn't have an alarm capability, I might use my computer to wake myself up.
I ate fish tonight! It went really really well. It was chicken-y but with a small fish edge. Quite good, especially with rice and beans. I might make it to being a Peruvian after all!! This has been amazing so far. I'm so excited for tomorrow!


Friday 3/7 -
Walked on the beach this morning while the sun rose behind me. There was a fair amount of pebbles and driftwood, but no glass. I found a tiny piece and saved it for my dad. Breakfast included avocado! Delicious! I'm a tiny bit overfull. We're going to a national park (Punta Sal in the Jeanette Kawas National Park) featuring wetlands and mangroves of about 6000 hectares. Jeanette Kawas was assassinated for her efforts to protect the area. Tela was a ghost town before tourism took off (because Dole moved its headquarters away). The river we crossed on our way into Tela gets pollution from tons of cities. There are developers trying to copy Cancun in Tela with a new golf course and four new hotels in a protected wetland. The government moved the Jeanette Kawas park boundaries to accommodated this. The development also goes through a Garifuna village, but 60 percent of the employees would be from outside of Tela for their language and skills. On our boat ride to Punta Sal, we stopped on a little beach to see some howler monkeys in fig trees. We saw a grey heron. We had to stop and order lunch on our boat ride because the place we're eating at has no phone. We just saw an osprey!
I didn't take notes on the Garifuna village we visited, Triunfo de la Cruz, so this is from memory. We arrived in our bus at a restaurant of sorts run by a Garifuna ambassadoress. This beautiful woman gave us a tiny sample of the local firewater and promised us some dinner. We walked along the beach with one of her daughters, who answered some of our questions. Those of us who knew spanish were rusty (except Fito, of course) and the rest of us had not had any time to learn, so we didn't learn as much as we could have from young Katie. We saw ditches from between the houses leading out to the beach. As far as I could understand, water treatment and wastewater treatment were minimal or nonexistent in the village. Everyone was very nice, and another of our hostesses children followed us around the village as we strolled. Dinner was a delight, more fish in a delicious soup. I didn't quite have the hang of eating it, but three meals (lunch was also fish) in two days certainly helped. Actually we had fish almost the whole time we were along the coast. I used the spork that Becky bought for me and forgot it there! :'( I hope that it is currently going to good use. After dinner we went back to the Hotel Sherwood and milled for a bit and then we went out.


Saturday 3/8 -
7AM, Hotel Sherwood, Tela. We ARE the dance party. Last night, we (minus Becky, Scott, Fito, and Ted) went looking for fun. It was a struggle for a while, but eventually we found an empty discoteca and jammed and grooved and had tons of fun! When we got out, it had started to rain, and I got rinsed a bit on our walk home. I was SO sweaty. Doug is so much fun to dance with! Everyone was really wonderful. We are so silly together. This morning we got Travel Guides, and I'm going to catch up on my Spanish ASAP. For now it's time to do a little note-taking on the Garifuna village and start my design. Oh, by the way, I ate more fish! I had fish for lunch and dinner yesterday, faces and all. I didn't eat that part, but it was there. It's going to be OK. I can be Peruvian. Now I need to learn to cook fish, but I'm not going crazy just yet.
In the morning, in the rain, we went to Lancetilla Botanical Gardens. They were founded as an experimental station for banana and african palm plants. It's the second-largest botanical gardens in the world, and we only visited their arboretum. Originally the park was run by Dr. Popenoe, whose wife died from eating a sometimes poisonous fruit from one of his trees. We learned a lot about how forestry is being practiced and promoted in Honduras today, as well as the names of dozens of trees, from which I'll spare you.
10PM, The Lodge at Pico Bonito, La Ceiba. My room is beautiful but Doug is unhappy and that brings me down. I want him to love this place as much as I do. The park is gorgeous! The tiny slice I have seen so far is amazing. Lush and verdant and exotic to my eye. It has rained steadily and intensely since last night, and the river next to the Lodge is swollen and incredible. The available energy is crazy. Trees are crazy here, too! They take a quarter of the time to mature that ours do. We ate lunch at a gas station. Just wait, inside it was clean and had the feeling of a mid-scale restaurant - buffet style. The third layer, the back of the restaurant opened to a beautiful area that we didn't visit because they were preparing it for a wedding! Imagine getting married at the Texaco. It could be pretty schnazzy, so it seems.


Sunday 3/9 -
I held off writing in my journal for a day due to exhaustion and incredible amounts of hormonal grumpiness that it took me forever to shake off. We went to Pepe's river house, but he wasn't home. Dougie and I walked to El Najarano and then back to the Jungle Cafe for dinner. Strange to be welcomed by an Aussie to a German restaurant in the jungle of Honduras. But wonderful. Poor Kerry got sick on the way back from that. Pineapples are bromeliads, which means that they grow up in trees. This can be a symbiotic or parasitic relationship. Aside from the fact that they never get taller than a meter or so, and most of that is leaves, they're basically what you'd expect. I don't know why I assumed they grew in trees, but apparently it's a common misunderstanding. If you grow them on the ground, you need to basically use sand and drop the water table a few feet to keep them in a tree-crotch environment. Not particularly good for the land, especially not when you coat it with plastic to prevent competition and add in fungicide and pesticide to the extra runoff. But damn, they can be so tasty! Just don't eat so much that your face burns for a couple of days. Not that anyone in our group would do that... Oh yeah, never mind. Anyway, look for organic or agroforestry grown pineapples instead of they Dole disastrous ones.

