Ode to Honduran Buses

Oh Honduran buses, how I hate thee. Sorry to start off on such a negative and weirdly theatrical note, but I have spent over 24 combined hours on various Honduran buses in the last week and the experience was harrowing. I will use this blog to try to acquaint those of you who are unfamiliar with the experience to just how un-enjoyable it just can be. To start off there are three types of buses in Honduras: the real luxury bus lines, the bus lines that claim to be luxury, and the chicken buses (that make no claims to anything including passenger safety, which is honestly pretty refreshing… until a child throws up on you while riding one of them). On my most recent adventure I had the pleasure of riding two of these types of buses (neither of which was the least bit luxurious).

To give you some background, I was traveling from my home in Ocotepeque (the farthest south western department of the country) to visit friends on the north coast (located coincidentally on the northern most part of the country). In order to get there I had to travel across the entire length of the country (or roughly the distance between like DC and Delaware). While this seems like a piece of cake trip to those of you accustomed to travel within the US (and usually in private cars), it is a daunting nine hour trek across some of the worst roads in the hemisphere (especially when one is living on a PC budget and forced to take 1970-1980s era US school buses).

The trip started off with a serious bout of luck, when I was able to catch a jalon with someone leaving my town headed to Santa Rosa. This was the first leg of my trip since SR is about 2 hours north of me and a fun place to spend a night. I was even so fortunate as to get a seat in the cabin of the pick up (truly luxurious by my campo standards) and the driver wouldn’t take any money for the ride (thus saving me about 60 lempiras, or 3 dollars US). I spent the night in a friends hotel room in SR and went out on the town with some other volunteers, overall a great first day of my vacation. Sadly the rest of my travel was not so enjoyable. I awoke the next morning to find out that the engineer from my mancomunidad who had offered me a ride all the way to my friends town (since it was right next to the town where he planned to vacation with his family) was not going to be headed up that day and was instead waiting till later in the week. This meant that I would have to cowboy up and hop on a bus headed north. After an appropriate grieving period, and a hardy breakfast of fried food, I made my way to the bus station and hopped the first school bus I saw headed to San Pedro.

This trip started as pretty much all of chicken bus experiences started, with a kid next to me vomiting (though at least this time he managed to get the majority of it in a grocery bag held by his father).

[As an aside I would just like to point out that while Hondurans will throw just about any piece of trash they accumulate during a bus ride directly out the window, they as a whole seem steadfastly against throwing their bags of vomit out. I honestly cannot comprehend this. Apparently a bottle or a churo bag or a plate of food scraps is un-bearable to hold onto until they come to a trash receptacle, but a bag of human vomit is totally ok. Often times they even place it on the floor of the bus and let it roll around, not sure what they think will come of this, but what it usually results in is an exploded bag of vomit on a crowded bus. Sorry, back to the story at hand]

To be honest though, I was actually pretty impressed by this kids skill, he actually managed to start puking before we had even left the bus terminal, no small feat seeing as we were only going about 10 miles an hour. Besides this puking, this part of the trip was relatively un-eventful and we reached San Pedro in decent time.

As a bit of background on San Pedro, it is Honduras’s most populous city, and has the highest murder rate in a country that is second in the world in killings per capita (it has a murder rate of over 120 people per 100,000, compared to say DC which has one of around 20). For those of you unfamiliar with Spanish, the name San Pedro Sula roughly translates to Holy crap get me out of here. To top it off it is located in a valley and the weather alternates between hot, hazy, and sunny, and hot, hazy, humid, and rainy, with an average temperature of balls hot. This last part is important to the story, since on this occasion I was left waiting on a turned on bus for 2 hours as they tried to jam more and more people on to it (in Honduras seating capacity on busses is taken more as a minimum than a max, and a bus is not considered adequately full until the entire aisle is full as well). My 2 pm bus eventually got on the road at 4, by which point I had literally sweated through my jeans and t-shirt and had successfully lost any chance of catching a connecting bus in La Ceiba to get to my friends house. Luckily for me everyone else traveling to my friends house that day had run into similar trouble on their bus from Teguz and my friend was able to get his host parents to come pick us up. Also luckily, the mall at which we ended up waiting for a ride has a Wendys, so I was able to cool off with a Frosty.

