Wandering Homestead

A History Lesson

Posted on January 18, 2013 by Henry

Our first stop in El Salvador was Perquín. It’s a lovely town and it has a very nice hotel, but our main purpose in going there was to visit the Museo de la Revolucion Salvadoreña, Homenaje a los Héroes y Mártires. It’s in Perquín because that was where the headquarters were for the FMLN during the war.

The museum is housed in a couple of small buildings. It occupies several rooms, each presenting a different aspect of the conflict. One is devoted to the conditions and events leading up to the war, another to daily life in the guerrilla camps, one or two to the weapons used, one to the rest of the world’s reactions during the war, and one to Radio Venceremos, the official voice of the FMLN. None of it was showy or professional, but all of it was very real.

One of the above-mentioned weapons was a de-activated 500-pound bomb. It was on display next to the large crater left by another such bomb, dropped some thirty years ago. Weather has filled it in a bit and softened its edges, and the jungle encroached on it somewhat. It was still scary.

The gentleman who met us at the museum’s entrance, guided us through the various rooms and described the exhibits, was a veteran of the war. He was polite, serious and soft-spoken, and about my age. Perhaps a few years younger. He told us a little bit about his experiences, and described his injuries. At one point he also mentioned that nobody in El Salvador blamed the American people for supporting the military regime, just the American government.

Despite this reassurance, I left the museum shaken. I remember the war, the sense of foul deeds being done in my name, and feeling unable to stop them. I remember learning of the Salvadoran military’s atrocities, of feeling horrified and powerless. One thing I hadn’t remembered was a quotation from Ronald Reagan, included as part of one of the displays:

I thought that the 1980’s were a time to stop apologizing for America’s legitimate national interests, and start asserting them.

Swell.

Posted in Buildings, Culture, El Salvador, Organizations and businesses | 2 Comments

Útila revisited

Posted on January 16, 2013 by Elizabeth

As I write this, we are in Santa Ana, El Salvador, waiting while yet another mechanic diagnoses yet another problem with Rocinante. I’m thinking we should, perhaps, have dubbed the car “Man-o’-War” or “Bucephalos” – a name that would have encouraged it to reach for greatness, rather than causing it to live in fear that we might be reaching for a rifle at any moment to put it out of its misery.

I’ll take the opportunity to give you my version of Útila, which contrasts somewhat with that of Scrooge McBeachbum.

He’s right when he says that there’s essentially nothing to do on Útila other than dive or party. The population of visitors skews very young here. We saw lots and lots of skin, much of it inked. Salt-dried, sun-bleached hair; bare feet in in the middle of town, anklets and bracelets made with string and beads. You get the picture. Very few ladies in one-piece bathing suits and sun hats (other than myself, of course) were in evidence.

I heard many languages and accents from most of the English-speaking world, but especially Australia, which, given the diving, isn’t surprising. (They have another big reef in Australia, you know.) I also heard a lot of Creole, which wasn’t surprising either, since the nearby island of Roatán was the locus of Garífuna settlement in Central America. The Garífuna people originated in St. Vincent as an admixture of indigenous Arawak and Carib with West Africans from a shipwrecked slaver. They were ousted from St. Vincent when it changed hands in the 18th century, and were resettled in Roatán. The Caribbean coast of Central America from the Moskitia in southern Honduras to the Mexican border is all largely Garífuna; only in Belize do they seem integrated into the general population. In Honduras and Guatemala they are more insular.

But back to the actual island of Útila. The town is (more or less) a single road with dive shops galore, eateries, and a handful of little tiny shops selling island-priced groceries. And lots of hotels. Our host at Sambo Creek, Dante, had arranged a room for us at his friend Phil’s hotel, the Tropical Sunset. It was, I think, the very best hotel room I’ve ever had. It was a large room with two areas, one for Joe and one for us. It had a refrigerator and a nice little table and chairs. It had a large, very comfortable bed and several cozy chairs. It was light and airy, with windows on three sides. It had a little balcony with a porch swing overlooking the Caribbean Sea. It even had a cute and clever little resident monkey, Marcela, who hopped in and out.

It was perfect, but like Camelot, it couldn’t last.

Henry was relaxing on the bed. I was curled up in a comfy chair, reading. Joe was in the bathroom. Marcela ran in, did a little somersault, chattered, and ran back out. A gentle sea breeze wafted in through the French doors. Suddenly, a terrific crash sounded, followed immediately by a panicked cry: “Mom! Dad! Help me!”

