San Juan de Intibuca

This is us, wet and happy in front of one of the waterfalls we went to.

Since we’ve been in Honduras we haven’t been inside of a car. We’ve been in the back of a lot of trucks, on lots of crowded buses, but we haven’t experienced the serenity of a sedan in quite a while.

Quick internet update: We have Skype now and although the call quality is not always the best it’s a way you can talk to us for free. Just look up aaron.sebens and see if we’re on.

School is going pretty well for both us right now. There are a lot of frustrations with the administration of the school, but both of us are feeling more comfortable with our classes. It is not easy by any means but I think our expectation of each day is less abstract and confusing than it was before. There are just certain things that you have to let go of and certain things you come to expect. Some examples:

- Whenever things get settled the administration likes to throw us a new “curveball” to keep us on our toes. A couple of weeks ago it was that we can’t mention Halloween in our classes and that we can only give tests that are copied from the curriculum. This isn’t really plausible as most of the students don’t really understand a lot of written directions and the tests are pretty complicated English. Last week we found out that we can’t make any photocopies except for the tests from the curriculum. I think this edict was two-pronged, that they didn’t like what we were copying and that they didn’t like spending time making copies. If only we could make our own copies like we’ve been asking for all along.

- The Social Studies teacher for fourth grade had the students build various volcanoes of Central America and bring them to class. The volcanoes ranged from a coke bottle with a cone of paper wrapped around it to an elaborate molded concrete and clay masterpiece with plastic horses and peasants unknowlingly wandering the countryside with no idea their world was about to be destroyed by vinegar and baking soda. They were supposed to be specific volcanoes but as you can guess Atitlan in Guatemala looked the same as Celaque in Honduras. My kids were really proud of them and spent most of the day guarding them like hawks against assaults of fingers from the students in other grades. I assumed that it was common knowledge that the ingredients for a good volcano were baking soda and vinegar. Not so. One kid showed up with a bottle full of gasoline (Did his parents give it to him? Did he siphon it from the bus?) thinking that was the best option for fake lava.

This past weekend we had an extra day off so we decided to spend a little time away from Gracias and see a different part of the region. Our limited travel capacity was mentioned earlier so our destination this weekend was San Juan. As you can guess there are like 200 towns called San Juan in Honduras but this one is only 35km to the east of where we are. It is a town of about 1000 people in an expansive flat valley amongst the mountains and canyons. As a town it doesn’t have too much to offer, dusty without any exotic stores or goods. It does have a couple things going for it though. The surroundings are beautiful. Although it is not that far from where we live and it’s pretty much the same set of mountains, it has a different blend of soil, rocks, and plants that make it distinctively stunning. There are large veins of rock that run through the ground so that you walk for a while on the road and then the road turns into solid rock, which saves a lot of paving. There is also actually a good deal of grass which you don’t see too often around here because of the dense foliage and farming. With the grass there were lots of cows set against the backdrop of 200 foot canyons at 8000 ft, so hopefully the picture is starting to form in your head. If not here are some pictures:

The other big thing that the town has going for it is a tourism cooperative. Several people in the town have banded together to try and promote this tiny town as a tourist destination and a better way of life for some of its residents. San Juan is a big coffee producing area and coffee pickers get paid about $4 a day. It’s kind of hard to figure out who is really at fault for the low wages here. The growers get paid $1.25 for a gallon of coffee beans, so they can’t pay the pickers much. It seems that the people who are really raking it in are the wholesalers here and the roasters and Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts in the states. Through the tourism cooperative they offer several different tours to the waterfalls and canyons around the town, but they also have some interactive craft demonstrations you can do like learning how to roast coffee or making ceramic roofing tiles and adobe bricks.

To get to San Juan we decided to take the bus, which is usually a pretty safe but slow bet. We got to the bus station right before it was supposed to leave but we didn’t depart for about 30 minutes so we were crammed in a microbus with not much air and a lot of people. The seats are soooo close together on those little things. My back is pushed against the seat and knees pushing forward on the seat in front of me, not that comfortable especially when there are three other people in the seat with you that can’t move at all.

When we got to San Juan we asked around until we found the Visitor’s Center, aka electronics store. The lady in charge wasn’t there so we just paged through the book of what the cooperative had to offer. As part of the cooperative, lodging is arranged at a hospedaje, or someone’s house with a few rooms open. Although they might not always be the most comfortable beds or cleanest bathrooms, they offer so much that hotels and motels can’t. Our hospedaje in San Juan was with an 80 year old woman named Dona Soledad in a beautiful worn rundown colonial house. One really nice thing about a lot of the houses here is that the center of the house is indoor and outdoors. Most of the time is spent either in the kitchen eating food/ making it or on the porch, which is really just more of an unenclosed room. We are always just like “sheesh, we need one of these on our house,” but it just wouldn’t work in any place north of Florida.

