Back to Honduras

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We were finally returning to Honduras...we hope, we hope. Maureen had received an email from Michael, BECA Director, who doubted very much that Guatemalan technology could “alert” the borders (his quotes). Still, I felt, you never know. After all the anticipation, the border was a breeze. So we were victims of our gullibility, probably what was intended.

The bus rolled down the eastern coast, not far from where a 7.3 quake had struck offshore six months ago.. I became reflective, preparing for a departure mindset. I glanced at Maureen listening to her iPod, gazing across the aisle toward a calm Caribbean sea. The thought “How special you are” crept across my trance, turned around, and passed before me again. Tears came up but not out and I turned away. When I felt her eyes in the back of my head, as she must have felt mine, I turned around myself. Not knowing what to say, I said “How special you are.” She put her head on my shoulder and we savored our time together.

They said the trip would take 4½ hours, and it did….if you counted only the driving time and not the 30 minutes it was

late, the 45 minutes between transfers to another bus and the 45 minutes at Honduras immigration. So we arrived right on schedule in 6½ hours, and too late for me to have caught my original flight.

We saw several encampments of extreme poverty along rivulets in ditches, a hundred yards of tires burning, women washing on large rocks, clusters of staring or arguing men, sleeping in three-sided shelters with plastic tarp for walls and roofs. They are too poor and temporary (?) to be called slums (as those dwellings have corrugated metal walls) or favelas (with electricity) or tent city (enclosed tents). I imagine folks here had not made it in rural life and are not making it in urban life and are permanently marginalized, refugees without a homeland. I’m afraid that living there is “temporary” because the absence of essentials, dengue fever, STDs, and gang violence mean that people just do not live very long. Such a helpless feeling to look at meaningless despair from the window of a bus going to the big city.

Taxis curbside at the bus terminal cost double, so we walked out to the street for ours. We drove into the dark night “in a city that likes to keep its secrets,” trash swirling on the streets. Maureen gave the driver an address and he turned left into an even darker street. I looked for an alley cat or a rat for a sign of life but it must have to dangerous for them. “There is a hotel here?” the taxi driver asked nervously. Two blocks down a flickering white neon sign beckoned, or warned. On his way to Nighthawks, Edward Hopper must have passed up this place as too depressing. A police car slowly rolled by, windows up, carbines visible. We stepped over the homeless derelict in the doorway. The night clerk looked up slowly, very slowly it seemed, eyes heavily lidded, “Thirty lempuris for the night,” slid over his forked tongue. I heard "thirty pieces of silver" and felt like I was wearing a bandolier. Lonely Planet sez, “Considering the locale and price, this is the best budget alternative. Charmless but clean rooms.” (p. 366). I love what they had done with the place: light green linoleum floors, easy to hose down, accented by cinder block walls in institutional pea green and a dirty beige trim. The beds…words fail me. “HOTEL SAN JOSE” stenciled in foot high letters. Mo wondered whether you can get STDs from bed sheets. In the high ceiling a single florescent tube was lighting, well, only lighting the ceiling. No blankets, no towels, half a roll of TP. A spider web in the sink, inhabited by a local spider who was “charmless but clean.” I checked for a tiny spider bandolier. We had our own private cell in county lockup. Except we had a key. The fan and the electrical outlet worked.

The topography of my bed was a central valley within a starboard tilt. Perhaps a diagonal alignment would protect me from a sudden midnight encounter with the charmless but clean linoleum. Maureen assured me that, now back in Hondo, it is always better to sleep under the helicopter blades (directly over my bed) than in damp hot stillness. I looked at her, pulled the white sheet over her head, and pronounced, “Body of 22 year old Anglo female, some signs of struggle, defensive wounds, shreds of assailant’s skin under fingernails.” She smiled. Or winced? All in all, a memorable stay, as in: remember never to go there.

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Photos

Honduras coastline
The route seems roundabout but that is the way the highway goes.

Refugee Camp
Our bus passed too quickly for me to photograph. The closest thing I could find is a refugee camp in Gaza.

Comments

[Marcia]

What troopers. I do hate when the kind descriptions of modest lodgings are lies.