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Published: June 23rd 2008
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So...after a year and a half and 8 countries later, we are ready to settle back into urban Nebraska life…for a while anyways. Ely thinks the title of this blog is an outright lie. We can’t say we’ve been to 8 countries, she says, since doing so would include our own country, the US. I am just going by what the Travelblog service tells me, 51 entries in 8 countries.
I have recently been contemplating putting these last 6 months of wondering travels on my résumé, citing them as valuable experiences which add to my marketability as an employee. I don’t know if they would buy it or not, but it is an idea.
It has been a wonderful journey with Ely and every day has been a blessing. We made it a year in China alone. Had a few scares in south east Asia. We made it through a few months in Central America. And we are still standing together!
A few months ago, in our first week here, I decided that I was going to ask Ely to marry me. The surrounding circumstances were quite funny, so I will elaborate. It seems that I get the
stomach bug in every new country we go to. The same thing happened here, painful stomach cramps and a high fever. Ely’s grandma suggested that I take a sweat pill to sweat out the fever. So I took one right away. I also needed to take one later that night, she said. You know, this is Honduras, and yes, it is hot. No, they don’t have AC, and yes, it is even very hot at night. So, despite my best attempts, Ely forced me to take the next pill around bed time, she said I couldn’t turn on the fan, and that I needed to wrap myself in a blanket, to speed up the process. So, sweating isn’t a bad thing when you are inside an air conditioned house or are working out. But, in Honduras, at this particular time, it was a recipe of hellish conditions.
I stayed up for hours, drowning in a waterfall of sweat, being a bit nasty to her, telling her this was a stupid idea and demanding the fan be turned on. She steadfastly refused. So…I was left alone in bed with my thoughts, sweating like an Afghani in the sauna.
The
funny thing was, after 30 minutes or so of purely despising everything Ely was doing to me, even at times despising her, my thoughts drifted towards the inevitable… how much I loved her, and how much she must really love me to put me through this kind of torture like cure. If you leave me alone with my thoughts long enough, surely I will deviate towards loving Ely, right?
So, there I was in the middle of the night, wrapped up like a mummy, panting like a puppy, sweating, and thinking in a mild meditative state about how much I loved the lady next to me. The next thought that comes in my mind is that I absolutely love her and was ready to marry her.
So I stayed up all night and devised my plan. As the sun came up, the fever went down, and I felt better the next day, still with my plan in mind. Her CIA-like torture/cure worked, of course.
Right after we dropped off Mogens in Puerto Cortes, we headed to a wildlife reserve near La Ceiba, a place that Ely read about and really wanted to see. To get to the
reserve, we had to ride a really old fashioned train about 30 minutes off the main road. This is surprisingly probably the only functionable train still in Honduras (thanks to Hurricane Mitch). In this protected reserve, their were all sorts of precious animals, snakes, alligators, tons of endangered birds, even manatees. The views were amazing, as you can see from the pictures. Our first day there we went with the locals to the beach to collect firewood. The reserve is on a freshwater lake/mangrove which closely parallels the ocean. On our way back, one of the guides pointed out a big alligator swimming close to our boat. They said we could go swimming if we wanted.
When we got back, we went fishing with the boys. First, we collected the bait, freshwater shrimp. The boys didn’t really have poles. Instead, they used a little stick with fishing string wrapped around it. Not high tech stuff, but they did catch a bundle of fish that night.
The next day, we got up at 430 to go canoeing through the mangroves. We saw all sorts of wildlife, and even heard/saw the famous howler monkeys causing ruckus in the trees. Unfortunately,
the surrounding Garifuno population still hunts the monkeys as a cure for asthma.
The proposal.
After a day at the nature reserve, I convinced Ely to go back to her aunt and uncle’s house in the hills. She didn’t know it at the time, but this is where I wanted to propose to her.
So, one afternoon we went on a little hike with her family. I had a special spot picked out in the river next to their house, so earlier in the day I hid some juice and fruit next to the river in a tree, planning to take her there when her family left us alone.
However, as I was giving her uncle the signal to leave us alone at the river, he must not have understood. He wanted to take us to a little secluded waterfall a short distance away. I kept saying no, because my plan was to do it right where we were at, but Ely really wanted to see it, so we went. It was a precious little place. They snapped some pictures of us and then left. We climbed to the top of the waterfall, I semi-botched my
speech, and she still said yes.
So, the plan, the place, and the speech I envisioned that torturous night were much different from the actual plan, but the only thing that mattered was her answer.
As we end one journey we start yet another one…together. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.
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