January 27, 2003
Photos -- Guatemala to Honduras
FINALLY! Some more photos from the road. I'll be a few more days in Honduras and then south to Nicaragua by week's end. More travelogue stories coming soon now that I've found $2/hr internet.
Current location -- Tegucigalpa, Honduras
Days on the road -- 45
Miles from home -- 4,800
Ratio of insane drivers in Honduras compared to Guatemala and Mexico -- 5:2
The Sunday market in Chichicastenango (God bless you!), Guatemala is reknown for its incredible crafts and mystic feel.
Some of the textiles for sale in Chichi.
I almost had this kid down to 5 bucks for one of the masks, but he held tight at six.
Zelie fell in love with this 30 lb. quilt at the market. Although it would not have even come close to fitting on the bike, Z had the woman down to around $25. Something like this is literally MONTHS in the making. Twenty five bucks...
The church in front of the market has a small fire burning in front of it all the time. Many people stand in prayer swinging a burning votive for hours. One man was swinging a votive the entire time we were at the market that day -- at least six hours.
Panajacel, Guatemala sits of the shores of the Lago de Atitlan, an enormous lake at 6,000 feet (maybe more?) above sea level in the crater of an extinct volcano. The lake is hundreds of feet deep in the middle, and is surrounded by 10,000 ft. high volcanoes.
We took a water taxi across the lake to the small pueblo of San Pedro for a night. Zelie really liked the bowman's butt, and took a "picture of the volcano" for us.
And you think I'm crazy! We ran into a German couple who was driving this 40 year old German fire truck that was converted into a "Winnetank" through Central and South America. The thing weighs 7.5 tons, will drive over 30 VW bugs laid end to end, and sleeps two people and two dogs quite comfortably, they said. They were on the road for "seven years or so." They had just bought land near San Pedro to build a house in the meantime.
And you wonder where coffee comes from. This 15 ft. high pile of coffee bean skins was on the side of the road in San Pedro.
Before roasting, peeled coffee beans must dry in the sun. Every spare patch of concrete across Guatemala seems to be used for this purpose. We saw coffee drying on basketball courts (what 5 ft. tall Guatemalans play basketball?), on the shoulder of most roads, and on roof tops. A 40 lb. sack of beans goes for around the same price as a tall Mocha Latte at Starbucks.
In Antigua, Guatemala many of the old colonial buildings are painted brilliant colors giving the entire town a radiant feeling.
No Mom, that is definitely not a volcano smoking 5 miles away outside Antigua. Nope. We didn't see lava spewing from it that night either. Uh uh, no volcano here.
I don't know where they get their information, but someone at the local paper pulled a fast one on all of Guatemala alerting people about violent eruptions on Volcán Fuego outside Antigua. The same one we didn't see erupting the night before.
If you feed them enough sweetbread, even wild Macaws will hangout for a while. A few years back two Macaws decided the entrace to Copán Park in Honduras was a good place to settle down. Now there are 12 Macaws perched there to greet and eat.
The ruins at Copán are evidence of a complex and highly successful civilization of Mayan people that stretched throughout much of modern day Honduras, Guatemala, Belize and southern Mexico. I hear they used to sacrifice people on the steps...
The grounds at Copán are lined with "stelas" such as these. Aside form being portraits of Copáns rulers, the stelas contain a heiroglyph language that archaeologists have used to determine much of the history of the Mayas. Sounds a little "subjective" to me...
A safe landing in Roatan. We shipped the bike out to the island on the ferry. It took 6 guys to unload it once we arrived. On the way over, the ship was pitching so violently in the high swells that we nearly lost it off the side. Once I felt the boat rocking I ran out back to check on it, and three guys were holding it down while another tied it to the railing. Uh, sorry sir. Your bike seems to have rolled off the boat...
Here's why it took six guys to unload it. Note the deck level compared to the dock -- about 4 feet up. Getting it back on the ferry when I left was even more fun. It almost tipped over and into the bay as we were loading it.
Seaman Hector Luis Rodriguez. The fine gent who saved my bike on the way out, and kept an eye on it on the way back. He gave me his address and made me promise I'd send him this photo as soon as I could. I told him I'd be home by March 2004.
Enjoying nearly 10 straight days of rain in sunny Roatan.
A little sunshine the day before Zelie left. We stayed in this Cabaña for most of our time on the island.
After picking up our laundry one afternoon in Roatan, we stopped in to check out the Happy Hour scene at a local watering hole. When we finally got home at 1:30 blind drunk after dancing on the bar for four hours, we were missing half of the laundry -- all Z's stuff. Later that week, her only remaining pair of socks had to be dried for the flight home. Z's solution was to fry them on the stove. Unfortunately, the socks were acrylic and the pan still has black plastic sock prints burned on to it.
Goodbye dinner. Home cooked lobster with melted garlic butter. Life doesn't suck, except for the fact that I've lost my co-pilot... Come back soon, Zelie!