Honduras III

The next day of my trip was Thursday, which is part of the Easter holiday, and I was worried about finding a bus. I noticed in my guide book that there was a national park nearby that had the highest mountain in Honduras, so I decided to see if I could find buses there. Luckily there was one bus leaving Copan that I managed to catch. I arrived a couple of hours later in the town of Gracias. The small town was founded in 1536 as one of the first cities in the New World and became the capital of Honduras and was used to administer the entire Spanish Central American empire. However now it is just another quiet Honduran town with most of the streets still dirt. The first day I spent exploring the town. Overlooking the town there was an old Spanish fort that was nicely restored. It gave a nice view of the town and contained the tomb of a famous former President of Honduras. There were a number of ancient churches, and the central one was full of people singing Easter songs. There was a large number of Honduran tourists, but I didn't have to much trouble finding a place to stay.

The next day I decided enter the nearby Celaque park and climb the mountain Cerro Las Minas. I wanted to spend the night in the park so I could get to the top early in the morning, but I hadn't brought my tent or sleeping bag. Luckily there was a shelter on the mountain, so all I needed to do was rent a sleeping bag in the town. After buying a gallon jug of water and some food I set out at about 10am. I wandered around town for a while until I finally found the long dirt road that led to the park. The 8 km road was hot and dusty and slowly climbed through Honduran farmland and hordes of exceptionally loud cicadas. Once inside the park, the many pine trees provided shade and reminded me of canoe trips up in northern Ontario. After the park office the trail followed a river. The park gets a lot of rain which provides water to 7 major rivers and to the surrounding towns and villages. There were many signs around asking visitors to avoid contaminating the water. The trail then headed up a series of switchbacks, climbing steeply. At one point I took a 1 or 2 km detour to a lookout of a open canyon with a large 100 meter waterfall cascading down on the far wall of the mountain. It's apparently even more impressive in the rainy season, if you can see it through the clouds. I continued to climb and reached the first campsite at about 3 pm. The shelter was falling apart with holes in the roof, parts of the walls missing, and the only bed was a piece of tin balanced on some poles sticking out of the wall. I debated whether to continue to the second campsite and risk getting caught in the rain, or stay here, where I would probably get wet anyway. After testing out the "bed", I decided that it was good enough to function as a shelter in the rain and I decided to stay.

After eating and watching the birds, a group of four very tired Honduran hikers arrived at the camp. They had camped at the second campsite the previous night and had tried to climb the summit that day but one of the women had injured her knees and they had to turn back. They were all from Tegucigalpa, two were programmers, one was a advertiser and the other a doctor. They were weighed down because they had brought too much stuff, but all that stuff was useful for camping. They made a fire, set up their two tents and had a nice supper. They mentioned that it was quite rare for Hondurans to do this sort of thing for a vacation and most of the people that climbed the mountain were foreigners, but they enjoyed it. That night I balanced on my noisy piece of tin and tried to get some sleep and not wake up the other campers. Fortunately it did not rain and I had a relatively comfortable night.

I woke up at 5am for an early start to the summit. At first it was dark enough to need a flashlight, but the sun was rising behind me so it was soon light. I left most of my stuff in the shelter and only took what I needed. The trail became extremely steep for about 500 meters, necessitating hands as well as feet in parts. Eventually it flattened out again into a large plateau covered in an ancient cloud forest, the largest in Honduras. Huge moss covered trees towered over the ground, blocking out the sun and making the floor almost clear of undergrowth. This made it difficult to follow the trail, but it was much flatter and easy to walk. I arrived at the second camp, where an older man from the States was camping. He had been a CFO of a software company that had been bought out and he had signed a 5 year non-competition clause. Since he couldn't work he decided to take the 5 years and travel the world. He was staying in the cloud forest taking pictures and looking for the elusive quetzal. The cloud forest continued for another hour of walking until there was one final steep stretch to the summit. Unlike most summits I have been to, this one was covered in trees. However there were some great views to the east and south through breaks in the trees because the clouds had not moved in yet. At 2850 meters (9350 ft) it wasn't the highest mountain I had been on, but it was high enough to be very cold. I had a sweater and a jacket on, but I started getting quite cold sitting on the summit. I ate some snacks and headed back through the cloud forest. After an hour, the clouds slowly started rolling in and the forest started looking very mysterious. I never saw a quetzal, or any other type of cloud forest animal, but I found that it was the most beautiful and peaceful forest that I have been to.

I returned down the mountain, passing the Honduran group I had met the night before, who were carefully descending with their limping group member. After exiting the forest I was faced with a scorching early afternoon walk through the open fields back to Gracias. I was thoroughly exhausted by the time I got back to my room in the town. I was planning to visit the nearby hot springs to soothe my aching muscles and meet up with my Honduran friends, but I soon fell asleep and didn't wake up until the morning.

