Honduras

As we drive north, entry fees to each country keep getting higher and higher. Furthermore, the very same country that charges for entry slaps us with an exit fee; perhaps they feel it is a more subtle form of extortion to take our money in two smaller sums rather than in one larger one. If faced with this price increase at the movie theater, we could just walk away, but we want to make it back to the USA on bike so we can't just tell a country like Honduras that the cost to enter their country is just high and they have no business charging people so much. We were trying to eliminate all of our currency in one country before entering the other, so these extra charges came as a great surprise and left us fumbling through money belts and our secret dollar reserves in order to meet the list of extraneous fees: average entry/exit fee ($2-$3), Transit insurance for foreigners in Costa Rica ($11), motorcycle fumigation fee ($2-$3 per country and I was told in Honduras that since the Nicaraguans fumigate the Hondurans, then the Hondurans fumigate the Nicaraguans), Road tax for foreigners in Honduras ($20 and we were only there for 2 days), Road permit for foreigners in Guatemala ($5).

Once we had emptied our pockets of our few safety dollars, we pushed through the kids at the barricade selling Honduran Lempeira and rolled out of the dry arid Nicaragua into lush green Honduras. At the border I met a New Yorker who has made himself rich growing tobacco. He insists that the while the Costa Ricans are only exploiting their lands for tourism, the Hondurans are using their equally fertile land for marketable crops such as coffee, bananas, tobacco and corn. But despite his capitalistic attitude, I found that he really continues to live in Honduras because of the slower pace of life in Latin America. Ironically at our next stop in Copán Ruinas, Honduras, the owner of the bed and breakfast we stayed in was also from New York. The guy moved so slow and with such reserve that I hardly believed he was from New York; the inn that we set up was definitely catered to gringos, and with hammocks hanging from the pillars in front of the room, I am sure he wants to share with visitors the reason a New Yorker would choose to leave The City.

Copán Ruinas, situated in northern Honduras, marks the southern end of what is now known as the Ruta de los Mayas (the Mayan Route). The ruins are an unearthed city that is in the process of being restored. I felt strange at first to be only one of a dozen tourists walking through a tropical forest to visit what the map indicated to be a grassy esplanade covered with stone pyramids, giant statues and a few stone buildings that were the center of the Copanican civilization. I had the association between impressive sites (like Maccu Piccu) and hoards of tourists. So if there were few tourists, the site could not be that impressive, but it was. Without the tourist crowd there is this sense of mysticism, surrealism - we walked up and down the walls of pyramids and between 3 story tall statues of gods that were positioned like chess pieces in the middle of a grassy field and without the interruption of a thousand cameras tried to imagine life back then.

Enric was finally able to fulfill a wish that had been gnawing at him since Bolivia. The South American equivalent of the Swiss Army knife is a machete, and every local from Bolivia up through Honduras has one! In Panama the locals were using them to cut coconuts, in Costa Rica, our horseback riding guide flicked his back and forth letting the reeds that blocked our path fall to the ground. Enric was pretty impressed; he began searching for a machete in Nicaragua, finding blades made in Colombia and El Salvador. He finally settled on a Honduran knife, and the machete carrying locals were all too eager to share their wisdom on how to best sharpen the blade. Fortunately we have not had time to accomplish this, and the knife is currently buried deep in our bag of camping gear, dull and completely harmless!