.islas de las bahias, the one about the caye.

These last photographs from our trip to Honduras are mainly of the time we spent across the channel on Pigeon Caye.  There are about five hundred people who live on that mile-long island and almost all of them have one of five very British surnames.  Jackson, Bush, Diamond, Powell, and Cooper.  Those were the five families who originally settled there nearly one hundred and sixty years ago and, for the most part, the people who live there presently are still members of those five families.

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Our first trip to Pigeon Caye was made with the intent to find ourselves some fish for that night's dinner.  What we found was a kindly woman named Esther who had five freezers filled with freshly caught fish and one large tame brown pelican in her "yard."  The pelican, as Esther assured us, was American.  From Miami, in fact, although aside from the fact that he was a lazy pelican she could not come up with a reason as to why she was convinced he was American.  But, really, the fact that he was a lazy pelican was probably reason enough.

That night we had yellowtail for dinner.  I'm guessing so did the Floridian pelican.

In Honduras they celebrate their independence from Spain on September 15th and we happened to be there to witness the festivities.  Aside from seeing the ruins at Copan for the first time this was perhaps the best moment of the entire trip.  

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Almost immediately after their independence performance ended and all the children had finished their cupcakes and sodas, an unseasonably strong storm passed through and rained everyone out.  We ended up taking shelter in a little store and talking for almost two hours to the guy working there because the lightening and rain made it impossible to kayak our way back to our house.  We eventually had to find shelter elsewhere when he had to close shop because his little brother was struck by lightening (he ended up being perfectly ok) while out playing in the rain.

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Eventually made it back across the channel but not before we were both entirely drenched by the rain.

Utila Town had their own festivities the next day and we went for that as well.  But the only highlights of that excursion worth mentioning was that I tripped and fell getting onto the dock and then I got heat stroke by the time we left.  Ha!

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(Nothing says "good time" like liquor bottles and plastic doll parts.)

We spent our last night on Utila on the dock because the power had gone out and it was far too hot to stay in the house.  So we laid out watching the distant lightening strikes and attempting to capture them on camera.  This is as close as we got.

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The next morning we left Utila for Roatan and the sand fleas everywhere mourned.  A very sad day to be a sand flea, indeed.

We had a few hours to kill before our plane left Roatan so we spent it in the water, enjoying a last bit of warm Caribbean ocean.  I befriended a bunch of kids who were there with their mother by giving the girls piggy back rides through the water.  They asked me how old I was -as old as their mother- and did I have any kids -no, not yet- and how old was my mother -in her 60s- and so on and so forth.  They thought Leif had the funniest name they had ever heard of.  

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They were great.  

It was a fabulous way to end our trip.

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.islas bahia, the one about the beach.

I won't bore you with tales of our day of traveling from Copan Ruinas to the Bay Islands, except to say one thing.  The only part of our trip when we felt physically unsafe was during our layover night in La Ceiba (a port town that most people pass through on their way to the islands).  To make it brief we ended up in La Ceiba after dark, in the taxi of a very unhappy and uncommunicative man, driving for what seemed like way too long to an area outside of the city.  There were dark alleys involved in very industrial parts of the city and one particular moment of driving through a back street next to a facility of some sort where Leif and I both thought we would be robbed and left stranded.  It turned out that our highly rated hotel in La Ceiba -don't believe all the ratings on trip advisor- was in a sketchy part of town.  The hotel itself was actually more like a compound complete with high walls and a guard tower.  Seriously.  We didn't sleep well that night.  

But things always look worse at night and in the morning, while in the cab of a very nice and very chatty man, we realized that although the area was clearly not one of La Ceiba's nicer parts, it wasn't as bad as we had imagined in the dark.

One ferry ride and one cab ride later we were in our hotel in Roatan.  We only spent one night here before we left for the smaller of the more populated islands, Utila.

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The lights of West End, Roatan.  

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Juan, the "watchie," as watchmen are referred to as on the island.

Utila is only twenty five miles from Roatan but there is no cheap, fast, convenient way to make the trip over.  You could make the ten minute flight for a couple hundred dollars, take a ferry back to the mainland and then another ferry back to Utila, or you could pay 55 dollars and take a four hour catamaran ride with Vern.

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We chose the catamaran. 