Monday 3/10 -
6PM, The Lodge at Pico Bonita, La Ceiba. It's been a full two days. It drained us. I'm at low ebb. Yesterday we went to Cuero y Salado National Park and went on a boat ride up the river to see wildlife. We saw some really intimidating crocodillos and some amazingly beautiful morphos. I really enjoyed being on the river and in the edge of the mangrove wetlands. We spent a few hours out there. Our conveyance to and from the park was a rickety tram with a Ford engine (from La Union). We saw a production operation for cassava bread. They peel, wash, shred, squash, dry, and cook it. That's it; just the cassava root on a hot griddle and no grease. I don't understand the physics or chemistry, but I'm impressed. I finally learned how pineapples grow. They are bromeliads. Good times. Trees still confuse me. Hopefully any design I make will involve only limited trees, because I remember now how I nearly failed dendrology. Not so excellent. Today we went to Curla, the agroforestry school in La Ceiba. There was a student from the school with us for our dendro lesson, and he was very cowboyed out. Manuel had boots, buckle, belt, hat, and knife in boot-shaped case. Pretty hot, if you like caballeros. Dendrology class was long and I couldn't focus well. I had beef broth for lunch and it was just like my dreams: bitterly disappointing. When we were at Curla I chewed a coca leaf and ate a cacao seed. In case you're not a tropical dendrology student, those would be the initial forms of cocaine and chocolate, respectively.


Tuesday 3/11 -
7AM, The Lodge at Pico Bonito, La Ceiba. After lunch yesterday, we went to see a Dole pineapple plantation. I was intimidated. I'm such a wimp. I need to go outside my comfort zone without planning for weeks or having done something before. I need to get more involved in the group. ASAP. Right now I need to get breakfast so we can get this river survey underway.
1:30PM, bus from La Ceiba to Olanchito. Cowboys from Curla aside, I was pretty freaking grumpy yesterday. It sucked. But a quick dip or two in a river were helpful, and a hot shower was magic. Doug was ever so patient. He's such a sweetheart, and I really appreciate having him on the trip.
Banans grow in a very strange way. They're related to corn, basically an overgrown grass. The leaves are huge, and they grow up, fruit, and die in the course of a year. Since they're root-sprouters, they can continue to produce bananas for many years. The fruiting body consists of a stalk with a large flower (about 6-7 inches long closed up) at the end. This stalk is probably a meter long, and when the bananas grow out of it below the flower, it bends over under its own weight and hangs down, with the flower at the bottom pointing to the ground. The bunches of bananas get covered with bags to prevent the pollinator that made them possible from biting them and leaving little black marks. The bags also keep the pesticides in and are used in a system to indicate appropriate shipping times for optimal delivery ripeness. Unless you're living in a tropical country where you can get a banana or plantain off of a tree in your back yard, you should probably avoid them. They need a lowered water table to grow, and the plastic waste and pesticide use is just a bit over the top.


Wednesday 3/12 -
1:30PM, Hotel Olanchito, Olanchito. Yesterday rocked hard. We surveyed a river (Rio Corinto) in the morning. It was so much fun. Wow, I love water. I was measuring the curvature of the river. I fell full-in three or four times and my Rite-in-the-Rain notebook was OK. Doug and I went hiking after. I'm a weakling, though, so we didn't finish our loop attempt. It was a lot of fun, though. We got back and relay-raced in the pool with Hannah, Kelly, Paul, and Kerry. Whee!
While I'm all for preserving the Honduran Emerald hummingbird, I still don't appreciate bird watching. Actually, I think I like bird watching less now than I did before. However, the very dry forest was a neat experience. Yes, that's the name, very dry forest. Anyway, we saw a small well-run dairy farm and the very dry forest. I got dehydrated and grumpy and over-sunned. A river surveying trip solved that right up. I love being in rivers. There were quite a few Olanchito folks staring at our crazy antics, shaking their heads to themselves. Julio drove our bus right into the river!! We had to survey around him while he scrubbed it clean.

