By the Grace of God

Wow, by the grace of God (now that Kim has found Jesus, and is praying A LOT in traffic) we made it out of Honduras alive. The crazy driving got worse and even I started to pray. Unfortunately, we didn't really like Honduras that much. We found the people a little pushy and downtrodden and then, there was the driving. This of course has its caveats, like we only spent three days there, and we only went through the center and missed the Caribbean coast altogether.

We spent one night at the archeological site Las Naranjas in the parking lot on the shores of Lago Yojoa. We showed up, and asked the guard, Mario, about sleeping and he said if we were going to see the ruins, and maybe buy him a coffee, we were welcome to stay. He assured us the security was excellent and introduced us to his squadron of military kids, each with an M-16, so we felt good about it. The next morning we saw him, much like the pied piper, marching in front of the 5 boys with a dead armadillo dangling by its tail in his hand. When I asked him if Hondurans ate armadillo, he first told me it’s illegal to hunt them and that this was ‘road kill’ (yes, each boy still had taken his M-16 to pick up the ‘road kill’, hmmm) and that yes, armadillo is quite tasty. Another man promptly stepped out of the museum office to tell me that ‘not ALL Hondurans eat armadillo’. Mario does have an interesting palate. We bought him a drink at Coti’s restaurant next door to the museum, and she was cooking up an odd looking plant that we had seen in the markets. Finally we discovered how to cook it. You can either just boil it, and eat it with a bit of salt, or after boiling, throw in some eggs and make a hash out of it. We tried the first option, boiled (luckily we were spared the second) and NO amount of salt made the bitterness go away. It was the worst vegetable we have ever tasted. This is Mario’s favorite dish, and several other men that came in to the restaurant were ecstatic to smell it on the stove. Pacaya con juevos they exclaimed. Weird.

The ruins were nothing more than a couple of mounds of earth, a disappointment after the amazing ruins we’ve been to so far. The birds however, made up for that two fold. The word for trail in Spanish is ‘sendero’. We laughed many times about what may have been lost in translation as the wooden sendero in the marsh had as many missing boards as rotten ones. This causes a bit of a perilous situation as ones gazes into the trees at the birds. I think we saw at least 30, of the 365 different species!

From the lake we headed towards the border, stopping in at El Paraiso for the night, a dusty cowboy town where the horses outnumbered the cars. I certainly was thinking of my niece and wondered if she can parallel park a horse.

The border was the first at which we encountered the ‘guias’ or guides. Of the ten kids offering to usher us through I picked one to get rid of the others, and then told him I wasn’t going to pay him. He was unfazed and took us to the first office window. Now imagine 100 feet of tiny windows, none with any indication of what it’s for. I quickly decided a few bucks for a guide would be worth it. When we got to the Nica immigration office, there was no one there. Juan, our guide, thought nothing of it and ran off to find the right guy, coming back in a few minutes with him. After a flurry of stamping and about $20US for us and the car, we were in Nicaragua. Oddly, this is the first country where the guard at the gate actually looked at our passport.