Talkin ´bout a HEAT WAVE!

We´ve moved on to the north coast and are currently in the beach town of La Ceiba. I´ve avoided the beach so far however cause it´s WAY to stinkin hot to be in the sun. Bumming around town is okay, but I think we´ll head out to the nearest national park soon and spend a couple of days hiking.

The other day we went rowing on the Lake. Although the super hot Ryan made rowing look real easy in ¨The Notebook¨, let me assure you, it is not. First off, the oars were attached to the boat by string, which was not super effective. And after about 20 minutes one of our strings broke. Bah. So after Geordie took several attempts to fix the problem, I finally took a try and fixed it immediately with my pant leg (pants that zipper to shorts are AMAZING!). From there on out rowing was okay. It took a while to figure out how to go straight, but eventually we got the hang of it. We rowed out the canal and into the lake, saw some cool birds, found a rocky bit to pull our boat onto and went swimming. We had gone to the supermarket beforehand so we enjoyed a great lakeside picnic lunch. Other than that I haven´t done much the last couple of days. Met some really intersting people though, which has definately been entertainment enough for me. Who doesn´t love hearing stories about travelling with a dead guy or wild conspiracy theories of a super paranoid ex-American?

Seems like there´s a lot going on at home that I want to get back for. Summer seems to be starting without me, but I´ll be back in 17 days. Since travelling started out so slowly with Geordie due to the baggage loss and then the sickness, I seem to have aquired a slow pace at which I want to do things. I dunno if it´s good that I´m relaxing, or bad that I´m not jumping all over the opportunity to see and do tons of cool stuff. Geordie seems to be getting annoyed with my lack of energy, so perhaps it will turn around soon and I´ll cram the funness in for the last 2 weeks.

At a Medium Pace

Hangin out at Lago Yahoa. Staying at the bed and breakfast (which also happens to be a brewery) which we stayed at the last time we checked out the Pulhapanzik Falls. We went to the falls yesterday when it was stinkin hot out, so the hurricane rain and sweeping water was really welcoming. Took some pictures to replace my lost ones, only since it's now the end of the dry season things are looking a little dead around here. But it's still tropical scenery, which is great.

Geordie is currently in bed with what he thinks is food poisoning. We ate at a little street vendor yesterday for lunch. I'm still doing fine however (minus the normal poncho visitations each morning which I've just come to expect) so perhaps I've built up some sort of immunity to the bugs here. So we're gonna stay in the area for a few days till he fills better.

Hangin Around

I now know the importance of packing your carry-on properly. Geordie´s back has been AWOL since Friday. And he didn´t pack a carry-on. Hilarious! But that means we´re still hanging aournd in Teguc waiting for his bag. But we´ve been assured it has arrived so all we have to do is pick it up and skidaddle. We´re going to head to the lake and waterfalls where I went on our first weekend away. It´s stinkin hot here, so some cliff jumping is definately looking good.

Not much else is new. The capital city is crappy, so all we´ve been doing is walking around and eating. Met some really entertaining drunken bums last night who asked us for money for drugs. The cops were keeping a really close eye on us, so I wasn´t overly worried, and they did entertain for at least 10 minutes before we were fed up with it. Oh, some kid did try and steal Geordie´s hat yesterday, but a local came along and literally kicked his butt. Oh Honduras.

Good-bye My LUNG!

My better half has gone. Flown home yesterday, she left me alone. The volunteering aspect of this trip has now entirely left, as I´m no longer with anyone from La Esperanza anymore. Twas good while it lasted, but I´m excited to start travelling. To all those who follow the blog because they know Teresa, I welcome you to keep checking on the updates of my travels as I go, and to Mr. Partridge, you can still post comments and sign them as Dad if you want (I like the comments).

So on my first day alone, I did what I could to occupy my time:

