A-wandering along the mountain path

So much for the hot season so far.  It’s summer here now, but I was dreading oppressive heat and dust, and the weather really hasn’t been too bad.  A lot of mornings start out rainy or cloudy, and then by mid-morning, the sky is clear and it does start heating up.  I recently planted some herbs and flowers in front of the house, so maybe this will be good weather to give it a better start than the other garden out back.  In that one, we have a few renegade tomato plants growing from the compost we mixed into the soil, but besides that, just some bean plants and a couple of tiny watermelon plants have really grown much.  Apparently, we put our garden on the wrong side of the house to begin with.  That side of the house was excavated to make the adobe bricks to build the house, and the other side has a little less damage, so it would have been better…ah, hindsight.

 

A couple of weekends ago, we finally packed up our backpacks with camping gear and food and headed up the mountain—all the way up.  The hike started in the familiar territory of the park, up to the visitor’s center, across the river twice, up the steep switchbacks to the fork with the waterfall-bound path, and then we crossed into the unknown (for us…lots of other people have been, obviously).  The trail meandered up and down and in different directions as it hugged smaller mountainsides and crossed several little creeks/waterfalls where we filled up our water bottles.  The water was really clear and straight from the ground, but we dropped in the nasty iodine pills just to be kind to our digestive systems.  Around this part of the hike, we saw a lot of GIANT ferns that looked more like small trees than ground cover.  Here is a baby fern all curled up:

We stopped for lunch at the first “campsite,” which was just an old building site littered with garbage and a pit toilet.  That made me a little worried about the second campsite, which we were planning to stay at for the night.  Still, it was a nice lunch in the sun, and everything tastes better when you’re hiking.

 Campsite that I'm glad we didn't stay long at:

We went on from there, and the climb got a lot steeper.  We followed a ridge for awhile, so the view was fantastic sometimes, and we also saw a little animal—our only real wildlife spotting of the trip.  It looked like a raccoon/monkey/weasel, and was about the size of a large housecat.  It had a long, striped tail, and just looked at us a little while, stood up on its legs like a prairie dog, and kept on climbing and exploring, like we weren’t even there.  The vegetation changed many times, and the plants were amazing as we went on.  Besides the giant ferns, we saw beautiful flowers, vines, bromeliads, really knotty old trees, interesting fungi…it was the jungle, and it didn’t disappoint.  Once we reached the cloud forest, though, it felt like we had entered a different world.  The canopy is so thick that it’s pretty dark, but the sunlight that does come through creates a green halo around all of the trees because of the thick moss covering them.  We heard lots of birds, but we couldn’t spot them because everything up there was so thick and full of green life. 

Here's us up in the cloud forest:

And an attempt to capture the canopy...it definitely doesn't do it justice, though:

 

We were going to call it quits for the day when we got to the second camp, but we got there around 3, and we figured we still had at least 3 hours of daylight, so we would either pass the time playing cards and looking for monkeys in the trees (a fruitless endeavor, unfortunately), or we could push on to the top and then come back to camp and just have to wake up and hike down the next day.  We opted for option 2, and it was a good choice.  The top was just another 1.5 hours, and it was all through cloud forest.  The summit itself was mostly wooded, even though it was at about 9500 ft, so there was just one place where you could look out at the green mountains surrounding us.  That little window was an incredible view, and it just felt good to finally have made it up the mountain that we spend most of our time at the base of.  

At the sign...

And another of us (maybe a little to up-close):

Here's the view from where you could see out at the top.  We were lucky that we got a view at all, since the top is often covered in clouds that cling to the mountain.

We headed back to the campsite, which turned out to be wayyyy better than the first campsite we ate lunch at, put up the tent, ate some leftover lentil soup out of peanut butter jars (we didn’t have the energy to make a fire or cook), and crawled into our sleeping bags around 7, just after dark.  It was amazing up there, but a lot colder, too.  We could see our breath, and it was a COLD night in the tent!  I also woke up several times thinking that Aaron breathing was actually some kind of animal lurking around outside planning its attack on our tent.

