3/23- The alarm goes off really, really early, and I force myself out of bed and into rapid packing mode. Maryse is way better than I am at waking up in the morning and going to bed at night. I never seem to want to do either, actually.
Not wanting to miss our bus out of Trujillo, we hustle out of our room, but are intercepted by the ever-over-solicitous Gunther, who attempts to force us to have a cup of his “Gut Cherman Kaffe” before we leave. Wanting neither his coffee nor his proximity, we tell him we’re running late and just don’t have time, which turns out to be absolutely true. Undeterred, he tries to head us off at the pass, but fortunately, due mainly to his bulk and attendant inertia, we are able to get past the kitchen door before he can get out of it, and we have a clear shot at the gate. “Dere’s always time for kaffee!” shouts Gunther, angrily and incorrectly, at our retreating backpacks.
On the way out of Casa Ale-MANIA, Maryse notices that there are several international symbols on the sign. One is the sign for bed, one is the sign for food, another is the sign for swimming, and there is the universal sign for telephone. Inexplicably and oddly appropriately, there is a symbol that looks like it means “shouting man”- it’s a little glyph of a human figure with his hands up to his mouth, with circular ripples emanating therefrom. Perhaps Gunther was warning potential guests about himself? Bizarre, in any case.
We make it to the bus as it’s pulling out, throw our equipajes abajo, and jump on. There are even two seats together, just for us. Ah. As the bus heads out of Trujillo toward SPS, I breathe a great sigh of relief. Maryse and I feel like we’re escaping something awful, which I guess we are.
It would have been nice to go snorkling and/or scuba diving in the Bay Islands, it would have been nice to get to a Garifuna festival, it would have been nice to do a lot of other things, but at the moment all I want is to get the hell out of Dodge. Screw Casas Kiwi and Alemania, and screw Honduras.
Maryse drifts off to sleep as the bus winds its way back to the big, nasty industrial city of San Pedro Sula. Her head is up against the left side window, while I have the aisle seat. The couple in the seats just ahead of ours trade positions in an oddly rushed and clumsy way, with the woman taking the window seat. The reason for her hurry becomes apparent moments later, as she opens the window a couple inches and vomits without bothering to stick her head out the window. Maryse wakes up being simultaneously vomited on and grabbed by me, trying to yank her out of the way of the flying puke that the air from the window is spraying back into the bus. For some reason, she does not flip out, but instead pulls out a wet-wipe and cleans herself up. Partly due to my quick reflexes, she barely got any puke on herself after all, but the inside panel of the bus is coated with it. We move to other seats, ahead of the barfy woman, who doesn’t apologize or seem embarrassed in the least.
San Pedro Sula. Hot, humid, and overflowing with smells as foul as the temperaments of its unfortunate inhabitants. The bus drops us off at its terminal, which is dismal. Instead of a central bus terminal, there are a bunch of little, out-of-the-way terminals scattered around the city, which means that you have to take a cab from one to the other, because you do _not_ want to walk around most parts of SPS, at any time of the day or night, especially with backpacks, especially as a gringo. Muchas ladrones, we hear from everyone. We take what has to be one of the very worst taxis on the planet, an ancient Toyota with at least one badly bent rim and something really wrong with the suspension so that every bump produces a paroxysm of swaying, lurching and bouncing. Whatever, it gets us where we’re going, and we aren’t robbed, beaten or killed on the way, so we count ourselves lucky. Stopping at the bus terminal, such as it is, we are missed by inches by a chicken bus, which prompts our taxi driver to jump out and stand screaming at the chicken bus driver until the traffic lets the latter roll on, about a minute later. Lots of fun.