My family informed me that a group of volunteers from some of the churches in our area at home were currently in Honduras working on a water main project. So with a few days to myself, I figured I´d see if I could find them. I knew which town they were in, so I took a bus out there. From the bus station I had to find the chicken bus (old school bus) to the little town outside the big town. Thankfully I met some nice people who found me a taxi and made sure he wouldn´t overcharge me and I was on my way. The taxi man dropped me off at a random location, and I asked around and found out where exactly to catch the bus. Another nice couple sat with me until my bus came. Then the tricky part came. Basically my plans were to bus out to the town, then ask around for a group of volunteers called the ¨Carpentaros¨. On the chicken bus on the way I asked the guy sitting next to me if he knew about this group and where they were. And he did, which was excellent. So I asked if it was close enough to walk to from town. He said no. Then I inquired about taking a taxi, but again was shot down. As I started to worry a little I shot a glance at this helpful guy next to me only to watch him not bother with me anymore and go to sleep. Bah. Luckily another gentleman came over a few minutes later to chat with me and he was really excited to hear that I was looking for the Carpentaros. He said a bunch of stuff I didn´t understand, but I figured he was my best bet, so I asked him if he could take me to the group. He said yes, and then he got up to get off the bus at a random house and looked back to see if I was coming. Welp, with no real other option I figured why not, this guy seems friendly enough and there are other people around on the road and whatnot. So I went to Carlos´ house and met his family (4 kids and his wife) and they all got ready to take me to the Carpentaros on bicycles while I waited patiently in the hammock on the front porch, not really knowing what was going on. About 40 min later we hopped on our bikes, cycled down this random dirt road for about 20 minutes until I saw the man in charge, Ken Vanderlaan, walking down the road. I stopped and said ¨Hi Ken!¨ and I think I shocked him pretty good. I found the group I was looking for, with a lot of luck. The watchful eye of God was protecting me, but I vow to never press my luck like that again....at least not by myself.

Lucky for me I met up with the group just in time. They had just finished their last day of work, and I got to see the leaving party celebrations, enjoy a great dinner, spend the night and have them give me a ride back to the capital on their way home this morning. Perfect timing. Plus there´s nothing like a little Dutch Bingo to make you feel at home! They were staying in a super rural community...basically the same as where Teresa and I worked, but we definately did not stay there. Living without electricity is something else. It was awesome to see the carpentaros interact with the community members though. It was quite different from my own experience, as they had translators and were therefore able to communicate with the Hondurans a lot more. Everyone was incredibly friendly and welcoming, and I had no problem mooching a bed and food off of them. Even though it was only for a short time, I´m really glad I went. There were a lot of devotions and group prayers, and it was wonderful to do some worshiping with a group, which has definately been lacking on this trip. Also, it was cool to see how the people were so thankful for the work the carpentaros had done. It really made me think that this is perhaps how the community members in Chiligatoro felt about us, only we weren´t able to communicate well enough to know.

Today has been spent running errands such as getting laundry done and buying groceries...and I have every intention of finding a hammock soon and not moving from it until I go to pick Geordie up from the airport tomorrow. So don´t worry Mom. On saturday Geordie and I will head out to a local Honduran town on the way to our next country, either Guatemala or Belize, I haven´t decided yet. Oh the lack of plans...I love it.

The sunrise from Pumpkin hill

The desserted beach we found. Oddly enough even though there were no people there was still tons of trash

Teresa admiring the water

Some last minute discussions with my dive course crew before hitting the boat. Sylvano, my instructor, is the hotty in the blue shorts

Some of the volunteer folks enjoying the full moon beach party

One of the many cayes surrounding Utila...not Water Cay though

Me and Matt toughing out the Friday morning dive. Sure I may look like a tool, but the sights underwater were more than enough to make up for it

Giant spider hanging out at one of the bars

There was a bar on the island called the Jade Seahorse that was decorated with tons of cool crazy stuff including seashells, jewels, old liquor bottles, and much more

More of the Jade Seahorse

Dave, Matt and Teresa hanging out at one of the pitstops on our hike yesterday

After the hike we waited at a random spot on the side of the road in hopes that a local chicken bus would pick us up

Me in my new bartending job. Look at me, I´m a pro....one for you, one for me :)

One of the last things on our list of foods to get, watermelon from a street vendor. It was delicious!

Finally an Update

Okay, we haven't written for sooo long so we have a lot of catching up to do.

First of all, leaving our family in La Esperanza was sort of hard and a little sad. They were really great to us for the whole twelve weeks we were building and after that long it really felt like home. We gave our house mom a little gift on Saturday morning to say thank you and parted with hugs and kisses from both our house mom and her mother. We spent the rest of the day on a chicken bus to San Pedro and then caught another bus to La Ceiba. La Ceiba was packed with tourists for Semana Santa and we had a bit of trouble finding a hotel so we treated ourselves to something way out of our price range. In general La Ceiba seems really fun. There were tons of bars along the beach and a huge concert sponsored by one of the local breweries was going on while we were there. On Sunday we checked out the night life but starting at a "bar" that was a little wooden shack off the street that sold beers for around 70 cents Canadian. We then managed to sit pretty and have several beers bought for us over the next hour or so. A couple came from a really sketchy character who was selling straw hats along the street. I have to type this sentence cause teresa is all embarrassed. This guy was totally in love with Teresa, kept telling her how beautiful she was and whatnot. I was very entertained by the whole situation. And he thought I was good at Spanish and she didn't understand a word, so everything was said through me starting with "tell her...". Ah my super translation skills. When I didn't know what the heck he was saying, it was fun to make stuff up and watch Teresa go red with embarrassment. Oh the good times. Um...yes...thats roughly how it unfolded. Anyway the night was pretty funny. Eventually we had to run away from this guy and get drinks and street meat elsewhere, but not before he insisted I give him my number. I was of course delighted to write down 867-5309 ( sadly only a couple OLD volunteers like myself remember this classic song).