 

Morning came, we made it back down in just a few hours, and then we showered, snacked, and napped for awhile.  Sleeping in a tent in a freezing forest with jeans for a pillow makes you appreciate your own bed soooo much.  We really enjoyed the whole experience, though…surprisingly, although it’s the main tourist attraction in Gracias (not that there are many), a lot of people that live here have never hiked to the top, but I wouldn’t miss it. 

 

Our neighbors, on the other hand, who are guides in the park, go up there all the time, and say that they get slightly annoyed by the tourists because they have to stop and rest so much.  Their family has been so generous and friendly toward us this whole time we’ve been here, though.  They’ve taught me how to make pupusas, tamales (which is VERY labor-intensive, the way they do it down here), and I’m going to make tortillas with them sometime after school when I don’t completely wiped.  I’m happy that Sonia, the woman that I mainly cook with and talk to, wants to learn how to make pizza, so we can at least have a little exchange going on. 

 

We went over to their house for Paola’s birthday this weekend.  Paola is in my class, and she’s one of the sweetest kids I have.  She knows everybody’s business all the time, and calls me out on every contradiction I make, but she is always giving out stickers, lending her school supplies to friends (which is a big deal here), and her arm is probably really strong from being practically constantly raised in class.  She comes over to my house a lot just to say hello, play around with sticks or chalk or her cousins, or to get homework help.  She has a lot of friends at school, but they couldn’t really make it up to her house for the party, since it’s not too conveniently located to town, so the party was just her family and us.  We had beef, beans, tortillas, and cake.  There was a minor catastrophe when her little cousin locked herself in a bedroom, but another relative was able to crawl between the roof and the wall to unlock the door before she had even stopped being entertained by jumping on the bed and having people talk to her through the window.  We played with the kids, sang Happy Birthday, and just hung out a little while.  I hope it was a good birthday for Paola…I think it was; she’s easy to please, and she got 3 whole packs of new stickers.

 

At school, our classes are doing pretty well.  Their English is coming along, and I’ve noticed some really great breakthrough moments with some of my struggling kids, lately.  I’ve been able to switch up the help class roster, my lowest reader can now read multi-syllable words and identify most letter sounds (although short and long vowels are still tricky for everyone since they don’t have that in Spanish).  One of my lowest kids at the beginning of the year is now one of my highest level kids, and has done a lot of fake dramatic fainting onto the floor lately upon receiving his test grades back.  Not everything has been rosy, but things like that are really encouraging.  Both of our classes have had a lot more drama and crying lately…I think they just need a few days off to play and recharge.  Some of the girls in my class are getting into a boy-crush phase, too, which has upped the drama and gossip level lately, too.  Today, a couple of them even gave letters to the 8^th graders that they like, telling them up front that they are their “secret love.”  A little out of their league, but they’re just having fun teasing each other and having secrets with their friends.  Still, I don’t remember a lot of that going on when I was in third grade.

 

My class finished our animal unit awhile ago, and we made clay animals, shoebox habitats, and collected information about them for a classroom zoo.  The kids had a lot of fun with that, and I wish that I had taken pictures.  Aaron’s kids came to look at the exhibits and hear the presentations, and they did a good job keeping their more critical thoughts to themselves, except for one girl who tattled by saying:  “Carlos say that Deyssi’s elephant looks like—como se dice (how do you say)—bleehhhh (with vomit sound and motion).”  This week, we had a cricket jumping contest, and graphed the cricket jump distances vs. the jumps the kids did.  They had so much fun running around and catching insects, and I loved helping them and just kicking back and exploring with them outside the classroom.