There is already a large line of people waiting for the bus north to Copan Ruinas, due to Semana Santa. We take our places at the back of the line, hot sun beating on our backs as we try to squeeze into the already-occupied shade of a corrugated metal awning. The bus is due in three hours, and I can tell it’s going to be a long wait in the unbearably hot, filthy dirt lot. There’s a really old campesino in front of us who keeps saying incomprehensible things, to which his wife (?) responds by winking at everyone around, and making “barracho” drinking motions with her hand. I go in search of something cold to drink.
Coming back, not a lot has changed. Maryse and I suck our freshly-squeezed orange juice out of plastic bags, which is actually more fun than it sounds, and then just toss the empty bags on the ground like everyone else does. When in Rome… And anyway, the place could not get any filthier. Three gringo guys show up: Andy, Jerry, and a fat guy whose name I forgot. Jerry’s been lugging a very large ashiko drum around in his backpack, which he had hoped that the Garifuna people would teach him how to play, but he never found any. They (the guys, not the Garifuna people) are all heading back to the States. There’s a slightly creepy vibe about Jerry and tubby, so I am not surprised when the big guy tells me that they have been working for a church project, his eyes flickering ever so briefly over my face, to see if I am part of the club or not. Ah yes, Evangelical Southern Baptists out to improve the world. In my opinion, they’d improve it more effectively by departing it, but what do I know? They’re nice enough guys, for people who would send me to Hell forever if they could because I don’t think that Jesus was a neocon and that starting Armageddon is good foreign policy. Anyway…
In Spanish, the words for “to hope for” and “to await” are identical: esperar. One thus “hopes” for a bus, which is exactly what we did. Finally, the promised bus arrived, only forty-five minutes late- not bad, actually. As the dilapidated old Greyhound-wanna-be pulled into the baking hot dirt lot, a ripple of anticipation spread through the waiting crowd, just as it would through any group of people in similar circumstances. I expected the people to be happy that the bus had finally arrived, and to be eager to get on it and get underway. What I did not expect was the total and utter chaos that ensued as the ripple of excitement blossomed into full-scale pandemonium. Rather than having any respect for the people, including old folks, women and children, who had been waiting patiently in line, most everyone just started screaming, shoving, and running around like crazed animals. Since the lot was tiny, the bus was forced to make something like a ten-point turn to get turned around. Forward, back; forward, back. Every time the bus stopped or paused briefly during this maneuvering process, the screaming crowd attempted, like their possible ancestors the pirates of the Caribbean, to board it. Oblivious to the fact that the bus was already packed with people, many of whom were trying to get off, the mindless crowd charged the bus again and again. For a minute, I was inclined to join the battle, but didn’t really feel like shoving someone’s grandma in the dirt for a seat on a packed bus. I gave up, and sat down on my pack with Maryse, the gringo guys, and the 10% of the hopeful passengers who had decided that the crowd scene wasn’t worth it. The bus finally came to a halt and opened its door. Massive stalemate as the departing passengers attempted to push their way through the embarking ones, and vice-versa. Finally, order of operations somehow prevailed, and those who were getting off got off. Then those who were getting on attacked like army ants. Throwing kids through the side windows, climbing in through windows, doors, and the hatches on top, the maniacally screaming crowd forced itself through all possible orifices and into the bus. “What is this, the last fucking chopper out of Saigon?” I asked nobody in particular.
More and more people got on, way beyond the bounds of safety, decency, and sanity, in that order. People were falling from the aisle into the laps of seated passengers, unable to rise because of the press of the crowd. After the bus had attained the absolute maximum possible number of passengers, a few more got on and the driver shut the door. There were about fifteen people in the front stairwell alone, and one poor old campesino (maybe el barracho?) had his face actually squashed up against the front windshield. The driver was trying to push the people back off the gearshift and steering wheel enough so that he could drive. Somehow, finally, the bus pulled away.