Honduras II

After waking up the next morning in San Pedro Sula I spent a couple hours exploring the city and looking to buy a return ticket to Managua in case it was too busy to find a bus during Easter. It seemed like a friendly city and I explored a market and the central park. I also needed to find a bank because I had almost no lempiras which is the currency in Honduras. The lempira is worth almost exactly the same as the Nicaraguan cordoba, but they only have bills, no coins. This means that rather than having a pocketful of change, you have a thick wad of bills in your wallets. It felt strange peeling off two 1 lempira bills (about 5 cents each) to pay for a little plastic bag of water but I soon grew used to it. I then caught a bus to the town of Copan Ruinas which is just outside the famous Mayan Copan Ruins.

After a four hour bus ride that went through the cool mountains of central Honduras, we arrived at the valley where the ruins are located, near the border to Guatemala. I checked into a very nice hostel that only cost $4 and was recommended in my guidebook as one of the best in all of Central America. It seemed nice and everybody put their name and nationality on a main blackboard, but it was almost empty when I arrived. I had a few hours left of daylight and I wandered around the town. The town was very picturesque and the central park had a Mayan theme with an old church and a very interesting Mayan museum. I also wandered down some of the country roads and noticed that the town had many taxi tuk-tuks going up and down the hilly roads. I hadn't seen any of these in Central America so far and they are apparently a recent development here, being shipped in directly from India. I found the entrance to the Mayan ruins about 1km outside of town but it was getting dark so I left it until the next day. Back at the hostel I met two friends who were traveling through Central America. One was from Sweden and the other from Oregon and they had come from Mexico, through Belize and had just arrived that day from Tikal, another major Mayan ruins in Guatemala. We found a nice restaurant in town and enjoyed supper. It turned out that the part owner of the restaurant also was the owner of the hostel and he also offered a number of tours and different excursions around Copan and Honduras, one of which my new friends signed up for.

The next day I got up early to get to the ruins right when it opened at 8 am. The entrance gate was covered with very tame Scarlet Macaws, which are the national bird of Honduras even though there are no real wild ones left. The ruins were stunning, ancient temples and intricately carved figures hidden in the jungle. The site is especially well known for Stelae, which are statues, usually of a ruler, and on the back they are covered in Mayan hieroglyphics describing the date and story of the ruler. There are many temples, some only partially excavated with tunnels going inside them, an ancient ball court, and living spaces for the upper class. There is also a hieroglyphic stairway where each step was covered in hieroglyphics. This detailed story tells the history of the city and the rulers and greatly increased our knowledge of Mayan hieroglyphics. In 400 AD, at the end of a spiritually significant 400 year period, a stranger arrived and conquered Copan. Using religion symbolism, he was looked upon as a god and declared his 400 year reign. Him and his descendants built many of the temples and artifacts and turned Copan into one of the great Mayan cities. After 400 years, it appears that the king at that time declared the era to be ended, built a number of buildings signifying this event, and Copan was abandoned within a hundred years. I was practically alone for the first hour of wandering around and it was very awe-inspiring. By the time I worked my way through the entire ruins the big tour groups started to come in and I decided to move on. There was a nature trail through the jungle that led to some excavated houses as well as a lot of unexcavated mounds. I then visited the museum at the entrance. The museum centerpiece was a replica of one of the temples, reproduced exactly as it would have looked when it was built. It was covered in stucco and painted bright red with many designs painted over the walls. I always imagined the Mayans living among dull gray stones, just like the ruins look like now, so this new perspective was welcome. They also had some of the more intricate original sculptures inside protected from the weather as well as some examples of white stucco-covered houses of the nobles.

After enjoying the park I was planning to head to Antigua Guatemala to enjoy the Semana Santa celebrations there but I was told that the town would be crammed with people and it would be necessary to pay over $100 to find any hotel room. I decided to leave Guatemala for another time and just spend the rest of my vacation in Honduras. This meant that I had time to sign up for a 'Hidden Copan' hiking trip that I learned about the night before. Our tour guide was a long time backpacker from Belgium who decided to settle in Copan. It was me, the two girls I had met the night before and a group of about 8 Dutch tourists who had joined the tour at the last minute. We took a group of tuk-tuks a couple of miles outside of town and were warned to prepare for ticks. We headed through a couple of cow pastures, passing under barbed wire fences, and noticed that many of the hills were shaped like temples. Our tour guide mentioned that there were many unexcavated ruins all around, but nobody had the money to uncover them. We continued along a foot path through the mountains and passed through two isolated Indian villages. Strangely, these villages had lost all their traditional clothes and food in the last 40 years while just across the border in Guatemala lived groups with all their traditions. The tour guide was a wealth of information and opinions. He was a member of the Honduras tourist board representing backpackers and talked about the many problems facing Honduras. He explained about one particular project that was intended to improve the lives of these villages. The Japanese government have donated a lot of money for improving the area around Copan in return for exclusive access to the ruins. One of the projects was to provide running water to the villages. The project was started four years ago and was supposed to provide water in a couple of months. Thanks to a lot of mismanagement and corruption there is now just a pump and pipes that are still not connected to anything. The people in the village still have to make a long trek to collect water from the clean stream. He also talked about the major gang problems they have in Honduras. It is the main country that receives cocaine from Columbia and gangs are constantly at war over this lucrative business. The gang wars have made San Pedro Sula the city with the highest murder rate in the world, and Tegucigalpa the fifth highest. We walked right up to the border of Guatemala, and due to the relative remoteness of the area, it was the most popular area for smuggling drugs into Guatemala. A person could get $50 taking a kilo of cocaine across the border, an afternoon of work, taking the same kind of path through the mountains that we were. Needless to say, there is never a lack of volunteers. We returned to the road again where our tuk-tuks had arrived to pick us up and take us back to Copan. I again ate with my new friends in the same restaurant where this time we had some interesting Asian-style food.

