Travel Writing: Honduras

I'm sitting on a bench, breathing the exhaust fumes from an air-conditioned van idling in the parking lot next to me.
Today, several cruise ships docked here at Roatan. All morning, vans full of westerners on all-inclusive tours have been descending on  Marble Hill Farm, where we’re staying. They paw through the organic jams, snap photos of the view, deplete the bathrooms of toilet paper, then board their vans and disappear.
It’s pretty easy to see the down sides of their type of travel. These whistle-stop tours leave visitors with cheap souvenirs and the ability to boast that they’ve been to Honduras, but almost no exposure to the country and its culture.
It’s harder to admit how little we can see of another country in our own attempt to strike a balance between comfort and authenticity. Because the land is so beautiful and the rivers are so irresistible, we spend part of a day whitewater rafting, but we choose guides from western nations because we have American notions of safety. We grow weary of rice and beans, and seek out pizza. Even when we ride with Honduran taxi drivers and hike with Honduran guides, our primitive Spanish limits the depth of our conversations. (Even if we were all fluent, we could only go so deep on one afternoon.) We would have to stay much longer and work much harder to get much deeper. We skim the surface, barely discerning what lies beneath.

Our red, double-cab pickup bumps down the rutted road along the edge of Pico Bonito National Park. One side is protected land, the other private. We pass a small naval base—little more than a hut guarded by impossibly young soldiers with absurdly large rifles. I ask Alejandro, 62, a small, wiry man with boundless energy but no upper teeth, why the soldiers are here on the edge of the park. “They protect the forest,” he tells me in Spanish. “They keep the people from cutting the trees.”
The trees blanket the slopes on our right. On the left, the land drops steeply to a deep gorge where the Rio Cangrejal courses through boulders, tumbling to the valley below. As we pass tiny villages, Alejandro waves. “My uncle,” he says. “My cousins.” “My friends.” It seems he knows everyone for miles.
At last we stop at the side of the road. We can see a small red and white building on the other side—the women’s sewing cooperative we intend to visit—but no obvious way to get there.
Then we notice the cable, a 50-or-so meter twist of rusty steel suspended about 25 meters above the gorge’s craggy bottom. Alejandro scans the other side. “He forgot,” he says, shaking his head, then bounds into the brush at the end of the precipice. Moments later we see him on the other side of the river, wet up to his waist, briskly ascending a dirt path.
Soon the cable creaks. At the other end of the cable, a small, dangling cage arcs toward us. It picks up speed as it descends in the middle, then slows as it ascends to where we stand. Alberto, 17, ratchets the cage until it rests on a concrete slab in front of us. He’s tall and thin, with the easy confidence of a trapeze artist.
“Two at a time,” he tells us. We nervously look at one another, at the rusty little cage, at one another again. This is how the single mothers who work at the coop get to and from their job every day. This little cage, piloted by this young man, enables them to earn enough money doing piecework to support their children and even send them to school. But for us, it’s optional. We could sit on this side of the gorge, listening to the grackles in the trees, watching campesinos walking down the dirt road, opting out of the journey. Or we could do what Alberto expected: climb over the broken cage door, sit down on the rickety wooden seat, and let Alberto ferry us across the gorge.
Travel is full of moments like this—times when we must decide whether to do something that makes us uneasy or skip something we’re likely to regret. There is no right or wrong choice; there’s simply a choice and little time in which to make it.

I’m afraid I’ve arrived at an unfortunate truth about any decent trip: At least once, you will find yourself barreling down poorly maintained streets in a motor vehicle driven by a maniac and think, “OK, this might be my last ride.”
As you’ll see in my students’ postings, today provided that near-death experience for the eleven of us. Those are the times you think, “What kind of an idiot am I to have gotten myself into this situation?” and then, “But at least I’m doing something I love,” and then, “But I’m responsible to my students and their families and my family and…” and then, “OK, what are the chances, really, that we’ll all die?” and then, “But if we do, it will be a disaster.”
And so on, But by now, you know we arrived safely at Omega Lodge, an outdoor oasis made all the sweeter by the distress we endured getting here.
We’re almost at the midpoint of our trip. I’m impressed by how hard everyone is working and how well they are working together. We haven’t been able to blog as often as we had hoped, partly because internet access has been uneven and partly because we’re so busy exploring, interviewing and reporting our stories. But we’re also bumping into an interesting conundrum: We don’t want to put material in our blogs that we plan to pitch to publications (print or online).
Tomorrow we’ll spend the morning whitewater rafting, hiking to a waterfall and swimming. Then we’ll visit a women’s sewing cooperative. All without setting foot in a van.

Forget celebrity journalism. Today we found some birds that were so showy, we mobbed them. After a little while, they got back at us by threatening to nip at any exposed toes. 

We've learned one of the early lessons of press trips: You have to find your own story angle, tailored to a specific publication, even when you're part of an organized tour. And sometimes you have to insist on leaving the group so you can discover stories that nobody else has noticed.
Copan Ruinas is providing fodder for a wide range of stories, from the Mayan excavations to the bird preserve and coffee plantation to discoveries in the town itself. If you want to read about them, click on the students' blogs.