Our parental hearts pounding, we rushed to the bathroom. Opening the door, we saw Joe in disarray, a confusion of bits and pieces, and water spouting from the floor. He had leaned back on the toilet only slightly, and the entire tank had burst apart; a huge chunk of porcelain had fallen on a capped fresh water pipe that was (for unknown reasons) sticking out of the floor. The pipe had snapped, and water was gushing out of the bathroom into the room. The shut-off valve was nowhere in evidence.

Henry ran around the room, picking up everything on the floor and putting it above sea level. I ran to the hotel office for help. Of course, it was empty and dark, as were all the other rooms in the hotel, as well as the owner’s apartment. At last I found the guard, who roused the manager and the owner. No one could find the shut-off valve. Finally someone located it, but it was too late. Our beautiful room was an inch deep in water, and no longer had a working toilet.

Much laughing and joking of course ensued, addressing Joe’s explosive qualities. It was concluded that there must have been a slight crack in the ceramic caused by a mild earthquake the previous month. Everything was cleaned up, we went to dinner, and when we came back we had a perfectly adequate room that made us very sad.

The next day we all got up very early for our first experience with scuba diving. Henry, not a water person, had decided against the dive, and chose to spend the morning on shore. I would have been just as happy with the (much, much cheaper) snorkeling, but Joe had his heart set on diving, so I agreed to take him.

The “fun dives” work like this: a certified diving instructor (in this case, very blonde Sarah from New York with a tattoo of the legendary whale shark Old Tom on her upper arm) gives you a lecture, complete with flip chart, about the effects of pressure on the human body and the basics of scuba diving apparatus. Then a diving instructor (now Rusty, a very blond Australian with tattoos over most of his torso and, inexplicably, one of those Peruvian knit hats with ear flaps) fits you with a wetsuit, flippers, and a mask, and you head out on the boat with other divers to a shallow area where you can safely practice breathing through the regulator. Joe was a little anxious about this, I could tell, so I encouraged him as best I could, and Rusty made sure that he felt safe. Then we moved out to deeper water.

Let me break here to mention that I am a very strong swimmer. I’m not the fastest, but I have an excellent, even stroke, and I am a master at breathing on both sides as I swim. The main reason I am not a Master’s Swimmer is because they always meet way too early in morning. I have good stamina and can swim for hours. I have no fear at all of deep water. I love to be on water of any kind, in any kind of boat. I had no anxiety at all about diving.

When we got to the deeper water, though, I found I couldn’t control sinking very well. As this was a “fun dive,” Rusty had a hand on both of us almost all the time, and really, he was the one doing all the work. But it was a little freaky. Still, I practiced breathing evenly and staying calm–until I suddenly noticed a huge brain coral right beside us. And fish–there were glowing fish, and fluorescent fish, and shimmering fish. There was fan coral waving. There were shapes and color like I never imagined. Up ahead, a ray sailed along the surface of the coral. It was magic.

Until it wasn’t. We paused on a patch of bare sand, and Rusty signaled, just checking that all was well. Joe gave the okay sign. I suddenly realized that I needed to get to the surface, so I signaled “Up,” and up we went. On the surface, I adjusted my mask and breathed normally for a bit, and then we descended again. I checked with myself at the bottom, and I still didn’t feel right. Not exactly panicky, but not okay. We surfaced again, and I felt like that was where I wanted to stay. Rusty was great; he said several times that many people feel uneasy, etc. etc., and it was perfectly normal and okay. It was time to get back to the boat in any case.

When the dive shop boats go out for these fun dives, they generally make two stops; one at the shallow reef, and one at a deeper reef. We had the option, for the second dive, of hanging out on the boat, snorkeling, or going for another dive. Joe didn’t even wait for the end of the question: he wanted to dive. I was very proud of him for being brave enough to dive in the first place, and for not letting my fears make him fearful too. He dove with the group.

I opted for snorkeling, which I enjoyed very much. I saw lots of exotic fish and coral, and I also got to enjoy the boat captain turning up his music and dancing and singing while he waited for the divers. I followed a large school of brilliant blue fish around for a while, and watched six of the divers swimming deep below me. I was floating aimlessly when I saw a little pink bubble near the surface of the water, and then another, and then another, and then I realized that my skin was stinging quite a lot and that I swimming right into a flotilla of pretty pink jellyfish. So then I practiced my fastest crawl in the other direction.

