Journal: Gracias and Celaque Mountain, San Juan, Erandique, Lago Yojoa at Honduyate
Tuesday 4th October
I did the hot springs in style today. I turned up late in the day and the Canadians – who were still supposed to be up a mountain – were sitting in a hot pool polishing off a smooth bottle of rum. They had spent one night up the hill in the rain, on some very badly designed, lumpy wooden beds, and decided to head straight back down without even reaching the mountaintop. But that’s great news for me – some company! Between the four of us, my new English friend Fiona, and our driver, Carlos, we finished off two bottles of rum and turned into prunes. Erm, yes I did say driver. He was wasted, and getting the 6 km’s back into town was a little scary, particularly when at one point he drove off the side of the track. He had the sense to plough on and bump the truck back up again though, and we all made it home in one piece.
Wednesday 5th October go to photos
Since I woke up at 6:30am, I thought “hey, why not go for a great big hike”. In most places I have ended up staying longer than planned, why change that now? I found Fiona and her brother and we were trying to sort out a lift to the national park (Carlos wasn’t answering his phone – surprise!) when brother realized he had lost his waterproof poncho. He got in a right strop and decided he didn’t want to come anyway. I made it my mission to find him a new waterproof and drag him up there, but in the whole town the best we could find was a second hand bright pink poncho designed for a teenage girl. I thought it was hilarious, but we didn’t want to risk making his day any worse so we left without him.
After the faffing we didn’t actually start walking until 10ish. That is extremely slack, and to make up for it we walked bloody quickly for six and a half hours to get round the path and back in time. A stunning hike – the view from the peak we climbed was over thick white blanket in the valley, across to far away hills that you could just make out through more wispy cloud. You could totally understand why the highest point of this mountain is called “window to heaven”.
Thursday 6th October
This is the first time I have had to wait for a bus in over a year. Usually around these parts you just jump straight on. I am heading for San Juan, another Lenca village that supposedly has some new tourist stuff going on. Even though the waiting crowd jump in front of every truck that comes past, no one is stopping and I don’t think we will be getting anywhere very quickly.
Today I am finally leaving Gracias and it is a good day for it – sunny and clear, and for the first time even Celaque mountain was visible and not completely buried in cloud. Oh and I saw some ant action worthy of a nature program. I didn’t realize they helped each other carry stuff, but I guess they were really desperate for this chunk of last nights pizza because about fifteen of them were around the edge, and it actually moved in the right direction.
Anyway…
I never saw a bus, but eventually got a ride on a pick-up. This may sound exciting – traveling the back roads in the country side on the back of a truck- but when the pavement runs out, and your mouth and ears are full of dust it is not so fun. After being lurched out off my bench too many times and rained on I arrived in San Juan and met Gladys.
She single handedly runs the tourist operation here and it looks pretty good. They have a folder of activities, with photos of people looking like they are having a lovely time doing activities such as roasting coffee, making clay tiles and horse riding. The hiking options included the “haunted canyon”, or “the waterfall of the guitar playing elves”. In the end I just went to the internet café, ate, and watched a coffee roasting demonstration. The demo wasn’t that exciting I have to say. You put the beans on the hot plate and stir - for about an hour. But give me a coffee plant and I now know exactly what I have to do to make it into the drink.
Friday 7th October
After a very quiet night (the only places that make any noise around here are the evangelical churches, but a lot of that is just shouting and chanting rather than singing) I tried the “hot water” shower in the bathroom of Gladys’ mums house. Guess what? No water at all. Why is it that all the hot water claims end up being worse than the standard outside shower (a tap seven feet off the ground).
I felt breakfast was a bit of a rip off at forty lempira (I usually pay twenty - $1ish) and I didn’t need the speech about God going with me when I left, but I was pleased to step straight on to a bus.
A tour guide last night had warned me about a landslide on the way to Erandique, and had given me detailed instructions on how to take a different route so I gave it a try. I ended up spending a lovely three hours at a road junction just outside San Miguelito waiting for a ride before ending up back where I started in San Juan. According to my latest friend there is no landslide and this is my best option of finding a lift.
After finally arriving in Erandique my gut instinct is to leave again as soon as possible. It is very important, therefore, to complete my missions in time to catch the 5am bus tomorrow. I manage to find a hotel room, buy opals, find a guide to a viewpoint and set off on a hike in about 20 minutes. My guide is a thirteen year old girl on the way home for a funeral party, and the aim of my walk is to see the hill “Pena de Cerquin”, (this is the hill I was trying to find when I ended up going to the wrong one from Caiquin). The hill is the location of Lempira’s great stand against the Spanish (he held them off for a short time before being tricked and killed…but still managed to get the national currency named after him), but after a slippery uphill trudge in which both me and my guide fall over, I stop kidding myself that the heavy mist is going to clear any time today. I look towards the hill and see nothing but white sky. I came all the way here on some pointless mission to see this ****ing hill, and it has evaded me once again. Before turning back my guide invites me to the funeral party, but I can’t say I really fancy it. The walk down is more enjoyable, and rather than just slipping around on the clay ground I appreciate how colourful it is. I would be exaggerating if I added green and blue to the list of colours, but pretty much everything else is there.