When you tell the ex-pats who live on or the people who are vacationing on Roatan that you are going to Utila for a week they automatically assume that you are a diver.  It is one of the cheapest places in the world to get certified and has, what many professionals consider, diving which is ranked in the top three around the world.  When you tell these same people that you aren't diving they then automatically assume you are a drunken part-goer or an idiot or both.  People just don't go there unless they fit into one of those three categories, I guess.

We had quite a few people trying to convince us that we had made a bad choice and we should try to cancel our plans and stay on Roatan.  Utila, they would say, is kind of a shit hole.  One in particular would said this -having us trapped in a shared taxi- sporting a blond ponytail and relaying his wicked gnarly diving trip and telling us how he lives in Santa Cruz and he just loves to surf and listen to Jimmy Buffet, man.  

There seems to be some sort of rivalry between (many but not all) ex-pats and vacationers on the two islands.  Roatan vs. Utila in the ultimate Parrot Head face off.  Winner takes all the weed and all the oxygen tanks.

Our place on Utila was only accessible via boat and was as far away from the hard partying of Utila Town as was possible on such a tiny island.  Other than the security guard and his family we were the only occupants on a strip of sand called Treasure Beach.  

No phone.  No television.  No internet.  If we needed anything we either had to use a CB radio or kayak across the channel to one of the cayes.

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Our house on the beach.

It was perfect.

Except for the sand fleas.  Or No See 'Ums as they are often called.  A little word to the wise, just because they are sand fleas doesn't mean they are relegated to the sand.  They love living rooms and bedrooms and laugh in the face of Deet and mosquito netting.  There is no escaping them.  They bite and they hurt and they itch much worse than any mosquito bite.  By the time we left I had close to two hundred bites.  Leif had maybe ten.  

So even though the house was really nice the sand fleas made just hanging out in the house or on the beach nearly impossible.  Which was why we spent much our days swimming and snorkeling in the ocean off of the deck in front of the house.

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View from the deck.

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It was spectacular.  There was life everywhere and a constant sound that was reminiscent of Rice Krispies in milk.  We saw baracuda, yellowtail (delicious, delicious yellowtail), massive amounts of various other fish, shrimp, moon jellies, lobster, an octopus, conchs, rays, and cuttlefish.  

One day we also saw hundreds of little inch long jellyfish floating along with the current.  Stupidly we decided to continue snorkeling.  I must have been stung at least a dozen times.  Luckily they didn't hurt that badly -like little shocks- but they could have been really poisonous for all we knew.  It was stupid but pretty amazing at the same time.

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A large school of thousands of silvery fish, maybe two inches long, was always hanging out by the dock and if I jumped in and stayed still for long enough they would get curious and surround me in a funnel of silver arrows.  

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I can see now how people fall in love with diving.  

Evenings, if I could tolerate the swarms of biting bugs, we would spend time on the dock watching the sunset and waiting for the stars to come out.  

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That tiny island in the back is available for rent.  The entire island, and the little house that sits on it, can be yours for 120 dollars a night.

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Pigeon Caye, as seen from the deck top observation tower.

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Next up:  What do five British families from the 1850s, a one mile long island off of the coast of Honduras, and the Mayan culture all have in common?  Pigeon Caye.

.copan ruinas; the pueblo edition.

We had to wait a few minutes in the lobby of the bus station with the handful of other people who were traveling to Copan Ruinas for the night security man with the blue trousers to shuffle over from his office to unlock the front gate.  As soon as he did we were met with a handful of upturned faces, in the foreground of a wash of red mototaxis, and shouts of "Taxi! Taxi!"  I don't think we chose a particular taxi driver in so much as he chose us by physically corralling us into his golf-cartesque vehicle.

It was dark outside and as we moved along toward our hotel we quickly left the narrow cobblestone streets of the pueblo and found ourselves traveling along a sort of main road out past the ruins.  Our mototaxi's driver was named Daniel (pronounced Dan-yell, like Danielle) but because, I think, we were English speakers he told us to call him Danny.  He was younger than us, but in the dark it was difficult to tell how old he was.  I guessed he was in his late twenties and as I later found out I wasn't too far off; twenty-six.

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I may have mentioned it before but my Spanish is pretty basic.  I spent a total of five years studying the language in high school and college but I never used it and so much of what I learned was lost like the rest of the information from my early college years.  American History, Anthropology, Calculus, Astronomy, Spanish...were all cleared out to make room for other things and the spaces which they once occupied in my brain now house Causes of Infectious Diarrhea, Blood Pressure Management, How to Perform a Pap Smear, and (my favorite) Who Got Booted From Project Runway on the Most Recent Episode.