On Monday morning we took a ferry to Utila. The island is really small and basically everything is located on two streets. There were tons of tourists and backpackers there and it had a cool beach town atmosphere. We spent the first day doing banking and other errands and walking around the island to figure out where things were. Tab booked diving at Crosscreek so we stayed in rooms there. The rooms were located right on the dock and there was a fun kitchen-lounge area for the diver to hang out in. We met tons of people while at crosscreek which was awesome. I'll let Tab fill you in on the diving adventures.... I spent the week relaxing and hanging out with other volunteers from La Esperanza who weren't diving. There was lots of swimming and beach time and some relaxing and reading in Matt's hammock that we strung up on our porch, and of course there was lots of eating!!! The first morning we were there, Tab and I got up at 5am like superstars and hiked out to pumpkin hill from which you are supposed to be able to see the whole island. The plan was to watch the sun rise from the top of the hill. Although we didn't quite make it all the way up the hill we found an empty beach at the base of the hill and were able to see the end of the sun rise. It was really nice to be out so early and the beach was really nice and peaceful. Another day a bunch of us rented a boat to take us to Water Cay, a tiny tiny island that is uninhabited. It was really beautiful and we spent the day there with just a few other people on the whole island, picnicing, swimming, and snorkelling. From the beach of Water Cay you could walk out a long plank to get to a little outhouse on stilts over the water and upon future inspection we found that the toilet consisted of just a seat that was open to the water and you could see toilet paper sort of floating in the area. So besides having to steer clear of that whole side of the island we had a great day. The other highlight was renting a scooter with Matt and driving around the island. We saw some iguanas running across the road and took the scooter to the old airport to race down the runway and also took it to the beach and had a good time posing for some scooter glamour shots.

I just wanted to add something about the pumpkin hill escapade. I decided after the sunrise to venture around and find a way up the hill. Unfortunately I found that there actually is no real path, and I spent over an hour getting lost in the jungle like area climbing through various barb-wire fences and avoiding cattle to realize this. Eventually I found my way back burr covered and soaked, but I enjoyed the adventure. That afternoon the diving course started. There were 2 sessions in class that reminded me a lot of drivers ed...mostly common knowledge spelled out slowly with crappy movies. But it was worth it cause the diving was really cool. I did my course with 4 other travellers, and my instructor was this hot, young french guy that I'm pretty sure every student had a crush on. We did underwater exercises for 3 hours one morning (I was FREEZING afterwards) and did 4 dives along the corral reef learning how to breath properly, keep bouyant, and not touch anything. We finished the course in record time because there was a big full moon beach party Thursday night that everyone wanted to go to, so we had to finish the course before friday morning. Since we were only there for a short time though I still signed up for some fun dives Friday morning anyways, which ended up being great cause there were so few people diving. Matt and I went alone with an instructor which gave us the chance to go really slow and check out all the cool little things along the reef and not have to worry about bumming into other divers. I saw tons of cool fish, many brightly coloured, a sea cucumber, an enemity, and a SEA TURTLE (so cool). It was quite amazing to see everything. I went down 67 ft at the lowest depth.

Since the diving took up tons of time all I really did aside from that is hang out with everyone for the nightlife. Some of the nights were spent in the bars on the docks, and others were spent hanging out with other divers in the lounge. It was quite a party week, which we weren't used to after 12 weeks of going to bed at 8. So we participated, but we definately weren't the big party crowd. We'd be up around 6:30 for breakfast and run into some friends still heading home from the parties. All in all it was a really good vacation week with lots of friends and tons to do. On the ferry ride back Saturday morning some lucky volunteers saw dolphins...meaning Teresa, but not me.

