I get off at the correct stop this time!
So, I did make it off the bus at Tela this time, and realized that I wasn’t asleep the last time, but rather remember the stop quite well, and thought it was strange that these white people were just getting off the bus in the middle of the highway…like, where were they going? Who special did they know? Well, apparently they just knew that this was the stop for Tela (as opposed to pulling into town and into a bus station, which I had expected to happen).
So, Tela is a Caribbean beach town on the northern coast of Honduras, and is a pretty popular spot for backpackers wanting to get some insight into the Garífuna culture. Garífunas are a black people who live along the Caribbean Sea throughout Belize, Guatemala, and Honduras. I had never heard of this culture before and was quite intrigued. I had met a few Garífunas in Belize, but hadn’t really been to a village or anything, so thought this would be cool.
I found a hotel and walked around a bit to check out the town (really standard practice when getting to a new place). Got some lunch and ended up talking to this 70-year old man originally from Wisconsin who was really excited to talk to a ‘Girl from Chicago’. (On a side note, I often find that my nickname is Chicago, especially when having a few drinks, since no one can remember my name, but rather where I’m from.) Anyway, this guy hadn’t lived in the States for 40-some odd years…he worked in the oil industry and traveled all over the world laying pipe. He was really excited to learn that I was an engineer and immediately wanted me to partner up with him in his smoke house business venture. Apparently these smoke houses (for smoking fish) were top quality and were going to be a hit in Honduras, and all he wanted me to do was install the thermostats for controlling the temperature within the smokehouse. “I can’t pay you for 2 months, but it’ll be big.” So, there was that, and there was the yogurt venture. Apparently there’s “not a lick of yogurt to be found in Honduras,” and he thought it would be big business, even just within the travel scene. He was trying to get some bacteria from Belize into Honduras so he could “make the yogurt, package it, and there you go. Picture it,” he said, “Girl from Chicago takes left in Honduras.” While I’m not entirely opposed to the whole taking-a-left possibility, I wasn’t entirely sold on either the smoke house operation or the yogurt gig. I wished him the best of luck and headed off to the beach for a while and then returned to the hotel quite early, were I thought I would take a shower.
I don’t think I’ve touched too much upon the shower scene here in Central America. Well, it’s really not all that hot. Literally. I consider myself lucky if I do have a hotel with a hot shower. These are few and far between, and often times you pay dearly for the hot shower, sometimes double (note that my ‘nice’ hotel in La Ceiba did not come with hot water). A hot shower means that there is a heater attached to the shower head that heats the water as it comes out. Sometimes this takes a while. For instance, at my current hotel (I am writing this in Tegucigalpa, waiting out Hurricane Beta), I was guaranteed “hot water, all the time”. I was also asked to keep shower time down to 3 minutes, as water in scarce in Honduras, so it’s only fair. Well, it just so happens that the shower doesn’t heat up within those 3 minutes, and if you wait for it to heat up, you feel like an asshole wasting all that good, precious water.
Sometimes the shower is a proper shower, with proper water knobs (two – hot and cold, which is quite comical…as if there’s any difference) and a proper showerhead. Other times, not so much. There have been some showers that were just PVC pipe coming out of the wall, sometimes with a sort of spigot handle right on the pipe, where you control the water. Well, today, in this shower, (of course, with cold water only, but it doesn’t matter so much when you’re on the coast and it’s hot), there was a proper shower head, but the on/off mechanism was a red handle (like you would use on the side of your house to turn on a garden hose) just sticking out of the concrete wall. At least they hadn’t wasted resources on 2 handles (and of course, the internal and unnecessary mixing valve and associated hardware).
So, I turned the little red handle and out from the wall behind the handle came a little dribble of water. Huh. Well, maybe it takes a little while for the water pressure to build up. Sure, that must be it. Well, no. I tried the whole turn it off and turn it back on thing several times and every time all I got was that little dribble of water from the wall. And then, I just reconsidered the importance of the shower at that point. I had showered the day before afterall, and I’ve hardly been on a shower-every-day type of schedule, so really, why did I need a shower right then? It really wasn’t all that important, in fact, it wasn’t important at all, and I did a marvelous job of convincing myself of it.
Tags: Honduras, Tag Index
Tania