Restless Me - Alternative Travel

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Autumn 2005

Restless Me Base Camp for the Global Traveler

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The Last Good Weekend (cont.)

The third part of the trail kept us within reasonable variations of altitude. We kept our pace up as the air thickened with mosquitoes. We’d also long since lost track of time. We could scarcely see the sky through the canopy of branches, but it had darkened several times already as clouds passed over like low-flying zeppelins. We figured we were near the trail’s end when we reached a series of abandoned mine shafts.

Silver mining began in this region in the 1580s, but all we saw were the remains left behind from the Rosario Company of New York, which assumed operations here in 1877 and shut down in 1954. Now their narrow tracks, half buried in weeds and vines, stop short of the gaping black craws of this lush green mountain. Joe and I ventured inside a muddy shaft with cigarette lighters held above our heads, but the small flames only magnified the void.

Shortly after reemerging into daylight, I heard music — percussion mostly — but I wasn’t sure if it was coming from underground or up above.

“Anyone hear music?” I asked.

They listened for a moment. “Maybe,” Joe said. Then: “Wait . . . nope, don’t hear a thing.”

I convinced myself that what I heard was nothing more than aural hallucinations spawned from exhaustion. Or perhaps Tegu’s tinnitus-inducing nightclubs were still reverberating in my head. Anything seemed more plausible than the idea of social gatherings deep in the forest; though in my delirious state, visions of dancing chupacabras couldn’t have been too far off.

We followed the mining road to the ghost town of El Rosario. The wooden houses built on stilts and steep hillsides resembled those in any West Virginia mining town. Few buildings in this community built for a thousand were still inhabited, though hundreds of bats found refuge in the train depot. Surrounding coffee and banana plantations made the town seem that much more lonely and out of place. Even a U.S. embassy, the first in Honduras, stood here in anonymous quietude.

We took a room in a hospital that had been converted into a dormitory. I unrolled my sleeping bag over a bunk and found a small and disoriented scorpion inside. It ran in frantic circles before I smashed it with a shoe.

Meanwhile, Joe braved an incoming storm to find beer in the ghost town. Miraculously, he returned with a case of Nacional. A nearby kiosk was well stocked, he informed us. He’d even bought rounds for the men there. As the night progressed, we could hear their voices and music rising above the storm. Both were hauntingly similar to what I’d heard in the forest.

- - - - -

Music and voices rose through the air the next morning as well, but they were far more distant, drifting in and out with changes in the wind. I was eager to head back into the forest to investigate, but Joe and Tim complained of muscle aches and insisted on continuing downhill toward the next village, San Juancito.

This nineteenth-century mining town nestled in a deep crevasse was visible from the road just outside of El Rosario, and it remained in sight for most of the hour it took for us to walk there. Along the way, the voices and music grew louder, and soon it became apparent that the whole village was engaged in celebration.

“Can you hear what they’re saying?” Joe asked.

I stopped and listened to one voice amplified above the rest, then replied: “She just said it’s ‘El Dia de los Gringos Muertos.’”

Joe stopped in his tracks and translated for Tim: “Day of the Dead Gringos.” For a moment, they actually believed me.

In truth, it was a children’s fiesta. We didn’t have to get much closer to recognize the oversized cartoon characters dancing in the plaza. The local police welcomed us into town, asking if we enjoyed our hike through La Tigra, and their chief showed particular interest in the two knives strapped to Joe’s hip.

They talked about their village with a tone of pride, but we couldn’t understand much of what they said because of their heavy accents. The conversation faded until Joe, in a spontaneous show of goodwill, presented his knives as a gift to the chief. He received them with enthusiasm, and said something along the lines of how useful they would be in La Tigra. Then he showed us his knife, a small bayonet from an old rifle, made in the U.S.A. It looked like an antique, probably worth much more than Joe’s knives, so I was glad that he immediately refused when the chief offered it in return.

We sat with the police on the front porch of their station, a good vantage point for observing the village. We didn’t talk much, just admired the place. It was like no other I’d seen in Honduras, or any other Third World country. Despite the fiesta, the streets remained clean. Landscaping around the buildings showed an attention for detail. Red tile roofs were in good condition and most walls seemed freshly painted. Folks acknowledged us with a smile or a nod rather than the usual clusters of stares and circles of yelling children. We didn’t stand out so much there because blond hair and blue eyes were not uncommon — a genetic legacy of foreign miners.