We arrived in the capitol city of Tegucigalpa on Saturday night. Two other volunteers, Matt and Dave, are here with us as they're flying out today. We've basically just been bumming around the city, which was dead on the weekend. Apparently everyone was still at the beaches for the end of Semana Santa. Yesterday the town came alive though once everyone returned. We did some hiking in a nearby national park yesterday hoping to see some local wildlife (mainly monkeys hopefully), but alas, we didn't really see much besides the plantlife. A few butterflies and bugs, I caught a glimpse of a snake, but nothing really cool. The hostel we're staying at had a sign up for a bartender wanted, so I managed to land myself a job for the week I'm here. All I have to do is open beers, so the lack of experience and lack of spanish skill is apparently not important. I feel like such a seasoned traveller! However no one showed up last night, so I only served the 4 of us, but hopefully tonight will be different. Today the boys leave and Teresa spends her last night here before leaving tomorrow. The volunteer aspect of this trip seems to have come to an end. But it was great!

Last Day Pictures

An overhead shot of some of the volunteers in the pickup we take to work. Our record to date is 14 people and 10 bags of corn.

Paolo has been our trusty driver for the three months that we´ve been here. Although the picture´s dark, hopefully you can make out his wicked mullet! And believe me his truck is a real beater, this is probably its best angle.

Trying to get three kids to look at you at the same time is quite difficult, especially when you don´t know how to say ¨smile¨in spanish. In pink is Alexandra and beside her is her brother Ilian. These are the two kids in our host family. The other girl beside Ilian is their cousin Laurita.

The adobe house that we were working on this week.

On Thursday there was a huge celebration for the community we´re working for. Although we couldn´t go because we had to haul bricks it was cool to see so many people milling about and see all the colourful clothing.

Another picture of Thursday´s celebration. Apparently some missionaries were there handing out clothes.

Ian and I sitting on the adobe bricks we were loading into the truck and unloading at our work site.

On our last day we thought we definetly deserve a huge, delicious treat. Practically the most expensive thing at the ice cream parlor, the ¨BOMBA¨.

Some drama at the work site caught on film; the family´s cat trying to hide in a tree.

AND...the dogs having none of that. I was definetly rooting for the cat during this showdown.

Last Day

Okay! Today was our very last day of work! We´re both pretty excited to have the next few days to travel. Our plans for this weekend are to head to La Ceiba, a coastal beach town on the north side of Honduras. From there we´re going to Utila, one of the Bay Islands of Honduras, by ferry on Monday. On Utila Tab is going to do a Scuba Diving course and we´re both going to enjoy the beach, snorkeling, kayaking, sailing, renting bikes and possibly a boat tour. Unfortunately we won´t be online until next weekend so stay tuned for pictures and stories from Utila.

Other than that I only have one story; possibly the funniest thing that has happened in Honduras. This past week I´ve been getting pretty annoyed with some of the unwanted attention we´ve been getting around town and on the walks home. Its pretty harmless hissing and name calling. For example, we´re constantly called ¨gringas¨ even though we´re not American. Also lots of guys (and grown men) seem to shout out english phrases that they may have heard on TV including, ¨I love you¨ etc. A couple days ago we were walking home and one of the many DBs (our code language for drunken bum) was swaggering towards us on the street. We sort of kept walking past but since we already had his attention he felt he had to complement us. I guess he wanted to also express his LOVE for us but it kind of came out a little mixed up and he ended up calling ¨goodbye my LUNG¨ after us. Oh, my LUNG! It was awesome! Now Tab and I have taken to saying that to each other even if we´re going to part for just a couple of minutes. Goodbye my LUNG.

Talk to you soon.

Random Picutres In No Particular Order...

This is the watering hole found at every house. The water runs into a non-drained area. The table top next to the water is a concrete washboard that has a drain, and behind is the shower.

Another mode of transportation, a fruit truck which never seems to carry fruit, only people.

On our list of things to try, ice cream cones from the ¨dickie dee¨ guy. Unfortunately, they taste like chemicals.

Our bedroom. Our sheets get changed weekly and our room swept and mopped daily. Nothing to complain about.

Our house from the outside. Note the compound wall in front. The gate to the driveway is open, so it looks slightly more inviting. Oh, and driveways are not common, I think our family is just somewhat well off.

Having run out of barbed wire, this family opted to paste glass shards above one of their walls. Not uncommon.

A typical cute Lenca couple. The man in Western clothes and a cowboy hat (yes, I´m in my glory with the huge number of cowboy hats around) and the woman in a colourful dress with a colourful headscarf.

An example of a bus with religious signs. Hard to read against the black it says Cristo Vivs (Christ Lives) and the Iglesia de Dios means Church of God. I don´t think this is supposed to mean the bus is a church...perhaps my Spanish translations needs some work, but regardless, and example of the signs everywhere.

An example of the dust flying off the road. Also in the picture are some girls walking home from school. Unfortunately they´re not close enough for you to note the brooms they are carrying. Home Ec. class the Honduran way.

