Gringo, peso
Trip Start
May 04, 2003
1
67
80
Trip End
Ongoing
We've been in Honduras two days and Nicaragua seems like ages ago. We've heard some not-so-good things about Honduras from a few travelers, but so far it's been one pleasant surprise after another. oh damn except I just noticed a notice on the computer I'm using asking me not to download porn videos. what to do with the rest of the evening ?... so anyway, I believe last I wrote was in matagalpa. That was a strange place. Though I guess the town itself seemed interesting enough, where you sleep is quite instrumental in shaping your opinion of a place. The hotel we crashed at was this little wooden box of a room barely big enough for two folding beds, and you could practically hear people breathing in the adjacent rooms. And breathing them we hear did; at one point there seemed to be some sort of sex-ed class or exorcism or something going on in the room next to ours, with one woman breathing very heavily, and 2-3 voices talking in a hush over her moans. There was a pizza joint next door though which provided a nice respite from the cheap healthy foods we had been eating, and also started a bit of a viscious trend, since we've pretty much been eating krap since. We went for a hike in a nearby private forest reserve which looked very German. It had a little pond with ducks, a lovely wooden hotel, it was like little Bavaria. Turns out it was indeed run by some German people, but I knew that even before I found out. The hike was decent, though mostly through a forest without much of a view. The reserve is supposed to have the bastard elusive quetzals, supposedly the most incredible and sacred bird around, though I'm beginning to doubt it actually exists. It may be like the "green flash" - we met this Canadian couple from Kelowna on Ometepe Island (have I talked about this already?). They also told us about the green flash - apparently when you watch the sun drop over water, and the atmospheric conditions are just right, you can see a flash of green as the last rays drop below the horizon. They said they'd been watching water sunsets for a couple of months though and still haven't seen the green flash. Or a quetzal. Needless to say, we saw no quetzals in the reserve. We didn't see any of the monkeys we were promised either, but that doesn't really matter so much since we've been seeing more monkeys than we ever wanted to these last couple months. But at one point, after slipping and stumbling our way up a steep muddy slope to trail leading along a ridge, we did see ants. Nice, fat, black ants. My thoughts went from oh look, ants - oh look, still ants - holy krap there's a shitload of ants up here - aaaawww they're biting run run run! So we were running along this ridge and the ants just wouldn't stop. That was the most ants I've ever seen in a day. Very exciting. Our next stop after Matagalpa was a town called Esteli. Our hotel there was much nicer (and at $5 a head one of the costlier places we've stayed), but the town didn't seem to have much to offer. Matagalpa was in rugged hills, whereas Esteli was pretty flat; the central park was barbed wired off, and you couldn't go 10 steps without some kids pulling on your pants or grabbing your arm asking for a peso (the corrency is cordoba, but everyone calls it peso). even eating at a restaurant, there was an undying chorus of "gringo, peso, gringo, peso". It was a sad thing to see, draining emotionally. But have I talked about the central park thing? There are all these things in my head that I know I've intended to write about, but don't remember whether I actually have or not. Well I may repeat myself a bit but whatever. who are you to judge meż an inverted question mark at the end of a question. because I can. oh and I'm cool like that too. but anyway, every town of any size or importance in Central America is laid out around a central park. this is where things happen. EVERY TOWN has one, a block square patch of grass and trees and benches, and usually a bandstand in the middle and at least one church or cathedral facing the park. So Esteli had one too. We met a cool Isreali girl Inbel at an internet place our first night, and since she's travelling alone she came along on a hike to some waterfalls with us the next day (and she said she'd seen a quetzal! In the same reserve where we got ambushed by ants ..) The "beautiful one hour hike" promised by guide books turned out to be a pretty mediocre 2 hour mission. The countryside around Esteli is very dry and hot; it's apparently the country's tobacco center, and we saw fields of it, low and green, looking especially lush against the backdrop of the surrounding parched yellow and brown hillsides. We met an american girl at the falls whose husband has a tobacco farm slash cigar shop in town apparently. The cigars are supposed to be good, but I wouldn't know the difference even if I tried. The falls we went to were decent enough, plunging to a large pool, which, though not very deep nor clean, was nice and refreshing for a quick swim. The rocks around the pool were packed with local families. Some were brandishing nice little camcorders; owning one of those in Nicaragua is like owning a jumbo jet in the states I'd imagine. I wanted to check out Elf with Will Ferrel at the local theater after the waterfall hike, but it was dubbed. bastards ... So we made it an early night, which didn't prevent me from sleeping in until 10, and headed for Honduras. Oh, another thing I forgot to mention. There is a big Rainbow Gathering in Costa Rica near Monteverde in a few weeks, and we keep meeting smelly hippies heading down. Supposedly, it's gonna be, like, totally awesome man, like, the energy is just like, totally cosmic man, you just go and share, it's like, totally awesome, like, fully, man. The thing that I find funny is that everyone expects this to be a little gathering of 3-5 thousand people, though there have apparently been thousands hanging around Costa rica waiting for this thing, and unbeknownst (or wishfully overlooked) by most of them, costa ricans are bracing for a massive, woodstock type event. There is a rumour of a Rainbow Caravan of several thousand hippies heading back up to the states overland after the gathering. Perhaps we can catch the caravan in mexico. I must admit that I'm somewhat intrigued, and if we were in the area I'd try to check it out. Except here's my peeve - why don't they shower? I think the clothes look nice and comfy, and the hair, well whatever, but why in the world don't hippies shower? I too think peace and love are very nice, but I like to shower. I guess I'm not a hippie. Hell for all I know, since I'm not part of the solution, I may even be a part of the problem. well ... anyway, I think our cross border trip broke the record for number of buses, as we took 5 different ones in a 7 hour span. The border crossing itself was surprisingly smooth and hassle free, it didn't even feel like we crossed a border. On the last bus towards Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital, I happened to sit by some dude who was hammered out of his mind and insisted on trying to talk to me and shaking my hand. He was pretty messed up; whenever he'd try to look me in the eye his gaze would just slide off my face and he'd have to keep readjusting. He seemed nice enough, and shared his tortillas and sour cream with me, I just had no idea what he was blabbering about. I have a hard time without the slurring. He seemed to be enjoying himself though. We spent the night in Comayaguela, a suburb of Tegus, and left this morning for La Ceiba, in the north on the Caribbean coast. It was a six hour cross country bus ride; Honduras is very rugged and surprisingly green after the parched western Nicaragua we've spent the last couple of weeks in. There's notably less garbage on the road sides too, and the towns and highway rest stops seem clean and modern. I guess not suffering years of civil war goes a long way for an impoverished country. Ironically (or perhaps just because), there are guards and cops with big guns everywhere. There was even a uniformed dude with an assault rifle in front of Wendy's where we ate dinner. Anyway, we're going to an island tomorrow to learn to dive.