Up until three years ago Spanish was almost completely evicted from my brain.  But, because of my graduate program and the fact that pretty much wherever I was at least half of my patients were Spanish speakers, the language has begun to creep back in.  I can, in fact, access the part of my brain that is responsible for How to Perform a Pap Smear While Speaking in Only Spanish without much difficulty at all.  This is all to say that while I can speak fairly decent medical Spanish, my conversational Spanish is somewhat lacking -unless you are one who talks about Pap Smears conversationally, and in that case I am quite an exceptional conversationalist- and so it was a huge relief to have a taxi driver who was sympathetic of my difficulty in the communication department.

He didn't, at least to our faces, ever laugh at anything I may have said that was incorrect or could have been interpreted in a way that was socially unacceptable.  He took my Spanish for what it was -remember, drunk toddler?- and communicated with me on the same level.  And so, we were able to carry on fairly decent conversations in the way only two drunk toddlers can.  So, by the time we reached the hotel Danny and I were already fast friends and we had made a play date for the following morning where he would pick us up and take us to the ruins.

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Over the next two and a half days the three of us spent quite a bit of time together.  Danny drove us around, I was able to practice my Spanish, and Leif took photographs from the inside of the mototaxi.  The second day we were there, after we spent an entire day at the ruins, we arranged with Danny a trip to go up to some natural hot springs some distance away from the pueblo and into the mountains.  It took about an hour to get up to the hot springs but as it turned out the actual drive was the best part of the day.  I don't mean to say that the hot springs weren't great, because they were -all hot, watery and in the jungle, just as advertised- but as we drove up Danny gave us an interesting narration of all the smaller pueblos we passed along the way.

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On the way back from the hot springs Danny asked if we wanted to stop at his friend's house for lunch, which we did, and so we had lunch in the back of his friend's house/restaurant.  It happened to be on a coffee plantation and although Danny offered to give us a tour, we were anxious to get back to town before the museum closed (stupid, should have stayed for the tour).  Instead we quickly ate our lunches and talked about last year's coup, Danny's girlfriend, his brothers in America, and how hopefully by the next time we came he would be married with children and he would finally have his American Visa.  Pretty sophisticated Spanish for a waterlogged drunk toddler.

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We spent the last evening before we had to get back on a bus to travel six hours to the port city of La Cieba wandering around the streets of the pueblo.  I wondered what it was like for people growing up in that place.  For me and Leif, coming from a city of nearly five million people and barely being able to recognize our neighbors because no one talks to anyone around here, it seemed very quaint and peaceful.  A place where people not only knew their neighbors but also knew their neighbors' cousins and knew their neighbors' cousins' cousins.  It was that small.  Which made me think that at a certain age kids must grow to despise it, similarly to how I grew to feel about the town I grew up in.  But still the pueblo is, relative to other similarly sized places in Honduras, in a much better situation economically mainly due to tourism and money from archeological grants.

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Danny was at our hotel the next morning to take us back to the bus stop, the same place we met him a couple of days earlier.  Before we got too far from the hotel he stopped the mototaxi and handed us two small packages wrapped up in newspaper.  They were gifts, he said, for us to take back with us to Los Angeles.  Two statues made of green clay.  The first, a representation of the Mayan God of Health (I had  explained to him earlier that I worked in the health field) for me, and the second, a representation of the first Mayan King of Copan for Leif.  They're great.  Leif and I so rarely buy ourselves mementos from our trips.  Now we have two that have sentimental value to them.

Leif and I joke that if we were to have stayed in Copan for much loner we would have probably ended up spending time with Danny and his family at some point.  The people of that town were so incredibly kind and generous to us.  If we ever do make it back to Honduras I know that I want to spend more time in Copan and I will surely go looking for Danny when we get there.

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.copan ruinas.

When Leif and I got back from our trip we had taken just over 1200 photographs and 200 videos.  Over the years we have determined that for every good shot we get there are at least five or six that are crap.  It is about that for this trip as well.  I will try to be judicious in what I post up here so as not to overload you with photographs that aren't very interesting to look at.

We had so many great experiences (and one not-so-great-almost-turned-terrible experience) that I will probably write about them in bits and pieces.  But I have to say that even though two weeks is not all that long, we really grew to love Honduras and especially the individuals who lived there.  They are really beautiful and kind people.  We hope to be able to return one day.