Feeling disgusted and dirty at being part of the same species who had just staged this repellent exhibition, I settled down to wait for the next bus, if there was one. An hour later, one arrived, a chicken bus this time, but I was way past caring. While I made sure that our luggage actually stayed in the hold until the doors were closed, Maryse went inside and scored us a seat. Smart girl she is, she checked the seats for legroom quotient and selected the most capacious. Some of the seats only had a couple inches between them, and we had a long ride ahead of us, so she chose wisely, especially for my six-foot self and my long femurs. Since the screaming idiots had packed themselves so efficiently into the first bus, there were plenty of empty seats on this one. We sat back to enjoy the ride to Copan Ruinas.
No such luck. The bus rammed a car backing out of the terminal, sending four mechanics, the youngest being about five years old, underneath in a futile attempt to fix the clutch. Lurching forward from ramming the car with the back end, the bus rammed a pole with the front. After grinding the gears for about a minute, the driver, who was taking all this stoically, got it in gear again, and tried a different line. We got clear of the bus station, but every shift was a major hassle, and getting into first from a dead stop seemed nearly impossible. I have never heard gears grind like that, and I couldn’t believe the tranny could last much longer.
After a couple blocks, we ground to a halt, and the crack mechanics dove underneath to try another fix. Meanwhile, some very grumpy cops showed up, pissed perhaps that they only had a VW Bug for a cop car, and a yelling round ensued, which seemed to be the cops telling the driver that he had to work on the bus somewhere else, and the driver telling the cops that he couldn’t get anywhere else without some work being done first, and then the conversation being repeated. The mechanics reappeared, and we got underway once again, with much grinding of gears. The cops were still yelling angrily as we pulled away.
Several times on the long, steep uphill ride that followed, the driver missed a shift and we rolled to a stop on an uphill grade. After much more screaming gear action, we’d get started again, only to blow a shift a few miles later. Each time, I held my breath, hoping that we wouldn’t get stranded at night in this chicken bus, in the middle of Honduras. We didn’t. The determined driver delivered us safe and sound, if not relaxed, to Copan Ruinas a few hours after dark. The driver, apparently unable to disengage the clutch at all at this point, rammed another pole with the back of the bus, and then got it rolling forward, toward the crowd of passengers standing on the sidewalk, including us. I saw the bus looming, and yelled “Cuidado!” but Jerry just looked puzzled when the bus hit him. Fortunately, it was a glancing blow to his backpack, and probably saved him from amputation of his heel by shoving him out of the way as the back tire of the bus rolled over the place where his foot had just been, taking a chunk out of the curb in the process.
As we all circled round to congratulate Jerry on his survival, guidebooks were opened and everyone looked for a hotel. In the midst of this scene, we were approached by a nice, smiling guy who told us in broken English that he could get us a good hotel with nice big rooms and a great view for cheaper than we were going to pay for the others, and it was just a couple blocks away. Like the bunch of gringo suckers that we were, we followed this guy to Casa Rosario, the worst fleabag motel in town. It was fifteen blocks away. The rooms were tiny and there were no windows, let alone a view. The place was a dump. I got pissed, and started telling the guy what a lying piece of crap he was. He responded by saying in Spanish that he didn’t speak English, which was odd as his sales pitch and subsequent hustling had all been done in functional, if inelegant, English. So I told him in Spanish that the rooms sucked and that he was a liar. He responded by pulling up his t-shirt sleeve to show me his bicep. Some sort of threat display? I would have liked nothing better than to have stomped this little lying piece of crap into the ground and then tossed him off his own roof, but it didn’t even seem worth the effort. Everyone else decided they’d just stay because it was too late to walk back across town, so by default, we stayed too, even though we didn’t know these guys at all. Herd mentality hits home. The scam was completed when the proprietress attempted to charge us all ten times the price the street hustler had quoted. I had to pick up my pack and say I was leaving before she said okay, you can have it for the quoted price. Totally disgusted, and with our hoped-for haven in Copan Ruinas a shattered dream, we went to sleep exhausted and embittered. Or at least I did. Maryse had probably regained her usual serenity, and slept peacefully despite it all.