3/18- Up early to catch the Casasola Express to San Pedro Sula. At $5 each, it’s cheap for a long ride, unless you factor in quality of experience. The nasty ticket lady provided a bit of a foretaste of the unpleasantness to come. We paid our money, and took our chances… After a fairly uneventful bus ride, we found ourselves in a really nasty place: San Pedro Sula, Honduras.
SPS was hot, ugly, and dirty, just like its inhabitants. People were all lame, grouchy, mean… Furthermore, they all slur their words, so they are totally incomprehensible if your ear is attuned to Mexican Spanish. We have to take a taxi to the Trujillo “terminal” which is actually a tiny, filthy lot. There is no main terminal in the city, just a bunch of different lots that go different places. If you want to be spared from this nightmare, you must take a Hedman Alas bus, which is Mexican-style but for some odd reason twice the price.
At the Trujillo terminal/lot, it is raining, which turns the dirt lot into filthy muck, which infiltrates my sandals and has the consistency of baby poop. We pick the nicest-looking bus in the lot, and climb on board. All of our attempts to ask simple questions (like when the thing is leaving, if it’s direct to Trujillo, hom much it costs, and where to pay) are met with blasts of rapid, deliberately slurred Honduran “Spanish” and nasty looks from the driver and crew. Frustrated, I go inside where a somehow even less comprehensible black woman with a very bad attitude is flatly rude to me, waving her arms around while speaking as fast and sloppy as possible. I walk away from her while she’s still babbling. Now I’m pissed. For some reason, the phrase “shit people” is reverberating in my head…
I go out and buy some food from the nearest vendor, drawing nasty looks from everyone there. Seriously, the vibe in this place is BAD. Maryse and I eat on the bus, while the driver and crew laugh at us and keep looking over their shoulders and snickering. What a bunch of assholes.
I go back under the bus where our packs are stowed and lock them to a chunk of the bus. This is the first time I have really felt sketchy this whole trip. I keep going out to smoke just to have an excuse to check on the bags.
Finally the bus fills up and we leave, after a three hour wait. The bus is sweltering, but the breeze helps a bit. At every stop, there are street vendors selling everything imaginable, getting on the bus with their things, pushing them through the windows, whatever. Finally we get clear of SPS and its lingering shit smell. I start to breathe again.
Black folks start appearing more and more as we near the Caribbean Maryse spies litchi fruits outside the window, and we buy a bag of the slightly intimidating-looking things. They’re good!
After a long ride, we pull into the Trujillo bus station after dark. There is no bathroom. All the taxi drivers mob us, demanding that we get in their cab right now. Instead, I calmly roll a smoke and refuse to speak to any of them until I am good and ready. Damn, these people are unpleasant. A taxi rolls in, and misses squishing our luggage by about a half inch.
Having no other option, we get in one of the cabs and ask for our long-awaited destination, Casa Kiwi. The driver knows it, and off we go, paying more to be driven six kilometers than we did to get brought a couple hundred. Whatever.
Our driver, Jorge, speaks some English as he’s been all over the US working. He is of the opinion that nobody will ever be happy, because “when you have a house, you want a castle.” He seems to think that this is some sort of inviolable law of human existence, and predictably, he is unhappy.
On this sour note, we arrive at Casa Kiwi, unload our bags, and walk into the dimly-lit bar. There’s a sad, depressed-looking woman behind the bar, who just looks at us with her droopy eyes as we enter. “Hi,” I say, attempting to be cheerful, “I’m looking for Chaz.” “Yeah, you must be Tor. I’m Chaz,” she says. Okay, so Chaz is a woman. That’s a small surprise, but an irrelevant one. The bummer is that Chaz is this woman. She heaves herself off her barstool and says we can put our bags back in a side room. Okay. Making no move to show us to a room, she sits back down, so we join her at the bar.
This is the place we’ve been heading. This is our destination, where we’re planning to spend a month or more. This person is the one we’re relying on for room and board… I’m not too happy about it, but decide to be calm, take a couple days and see what’s up. Okay. We order some food, and I have a beer. The food arrives, and despite the fact that we are directly on the Caribbean, the fish is terrible. I am being attacked by “sandflies” otherwise known as no-see-ums in the States. Nasty little things that Chaz had assured us weren’t a problem.
Before I left on this trip, I had just started to work with a therapist who works in the lineage of Wilhelm Reich, in a system called Bioenergetics. The basic premise is that because of childhood traumas, we get not only mental and psychic problems, but physical energetic blockages. Most therapy systems just access the mental planes, but Bioenergetics gets at the physical. I got a book by the founder of Bioenergetics, Alexander Lowen, called “Depression and the Body” and had been reading it on the way down. Both Maryse and I had found the book really insightful and helpful. Arriving at Casa Kiwi, I found it to be a totally depressed and depressing place, reflecting the energy (or lack thereof) of its proprietor.
Finally, Chaz showed us to our room, saying, “there’s going to be a lot of guests this week, so you can bunk with me.” Okay, except the room she took us to was an absolute pit. Not having time or energy to argue about it, and with no other option in sight, we broke out our silk travel sheet and went to sleep to the best of our ability in the sweltering hot room. Opening the sliding door to let in some air, I also let in tons of the evil sandflies, which set about eating us as we fitfully tried to sleep. Maryse was feeling bad, and in general, everything was sucking pretty thoroughly. We had arrived.