Nice relaxing porch (we're sitting on a sofa taking the picture)

We dropped our bags off at the house and went to cruise the town while waiting for the tourism lady to get back. We found some pretty overboard concrete art in the plaza and then set our sights on a big grassy hill outside of town.

Concrete serpentine railings:

We didn’t really know which muddy road would lead there so just started asking people “How do we get to that hill?” Bit by bit we moved in the right direction, getting reassurance from people in their houses around the countryside. We were getting closer when we met three kids who were actually heading to the same place with their three cows. We passed by some really picturesque fields and fences and finally made the summit of the hill.

There were really nice views of the whole area and you’ll hear more about our trip, but this was my favorite part, just being up on this hill before sunset throwing a Frisbee around with some very curious kids. Here is me showing a kid how I can throw the Frisbee to the house we’re staying at 3 miles away:

And here are a couple of pictures around the fire tower:

We ran down the hill with the kids and their dogs and headed back to town to meet with the tourism lady. We scheduled a tour for the next day to a nearby waterfall had some comida tipica (eggs, rice, beans, tortillas) at a comedor, read and turned in earlier than our 9:30 usual. We got up, had some comida tipica and met our guide for the day. It was raining a little bit but that didn’t dampen our spirits. Our guide was really nice and used an easy to understand version of Spanish/ acting things out and led us through all of the mud up the hills towards the waterfall. He was a good guide, lots of funny stories and info about the plants. I found a queen ant from a car sized ant hill wandering around and our guide picked her up with his finger and let her bite him for our pleasure and with her huge pinchers she drew blood. Melanie and I were kind of like what is this guy doing, but he seemed to be enjoying himself. We asked him what the queen was doing out of her lair and he said “Going for a walk.” We walked through lots of coffee plantations and banana plants and found out that there is a type of banana that turns red when it is ripe (kind of funny for any Mitch fans out there). We tried some raw ripe coffee which is bright red and really sweet. It tastes a lot like honeysuckle.

Our guide scared off some apprehensive looking cows with a stick and we proceeded to slide down a couple of cow fields to the first of four waterfalls. We’ve seen a lot of waterfalls and it wasn’t anything earth shattering, but it was really pretty and had a nice chest rattling sound with the excess rain water that has fallen the last few weeks here. It was probably 40 ft tall with a nice looking pool at the bottom, but with so much water it was a little dangerous for swimming and it was cold and raining. We walked up to another waterfall that was actually two, and then a final one that was probably 70 ft tall. The waterfalls were really nice but I think the best part was the walk back, on a less muddy road that wound through the countryside. We stopped at his brother’s house and just sat and talked while his five kids peeked shyly at us from behind the door. He told us after we left that the kids are really excited to see foreigners.

Our guide told us that we were going to a nice lookout. It turns out the nice lookout was the same hill we had been to the day before. I wasn’t that happy about it since we had paid this guy to show us some new places and even though we asked not to go to the same place he couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. At least it was a nice place to begin with, so it wasn’t a bad place to see twice.

We made it back to town for the coffee roasting demonstration with the older woman we were staying with. She was a teacher for 25 years and ran the local elementary school so everyone in town still calls her teacher. It was nice talking to her, sitting around the fire listening to the coffee beans pop as they changed from “gold” coffee to black. Here are a couple pictures of the roasting and different ages of coffee beans throughout the year. We couldn’t grind the coffee then because it was way too hot but I think the experience and the good tasting coffee have started me down the slippery slope of being a coffee drinker.

Here is a picture of Dona Soledad roasting coffee and then each of us giving it a spin:

The different stages of coffee:

We headed over to the same comedor for dinner, caught a little of the World Series (I was very excited) and headed back to the hospedaje. It turns out the comida tipica was a little too much after 6 straight meals of the same thing. Melanie was sick pretty much all night and the next morning we just wanted to get home so we decided to hitch hike rather than wait around for the bus. Dona Soledad at the hospedaje was really nice though. Melanie told her that she didn’t think her stomach could handle comida tipica for breakfast and she asked Melanie if she had diarrhea, which seems to be a pretty common and approachable topic here, and made her a stiff concoction she said would fix things right up.

We walked down the highway a little ways and caught a ride within 5 minutes. Hitchhiking is more than just common here, it has a pretty equal market share with bus travel as the main mode of transportation. We hopped into the back of a pickup (turns out this guy must have been a race car driver in a past life) and made the hour and a half trip back to Gracias in 30 minutes. Wasn’t the best thing for our stomachs, but it was much better than being crammed on the bus. We did our weekly shopping, got a motortaxi back to our house in the rain since we had so much stuff and breathed a big sigh of “Glad to be back” when we got home. It was nice to go away, but it is so nice to come back to our quiet comfortable house after traveling.