 NOTE: This is the first internet access we've had since leaving San Pedro Sula. The access we have now is slow and quirky. Our rate of posts may increase after we leave Copan Ruinas. Please be patient...

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It’s easy to regard days spent moving from place to place as at best merely necessary or at worst a waste of time.  In fact, travel days are a rich and revealing part of any trip, offering lasting images and an awareness of how here connects to there.

Yesterday we spent half a day getting from the city of San Pedro Sula to the small town of Copan Ruinas. We left behind the noise and heat of a modern Central American city and headed for the ancient land of the Maya.

The road, which was rebuilt after Hurricane Mitch struck in 1998, is in relatively good repair and efforts to keep the greenery from taking over are obvious.  Along the side of the road, machete-wielding men rhythmically sliced the roadside grasses.  People hauled bundles of newly felled firewood on their backs and their heads.

The road is a museum of the architecture of necessity.  We passed mud-brick and thatch huts made of available materials and small cinder block stores with corrugated metal roofs and signs advertising Pepsi, comida and Alka-Seltzer.  We saw people carrying food and equipment by bicycle, stray dogs prowling for food, and little children scampering up steep dirt footpaths that disappeared into the greenery.

Cars and trucks barreled along, passing without regard for double yellow lines, oncoming traffic, and the bikes, people and animals on the sides of the road.  When we reached the cobbled streets of Copan Ruinas—sweaty, dusty and tired—we reveled in the cooler, drier air of the mountain town. The noise of cars and crowds was replaced by the crowing of roosters and the calls of unfamiliar birds.

Airplane travel always leaves me with an odd feeling of dislocation. The connection between the place I was and the place I am is lost to the speed of the journey.  Car and busses come a little closer to human scale; at least we can gain impressions like these. But the best pace of travel is what’s to come over the next few days as we explore the town and visit the nearby Mayan ruins, coffee plantation and bird sanctuary. Then images will cede to encounters as we get to know this place and the people who call it home.  

Wallet-thinning is one of my travel rituals. I take out everything I won't need while I'm away, partly to lighten my load, partly to reduce the number of cards I'll have to replace if my wallet is lost or stolen.
The essentials come along: driver's license, credit card, ATM card, insurance card, cash.
The rest of the cards remain home: Chicago Public Radio membership, AAA membership, driver's insurance, REI membership, ACA instructor certification, faculty ID, Field Museum membership.
The process of separating the cards that come from the cards that don't is a transformation of its own. I leave behind my identity as a public radio listener, safe driver, outdoor enthusiast, kayak teacher, journalism professor and supporter of Chicago's museum of natural history. All I retain is my identity as an American consumer with health insurance.
It's not my favorite view of myself, but it's the tale of a thinned-out wallet.

It’s been a productive week. The ten of us met for two long class sessions, during which we learned about the history of travel writing and the various forms that exist today, from where-to-go, what-to-do service pieces to tales of adventure and misadventure, and from outward-focused chronicles of the people and places being visited to inward-focused pieces that are, first and foremost, about the person doing the traveling. We also discussed what we had learned about Honduras, drawn from the books listed in my Dec. 23 post.
And then we talked about packing and the various complications of getting through airport security and customs. On this topic, I discovered, I sometimes had less to offer than the other people in the room. I’ve never traveled abroad with prescription drugs, for example, but my students knew that these have to be brought in their original containers and packed in carry-on luggage. We shared tips for packing light: wear a windbreaker over a fleece jacket instead of a winter coat; wear sneakers and bring sandals; choose quick-drying synthetic clothes over cotton; bring a bar soap/shampoo so you don’t need to put yet another liquid in your quart-size zip-lock bag.
We also barraged our guide, Michael Gray (www.uncommonadv.com), with questions. Should we take malaria drugs? (Yes.) How about rabies shots? (No.) Should we bring portable water filters? (No.) What kind of bug repellent should we bring? (Broad spectrum to repel no-see-ums and black flies as well as mosquitoes.)
We’re excited. And nervous. Collectively, we’re afraid we’ll miss the plane, lose our luggage, get sick, misplace our passports, break our laptops, and dislike the food. But we’re also eager to wander through the Mayan ruins, smell the unfamiliar tropical air, meet all kinds of people, marvel at all the birds, scrutinize unfamiliar plants, hike the trails, splash down the rapids, paddle in the salty water, and try to commit our impressions and excitement to paper.
We’ll be on Honduran soil three days from now. I think we’re ready.  

Yesterday I bought a new pocket-size Spanish/English dictionary to replace the one I lost in Costa Rica a few years ago. I'll carry it with me wherever I go and use it to refresh my severely atrophied memory of the language.