 

Aaron’s class has been busy, too.  They’re studying birds right now, and he had them cut out life-size wings of different species, measure their own wingspans, and right now, they’ve been playing a migration game he made up.  It involves two big cardboard dice, a big chalk map of the Americas, and the kids having to try to make the trip without losing members of their flock.  Sounds a little reminiscent of Oregon Trail for birds, but without the wagon to caulk or Jimmy getting a snakebite.

Here's Marcos, one of Aaron's kids, in the nest he made.  Both of our classes actually did this activity...pretty entertaining way to spend a Science class!

 

Tomorrow afternoon, some friends from Landmark will be in Gracias to visit for a week!  This weekend, we’re going to the coast for some rafting and relaxing at the beach with them.  It’s so great to have visitors to look forward to and spend time with!  Hopefully, we’ll have better luck with the rental car this time.  We’ll be better about taking pictures while people are here, so look forward to some good ones on the next post!  If you read this, thanks…it means a lot to us.

We get by with a little help (from family and strangers)

A big cloud trying to make it over the mountain


So, someone (aka me) should have written a blog entry about a month ago. There is a lot to catch up on. While its been winter in North, we’ve had some great weather here the last six weeks. January and especially February are supposed to be hot dry months but most of the days have been in the 70’s with a little shower every once in a while. Wherever we end up next year it will be hard getting used to the idea of experiencing winter again.

The last weeks of January were a little tough. We found out that the other three teachers from the United States at our school were going to be leaving. One of the teachers had to leave because her mother is sick and the other two teachers decided to leave because they didn’t like living and working here. They were all our friends, and it was really sad seeing them leave. It was an emotionally draining time, just thinking about them all leaving and wondering how many more classes we would have to be covering. It is a hard job and not always the easiest lifestyle, but is hard for us to imagine leaving the kids and the community. It was a stressful time but once the teachers left it turned out it wasn’t as bad as we thought. Although our schedules have changed we really haven’t had to take on too many more classes, since I think the school is scared that we will leave.

The first weekend of February we had a nice visit with a friend of ours from college. Amy and her cousin were spending a couple of weeks traveling through Central America and they were nice enough to make a detour and come visit us. We hadn’t seen Amy in 5 years and it was great catching up with her and hearing about her experience in the JET program, in Mongolia and all the other cool places she’s been. It was so unexpected to have this person we haven’t seen in five years show up at the bus station in Gracias, but it was a really nice break in routine for us.

In other news, I’ve started playing on the neighborhood soccer team. Luckily, I’m far from the best player and definitely not the worst, so it’s a good opportunity to get a little more exercise. We play a couple times a week on the field at school and then every once in a while, probably once a month, we have a real game against a team from another community. I thought that the soccer style would be a lot different here. The last time I really played competitive soccer was in high school, and even then the main strategy (not of the better teams) was to kick the ball as hard as possible down the field. When we’re just playing around here they guys show a lot of foot skills and touch but as soon as we got into the game it was the same old boot it as far as you can strategy. Here is a picture of one of the fields we play on taken by Dad. I don’t know if you can tell too well from the picture, but it is a steep grade with lots of rocks, more often a description for a road than a soccer pitch.


At school we’ve started having afterschool help classes twice a week. Melanie I and have been pushing for it for a long time (as well as a lot of parents) and while it is a good chance to give some students some extra attention it can be pretty exhausting. The kids seem to have more energy after 3:00 but I’m exhausted. It's also hard because while it is a smaller group than our class, it is still kids and I try to balance one on one time with group activities. The kids and the parents both see it as a desirable thing to have help class, so at least they aren’t griping about having to stay after. Both of us are really beginning to be able to notice progress in our classes too, so hopefully we can keep that ball rolling.