Joe loved his dive so much that he was ready to go again that afternoon. In the end he went for two more dives the following morning (this time with Frankie, an Australian with a navel piercing). He’s been talking about diving ever since. I’m glad he loved it, and glad he has a new interest. I only wish it were something a little cheaper.

Posted in El Salvador, Family, Honduras, Nature | 9 Comments

Fresh fish and dried butterflies

Posted on January 10, 2013 by Elizabeth

Before we got stuck in Lotus Land, we stopped in the city of La Ceiba. It’s one of the largest cities in Honduras, set on the Caribbean coast just across from the beautiful bay islands, with mountains and cloud forests behind it. Our interest was not the lovely setting, but rather lunch.

We had read in our guidebook about Sushi Palmira, a Japanese restaurant with a Honduran twist, and of course we couldn’t resist. It turned out to be fantastic. The menu listed six pages of maki (sushi rolls) created from muchos ingredientes exóticos. Our eyes bugged out and we heard bells ringing, and the arrival of the waitress triggered a frenzy of ordering that left us slumped and panting in our chairs while she murmured, shaking her head, “Es mucho…” as she walked back to the kitchen.

Then we sat and waited. And waited. And waited. Quick service is not a watchword in Honduran restaurants in general, but this was extreme. After at least three quarters of an hour, the waitress finally returned, bearing a boatload of sushi. Literally. Okay, it was a small boat, but it took up most of the tabletop, and the sushi rolls aboard were each about five times the size of maki at home. Gulp. Then the waitress brought in another platter with more. She was right–about half that much would have made a hearty meal for the three of us. We girded our loins, fell to, and manfully devoured maki until we could barely sit upright. It was marvelous. One roll was coated in shredded fried carrots with a cane syrup glaze, another rolled in something chewy and bright yellow and stuffed with cream cheese and hot salsa. We petered out after all but six slices of maki, which we wrapped up and ate a few hours later as a chaser.

Our other goal in LaCeiba was the Butterfly and Insect Museum. If you’re thinking about a pretty greenhouse full of colorful butterflies darting about in the sun, forget it.

This is a personal collection of specimens – but what a collection! Retired teacher Robert Lehman, a resident of Honduras for many years, has displayed here thousands of butterflies and insects from Honduras, plus hundreds more from the rest of the world. From the moment we walked in the door, it was clear that Mr. Lehman is a true teacher: the first thing he did was gently offer a stag beetle for Joe to hold.

This isn’t a static museum; as Mr. Lehman walked around the tiny building with us, explaining and describing various creatures, he tilted the cases back and forth to show the shimmering color changes on the blue morpho butterflies, and took case off the wall so we could see the iridescence of the painted beetles more clearly. He showed us butterflies with fake eyes that make predators think an owl is staring at them, and butterflies with little dangly bits on their wings that predators bite at instead of their heads. We saw insects that look like leaves and insects that look like sticks. We saw moths the size of your head and butterflies with transparent wings. And we saw color: shining, sparkling, shimmering blues and oranges and reds, velvety blacks and yellows and browns, and pale greens and creams.

I’ve been a total failure at bird watching on this trip. Birds don’t hold still so you can get a good look at them, and even if they do, they inevitably have markings I can’t find in the field guide, or don’t have markings they should, or just aren’t in there at all. I finally ceded the field, and gave my (rather expensive) Central American bird guide to the bird enthusiast folks at D&D Brewery. But since our visit last week to Robert Lehman’s collection (and the purchase of his very useful photocopied butterfly guide) I have been able to identify a over half a dozen butterflies and insects with reasonable certainty. Woo hoo! That’s about the same number of birds I’ve successfully identified in the past two months.

Here, for your enjoyment, is a Citheraerias pireta pireta, which I spotted while hiking in the cloud forest near Lake Yojoa:

Posted in Food, Honduras, Nature | 4 Comments

And Into Perquín

Posted on January 10, 2013 by Henry

… continued from part one

Our approach to Perquín was so slow, as you’ll recall, that it became clear we would not arrive before dark, and that we’d need alternate arrangements for our evening. The logical place to stop would be Marcala. The town is sufficiently small that it has no entries in our guide books, but a quick look at TripAdvisor finds a couple of hotels there. One of them, La Casona Hotel y Restuarante, has a single review that is so descriptive, and sounded so wonderful, that we had to check it out.