Speaking even a small amount of the language of a country you're visiting--or making a good faith effort--pays off in a host of ways, from the delightful to the absurd. I first learned this lesson when I was about seven years old. In preparation for a short trip to Germany, my mother--who is utterly unabashed about butchering a foreign language in an attempt to communicate--had taught me how to respond to the question, "Do you speak German?" with "Yes, I speak German" in that language. This led to any number of German monologues by well-intentioned people who had no idea how mystified I truly was.
Sometimes people aren't willing to make the effort, however. During one of my trips to Japan, when I wandered into a food stall looking for something to eat, the mere sight of me terrified the proprietor. Fearing I might try to say something garbled in his language, he backed away, waving his hands in front of his face and insisting, "No tempura! No tempura!"
More often, however, speaking even a little bit of a country's language opens doors. Years ago, when my husband and I visited Italy with our 18-month-old daughter, we attracted the attention of people young and old who were smitten by our blonde toddler. When they discovered we could actually communicate, they befriended us as well. One evening in Rome, a trio of middle-aged men invited us into a bar, where they bought wine for us and milk for our daughter and we debated the relative merits of Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright (some small fraction of which probably made sense) well into the night.
But one of the most dramatic examples of the door-opening qualities of speaking the country's language happened in Costa Rica. We hired a cab driver, Jose, to drive us to a remote cloud forest. He planned to wait while we hiked, then drive us back to our hostel in the evening. It was a long ride down typically potholed roads, allowing him plenty of time to get used to my horrible accent and realize I was earnestly trying to learn more about him and his country. By the time we arrived at the park, he chose to spend the entire day hiking with us, explaining the medicinal benefits of various local plants and introducing us to hidden waterfalls and swimming holes.
I lost my dictionary shortly after that and haven’t really spent much time speaking Spanish since then. My new dictionary is still pristine, and I’m looking forward to thumbing through its pages beginning one week from today.

When I was a kid, flying was a big deal. People dressed up for the occasion. They wanted to look respectable when compared to the riff-raff who traveled by Greyhound.
Today, interstate buses are an endangered species and flying has become the transportation medium of the masses. The elite no longer fly on commercial jets; they own their own.
None of this comes as any surprise. It's the same trajectory that nearly every modern convenience travels. Remember when a cell phone was a sign of unfathomable affluence? Certainly your grandparents remember when dishwashers were an almost hedonistic luxury.
Lately I've been fondly recalling the airline food fight of the 80s. It's hard to imagine it now, but back then, when I was the age of my students, airlines thought the route to passengers' pocketbooks was through their stomachs. As a vegetarian, I welcomed this culinary tussle. At long last, I wasn't obligated to eat the ubiquitous stuffed green pepper. Instead, I was offered a plethora of options: lacto-oco vegetarian (usually an Italian dish), vegan (often containing tofu), Asian vegetarian (something vaguely Indian), and so on. There were literally dozens of "special diet" options, including low-fat, low-cholesterol and low-sodium. (As though one meal 35,000 miles above the Earth might scuttle an otherwise successful diet.)
Then the airlines hit harder times and had to tighten their belts. First they cut back on the variety of food options. Then they cut back on the quality. Finally, they pretty much cut out the food. For a while, it was OK. Passengers simply brought their own meals aboard, in effect having a high altitude potluck picnic. But after 9/11, restrictions on carry-on luggage made that impractical. Passengers had to buy overpriced airline food in the post-security-check concessions or resign themselves to eating nothing more than peanuts and soda pop.
Today, as I prepared a "Don't Forget" list for my students, I included "enough food to sustain you until about 9:30 p.m." Then I remembered that they couldn't bring any liquids or gels in containers larger than 3 ounces and wondered what the current TSA guidelines were about other potentially combustible ingestibles. There wasn't too much information about food on the TSA wesbite (www.tsa.gov), other than the fact that I could bring yogurt, Jell-O, pudding and whipped cream as long as they were in containers no larger than 3 ounces. I'm fairly sure that means that truly solid food is OK, and I plan to bring along plenty of Clif bars and fruit.
But I couldn't resist perusing the rest of the list, which suggested all kinds of things I never considered bringing along but now might. I can bring a corkscrew, it turns out (but no wine--or at least not in a container larger than 3 ounces). I can wear a gel-filled bra. I can bring along up to 3 ounces of bubble bath (although last I checked, there was no tub in the airline restroom). And joy of joys, I can finally bring along nail clippers, formerly considered a lethal weapon.
And I can still dress up, if I like. But I won't.

I finally located my sandals (see post #2 below). I hadn't seen them in months, and they looked slightly unfamiliar. They're more protective-looking than I recall, as though they were designed to withstand a high-impact crash. I had previously thought of them as sports sandals or water sandals, but now I realize they're sports utility sandals, the SUVs of the footwear world.

Which got me wondering, what else had put on armor since I saw it last? I dug around for the toothbrush I take on trips. Sure enough, it looked like it could stand up to a serious bite.
 
Other items in my house also look dramatically defensive. They boast rubber bumpers and aggressively bulky designs.

Perhaps their manufacturers are trying to reassure us that come what may, our toes, teeth and address books will be OK. Or perhaps I'm having way too much fun playing around with embedding photos into this blog entry in preparation for our trip to Honduras.