The biggest thing that has happened since the last blog entry was having my parents visit for a week. They flew from Raleigh to San Pedro, rented a car and drove the four hours to Gracias. They don’t speak any Spanish and they did a great job navigating the roads and potholes to get out here to the mountains, even with the clutch of the rental forcing them to drive in 4th gear for the last part of the trip. Dad did a quick fix on the car once they got to Gracias and we drove up to Guancascos where we had a nice dinner looking out over the town. After dinner we began our drive up the mountain to our house and quickly realized that the car was pretty unsuited for the road, scraping on rocks the entire way up. We finally made it up, gave them the thirty second house tour, and turned in for the night. The next day we headed to school and let them have a day to relax and explore around our house. They ended up doing quite a hefty hike up the mountain, getting to see the river and a little bit of wildlife. We just relaxed Thursday night and then Friday my Mom and Dad came to school with us. For our morning devotional Dad taught the kids a song and sign language to go with it and then Mom told a story I remember hearing a lot growing up about doing your chores. It was so nice having them at school, both so they could see it and to have the extra help. It was amazing how much more you can get done when there are three teachers in the room. They also were very helpful harvesting the radishes from the 4th grade garden. The students were foaming at the mouth to pull them out of the ground and having three people made things a lot calmer.
Mom keeping the washing of the radishes under control:


Juli with the biggest radish:


Dad overseeing the picking operation:



A happy gang

We’ve harvested about 150 radishes from the garden and the first day we picked them with my parents we made a radish salad that the kids are still talking about.
Here is Dani working on the salad:


And David and Claudia adding some finishing touches:


Friday after school I played a little soccer and then we headed down the mountain with our neighbor Mark to go to the hot springs. The hot springs here are nice, really big and deep with a couple different pools, but there are a couple of things that make the environment very Honduran. One of these is the music; you sit in the pools trying to relax and there is this thumping loud music playing, the equivalent of the music they used to play at roller skating rinks. The other nice touch that adds to the atmosphere are the armed guards. While it is a little strange having a couple of guys walking around with sawed off shotguns it does make me feel a little better about not having people rifle through our belongings. We had a nice soak in the hot springs and got into the car to head back up the mountain. By this time, it was about 10:30 and we were all looking forward to bed. We made it about a kilometer down the dirt road and then the tire went flat. After already having a little trouble making it down the mountain this just added to the annoyance and the stress level of everyone but we thought it would be a quick fix. We got the spare on, started off again and in about 100 yards it was flat. As you can guess, by this time we were all a little beyond the state of being annoyed with the car. I thought I would just call a friend in Gracias and see if they could come pick us up so we might get the tire fixed, but when I tried calling the phone went dead. So with this perfect storm of events we all realized we were going to be in for a long night. Mark and I walked back to the hot springs to see if we could find anyone who would give us a ride. Luckily there were still some people there that Mark had been talking to earlier and they agreed to give all five of us a ride. We got back to the car where everyone else was waiting and decided what to do, as it was now getting close to 11:30. The people who were giving us a ride were sooooo helpful; they offered to let us use their spare tire to get our car back to town. Then it turned out that the originial spare for our car was stuck, and it took a good fifteen minutes of hitting it with a basketball sized rock to get it off. Finally, we got the new spare on and drove back to Gracias with our new friends following us to help us look for a tire place that might be open at 11:30. We found one tire place on the highway but when we went over to try and rouse the owners there were five of the meanest dogs I’ve ever seen, ready to take a nice bite out of us. We gave up on getting the tire fixed that night and offered to bring their spare back to them a couple days later when we were passing through their town. It turns out the guy who’s spare it was happened to be driving to Mexico the next day so we had to give him back the spare that night. We decided to drive the car to Guancascos where it would be safe, leave it there for the night and then get it fixed the next morning. This still left the problem of getting home, and since we didn’t really have many options we all started the march up the mountain to our house a little after midnight. It was a long dark walk, but my parents did an amazing job and were really good about all the adventures we had that night. The two things that will stick in my mind from that night are the crappiness of the car and how amazingly kind and helpful the strangers were at midnight when they still had to drive an hour to get home.