Honduras I

I had an week off again for Semana Santa (Easter Week) and I decided to visit Honduras. I left on Saturday early in the morning and planned to arrive in the city of Leon in Nicaragua by late afternoon. However the first day did not go very well. I arrived at the border and immediately noticed that there were way too many people there. The road was so crammed with cars and trucks that the bus couldn't even make it to the customs office and let us out about 2 or 3 kms away. There was a huge line at the customs office, so long that it snaked around the parking lots and stretched a couple of hundred meters down the the road. I knew that the border would be busy because all the Nicaraguans that work in Costa Rica would be heading back to their families for Semana Santa, but I didn't expect it to be this busy. It took about 4 hours sitting in the hot sun before I got to the front of the line and was able to cross into Nicaraguan side. The station on the Nicaraguan side was also pretty bad and it took another 2 hours of waiting to cross. I met two other travelers in line. One a surfer from New Zealand who had been surfing all across the world for the last 18 years and the other was a traveler from Minnesota. Neither were very impressed by their trip so far, partly from the horrendous line and partly from the high prices in Costa Rica. The surfer was also disappointed by the surfing in Costa Rica because there were way too many tourists and beginner surfers crowding up the waves. She said she preferred quiet solitary surfing and was hoping she would find better spots in Nicaragua and she especially was looking forward to a particular wave called La Libertad in El Salvador. She had spent so long surfing in remote places that she had caught malaria three times. They were both heading to Granada and I helped them get through the border and find a bus.

I continued on to the capital of Nicaragua, Managua, and due to the excessive time at the border I didn't arrive until after dark. I needed a taxi from one bus station to another one with buses to Leon in a hurry so I was glad that there was a taxi right there with another passenger heading to the station. It was only 20 cordobas which is about a dollar and a pretty good price. We were driving along and the driver engaged me in small talk. Then he asked for the 20 cordobas so he could get gas. I gave it to him and he immediately started heading down a side street and asked me for the rest of the fare, which including taxes was 400 cordobas. I was not impressed and started arguing that we had agreed on 20. He asked his "passenger" if she had paid 400 cordobas and she just nodded quietly. Finally after a lot of arguing and random driving through the night side streets he stopped the taxi and got my pack out of the trunk and demanded 100 cordobas for the ride. I refused and he dropped my bag and took off. He was at least nice enough to leave me on a fairly main road so I had no trouble finding a taxi, but I had to overpay 80 cordobas to get to the station. Another hour or two in the bus and I finally arrived in Leon and found a hostel at 10 pm. At this point I was not too thrilled about the trip and I had even lost my voice from the combination of a cold and arguing with the taxi driver. Luckily the trip got much better after that and I didn't have any more problems.

The hostel I found was really cool. It was only $4 and there was a pool table, movies and even an indoor wading pool. I met a lot of interesting people, a Japanese-American, a Basque from Spain and a group of eccentric Greeks who knew how to have fun and I managed to have a good time and forget about the rest of the day. I decided to stay an extra day in Leon because I got there so late and it was a very interesting city. The city had about 12 amazing cathedrals, including the largest one in Central America and it was the home of Ruben Dario, a famous Nicaraguan poet. The next day I took a bus down to the nearby Pacific beaches and I met a guy from New Orleans whose family was Cajun and had lived there for a long time. He was checking the waves out for surfing, but they were too advanced for his skills. There were two or three surfers in the waves and the rest of the people stayed right at the shore because the waves were so powerful. The guy from New Orleans was planning to stay the night at the beach because he had an itchy problem with his bed at his hostel, but he decided to go back to Leon when I told him about the nice hostel I was at. On the way back we waited for the last bus and it was crammed full. I didn't see how they would fit anybody else on, let alone the 15 people waiting for the bus, especially since the New Orleans guy was carrying all his stuff. But they kept cramming and cramming and we all managed to fit, despite hanging half out the door. And apparently it was going to get a lot busier the next weekend. That night I met some more interesting people, a guy from Brazil, a couple of Germans, a couple of Costa Ricans, and an American who turned out to be a friend of a friend in Bagaces.

The next day was a traveling day and I managed to get up at 6am after 3 hours of sleep for a bus. I took two buses to the border and got a bicycle ride across the border to Honduras. I managed to not get too ripped off by the money exchange people and the border guards failed to give me a stamp for my passport. I took two more buses to the capital city of Tegucigalpa, which was a pretty city in a valley from afar, but dirty and disordered up close. I then took one more bus to the second largest city in Honduras, San Pedro Sula. I arrived in San Pedro at about 9 pm and I immediately checked into the hotel across the street. It had a TV and a private bathroom for only about $7 and I even got to share the room with cat-sized cockroach.