So, on to the first of several long (sorry, you can always just skip down to the photographs) posts about our trip.

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Surely two days is not enough time to spend in a place like the Mayan city of Copan.  It is huge and breathtaking and intimidating and lovely and sad.  But two days is all we had in what is often referred to as the Paris of the Mayan world.  We were fortunate, however, that the two days we did have turned out to be pretty spectacular.

I don't know much about tourism in Honduras but I am fairly certain that it isn't often that people find themselves to be one of only a handful of visitors to what is considered by many to be the most beautiful of all ancient Mayan cities.  Maybe it was because it was toward the end of their main tourist season but when we arrived to the ruins on our first day we were amazed and counted ourselves to be very lucky in that there was hardly anyone else around.  The day started out with a couple of other groups but as the day pressed on into afternoon we found ourselves, aside from the men working there, to be the only two people wandering around, gaping at the stone edifices.  

Leif and I are admittedly not well versed in the history of the Mayan culture, although I did receive a quick lesson from a friend who lived in Belize for a year helping at a Mayan archeological site.  We decided that without a guide of some sort whatever we saw would make about as much sense to us as if we were to stumble upon an alien spacecraft deep in the jungle.  As it turned out we happened to hire a guide who had been giving tours there for nearly thirty-five years and probably knew just about as much Mayan history as any PhD in Archeology.  Although his formal education was limited, Tony spoke fluent Spanish, English, German, French, Italian, and spoke passable Russian, Japanese, and Mandarin.  He also, as he told us at least three times during the tour, is in the Guinness World Records for being able to give a greeting in the most languages*, has three sons (one of whom died six years ago and one of whom is very fat, according to him), and has met a Japanese princess. 

Our three hours with him were not solely spent discussing his personal life.  He did talk about the site, of course.  But somehow I think it reads as less interesting as Tony's self-proclamations.  For the history of Copan, Wikipedia is more thorough than I can ever hope to be.  The one thing that he did tell us about the Mayans, which I find particularly interesting and will pass on here, is that they held the belief that when one of their warriors died, his soul took the form of a butterfly to make its journey into the afterlife.  This is a concept that isn't too difficult to understand how they came up with if you are able to spend even five minutes there. Simply everywhere you look there are hundreds butterflies of perhaps a dozen or so types.  

Toward late afternoon, long after our tour with Tony ended and not long after a longish conversation in Spanish (I often compare my Spanish to that of a drunken toddler) with a young guy named Nelson in which we talked about how his daughter is named after a red-headed American doctor who relieved his wife of kidney stones so that she was soon after able to become pregnant, we were completely alone and it began to rain heavily.  I found out from Nelson later that when it starts to rain that heavily and the lightening and the thunder begins they all generally clear out for fear of being struck by lightening, which we did not do.  Oops. Instead we ended up climbing to the top of the tallest temple and took photographs until I got scared and forced a retreat back down the slippery stone.  But for those moments, alone atop that stone structure thousands of years old looking out upon an empty courtyard, I felt like we were experiencing something pretty unique and special.

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At the entrance to the site there were maybe ten parrots all perched along the fence, noisily awaiting treats from passersby.  This guy got tired of waiting for someone to feed him but he couldn't fly so he had to walk down the path to where they had their feeding buckets set up.  The soldiers in the background were walking toward the ruins themselves, presumably to do some sort of security rounds, all the while playing with the rifles.  Bizarre. 

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Our linguistically inclined guide, Tony.  He was missing his front two teeth and, by his own declaration, looked strikingly like the old-man statue below.

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Although the grass is beautifully manicured now, during the time when the city was occupied by its architects, the entire ground was plastered over such that it was completely devoid of vegetation within its boundaries. 

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These two images are of the ball court where they would play their games and sometimes, depending on the significance, the winning or the losing team members would lose their heads.

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The view from the top of the temple.

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A very well endowed bat sculpture at the onsite museum.  Not a critter you would want to come across alone, for a variety of obvious reasons.

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*I have since looked into Tony's claim to fame only to find that the online website is not as thorough about keeping records as one would suppose from an organization that records facts and feats as it's main purpose. Subsequently, I did not find anything that would validate his claim but I tend to believe him anyway. I did find that the most nationalities in a sauna is 57, a record set in 2008 in Japan (where else?).  I also found that the most Ferrero Rocher chocolates to be eaten in one minute is seven.  A number to which I scoff at and think that perhaps I should try to set my own record for eating those little treats.