After a shower I track down the gringo living in town (Peace corps worker) and get a guided tour. The three churches are fairly blackened, there is indeed an enormous tree broken in two by lightning, and the statue of Lempira gives a rather strange likeness. He was a stocky man with purple lips apparently.
Libby also takes me to the “bad” side of town. The people on our side say that once you cross the bridge you are among delinquents - village life eh. The other man who sells opals lives over here, and after some hard bargaining I buy some rocks. They look pretty in the water, but when I examine them later, a white dust has already settled over the few little bits I though might actually be opals.
Lots of the villages in this area have hotels, but they are not for tourists they are for “business people” which around here means people trying to sell stuff. Since the buses arrive in the afternoon and leave first thing they have to spend the night. They charge per person, rather than per room, which is great news for lone travelers because, for once, it is just as cheap as being a pair. My favorite hotel guest was the man with the shelf. He was walking around town with a six foot shelving unit over his shoulder. He had hitched with it all the way here with the hope of selling it.
At dinner Libby shares some local gossip with me. Last week the bus (that I am going to take tomorrow) got stuck in the mud half way up a hill. The men got off and pushed!! But apparently this worked and they got it moving again. A different bus was not so lucky and had to be dragged out by a tractor. In deep mud the concept of moving forward using wheels goes to pot, and the tractor ended up dragging it out completely sideways. If only the little American kids who used to ride this bus to school could see what it is attempting now!
She also told me about her Honduran boyfriend, who was special because he wasn’t just after a visa. Unfortunately after his own application fell through it turned out that he was just after a visa and he suggested they get married and move to the states. He offered to pay 1000 dollars if the marriage didn’t work out. He got binned.
Even after dinner I managed a record early night of 8:30.
Saturday 8th October. go to photos from these days (you have to scroll down a bit)
The bus did get stuck. I woke up (at 6am I am capable of sleeping anywhere!) and noticed we were moving backwards. Odd. After a few minutes we changed went forwards again, at a hell of a pace towards a corner. Around the corner all became clear, there was an uphill section of mud. Just mud everywhere, about two foot deep. We made it about half way up before the back started to swing out and something started smoking. I was looking forward to getting photos of people pushing, but a week on they were more organized. We just had to trudge 300m uphill through the mud with all our stuff, and another bus was waiting at the top. The locals don’t care about mud though, even when they are wearing their best clothes it is just expected that they will get dirty.
After several buses the day ended perfectly next to Lago Yojoa. What with all my deep cultural experiences I felt justified in going to stay at Honduyate Marina with the “amiable Brit, Richard joint” (according to the book). He wasn’t there, but the cabin was cute, the lake was beautiful and the bar was great. It was like a sailing club back home, random signs and pictures of boats, and a proper wooden bar with stools, and a bell. My plan here is a day and two nights to read a book, before I go to Copan Ruinas. I think I came to the right place.
Sunday 9th October
Sitting by the lakeside in the early morning light I was watching fish, birds, and the locals paddling around in wooden rowing boats with fishing line. If it wasn’t for the trucks roaring by on the highway it would be idyllic. I mean it’s pretty good anyway, but you do notice the noise.
The reading is going well until I meet Richard and his son James and get chatting. It’s true, Richard is amiable, and he has tea at 4pm every day, to which I was invited. He seems disappointed that I am only staying one more night, and as an incentive to keep me he says the price of my room will half every night starting tomorrow.
During the afternoon rain I watch dvd’s with James and am feeling fairly certain I will extend my stay.
There are some other foreigners who have been trapped by this place, Bob rents a house and Carlos is living in a cabin whilst he builds his retirement home on the hill behind the Marina. I was under the impression that hill was a national park, but I guess not. Carlos kindly takes me rowing on the lake, but we only get as far as the view to his house and then we stop. I have met many ex-pats out here, and I can safely say they are not all like Carlos. Here are some of the things he said:
“My grandson is three and has three pistols, one for every year.”
“I’m seeing a girl down the road, she’s cute as a button, less than 5 feet, and young – well over 18 obviously. I tip her twenty lempira ($1 ish) every time I go to the restaurant she works in.”
“I’m just a tourist really, Richard sorted everything out for me. Some people say you have to invest money into the country in order to become a resident, but you can get around that.”