The review was warranted. La Casona is owned and run by Don Manuel, a friendly, highly personal gentleman in his late sixties. He reminded me of my mother’s father, even in appearance. We didn’t meet him until the morning after we arrived, when he appeared and volunteered to show us around the grounds. As he did, we learned something about the place’s history.

He bought the land and started building on it in the 1970’s. The building that houses the hotel and restaurant used to be his home, but after his children moved out, he build a smaller house, moved there, and added to and converted the old building to its current use. The rooms are spacious, simply furnished, and meticulously maintained. And cheap. Don Manuel explained that the hotel doesn’t really make any money. For that, he has his business in town.

Don Manuel is a religious man, but talks about it only indirectly. He mentioned that he’d been baptized in the Jordan river, and jokingly refers to a small, spring-fed pond on the grounds as his own Jordan River, and to his land as Pequeño Israel. I don’t know about that comparison, as this place is one of the more tranquil and peaceful in my experience. Just lovely.

The grounds are large and productive. There are piney woods, coffee plants, banana trees, groves of oranges, lemons and other citrus, avocados, peaches, and more, even a stand of papyrus near the pond. Don Manuel offers the grounds to church groups and other religious organizations for retreats, meetings and such. To that end, he has built seven “caves”, or rooms cut into the hillsides. A couple are big enough for just one person: a monk’s cell with a bed, desk and shelf. Others are larger meeting rooms, and the largest, still under construction, will hold up to 400 people when finished.

There’s even a round table, constructed of rock, built into the ground overlooking the pond.

In the course of our tour, Don Manuel shared oranges with us, then loaded us up with an armload to take on the road. He also recommended a tire store in town when I asked about it, and reassured us that the road to Perquín is rough, but not nearly as difficult as the one from La Esperanza. We thanked him and hit the road, stopped in town for a new (used) tire in excellent condition and reasonably priced, got some food for the road, got more directions from locals, and headed off back into the mountains.

Don Manuel was right. We were still on a dirt mountain road, but it was a definite improvement over the previous day. And through more beautiful country. After an hour or so, we arrived at the easiest border crossing to date. Everybody on both sides was friendly and helpful. We didn’t spend any money crossing, and didn’t have to fill out any forms promising dire consequences if we tried to leave without the van. Piece of cake.

We continued down the road, arrived in Perquín in mid-afternoon, and found a very pleasant hotel, where I’m sitting as I type these words. I’m watching the sun set, and getting ready to gather up the family and get some dinner.

Posted in El Salvador, Gear, Honduras, Organizations and businesses, photos | 7 Comments

La Esperanza to Perquín

Posted on January 9, 2013 by Henry

You’ve all read the story of the long, dusty, bouncy and stall-ridden trek from Quetzaltenango to Salamá, in Guatemala. If you haven’t, go ahead, I’ll wait here. Well, we’ve managed to do it one (or two, maybe three) better. We’d been noodling around Lago Yojoa, Honduras for a couple of days. The mountains and forests and jungles of Honduras are without compare, in my experience. Combine them all, and you get a cloud forest. This is just magnificent country, and no error. I expect others will provide more details anon.

Though we all love Honduras, we were also getting itchy to move onward to El Salvador. After all, we’ve only got about six weeks left in our travels. And one of the places we absolutely had to visit in El Savador was Perquín, a small town near the border that had been an FMLN stronghold during the civil war, besides being beautiful in its own right. Plotting the course was not simple. Maps of the area are notoriously inaccurate. Google Maps is better, but not infallible. But after a few false starts, wrong turns and roadside discussions with members of the local populace regarding roads that appear on the map but not on the ground, and other roads that look good on the map but are too difficult to drive, we figured out our course. And with a paper map and Google Maps on an iPhone to guide us, we set out through Siguatepeque to La Esperanza, then on to Marcala and to arrive in Perquín.

To illustrate this point, here are a few screen shots from Google Maps. Click on a shot to enlarge it. In the first one, the road from La Esperanza to Marcala is clear, but the town of Perquín is absent. As we zoom in, Perquín appears, but the road to it from Marcala (one that crosses an international border) does not. If we switch to satellite mode, we can just make out that road. So we can see it from space, but not in Google Maps’ database. Sigh.

The first leg, to La Esperanza passed without much fanfare. The country remained beautiful, the road reasonable. South of town, the road got more interesting. It quickly left the pavement and became dirt. The terrain was mountainous, the ground rocky and the climate alternating between dry and torrential. These elements combined to create a road surface criss-crossed by ruts, gullies and ravines. Most of it was rather hard-packed, so there was little danger of getting stuck, but progress was very slow. In many places, it was necessary to stop and survey the road ahead, plotting a course over and around the various obstacles. I figure our average speed on this stretch was under ten miles per hour.

