Jenn in Belize is now in Honduras

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Well, firstly I must apologise for my complete tardiness in not writing for 2 months. Time has completely slipped by and I guess an update is in order…
So as most of you know, we have left Belize and are now in Honduras. The Mexico backpackers hasn’t happened yet. Basically the owner of it had no financial records at all. What he did send us was a bunch of hastily typed, inconsistent details that told us nothing. Apparently he runs his business without any financial record and does not get regular reports from the guy currently managing it. So we told him if he can get us a copy of proper financial records we may be interested and at that stage we could not validate spending around $US600 for us both to get there without knowing any financial details first. A shame yes, but hopefully the right decision made. We’re still waiting to hear back from him, so maybe one day we’ll get the email and go from there.
The decision then came to - ‘What do we do now?” Belize, as incredible and beautiful as it is,, and we were having a fantastic time there, just didn’t look like it was going to produce the desired results any time fast.. So researching a new line of thought, we came across Casa Kiwi in Trujillo, Honduras. We checked out their website, got in touch with the owner, and are now working here. We were upfront and honest from day one - we want to open our own backpackers in CA. We are hear to learn the CA way, get back in touch with the backpacker way of life, and pick your brain on how it got started, hurdles along the way and where to from here. Fortunately the owner and manager (both kiwis) are very accommodating and have been great to us from day one.
So we are enjoying Honduras so far. On the boat across from Punta Gorda Belize to Puerto Barrios Guatemala, I realized how much I had missed landscape and seeing the mountains rising out of the sea just made my childhood dream to become Indiana Jones alive again. I just wanted to get off that boat, run into the mountains and explore my little heart out. Now in Trujillo we have the best of both worlds. We are still on the Caribbean - note the only mainland place in Honduras where you can see the sunset over the Caribbean, and we have the mountains rising up to the side of the bay. The town of Trujillo itself (we’re about 5km out of town) is small and quaint. Not yet overrun by tourists, we are still a novelty and people are interested & polite, more than what can be said for some of the bigger cities around. How I had pictured in my head of a little hilly seaside CA town with cobble stone streets, colorful houses, chickens running everywhere is pretty much what we’ve got. Despite living in a hostel, and being daily surrounded by foreigners, I finally feel like I’m in central America. It feels like home here, the people are wonderful, the culture amazing, interesting, sometimes confusing and it’s nice to be immersing into a culture to learn a language again. In my heart I feel very content.
Our Spanish is coming along. Honestly I feel we are both learning quickly. But the more we seem to learn, the more there seems be we need to know. My Portuguese has definitely helped in many cases, though often I completely confuse myself getting the very similar but different words all muddled up. Hopefully in learning Spanish I won’t forget Portuguese. We, normally, have 3 local staff that work at the hostel, Irma & Liliana in the kitchen and Alberto who’s the yard boy. So we get to practice Spanish daily with them. Irma also lived in the US for a number of years, so understands a lot of English if we have no idea what to say in Spanish. She’s also good at correctly us on every mistake. I am becoming very interested in the lives of the women here. In a small town, male dominated society, there view’s on the world, relationships etc is interesting…maybe I will do something with that anthropology degree. Affairs here are the common everyday thing. Every women who gets married expects to be cheated on. A man is not a manly man if he does not have lots of children (to many women of course) and a number of girlfriends, each one younger than the last. The men aren’t subtle either, but the women are jealous and very protective. Of course, the women do also have affairs, just more discreetly. I’ve understood enough Spanish to get the girly chats in the kitchen while cutting veges to know the girls here have a couple of boys on the side. One girl who works here occasionally is 29 and has 6 kids to 6 different men. She has never married, and never lived with any of the fathers. But this is normal and accepted. Me and Chad are the strange one’s who at 27 don’t have any children and have no plans for them at any point soon. As a culture they seem to be very happy at picking & choosing the preferred elements of their catholic society. Anyway, my plan once my Spanish gets better is to learn more about this and their views on their world.


So we will probably be here for a while now. If anyone’s interested, look at the website www.casakiwi.com (think that’s right) and see where we are. Photo’s havent’ been updated for a while, am still working on figuring out their old website system on how to do that, but one day…

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