“I’m seeing four girls at once”
“Visit my family? I love it here why would I go back to the states?”
“I wouldn’t live in Mexico if you gave me the damn place, I don’t like Mexico or the Mexicans. The Hondurans are much easier to work with.”
“I pay, erm, 170 Lempira (less than ten dollars) a day for the two men who are building my house”
“Richard is too generous, he has eleven people working for him and paying their salaries costs him”
“Reagan was the best president we ever had”
“I used to teach the scriptures every Sunday to my girls”
“The Hondurans and the US military have a strong bond. We did a great job getting rid of the Sandistas we only killed about 1% of the population”
“There’s my house isn’t it great”
“You should see the view from my house, it’s incredible” (x 3)
His t-shirt says (with garish pictures) “I don’t drink water fish fuck in it. Greetings from Prague”
Monday 10th Ocober
Yes, I stay another day. James, Richard and I go to visit Edwin, one of the boat boys, on his day off. As we are driving up the road to his village there are people waiting for a lift. Richard doesn’t stop because he can see the taxi guy coming down the hill to make some more money with his truck. After saying hi to the family, Edwin takes us to the river and shows us places to jump off the rocks and swim. The water is clear and beautiful, the little boys with us are lovely, and up here in the hills you can see the local coffee plantations and citrus orchards.
After picking some oranges we head back down and give a lift to the five people waiting. Richard goes out of his way to drop them where they want to go, and obviously doesn’t charge for the “jalon”. After sensing yesterday that Carlos was here to use the cheap facilities and not much more, it is great to see these two British guys chatting away to locals as equals and doing little things to help them out.
Just to sing the praises of Richard a little bit more…. he employs his staff on a rota basis so more people can earn a weekly wage from him, and next weekend a group of thirty orphans from the capital are coming to stay on the lake for free.
When I asked him if he was affected by Hurricance Mitch in 1998, he replied “We had some great sailing”.
We have tea, more dvd’s and then the greatest fish’n chips I have had since leaving the UK, before discovering the disturbing fact that up to thirty thousand people just died in the earthquake in Kashmir. I knew it was bad, but not that bad.
Tuesday 11th October
I must have experienced a side of Honduras that most tourists miss today. I spent the morning doing errands in various hypermarkets with James. When you step through the automatic doors into Price Mart you say goodbye to Honduras. The café inside served only pizzas hot dogs and frozen yoghurt – no hint of a tortilla! They had bananas imported from the Caribbean (bananas are one of Honduras’ most important exports) and what really made me laugh was that they sold Nescafe. Good quality fresh coffee is cheaply available everywhere; in the villages it was easier to come by than water (although possibly less readily available than coca-cola), and was so good I even started to like the stuff.
The boys had given me a lift to San Pedro Sula to help me on my way to Copán Ruinas, but I wasn’t quite ready to say goodbye so I hung around helping with these errands before lunch. We ate in one of the posh places in town, and were obviously among important company as there were about six armed bodyguards hanging around.
I finally said goodbye and was dropped at the bus station in the heat. Altitude is everything in these parts. I know I’m always saying that, but SPS is down at sea level and it’s too much for me. After sitting on a bus for 40 mins without moving I start to wonder why. The first person told me there was a strike blocking the road. The second told me there was a landslide. The third told me there was a landslide and a strike. I was sweating too much trying to figure it all out. I got the distinct impression that there weren’t any buses so I went to an air-conditioned shopping centre sorry, mall, where I couldn’t buy water with my food. 7up or ridiculously sweet iced tea were the closest I could get.
Warning: imminent, poorly articulated rant. go back
So I ended up in the plaza. Yes this makes me a hypocrite, and yes I buy a designer shirt (in the sale) from a shop I am totally opposed to in a mall which is a perfect demonstration of how American culture is imposing itself wherever it can around the world. But the heat gets to me, and is it better to be a hypocrite sometimes and to act on what you believe in most of the time, or to not believe in or act on anything? My dilemma these days is that in theory the people of Honduras should have the right to go and buy American food in air conditioning. But what about me, I want baleadas, I have the right to get baleadas, and can I buy them here? Well yes, in the shopping centre I can, but in the hypermarket I couldn’t, and in the US I can’t, and in Mexico I can’t. And what if I want proper tacos (not Taco bell) when I am in the states, what about my right to that? So basically American culture is getting everywhere, but other cultures aren’t escaping their own countries. That’s what I have a problem with. And who uses the air conditioning anyway? The rich people. There’s no reason poor hot people shouldn’t go and hang around in their too (like me on that particular day), but then I suppose they would just have to leave and go back to their sweltering apartment/ bare concrete house/tarpaulin and corrugated iron shack. And why the fuck do price mart import bananas??