And the van’s bouncing and pitching suggested another possible hazard. A couple days earlier, I had noticed a bubble on the side of our left rear tire. Possibly the result of hitting a huge pot-hole, unseen in the dim evening drizzle, as we searched for a hotel we had seen earlier. The jolt had nearly loosened our fillings, and may have damaged the tire as well. We’d not had an opportunity to replace it, and now the image of that blistered tire bouncing merrily along the rocky path was looming large in my mind.

Then, just to make things more interesting, the van began to stall again. Since we had made it through such behavior successfully once before, it was unsettling but not quite so worrisome, and I was able to pay attention and gather more information about the problem. My current hypothesis is that the intake to the fuel pump has somehow come loose, and is no longer at the bottom of the gas tank where it belongs. Maybe the rough road contributed to this. Anyway, although the gas gauge registered three-quarters full (and later filling it proved that this was at least close), the engine behaved as if it were running out of gas. Repeatedly. Our minds began to entertain images of pulling off the side of this mountain track, and pitching camp until we could flag down a passer-by to take one of us into Marcala for more gas.

Fortunately, by this time, Marcala was not too far distant. More over, the last ten kilometers or so were all on nicely paved highway. Amazing. Both the tire and the gas supply held, and brought us to our day’s destination.

It should also be noted that the paper map showed these paved 10K as part of a paved highway connecting La Esperanza and Marcala, separate from the mountain track we had just traveled. Perhaps such a road is planned, but only its southern quarter exists so far.

to be continued…

Posted in El Salvador, Gear, Honduras, Maps | 1 Comment

An Island by Any Other Name

Posted on January 7, 2013 by Henry

If you just read the word Útila, the name of an island in Honduras Bay, it’s pronounced OO-tee-lah. It is, after all, a Spanish word, and it tells you how to pronounce it, since the stress is not on the penultimate syllable. But if you go to the island, you’ll mostly hear people saying, “you-TILL-uh”. This is not because the word violates the usual rules for spoken Spanish, but because most of the people that you as a foreign tourist would encounter there are other foreign tourists and ex-pats, largely USian.

They’re all over the place: in restaurants and bars, in stores, on the beaches and on the streets. Rather filling the streets, which creates something of a problem. All over Central America, at least all the places we’ve been so far, the streets and sidewalks are often masses of motion. People are moving about on foot, on bicycles, scooters, motorcycles, tuc-tucs, cars, buses and more. It all works quite well because, for the most part, everybody is repectful of others and they want everybody to get where they’re going, all in one piece.

But on Útila, the streets are populated with foreigners and their foreign ways. And the spirit of cooperation, of traffic management by consensus (on which more later), is largely absent. In its place is the pattern one usually sees in the States: “out of my way, I’m in a hurry.”

And this doesn’t apply only to traffic. Throughout Central America, people greet each other, whether they know them or not. When you encounter some one walking in the other direction, you usually exchange, “Buenos dias”, or just, “Bueno”, or even “¡Hola!” When a person walks into a restuarant, s/he’ll often greet everybody in it, and upon leaving say, “Buen provecho” to all. But not on Útila. There, the behavior is much closer to that of the States: an unspoken, “if you don’t have specific business with me, you don’t exist.”

Apart from all that, the island is pretty nice. And in fact, the above rant probably applies only to the part of the island centered around the dock where the ferry from the mainland lands. There are a number of other villages scattered around the 7×3.5-mile island, which unfortunately, we didn’t get a chance to see. In those, non-tourist villages, my guess is that the people interact in a manner more similar to what we’ve seen on the rest of our journey.

In the tourist area, there are approximately two activities available: diving and partying. The former also implies snorkeling, kayaking and other oceanic activities, and the latter usually implies mass quantities of alcoholic beverages. We mostly eschewed the latter, but some of us dabbled in the former. One of the many dive centers on the island offers “fun dives”. After an hour or so of instruction, you suit up and go down with a dive-master keeping close tabs on you and your equipment, doing for you all the things you would have learned to do yourself in a full certification class. You dive to a maximum of 18 meters, for about 40 minutes, and see lots of marine life.

I wasn’t sufficiently interested to justify the expense, but Elizabeth and Joe gave it a try. Then Joe went down again. And then two more times the next day. I guess he liked it. Maybe he’ll even blog about it.

