Travels of the Bay family and the Yoda Van

Choluteca is a city in Honduras.  Now you know at least one city in Honduras.  How many of you know what the capitol of Honduras is?  I’ll give you even more points if you know how to pronounce it correctly, because it is a mouthful.  Tegucigalpa.  We never made it to the capitol, but the two days we have spent here in Choluteca just leave me wanting more of Honduras. 

When we crossed into Honduras we were really expecting the worse, but we have only been pleasantly surprised since we’ve been here.  Choluteca has such a lively center.  And the church and old town are beautiful and honestly charming.  Once the sun sets I’d advise staying close to your hotel room, but that is the case in a lot of Central American cities.  With little kids we don’t venture far from “home” at night anyway, so it isn’t any sort of imposition at all for us. 

We’ve turned heads like never before here.  Women of all ages have been real suckers for our two blue-eyed boys in all of Latin America, but we’re drawing attention to even the men.  Yesterday when we were walking through town I remember we passed a billiard hall where about 10 men were sitting on a window ledge.  As we walked by at least 8 of them turned around to stare at us.  But it doesn’t stop there.  William and Julian showed interest in a woman selling sweet tamales on the street.  We were planning on eating dinner later so we told them we wouldn’t buy any right then.  But the woman insisted on giving them each a tamale.  Matthias asked how much we should pay, but they refused.  They were gifts for our beautiful boys. 

Choluteca is also very hot.  During the hottest part of the day the temperature was around 103º F (40º C).  This kind of heat sends Seattleites into a frenzied tailspin.  But here, life seems to have the requisite pace to deal with that kind of heat on a regular basis.  Everything moves slowly, and even the street vendors don’t bother you with aggressive sales techniques.  It is just too dang hot to exert that much energy.

We also found a nice Comedor (eatery) where we had most of our meals.  The menu isn’t complicated – there is only one thing on it each day.  They only thing you specify is how many plates you want.  Most of the meals were traditional for this area: beans, eggs, tortillas, meat for dinner and fried plantains for breakfast.  They were substantial, filling, tasty meals, and each plate only cost around 2 dollars.   

We didn’t do much other than eat, sleep, check out the city and spend time at the playground.  But the slow-placed, friendly atmosphere pleased us so well we spent an extra night there.  Choluteca doesn’t have any “sights.”  Other than the surrounding beautiful countryside there wasn’t much of interests to tourists, other than regular Honduran life.  We most likely won’t be traveling back to Honduras on the rest of our trip, and we think that is kind of unfortunate.  If this is just a sampling of what a lot of Honduras is like, I think this country is worth visiting and I’m sorry we won’t get to see more of it.

When we started writing our blog we wanted to have 2 to 3 entries every week. In the past the problem wasn’t lack of ideas and stories, but lack of internet access. Now it’s different. We have wireless internet in the apartment in Alajuela, but no stories to tell.

Life here is even quieter since Allison’s parents left. Now we can’t even complain about them anymore. However they still get all the blame for the kids being spoiled and watching too much TV, even after they have left.

One of the nicest things about being in one place for one month is the cooking opportunities. We have a big kitchen and it’s so much fun to spread out and take time to cook great dishes. The cooking gets even more fun when all of the fruits and vegetables are bought the same day super fresh from one of the local markets.

Going to the markets is the biggest excitement these days. Markets in Central America never get boring. They are very chaotic (not so much in Costa Rica) and they have an incredible array of things to buy. We also get great fish and shrimp that were caught the night before and I mostly enjoy buying meat at one of the butchers.  If you get there early in the morning you see men carrying half a cow on their backs into the stalls in the market.  Or you see people peddling cows bones out of the back of a run down pick up truck.  You can also buy a pig’s head if you are hungry for it.  It sure is different from the meat counter at Safeway where the workers are dressed in what almost looks like a Haz-mat suit and all the meat is served on white Styrofoam trays wrapped in shiny plastic wrap.

But after a while the markets get less exciting.  The amazement of the strange green dimpled fruits I’ve never seen before just becomes “Oh, there’s that weird fruit we have no idea about.”  The most exciting thing is that you notice how the beets and radishes get larger and the lettuce gets tougher each week.  The drudgery of cooking every day has begun to set in, and now I just want to go out to eat.  I can tell you exactly how to get through town which means we don’t get lost anymore.  Getting lost is almost always fodder for great blog entries.  Our life is getting a bit boring and therefore our blog is, too.  Yesterday we noticed that an open bottle of motor oil spilled out into our cupboards in the Yoda Van.  Trying to get motor oil out of our REI camping towels has been the major excitement of the week and is hardly blog worthy.

It really has been nice to have a break from being constantly on the road, but now we are ready to hit it again. Our nomadic tendencies of the last 5 months are making us stir crazy.  On Wednesday Julian gets one more x-ray and I hope we will be on the road again by Friday and then we should have more interesting stories.  We’re considering parking the Yoda Van in Alajuela, packing our backpack and doing Panama by bus.  We’ve met a lot of backpackers on our travels and are intrigued by that way of traveling.  If we end up doing that I’m sure the stories will get much more interesting fast, so stay tuned.