Thursday 3/13 -
7AM, bus from Olanchito to La Ceiba. I'm starting to get behind on journaling. I'm too susceptible to the lull of the bus. Last night the doctors were celebrating, or maybe it was the teachers. Whichever, I karaoked with Russ, "I Will Survive." I can NOT sing well. It was pretty glorious. At dinner, I started with a cup of Sex on the Beach (followed by Chafed Grundle) and everything was funny. Jill and I had eye sex and the food was delightful. That morning we had been in the very dry forest preserve looking for Honduran Emerald hummingbirds. Last night and the night before we ate at Erica's resturant, "El Meson" (Fito's sister). Fito is pretty awesome. He knows everyone and everything about conservation efforts on the north coast and Aguan Valley in Honduras. His sister is hot, sings well, cooks better, and danced with us last night. I looooove dancing. We had so much fun. I danced until I could no longer breathe, then Doug walked me back to the hotel and we cuddled a little. Such an amazing night! I love river surveys with appropriate technology. Those were so much fun. Wet, cool, and useful. I worked with Steph on Tuesday and Doug, Scott, Kerry, Russ, Otis, and Steph yesterday. Our group is awesome. Ted is very perceptive and subtle. I like it. In Utila (where we're going today), I might room with Dougie. I think I've done enough in the professional appropriate relationship vein for the trip. So what am I missing? Pretty much just the fact that I need to be more social, but last night was a good start. If I do room with Doug, I'll try to avoid spending the rest of my time with him. It's just so nice to hold his hand or touch his knee and generally be together. Becky has been off lately, but overall I believe she's having fun. We roomed together in Pico Bonito with Kelly and Hannah. I was too grumpy to appreciate it. In Olanchito, I roomed with her again, and last night we chatted until I zonked. That was excellent. Now the bus wins and I'm zonking again.

Friday 3/14 -
10:30PM, Colibri Hill Resort, Utila, Bay Islands. "Were you guys having a moment?" Un poco. Yesterday, we rented a boat to take us out to Water Key, where we lounged on our own tropical paradise. The water here is amazing. I got too much sun, but it was worth it. Snorkeling was new for me, but I had fun. We looked at the coral reef all morning today, then saw an iguana or three after lunch. I tried to get a picture for Schalkie, but pretty much failed. We hiked across the island after that, then hiked home in the fading light. Lots of tropical paradise and hiking today. It was about perfect. Utila is a 24/7 vacation, even sometimes if you live and work here. Our hostess at the hotel, Jo, said she loves it here. She was truly friendly and welcoming. The hotel is beautiful. I can see the Caribbean Sea from my hammock on the porch. There's a flowering vine wrapped up the pillars and the moon is so bright it seems to be in front of the clouds.

Saturday 3/15 -
We traveled much of the day. The ferry departed Utila at 7:20AM, and we met up with the EWBers in La Ceiba. Julio was off, so Miguel drove us around. Mauricio showed up to ensure that we were OK one more time. We were his first customers and I'm not sure Fito was so pleased with that. Anyway, we ate at the Texaco where the wedding had taken place. This time we got to go in the back and admire the awesomeness. We took a large group picture there, too. We stopped in El Progresso, but I wasn't excited about anything in the shop we visited. The rest of the way was pretty much bus sleeping and settling into Copan. We went around town and shopped a little. I don't remember buying anything, but I'm sure I did.

Sunday 3/16 -
7:45AM, Casa de Cafe, Copan Ruinas. Yesterday we just traveled all day. First the walk to the ferry, then the ferry, then the bus forever. We rode with the EWBers from La Ceiba to Tela, and ate at the Texaco again. Copan is effing gorgeous! It's a sprawling village or a small town. No Julio on yesterday's drive, he's on break. We'll get him again Tuesday for the drive to SPSula. I'm rooming with Doug, which is nice. We're definitely getting closer now. Today we're going to see coffee plantations and a butterfly and orchid farm. Hopefully, I'll get to go hiking today. We're getting close to the end and I want to enjoy every single second. Ted is amazing, the kids are amazing, Fito is a delight! Our dynamics are really good right now. People feel good.

Monday 3/17 -
4:10PM, Casa de Cafe, Copan Ruinas. Happy St. Patty's Day! Not such a big deal in Copan, but we're excited on our own. I should have brought my 'Kiss Me, I'm Irish' tee down. We saw Mayan ruins this morning; they were beautiful! The intricacy boggles my mind. I wish I could have seen it in full color. My spanish is finally improving on our last day. Next time, I'll be ready. Now we're going down/up town to go shopping!
10:30ishPM, Casa de Cafe, Copan Ruinas. I went to my first-ever rodeo tonight at the suggestion of Sid, who works in Casa de Cafe. How awesome? Even more fun, perhaps, because I couldn't understand well. Lo siento, no entiendo. That's actually all of the spanish that I know. Sigh. This summer, Jess will help me. We'll go to Peru or Ecuador. I would adore to stay with Maria's family for a few weeks. I'm being lame on our last night in Honduras, because that's how I roll. Oh well. I had fun, and I don't feel well enough to keep drinking, so I'll just chill in this fancy hammock for a bit. I hope Kerry comes back to teach me step-dancing. Tomorrow is certainly going to be an adventure.

Tuesday 3/18 -
Ew, traveling. Ew, 3 hour layovers. Ew, Syracuse. Ew, checking my email and voicemail again. Ew, non-tropical weather.