We spent two days on the island. The afternoon and evening of the first we spent in an absolutely beautiful room in a little hotel on the bay. It had a little balcony overlooking the water, with a porch swing on it, excellent beds and other furnishings, and plenty of space. We loved it for a few hours, and then the toilet exploded. Sigh. The replacement room was not nearly as wonderful.

After Joe’s second morning underwater, we packed up and caught the ferry back to the mainland, remounted Rocinante, and headed out for parts West.

Posted in Culture, Honduras, Organizations and businesses | 3 Comments

Please Pass the Lotus

Posted on January 1, 2013 by Henry

Ed. note: Although post topics have been accumulating, and are waiting in the queue for human attention, this post concerns today, right now. We’ll get back to the others presently.

Elizabeth’s folks have a place in the Upper Peninsula. Cross the bridge, turn left, go four miles, stop. The living room has floor-to-ceiling windows facing the straits, from which the bridge can easily be seen. One can—as we have—spend many hours sitting there, doing very little more than watching the freighters cruise by. It’s the most relaxing place I know.

Or it was. For the past several days, we’ve been holed up outside of Sambo Creek, Honduras (yeah, I know), a Garifuna village on the Caribbean. We’re staying at Paradise Found, a small hotel/B&B run by an ex-pat couple from Ohio. We’d originally planned to spend a night or two. Tonight will be four, I think, and we’re making a Herculean effort to get back on the road tomorrow, but it’s not easy.

It’s just really comfortable here. The bar/dining room is a round, open-air, second-story room with a palapa roof. It has railings facing north, overlooking the bay, and many Adirondack chairs for observing the waves. The proprietors and guests alike are low-key and laid back, words that have taken on new meaning here in Honduras. The food is excellent, the company enjoyable, the weather wonderful, the atmosphere mellow. Coffee seems to have little effect.

Yesterday, we managed to work up enough energy to stand outside the gates and get picked up by a truck that took us all of two miles to a combination zip-line park and hot springs. Both aspects were amazing. The zip-line had eighteen separate components, one of which was over a kilometer in length. Because our group was small, with only four people, we made it through the whole course in only 45 minutes of flying through the jungle canopy. Although Joe is a hardened zip-line veteran, it was my first foray into the activity, and I have to give it an enthusiastic thumbs-up. On the long segment, one of the two very cute young men who were our guides through the course went just ahead of Joe, staying about ten feet in front of him, taking a movie of him all the way.

Once grounded, Joe and I rejoined Elizabeth, who had been soaking in the hot springs and enjoying a massage. We all soaked a while longer, relaxed, nibbled some fruit, then strolled back to the entrance and relaxed and waited for the truck to take us back to Paradise Found. That was enough work for one day.

We’ve been batting around the idea of taking a boat out to Cayos Cochinos, an island visible from the dining room. It’s reputed to be a wonderful place and, had the wind and water been not quite so rambunctious, we’d have gone the second or third day here. Now the surf has less energy, but so do we. Mañana.

No. Tomorrow morning we have to get out of here, or we never will.

But wait! Our host just walked in as I was typing these words, and told us he’ll be going to Útila, another of the bay islands here, in the morning, and asked if we were interested. Nothing for us to do but nod and pack. Seems like we’ll be rescued from our lethargy after all.

Posted in Family, Food, Honduras, photos, Time | 4 Comments

Gringos on Horseback

Posted on January 1, 2013 by Elizabeth

It sounds like an hors d’oeuvre, but it’s literal:

We spent Christmas Day at Finca el Cisne, a ranch that has been owned by the Castejon family since the 1880’s. They produce mostly coffee, but also cardamom, chocolate, dairy and beef cattle, fruits and vegetables, and renewable energy. In addition, they run a small guest house and day excursions with home-cooked meals, horseback riding and visits to nearby hot springs.

Our host, Carlos Castejon, picked our group of eight or so up in Copán Ruinas for the 45-minute ride out to the ranch. Joe, as usual, wanted to ride in the back of the pickup truck with the rest of the crowd, but I was glad I played the middle-aged card and sat inside, because Carlos turned out to have a wealth of information to share about the area, ranching, and the world markets for coffee, cardamom, and chocolate. (And because he was educated in the States and therefore speaks impeccable English, I could understand everything he said.)