We were supposed to spend most of the next day making tamales with our neighbors but after the late night we nixed that and slept a good while and then walked back down to Gracias. It was a nice walk down, introducing Mom and Dad to all the acquaintances we’ve made doing this walk every week. We made it to town and Melanie and I took the tire in a mototaxi to one of the tire places in town. The good thing about places like that is that even in a foreign country there is really only one reason you would show up at tire place with a tire in hand. It made our job easy. We just sat their while they fixed the tire. It cost $1.50 to patch the tire and we did have to buy another tire for the spare rim but that was $25 well spent for a little peace of mind.


A picture of the house and the car, the Chevy Headache

After getting the tire fixed I showed Mom and Dad around town, the market, square, church, and of course the popsicle lady. We got a little lunch and then headed across the countryside to La Campa, our favorite nearby town. It's usually utterly tranquil and serene, but this weekend was the town festival, one of the biggest in the region. The ride over there was still really pretty, but there was tons of traffic and we got stuck behind a truck full of metal poles that weren’t secured to the truck at all so we had to stay pretty far back for security purposes. The festival was a lot like fairs and festivals in other countries with a bigger concentration of used clothes and hair gel products. We wandered around looking at and sampling some of the food, buying a little pottery and unfortunately finding a foosball tent where Melanie beat me, an event I won’t be allowed to forget for a long time. Here is some unfortunate proof:


A portable version of the wood cookstoves (fogon) everyone has in their house here:


Sunday morning we packed up a little to get ready to head to Copan and then went to our neighbors house to make pupusas, kind of a stuffed fat tortilla.


Mom and Melanie getting the cheese ready for the pupusas


Pupusa sounds like baby indian but man do they taste good.

It was supposed to be a women only thing but dad and I peeked our heads in the kitchen and got permission to give it a go. While the women finished up, I brought down the banjo that Dad brought down and let our neighbor, the church piano player have a go at it. He was playing tunes in 2 minutes. There probably aren’t too many banjo players in Honduras and he might already have the title as best in the country over me. After the good lunch of pupusas we hit the road for Copan about 3 hours away. It was a pretty easy drive and we made to the cobblestone town and to the hostel Iguana Azul where we had stayed before. We walked all around getting some pizza, people watching, and just sitting on the patio at the hostel talking, a really nice evening. The next morning we grabbed some breakfast and walked over to the ruins where we had a nice walk around looking at the pyramids and sculptures from 1500 years ago.
Mom and dad in front of some ancient dressing rooms:


Here is Dad checking out the pyramids from above:


The ruins are really interesting and its also a kind of spellbindingly beautiful place that you just want to walk around slowly and take it in with giant trees and cool moss covered stones everywhere. We got some lunch before we headed back towards Gracias and made it as far as Santa Rosa before the car had another flat tire. Melanie and I were in the big grocery store there stocking up while Dad walked over to a tire place and got them to fill it up. It didn’t fix it, though, and as soon as he put it on it started going flat again so we had to drive over as quick as we could. The rim was bent on the tire making it so there was never a good seal and they couldn’t really fix it, so after an hour and a half we put the spare on and drove back. The drive back to Gracias was fine except for the fact that the headlights of the car and everyone we passed flashed us because they thought we had our brights on. Mom and Dad just relaxed the next day to recover from a little stomach bug we all had caught. They did a really good job with their Spanish and went up in the park to a little restaurant there to buy some coffee. When we got home from school, we walked over to the natural hot springs near our house and had a soak. It was a little weird because when we got there, there was already someone in the pool and I didn’t really know the correct etiquette so we just waited for him to get out. After soaking we walked back in the dark which was pretty tough. We made it back to house, had some soothing potato soup and helped load Mom and Dad up with stuff to take back with them. We called it a night and woke up early to say goodbye. It was so nice having them here, to help us out, to talk to, to show them around our world here. It's been really hard being so far away from our families and friends this year and having them here made it not seem so far away at all. We're having a great time but we can't wait to see everybody this summer or even sooner if you happen to be heading down this way.