Our lovely Teresa with the best bean dish in Honduras, Anafre. It´s tortillas chips served in refried bean paste with melted cheese served in a dish kept above hot coals in the black pottery thing. Delicious!

Radomness

3 days, 4 sleeps left. To say we can´t wait to get outta here would be an understatement. Work has been great, we both feel like we´ve learned copious amounts, we´ve helped the best we could, and the experience is invaluable. But we´re ready to be done. Life here in Honduras has become ¨normal¨ to us, so we no longer notice little quirks we once did, and little things that we would just let slide are now starting to annoy us. Thankfully the end is very near though.

This weekend I decided to tinker with my camera right after getting up and but not before actually waking up. Bad move. I ended up deleting all my pictures. Way to go me. Luckily Teresa has been taking tons of pictures with her old-school film camera. And I used to tease her for taking so many pictures. Swallowing my words now! Anywho, this new development has pushed me to take more random pictures of life around La Esperanza this week and I thought I´d share some of the little things of life Í´ve noticed here.

• it´s REALLY dusty here, so often you can find people tossing water on the road in front of their house to settle the dust
• transportation here mainly includes walking, biking, or riding in the back of an old pick-up
• bikes very rarely carry only one person, two or three are much more common, with different people steering and peddling
• the trucks here are generally falling apart. Our own personal truck has super bald tires, a hole in the floor in which we can see a back tire, and one ride we had to stop 3 times so the driver could tighten the nuts on the ever loosening tire
• our personal chaufer is named Paulo, and he´s got the wickedest mullet ever (I´ll get a picture soon)
• since the roads here are really only wide enough for one car, when cars pass eachother one must go to the shoulder, which is very sloped. For this reason it often feels like the trucks are going to roll. Hence a large part of the time our thoughts on the way to work include the best way to ¨jump¨ from the truck should we roll
• most of the houses here are behind some sort of compound wall that generally has barbed wire on top
• all windows here have bars over them. Not usually prison-type bars, but wrought (sp?) iron bars in some fancy pattern. Bars none the less though
• all the schools in town have uniforms, but the uniforms here include track suits!
• all the buses here (and some cars) have some sort of religious saying on them, often both inside and out
• like hotdog guys in Canada, there are street vendors here, but they sell oranges, mangos, watermelon, and lately there´s been a coconut guy by our truckstop
• you can´t throw toilet paper in the toilets here, it goes in the waste basket

Well that´s all I can think of at the moment. Just a little picture into the world that is Honduras!

One More Week

Hi everybody,
Things here are going well. We spent the week working at one project the whole time so its good not to be shuffling around anymore. We joined a project rebuilding an adobe brick house. Previously the other volunteers took off all the clay roof tiles, took down the roof beams and then took down all the bricks. An area next to the old house was dug out and leveled and then trenches for a foundation were dug out and a foundation of rocks and cement was laid. We´re now at the stage were we´re laying the bricks and mixing mud to be used as mortar between the bricks and the layers of brick. We don´t actually get to position the bricks so we mostly carry bricks from one pile to another for a few hours. There is a lot of down time on these types of houses because we have to wait for a whole layer of bricks to be placed before we can fill in the mud. So generally we carry bricks for a bit, rest and chat for quite a while, carry more bricks and then chat for the remainder of the day. All the other projects are progressing slowly like ours so we don´t feel so badly.

Tab and I haven´t really worked out who´s who in the family we´re building for. There are a lot of people around and maybe two generations of a family in the house. There are two strange little kids at the house that usually play together and avoid us although occasionally the little girl Elisa will violently attack Tab or I in what might be an attempted hug. It´s sort of uncomfortable and hilarious all at once. The kids at all our projects just sort of roam free and we´ve both noticed that they don´t get much attention or supervision of any sort because their parents and older siblings are busy working. I´ve stopped freaking out when the kids start swinging around machetes although this week it was alarming that the little girl who is around 4 was starting little fires around the work site. We also saw her consume an entire plastic baggy but no one else seemed to bat an eye.

Quite a few volunteers are done this week and off to travel around Honduras. One of the guys bought a pinata this week and we had a little going away party at a lagoon by our work site. The pinata was a big blue dog that sadly didn´t hold up for too long, but that was followed by hours of eating candy. A group us also went out to a ¨disco¨here in town. The night life here is almost nonexistent as you can tell by the fact that the disco closes a 10pm. Seeing people finish their projects makes us both eager to be travelling and we´re already thinking about our last day and our next week of doing the touristy vacation thing!