Honduran Get-away

The first weekend in September, we were lucky enough to take a few days off and have a little escape from life in Talanga. We headed north a few hours for the largest lake in Honduras, Lago Yojoa, and it was beautiful. We had read some of our travel guide and picked out a few things we wanted to do there. We didn’t make any set plans though, making it feel a little more adventurous. Our first stop after arriving at the lake was Pulhapanzak Falls, an amazing 43-meter waterfall north of the lake. It was incredible to watch even from a distance, as I’m pretty sure it was my first time ever seeing a waterfall, but someone decided it would be a good idea to take this cave tour behind the waterfall. I wasn’t so sure about this cave tour, and tried asking this “guide” about what it entailed, but that didn’t exactly work out. He assured me that it didn’t involve jumping off rocks into the water, which was my biggest fear since the pool of water was a ways down from where we were standing, and he also added that anyone could do this- pointing out that children go often. I decided to go and see what happens, but I didn’t make it very far before finding out this man was a liar. We walked maybe 100 feet before we reached the point where you had to jump into the water to continue the hike. Now this first jump wasn’t too high, but that’s not the point… he told me there was no jumping involved! After a minute or so of debating whether or not I was about to die, I jumped in the water and we continued the voyage. And that was about the easiest part of the whole trip. From there, our guide informed us to follow him and breathe through our mouths because the wind tunnel and water from the waterfall made it impossible to do otherwise. We basically held hands as he dragged us through water up to our necks, over rocks, and under the water crashing down from the falls. You couldn’t see or hear anything, and it was definitely hard to breathe or even move. Eventually, we made it behind the actual waterfall to this tiny cave that our guide informed us to climb up into. There was no way I was going into this dark hole first, so we made Joe do it. Despite being a tiny, pitch-black space, the cave was actually a reprieve since it was the first time we could take an actual breath since we had started. The only bad thing was that it gave us the chance to think about the trip back, and how we were about to risk our lives again trying to return to our starting point. The return was actually a bit worse because as we exited the cave we were being pounded by the water falling on us from 43 meters above, and the wind had changed making it come at us from different directions. But after another high jump off a rock into the unknown and some extremely high pulse rates, we made it back safely from what was easily the most frightening but exhilarating experience of my life. It’s hard to explain in writing, so you’ll just have to believe me that it was crazy. I can definitely say that I would never let me children do this, and I will never trust any crazy tour guides that swim behind waterfalls on a daily basis. So, after all this, we headed out to set up camp somewhere… we just weren’t sure where exactly. After one failed attempt, we ended up at this random coffee farm out in the woods, and the camping area couldn’t have been more beautiful alongside a surprisingly clean river. We were definitely the only people out there, which made it both fun and sort of creepy- if we thought too much about it. We’ll just say the whole setting reminded us of something out of a horror movie, and the fact that it was continually brought up didn’t help at all. We set up our tents though and thankfully were able to start a fire with Mike’s expertise as the sun went down. We made spaghetti over the campfire, but unfortunately no s’mores as the ingredients are difficult if not impossible to find here. We’ve seen marshmallows (though they’re crazy looking and colorful), and the occasional chocolate bar (usually with nuts), but no graham crackers. It’s sad to admit, but I had to travel to Honduras to sleep in a tent for the first time, but it was pretty amazing and peaceful as we listened to the nearby river. The horrible miniature-biting ants surrounding our tents didn’t come inside at all, and we slept about 8 hours waking up without roosters crowing outside our windows for the first time in weeks. We swam/bathed in the (really cold) river and headed to the Lake for kayaking. The lake was amazing, and we pretty much had the whole thing to ourselves. I should have mentioned this earlier, but Hondurans don’t really enjoy doing outdoorsy stuff like this, so we were literally the only people on this huge lake for recreation. Before we left Talanga, whenever we told people about our plans to go to the lake for 3 days they thought we were crazy and told us we would be bored out of our minds the whole time, but that definitely wasn’t true. We tried to find one of Honduras’ National Parks that was nearby, but had no luck because the few signs we saw were incredibly misleading, and no one we talked to seemed to know anything about the park, let alone directions on how to get there. We drove up and down mountains for 3 hours and ended up with nothing except some amazing views of the countryside. We read in our book about these nice hot springs, which were supposed to have good places to swim nearby, so we decided to check them out. Unfortunately, when we got there, we found bubbling and smelly brown water that was hot enough to burn you, and a raging brown river one could easily drown in. It’s possible it would have been nice for swimming had it not been rainy season, but overall, the ‘aguas termales’ were a big disappointment. We were pretty discouraged from the day as a whole, because all we had really accomplished was an hour of kayaking that morning, so we decided to forego camping that night which turned out to be a wonderful decision as it proceeded to downpour most of the night. We stayed in an amazing cabin, which happened to have a toilet, shower, running water, deck, and 5 beds, and cost us only $7 for the night. There was a restaurant attached where we could finally try the infamous fish from the lake. The weekend went fast, and before we knew it it was time to head back home to Talanga.