Well Ill just conclude by saying that all the busing was worth it, since it resulted in me spending 2 days on a tropical island paradise, and then 3 more in the happening colonial city of Trujillo partying with fellow volunteers. Also on the way back I got to ride next to a lady on a chicken bus who actually had 2 chickens in a bag on her lap as well as a toddler on the other knee (this time the kid did not throw up, and neither did the chickens for that matter).

"Like a stranger on a foreign shore"

This is one way to spend 10 days in Honduras:

http://www.moon.com/destinations/honduras/discover-honduras/explore-honduras/the-10-day-best-honduras

...but if you always do only what the books recommend you're not going to get very far, and you're not going to see very much that hasn't been seen. for semana santa this year myself and a bunch of us decided to use Honduras' national vacation-time/semana santa to see Cayos Cochinos, as well as the beach town of Trujillo. These areas are areas infrequently visited by foreign tourists, most of whom instead fly or boat right past these locales on their way to Bay Islands. 

Map of Cayos Cochinos
Map of Trujillo

This was my second time out on Cayos, but this was the first time heading to there for something other than work. Most of the tropical beach pictures that you see in the columns of this blog are from Cayos.  For the two nights we basically had our own private caribbean island with access to snorkel equipment, and the ability to explore this crazy archipelago, located an hour off the shore of Honduras.  we did all this for around 1000 HNL, or $50 per person, but then again cayos is one of those places that is rarely mentioned in guide books. it maybe get's a paragraph in Moon Travel, and it's not terribly easy to get to either. the most common way is to know a fisherman, negociar him down, and then take an early morning hour long ride in their small boat before the ocean is too rough for travel, but that's what makes Honduras so great and so full of unrealized potential. if Honduras has this much to offer, what have i been missing in other parts of the world?

An abandoned lighthouse on Cayo Mayor. "Like a scene out of Lost"

The second half of our tripwe spent in Trujillo, which was just as great, if not better than cayos. got to see a lot of neat historical stuff, like the city's historic cematary and la Fortaleza de Santa Bárbara, which is one of the oldest defensive establishments in the America's and death-place of some random guy known as William Walker. we trekked up some waterfalls outside of town and I definitely sprained a few toes jumping from slippery rock to slippery rock barefoot, and of course we spent time relaxing on the beach when not celebrating a despidia, going out, or night swimming in the Atlantic. it was a pretty great way to spend the second part of my semana santa. 

View from the fort of Trujillo's beach (BR)

Work: When not backpacking through Honduras I occasionally find time to work on the project that has been consuming most of my time since arriving.  Currently, we are laying down the last few truckloads of soil for the field in order to crown the center of the field so that water flows to the sides rather than just sitting on the top of it. at the same time we're reworking the drainage plans, and there is some desire on the muni's end to install an irrigation system, pero vamos a ver. also, i've received word that the grant application for this project has been approved and we should be receiving funds in about two weeks. otherwise I'm also setting up a stakeholders meeting of businesses and residents around the park to discuss their ideas on how the park should be developed, which should happen sometime before June.

"Like a stranger on a foreign shore"

This is one way to spend 10 days in Honduras:

http://www.moon.com/destinations/honduras/discover-honduras/explore-honduras/the-10-day-best-honduras

...but if you always do only what the books recommend you're not going to get very far, and you're not going to see very much that hasn't been seen. for semana santa this year myself and a bunch of us decided to use Honduras' national vacation-time/semana santa to see Cayos Cochinos, as well as the beach town of Trujillo. These areas are areas infrequently visited by foreign tourists, most of whom instead fly or boat right past these locales on their way to Bay Islands. 

Map of Cayos Cochinos
Map of Trujillo

This was my second time out on Cayos, but this was the first time heading to there for something other than work. Most of the tropical beach pictures that you see in the columns of this blog are from Cayos.  For the two nights we basically had our own private caribbean island with access to snorkel equipment, and the ability to explore this crazy archipelago, located an hour off the shore of Honduras.  we did all this for around 1000 HNL, or $50 per person, but then again cayos is one of those places that is rarely mentioned in guide books. it maybe get's a paragraph in Moon Travel, and it's not terribly easy to get to either. the most common way is to know a fisherman, negociar him down, and then take an early morning hour long ride in their small boat before the ocean is too rough for travel, but that's what makes Honduras so great and so full of unrealized potential. if Honduras has this much to offer, what have i been missing in other parts of the world?