Despite its proximity to the cloud forest, San Juancito did not cater to tourists. Aside from the U.S. ambassador, who happened to cruise by us in a caravan of two white Chevy Suburbans, we were the only foreigners in town that weekend, perhaps longer. Still, the government had declared it a historic place with a rich cultural past. During the mining years, San Juancito had theaters and dance halls, and in 1910 it introduced motion pictures to Honduras with the first movie house in Central America.

Now plans were underway to open museums, restore hotels, and even build a cable car to El Rosario. All they needed to get these projects underway was money. In a way, I hoped it would never come. It was a selfish thought, I know. But there were so few places like that left on earth, and tourists could trash this one within a year. I made a silent promise not to mention this place in any articles until after its magic was gone. I had no idea how soon that would happen.

We remained so captivated by San Juancito we nearly forgot that we had no transportation back to Tegucigalpa. When this problem finally surfaced in our conversation, no one seemed too concerned about it. Then, in a sudden burst of energy, Joe said, “Let’s just hump it over to Valle de Angeles and catch a bus from there.”

The chief told us the valley was no more than six kilometers away. But after 90 minutes of hiking a winding road out of San Juancito’s crevasse, we suspected that his estimate was as the crow flies. Sun-scorched, aching and hungry enough to dine on MREs again, we dropped our packs by the side of the road. Halfway through our lunch, Joe figured that the high altitudes had caused the bags to expand, drawing in air and spoiling the food. Still, my cold meatballs with barbecue sauce seemed fine. The chocolate cake was delicious. And when Tim and Joe started to throw out their food, I offered to eat it for them.

Stuffed now, I flagged down the first truck that came along. We climbed into the back and barreled down the mountain toward Valle de Angeles. Twenty minutes later, we arrived and found it in depressing contrast to San Juancito. A declared tourist zone, the valley contained a handful of hotels and dozens of souvenir emporiums. Every other store sold irrelevant carvings and overpriced leather goods, while folks wandered the streets pushing ceramics and baskets. We needed to find the fastest way out of there.

As fate would have it, two white Chevy Suburbans sped down a narrow street, passing us at what might be considered terminal velocity in slow-paced town. Joe radioed one of the drivers and requested a ride. The ambassador responded, saying he’d be happy to take us along, but first would we join him for a beer.

In sunglasses, a baseball hat and casual attire, the ambassador claimed he was traveling incognito. So maybe it was the Suburbans and armed escorts from Honduras’ elite Cobra division that tipped off the locals. Everyone at the hotel café seemed to recognize him. Food came free of charge, and the hotel manager and his family greeted us with enthusiasm. When introductions were exchanged, which was several times in the course of an hour, the ambassador referred to Joe, Tim and me as “three Marines.” A wink in my direction indicated he knew I wasn’t one, that he’d said so only for the sake of brevity.

I wanted to protest. I wanted to tell him it was one thing for me to hang out with the Marines in Honduras, to run amok with them in the streets and forests, but it was quite another to be introduced as one.

Prior to my trip, I would’ve more likely envisioned myself ensconced with the Peace Corps. I couldn’t have imagined fraternizing with the Marines for more than 10 minutes, figuring instead they’d be too busy nuking rogue banana plantations in an effort to protect U.S. interests.

Now, a week or so later, I understood why they were so few and proud, and that their Santini-style hijinks were as much fun as they were obnoxious. Still, there was this nagging guilt by association, this lingering moral dilemma.

If I’d learned anything from daily campus protests in the mid to late eighties, it was that our military actions in Honduras have rarely been honorable. When I was Joe’s age, the Reagan administration used Honduras as a base to launch covert wars against Nicaragua and El Salvador. Our military trained tens of thousands of Contras and Salvadorian refugees and Battalion 316, the death squad responsible for the “disappearance” of hundreds of leftist activists. And in all likelihood, given the history of our relations, some equally insidious act of intervention was probably going on at that very moment.

But considering the fuss Joe put up to keep me entertained in the absence of my cousin, a protest would’ve been impolite. So instead I sought diplomacy and told the ambassador that I didn’t mind being introduced as a Marine, just that maybe it wasn’t fair to the others. After all, I’d done nothing to earn the title — aside from drinking tremendous amounts and holding up with two of them on a hike through 20-odd miles of Honduran countryside. And in the end, all it really earned me was a Marine T-shirt, which Joe presented with a minimum of ceremony that very night in the Marine house. NEXT

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