Trujillo
Trip Start
Oct 10, 2006
1
27
110
Trip End
Ongoing
Trujillo***,
Honduras
Thursday, January 25, 2007
The wild East of Honduras, Trujillo is noted for being the start of the Mosquitia which is home to the Hondurean Miskito race who are sposed to be very different altogether from the Hondureans themselves. The area really is a land away from land where the only way to navigate one`s ways is through the means of boats. They`ve recently built an airport in Palacios but it would have defeated the purpose if you flew there.
It would have been a bit of an adventure to eh er venture into the Mosquitia but it was one that we decided to refrain from. The idea of more mosquitoes, sandflies and every insect imaginable including the kissing insect that kiss you on the lips when you`re sleeping and give you the incurable Chagas disease, was just insufferable at the time. Plus it would have resulted in a huge amount of money as EVERYTHING from petrol to food costs a bomb and more cos it all has to be imported etc
So we went to Trujillo instead which is considered the last point of land. It was a cool little place...the people there were typically Carribean. These dark skinne folks were tres laid back, moving in Carribean time which seems to be even slower than Latino time..if possible. The women walked round with baskets of cocunut bread on their heads, wearing the colourful head scarves that you see on the Jamacian people on the Malibu advertisements.
The beaches were once again quite nice but destroyed by litter.
We also went on a day trip to Santa Rosa de Aguan which is novel turned film called "Mosquitia coast" starring Harrison Ford was set. The people there were very, very friendly despite suffering hugely at the hands of Hurricane Mitch in 2002. The damage done by the hurricane is still hugely evident in the rumble and shacks of houses that have still to be rebuilt.
We landed there when it was "women`s day" in Honduras so I got to see these women shake their "sista" hips...There was a load of them approaching me congratulating me on being a woman calling me "hermana" ..sister in Spanish!
Of course, the sad fact is that no matter how much these women and their counterparts in other parts of Honduras shake their hips on this day, they have little else to celebrate. The stark reality for many women in Honduras, and in Nicaragua, is that their fate is to marry at 13 or 14, 16 at the latest and bare children. I got chatting to a lady who was in charge of a community programme in the area and she told me that AIDS was becoming a huge problem, even here. And the disease usually came from the women`s husbands who were obviously seeking pleasures elsewhere.San Pedro Sula which is the transport hub of Honduras (we changed buses here twice) is the worst affected area in all
of Central America
It is indeed heart rendering to see these Hondurean young girls, generally quite pretty in slim, fashionable jeans chatting with each other whilst carrying two kids in their arms...but that can happen anywhere,,,imagine to think that in every thirty of these young girls, at least one probably is HIV positive.
We moved on from Trujillo and headed to the Bay Islands for a spot of diving....