Like almost everyone we’ve met on our trip, the group was an eclectic and international mix of very nice people. There were two young women from San Francisco on a diving vacation, two French Canadiens from Quebec, one of whom used to be the travel organizer for the Canadian prime minister, a pleasant young English couple, and us.

We spent the morning riding. The horses were really terrific: spunky, but not temperamental; so often trail-ride horses are so bored that they’re just not that much fun to be with. I absolutely loved my horse, Muñeca; she was cheerful, responsive, pretty, and exactly the right size for me. I tried to figure out how to smuggle her home, but I didn’t have a big enough purse with me.

Joe was a bit uncertain that his two weeks of lessons at Camp Algonquian would be sufficient, so Carlos seated him on a very experienced horse, Lucero. Lucero, it turned out, had been Carlos’ horse when he was Joe’s age. It wasn’t too long before Joe got comfortable and confident enough to canter and even gallop a bit.

We rode past some cardamom plantings. Apparently there was a cardamom boom a few years ago, and all the ranchers planted cardamom; now, the price is a quarter of its high, and everyone’s looking for something else to plant.

After becoming reacquainted with the literal meaning of “saddlesore,” we had a delicious lunch, which included fresh watercress salad from the garden, fresh cheese from the ranch’s cows, fresh tortillas, Christmas turkey with an indescribable stuffing of onions, garlic, raisins, olives, and several kinds of chiles, mixed vegetables including the pacaya flower. For dessert, bananas in a caramel-cardamom sauce. And of course, a cup of very perfect coffee.

Carlos took us on a short tour of the coffee processing area, which was quiet for the day because of the holiday. Coffee berries, as you may know, are picked only when they are perfectly ripe and red; the fruit is washed off the seeds, which are then thoroughly dried in the sun. The beans are turned and raked several times during the drying time to prevent fermentation, which gives the coffee and unpleasant flavor. Here is a farm laborer raking coffee beans:

The discolored or misshapen beans will be sorted out, and only the best ones reserved for sale as premium coffee.

The group then piled back into the pickup truck and headed (or rather, jolted) a few miles down the road for a lovely and well-deserved soak in the Luna Jaguar hot springs. A convivial dinner of fresh chicken soup, more fresh tortillas, two kinds of squash in a light cream sauce, and homemade chile sauce followed. The three of us crawled into the truck once more, and Carlos took us back to our hotel, where we slept like the proverbial logs.

Posted in Honduras, Nature, Organizations and businesses | 5 Comments

Copán Ruinas

Posted on January 1, 2013 by Elizabeth

We’ve been to many Mayan ruins, both major and minor, from Chichen Itzá to the lonely pyramid sitting square in the middle of some dinky village we happened to be driving through. Of all of them, I think I have to say that Copán is the most beautiful. At the southernmost tip of Mayan territory, it’s nestled among lush tropical greenery, a pleasant walk away from the charming nearby town. The site itself is compact and navigable; there’s no wandering around for hours trying to figure out where in the jungle you are. And, because the stone here is not as soft as the limestone of many other sites, the decorative carvings have stayed crisp and rich.

Copán is known for the beauty and elegance of its sculpture, and is known as both the “Paris of the Mayan world” and the “Athens of the Mayan world,” depending, I suppose, on whether your imagination gravitates more to the ancient or the modern era. In any case, the place is gorgeous.

So gorgeous, in fact, that it appears on the Honduran one lempira note (worth about a nickel).

The emblem of the Copán was the macaw, which can be found as a decorative element throughout the city, and as a theme of the archaeological site. A colony of macaws greets you as you enter the ruins.

Official guides can be identified by their long staffs topped with a macaw feather, which apparently lie thick on the ground during molting season.

Macaws are carved into many of the buildings and were used as the “goals” in the pelote (ball) court.

Like most Mayan ruins, Cobán was found in pieces under the jungle growth; the buildings have been reconstructed from the blocks found in situ augmented by modern replacements. Here’s a before and after in the same place, and a stonemason repairing a broken piece.

The Hieroglyphic Stairway is the longest inscription in the New World. It has over 1,250 blocks carved with glyphs which are a series of narratives of the reigns of the kings of Cobán, who have wonderful names like “18 Rabbit,” “Smoke Monkey,” and “Waterlily Jaguar.” The carvings are on the risers, so when you stand at the bottom and look up, you see essentially the entire history of the city spread before you. It’s breathtaking.

