Chrissy C

There are more Ramones t-shirts per capita in this country than anyplace I've been. What's up with that? Hostels here are really expensive. I've paid $50 for rooms here that I would be embarrassed to pay $15 for in Central America. You get better value in a Motel 6. I've never traveled anywhere in the high season before. If I can avoid it I never will again. It's a drag to have to trawl through 4 hostels dragging your pack around town until you find one that will give you a crappy room for an inflated rate. But it is a beautiful country. Waterfalls and incredible cacti and butterflies and ruins and technicolor mountains and big sky and...well, you get the idea. Also good wine and great ribs. But it's killing our budget, so we've decided ... read more

The equivalent of one third of Honduras’ GDP is wired home every year by Hondurans living and working abroad, the vast majority of course in the States. Without that constant inflow, the economy would collapse completely. Everywhere you go, somebody is asking you where you are from and telling you that they once worked for a year or two in Minnesota, Texas, California, or even Ontario. More often than not they are going back there in a few months. Throughout the country there are Western Union outlets, as well as less well-known operations, dedicated to keeping that money flowing. On a Friday afternoon there will often be a lineup down the street outside these tellers, young mothers picking up the money from their husbands that will feed the children, older mothers receiving pensions from their grown ... read more

We went on a canopy tour today. Definitely a novel experience. Curiously, however, I did not experience the kind of adrenaline rush that I thought zipping along suspended fifty feet in the air might provide. It felt altogether too safe. Also, I had been led to believe that the point of a canopy tour was to experience the jungle canopy, where most of the life goes on. But in fact we just shot from one platform to another, with little time to really look around. Perhaps it would be different in the rainforest. ... read more

Spent the last three days in this Garifuna village, apparently the second largest Garifuna village in the world. This is a side of Latin America I’ve never seen before. The Garifuna settled the north coast of Central America, coming from the Caribbean Islands over 200 years ago. Their original landfall was on one of the Bay Islands just of the coast from here, and from there they have spread out along the coast from Belize at least as far as Nicaragua, and perhaps further, I don’t know. There is not much to do here. It is stiflingly hot. If you just sot perfectly still, it’s fine, but the moment you stand up and start to walk sweat starts pouring from you. The village is a collection of randomly placed concrete houses stretching along two or three ... read more

One dark, unblinking eye stares out at me, with a cold look of appraisal that reminds me of its reptilian ancestry. With a movement of its head, it shakes the serpent hanging limp from its beak, perhaps to make sure that the snake is in fact dead. For a moment, the bird grows in my mind’s eye to engulf me, that cold staring eye sucking me in, hypnotizing me. The shake of its head seems defiant, as though daring me to try and take its prize, and although it is silent all around, in my imagination I hear the harsh deafening cry of some prehistoric creature. While there is certainly no physical menace from this small heron, the scene itself seems to convey some primal threat, a powerful omen and symbolic warning. The violence of the ... read more

Does anybody know what gunshots sound like? 'Cause I swear, last night there was a shootout going on in the neighbourhood around our hostel last night. It doesn't make any sense at all, we're in what is probably Honduras' biggest tourist destination, a sleepy but prosperous little colonial town on the border of Guatemala, known primarily for being right next to the ruins of one of the major Mayan cities. We've been here for three days while Vanessa was recovering from a bit of fever, and the people here have struck me as leading as peaceful and relaxed a life as anywhere we've been so far this trip. I don't know, maybe it was the bikers. See, last night there was some kind of fiesta going on in town. There was a little charity event just ... read more

We left Guatemala today, after a trying day yesterday wandering around Guatemala City picking up my passport, trying to get my plane ticket replaced, and getting a special stamp in my new passport to confirm that I was in fact in Guatemala legally. I just wanted to leave you with a few parting thoughts about Guatemala, in no particular order and not at all related. Ten years ago, Guatemala ended its thirty-year civil war. That means that everyone you meet here between the ages of 15 and 45 grew up in an environment that threatened, and frequently erupted in, violence that remains practically unimaginable to us. This holds particularly true for the Mayan communities of the Altiplano, where a large number of massacres were perpetrated by the military (and occasionally by the guerillas) and entire towns ... read more

Over the course of the last couple nights, I was befriended by one of the longer term gringo inhabitants of Lago de Atitlan. We'll call him Joe. I think Joe liked me primarily because I was able to go head to head with him and not fall down, resulting in a couple of expensive nights and a couple of rough mornings. Nevertheless, as the Dirty Willies flowed (Dirty Willies - rum and ginger ale, known elsewhere as Quebec Libres), Joe told me a bit about himself and a few of the odder denizens of this navel of the world. Among the more sinister aspects of the lake of which he informed me, the revelation that there were many mercenaries and/or assassins living there surprised me. Perhaps it shouldn't have, Central America being the home of American ... read more

...read this instead: Executive summary and if you have time: Full report ... read more