An abandoned lighthouse on Cayo Mayor. "Like a scene out of Lost"

The second half of our tripwe spent in Trujillo, which was just as great, if not better than cayos. got to see a lot of neat historical stuff, like the city's historic cematary and la Fortaleza de Santa Bárbara, which is one of the oldest defensive establishments in the America's and death-place of some random guy known as William Walker. we trekked up some waterfalls outside of town and I definitely sprained a few toes jumping from slippery rock to slippery rock barefoot, and of course we spent time relaxing on the beach when not celebrating a despidia, going out, or night swimming in the Atlantic. it was a pretty great way to spend the second part of my semana santa. 

View from the fort of Trujillo's beach (BR)

Work: When not backpacking through Honduras I occasionally find time to work on the project that has been consuming most of my time since arriving.  Currently, we are laying down the last few truckloads of soil for the field in order to crown the center of the field so that water flows to the sides rather than just sitting on the top of it. at the same time we're reworking the drainage plans, and there is some desire on the muni's end to install an irrigation system, pero vamos a ver. also, i've received word that the grant application for this project has been approved and we should be receiving funds in about two weeks. otherwise I'm also setting up a stakeholders meeting of businesses and residents around the park to discuss their ideas on how the park should be developed, which should happen sometime before June.

The Difference Between Right And Wrong

So I was having a conversation with one of my good friends here (another volunteer) a while back about dealing with the fact that we both live in extremely small rural sites in which we are the only foreigners. In both our cases this meant that we were quite literally one of the only people that anyone from our site had interacted with closely, and routinely, who came from a different culture and had different ideas and ways of doing things. Now as someone who has a lot of experience traveling the world, I am pretty used to encountering different ways of thinking, doing daily tasks, and preparing food. Due to this experience I am probably much more adept at adjusting to new surroundings and open to new ideas than many Americans (for example, in Taiwan I happily ate jelly fish and a kind of tofu called smelly dofu, which literally emits the smell of dog poop when it is being fried). Thus going into this experience I was confident that I would be able to adjust to the culture and food of my new home relatively rapidly (even though honestly it is pretty hard to imagine two places more different than Washington DC, the capital of the most developed country in the world, and La Fraternidad, one of the smallest backwoods municipalities in the smallest department in one of the least developed countries in the western hemisphere). I was also pretty confident that even though I am the first volunteer (or American in general for that matter) to live in the town, people would adjust to my presence and cultural differences over the first six months. But quite honestly, before settling into my village I had no idea how un-adept they would be at this.

Going into this experience, I could not have been prepared to how completely closed off rural Hondurans are to the possibility of any other way of thinking or doing anything in a different way. This inability to adjust their way of thinking or accept my way of doing things as a different but valid option truly baffled me at first. They were so closed off to new ways of approaching anything, that I came to realize that they viewed my actions and beliefs not just as different, but as wrong and many times as a sign that I was “mal educado” (basically that I had bad manners). This was very frustrating and at times somewhat offensive until I finally realized that they honestly did not know better.

This finally occurred to me when I was talking to my friend’s four year old son, and I didn’t understand a phrase and asked him to repeat it. He proceeded to shout it directly into my ear, assuming that I was just hard of hearing, because it was inconceivable that I didn’t understand Spanish perfectly (or even that I didn’t speak it exactly like everyone in town). When his father and I tried to explain that Spanish wasn’t my first language, he was truly dumbstruck that such people existed (he had heard me speak English on the phone and I think just thought I had learned it in school like everyone here, but was just a way better student).

While he was just a child, I realized that his behavior was actually indicative of a general trend. The vast majority of the people in my village have never traveled more than ten miles from home, and have never been exposed to different ways of thinking, talking or doing daily tasks. Thus they do not understand that there can be multiple ways of doing things in many cases. This lead to situations, like when my friends watched me make white rice by boiling it in water, as opposed to frying it in vegetable oil (actually how they make rice), it isn’t different, it’s wrong (This reaction was made more interesting by the fact that they were all men, and thus had literally never made rice before, but they knew I was doing it differently than their wives and mothers).