A Day in Honduras

I know, it´s true, I´ve let you all down by not keeping up with my blogguing since I´ve been traveling these past 2 months. But I´m ready to stop all that and write you all something, but since i have to use this mexican key pad, ill be refraining from using capital letters because the button is in a different place that my pinky simply cannot reach. i hope you can understand

So here i sit in a small smelly orangish brown cubible in a place called choluteca, honduras. But let me tell you first about how i got here in the internet cafe owned by the brother who´s sister is currently housing me.

FRONTERA FRONTERA FRONTERA. these were the words of the young man hanging out of the old yellow school bus as we raced down the two lane highway on the eastern edge of el salvador. we were moving to the frontera, or border, and there was no turning back. every 30 seconds the bus would halt to a rolling stop to pick up new border jumpers or to drop off others who were simply tired of the blaring reggaeton music that blasted through the fuzzy creaking speakers of the long retired school bus.

the landscape was incredible and every new turn of the bus would reveal some new type of geographical layout. on the right side one could glare at the cows grazzing through long green hills sprinkled with healthy sprouting trees. then you could look on the other side of the bus past the sleeping locals to see giant mountainous valleys with a orange sky painted by the descending sun.

just as the sun was at its hottest the bus stopped and the last sign for el salvador was duly greeting as it read ¨bienvenidos a honduras.¨ I jumped off the bus and was the first to greet my fellow immigration officers. as I sat in the interview chair i felt like a true explorer crossing from one ancient land to another. after a good conversation with one officer about the educational standards in the US the checks were made and a door was opened to reveal a long solitary bridge in front of me.

I put my best foot forward and made the great walk from one country to another. it was amazing walking across that bridge and glancing down at the people bathing in the river. from one side el salvadorians were washing their clothes while conversing with their bathing honduran amigos on the other side. even the look of the country seemed to change as i walked across the bridge. it only took me one minute to walk to the land i once visited only 5 years ago.

And now the story gets interesting as i step into honduras.

questions and more questions. I ask so many questions in these places because 1. i want to use my spanish 2 i have no idea where im going and 3 everyone else seems to be just as lost and therefore i have to weed out the doofs who simply point in the direction away from them when i ask how to get to another city.

after asking three people i finally found yet another rickety school bus with a hand made sign flowing accross the windshield that indicated it would take me to choluteca.

now, you might ask, why the hell was i going to choluteca? well i can´t really tell you why. I´ve done a fair amount of traveling in my life and it always seemed to have a purpose whether it was to see some museum or visit some old town or something else.

before this tip i was able to save up more money than i have ever had for a trip. and yet my objective here has been to spend hardly any money and to get around with the locals. and in the past week ive done that. ive stayed way below my 20 dollar a day budget and i´ve been floating wherever people i meet take me. why for instance i was in antigua guatemala just two days ago and now i´m two countries over.

So back to the hottest bus i´ve ever been in ever. the sweat was literaly pouring down my face as i sat waiting for either the driver to get some air flowing through the cab or for the sun to cook the skin off everyone´s bodies. i would have waited outside of the bus if i hadn´t been afraid of having all my belongings stolen.

the bus finally left and we rolled away peacefully until a very fat man came aboard. he was slow to find the seat next to me and could hardly fit in the child sized bus.

for the next fifteen minutes i was mesmerized to watch this landwhale jam out to the music while eating some sort of meat and potato goolash that he produced out of a thin plastic bag with his grit covered hands. i was half mesmerized by his nasty eating habits and half dying for a bite since i hadn´t eaten anything all day.

After the man finished, he did what all people in these situations seem to end up doing...he offered his finger lickin´ hand in the clasic gesture of ¨let´s be friends and get to know each other.¨ so i then met walter and we talked only for a little while about our lives until he got onto, what seemed like his favorite subject, sex. so, at 8 pm, with an empty stomach and a sore ass from 8 hours riding on 4 busses, i talked to an old fat honduran man about his different sexual exploits. most entertaining!

i was set to stay with a recent aquaintence i had met in san jose, el salvador and the man was most interested in helping me to get in contact with her. when we arrived we walked around the dirty dark streets of choluteca asking random people for their cell phones. we finally got a hold of my ¨friend¨ but the woman´s phone was messed up and my friend couldn´t hear my voice.

so when after all this trouble what did i do in this foreign town in this foreign city? i piled into a the shittiest cab in the world with all these new people and we drove off. well actually the driver first had to plug in a battery for the car and we were all instructed to hold the doors tight since they no longer closed. and then we were off.

we drove around everywhere with simply a piece of paper with my friend´s name and phone number. we went to a gas station and asked if anyone had heard of her and what would you know, the man was sort of friends with her and told us where her neighborhood was. at this point i felt like this little ¨adventure¨ was bridging from an invite to me and two fat dudes stalking a poor girl down. I didn´t really know what to do.

We went into the neighborhood despite my many offers to simply go to a hotel and then the men started walking around asking people on the street where this girl lived. we did this for about an hour, always rejumping the car and holding the car doors closed. it was very uncomfortable.

when we finally arrived at this girls house and her mother opened the door i realized that i probably now knew the two fat guys in the taxi better than the people who´s house we had stalked down. now the tables were turned and everyone started to ask me questions like are these your friends? is this the girl? and from the other side, what are you doing here? can i....help you? of course i was doing a bang up job of shittily explaining in my broken spanish that i had no idea what i was doing and that i really just wanted to go to a hotel where i could stick my head under a pillow and die of confusion and embarrassment.

but instead i went into these people´s house where i then tried to explain myself and how stupid i felt for hunting down some people whom i simply met in passing and was probably never supposed to see again.

so what happened after all that? ....well.....the dudes just wanted to rip me off for the cab, which they did, and the family wanted to forgive my ignorance, which they did. i was served a big late dinner, my first meal of the day, and given a room in their house. so how about that, i survived my day in honduras.