Many of the stelae are left in their original positions, protected by thatched roofs (which are, incidentally, surprisingly watertight). Clearly we were not the first visitors to see this one:

The Mayan pyramids are not hollow, or full of tunnels and tombs like Egyptian pyramids. Succeeding generations built larger, grander pyramids right on top of the older pyramids, encasing them, one after another, like matryoshka dolls. In one of the excavations at Copán, within a later pyramid an earlier building was discovered that still had paint on its exterior. It was called the Rosalila temple, after, as our guide explained, its lovely shades of pink and purple. Exposure to oxygen caused the color to fade, but a reconstruction of it has been built in the museum on the site.

The museum is terrific. It’s built as a courtyard with a covered gallery. In the middle is the reconstruction of the Rosalila pyramid. I’ll let you come to your own opinion about the lovely shades of pink and purple, but the structure is impressive.

The museum houses many of the sculptures and carvings from buildings throughout the site in order to protect them from the elements. The open structure of the museum is lovely, the fresh air gives one a much better sense of how the carvings would look in situ, and the light inside is perfect. I think it is one of the most pleasant and effective site museums I’ve ever visited.

And the carvings themselves are stunning.

Posted in Honduras, Mayan | 6 Comments

The Tai Chi Border Crossing

Posted on December 29, 2012 by Elizabeth

Rocinante back in fighting trim, we prepared to leave Guatemala. We had been in Guatemala City for five days, which were pleasant enough, mostly because we didn’t have the car and therefore were unable to get lost. Guatemala City, like most cities in the country, appears to be on a straightforward, Roman-style grid; “Avenidas” go north-south, while “Calles” go east-west, all numbered consecutively. A navigator’s delight, one might think. However, street signs are haphazard and usually absent, there are unmarked diagonal streets and dead ends, dog-legs and jug handles, and to make matters worse, Guatemala City is divided into Zones, so that the exact same street address can exist in numerous spots in the city. And of course there are diesel-belching buses and cars driving at breakneck speed throughout. We had already spent two full afternoons on two different occasions driving in circles, wandering, lost, helplessly through the city. These trips included many stops for incompletely-understood directions, which of course we were only partly able to follow. The wear and tear on our mutual civility in the van was considerable.

Leaving the city, we had two choices: to head south toward the Inter-American Highway and El Salvador, or east and then southeast into Honduras. Both destinations seemed appealing. No one had strong feelings about the decision, until I realized that I could easily and confidently get us out of Guatemala City and onto the road east, but that heading south would require navigational research and a likely reprise of our Flying Dutchman routine. Honduras, ho!

The trip east was short and easy; a couple of hours on the highway, another on a smooth, pretty, rural road, and we were at the border at El Florido. We haven’t had any trouble crossing borders, although it takes a bit of time because there is always paperwork (and fees) for the car. A remote border crossing in a lovely mountain setting, far from the trucking routes, is a much better place to spend an hour than a busy and hot highway spot with harassed and probably underpaid officials.

The officials at this crossing, both on the Guatemala side and the Honduras side, were unfailingly helpful, polite, and patient with our Spanish. We didn’t have to wait in a single line. Nevertheless, the crossing took over an hour, because the gentleman who registered the car for entry into Honduras was the most painstaking, careful, conscientious border official I have ever met. He folded Henry’s passport open, consulted us on which page the visa should go on, lined up the rubber stamp with the edges of the page, and inked in each specific piece of information with great care; each form he filled out was treated with the same respect and care. Even the stack of small bills we gave him for the cash-only fee was sorted by denomination, edges tapped carefully against the desk for alignment, set atop the entry forms with edges perfectly matched; all was then stapled together with the precision of a surgeon. The first time he signed the document, he took a tiny leather case from his pocket, pulled out a round metal box which revealed itself to be a small rubber stamp with a self-inking cover, dabbed extra ink on it from the larger pad on his desk, and then carefully applied the stamp to the edge of his signature. He was required to sign the papers several more times as well, and each time he repeated the procedure, always putting the seal in exactly the same position on his signature, and returning the seal to its case and the case to his pocket. Truly, he missed his calling as an origami master, or perhaps as a repairer of doll’s wristwatches. And through the entire lengthy procedure, he was friendly, welcoming, and helpful.

By the time we left the border and headed into Honduras, afternoon had turned to evening and it was quite dark. Our destination was the town of Copán Ruinas, only ten kilometers away. We arrived there without further incident, although we met some of our first Honduran residents on the way: two old horses, nonchalantly standing there relaxing, right in the middle of the road.

Posted in Honduras, Itinerary, Time | 4 Comments

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