We had spent too much time that morning enjoying the paradise-feel of where we stayed, and we left just as the typical afternoon torrential rains were starting. We had made it maybe a half hour from the lake when we came across the accident. We were in the more mountainous part of the country, where the roads are curvy and the rain only made things worse. We had just come around the corner when we saw the big charter bus (a form of public transportation here which go between the larger cities in Honduras) and the small black car smashed against the mountainside. It had just happened seconds before because we were one of the first on the scene. Our first instinct in a situation like this is to call 911, but after we remembered we were in Honduras, I think in a way we knew that wasn’t going to help much. We were seemingly in the middle of nowhere, at least a 2-hour drive from either of the closest big cities. By the time we had pulled over and left our car, another group of Honduran men had stopped and had started working on extricating the one man from the black car. It looked like a scene from a movie- chaotic, pouring rain which continued the whole time we were there, people yelling everywhere, and it was terrifying when you realized it was all real. We really didn’t know what to expect or how on earth we would be able to help. The man in the car was in really, really bad shape, but there were already a number of people working on physically picking up his car and moving it from the ditch between the mountain and the road as it was filling with water. Thinking about what was on the bus scared me the most, because we know that buses here are almost always completely filled with people- standing room only. We were a bit surprised as a man came to one of the windows and asked us, in perfect English, if we could help people get off of the bus through the window, because the side with the door was leaning against the mountain. He started sending people out the window; the most injured first, then everyone else. To our surprise and relief, there were only four or five people that came off the bus with significant injuries. A 17-year-old girl came off the bus missing significant pieces of flesh from her right arm. Her right leg was swelling a lot too, so I assume she was near the front of the bus on the right side that hit the rock. We wrapped her arm in one of our towels, but luckily it wasn’t bleeding too much, and ripped the leg of her jeans to check out her leg that didn’t have any apparent injury besides swelling. She had been alone on the bus, so I spent the next hour or so trying to keep her calm by talking to her in my horrible Spanish, which incidentally is much harder to use in a stressful situation like that. Around 30-40 minutes after we had stopped, a police car showed up at the scene. A few cops got out of their car, put up some cones on the side of the road around the bus, and attempted to somewhat control traffic. One did come over to where I was standing and asked if I knew the girl who was hurt, but other than that, they had absolutely no contact with anyone who had been involved in the accident. They didn’t talk to or help anyone there. We just stood there next to the bus and watched the traffic go by, and waited, though we weren’t sure what for. People on other buses were just staring at us through their windows trying to see what had happened- many taking pictures on their cell phones. A number of buses and cars would slow down to offer rides to those with injuries or anyone else. At least an hour after we had stopped, the “Red Cross”- paramedic type people showed up in one ambulance. By this time, the group of men who had stopped had finally gotten the man out of his car after working an hour or so with their bare hands and an ax to free him. Most of the people there, including all of us, were very shocked that he was still alive. The men who had freed him carried him haphazardly by his arms and legs to the ambulance, while the paramedic people carried a backboard underneath him- I have no idea why, but that’s when I decided I couldn’t watch any more of what they were doing. The ambulance was there only for this man, but one of the Red Cross people did attend to the girl. He tied a tourniquet to her upper arm, and then put essentially a large band-aid on it. She was then put on another packed bus, exactly like the one she had just been on, to go back where she had just come from- a 2-hour ride north to San Pedro Sula. She wasn’t given anything for pain, or anything for her leg that continued to swell, and I hated thinking about how horrible that drive must have been after she settled down a bit and realized what had just happened. Anyway, after being there for over an hour we got back in our truck, soaking wet, and resumed the 3-hour ride home. We were all pretty much in shock about what had just unfolded, but I think the hardest part to deal with was just the difference in how everything was handled here versus what we are used to. When we had stopped, I half expected more competent and qualified people to show up soon to help, but that wasn’t going to happen. As we found out here, Honduran people have learned to take care of their own in situations like this, as all the assistance provided was by random people passing by. Nobody asks questions about what happened, and no one really cares who was to blame. The “Red Cross” unfortunately doesn’t have the training, technology or resources found in the US, and the 3-hour ambulance ride to the capitol was not going to help that man’s cause one bit.

We knew coming into this experience that there were major differences between life here and in the US, but I’m still often shocked by how huge those differences can be. When we were learning about culture shock it was stressed, “things aren’t better or worse, they’re just different.” This incident definitely challenges my belief in that phrase, as it was incredibly hard to sit back and watch things handled completely differently from the way we consider right or at least best.

It´s still hard to try to make sense out of this experience, or wonder why we happened to be passing at the time we did, but I definitely think it will be one of my most significant memories from my time here. There´s no doubt that it´s an experience we´ve learned from, and another reason for us to be thankful for the things we have at home.