Waah, waah, you say. That’s you, weeping. Where's the blog??
Alright, I know. I’m pretty far behind. I meant to write this at an earlier point in time, but then I got busy, and then I meant to write it later, and then I got really busy, and then I finally had a few days free, but then I got wicked busy. And you're not allowed to ask what I’ve been busy with. That’s my secret.
Anyway, now I’m about as far away from Honduras as one could be while still in South America. I’m looking up at the granite face of Fitz Roy mountain turning pink in the sunrise, and I’m getting carted back by this old thing, back from south to north, from bread country to tortilla country, mountain to beach, me-time to we-time. I suppose that, to tell the stories from far-away Honduras and Colombia, it makes sense to focus on the things I think about most – the four reunions that took place. So I’ll relate those four reunions, and the four reflections I have from them, and that will be that. Then I can go back to doing secret things and avoiding the bath, and you can go back to that which motivates you.
Off we go, then, as British people would say.
Reunion 1: E — Honduras
I had, really, one overarching plan for this trip: go south.
The only person who could make me reverse this southbound frolic and suffer through a 15 hour bus ride in the opposite direction from Nicaragua to Honduras with repeat Central American border crossings is one of my bestest pals in the whole wide world: E.
E had been my mentor at the high school I worked at for the past two years prior to the trip. We taught the same class and the same cohort of miscreants, and she pretty much was the one who made sure I survived. Sometimes it felt like a war movie where I had gotten both my legs blown off out on some frozen wasteland, and she was dragging me by my shirt collar as I screamed to be left to die, back to our meningeal trench to suffer another day. And that’s what urban public education is like.
Kidding. Kinda. Anyway, E and I spent the first forty minutes of every Monday to Friday together for the better part of two years, and we went to prom together (hehe), and over the course of that time I learned that she was certainly not the normal, adjusted, home-owning, responsible adult I had first assumed but some much more wacko, funny, caring iteration. Along the way of her teaching me how to be a teacher and answering all of my problems posed as questions (“Hey, hypothetically, what would you do if a kid in your class…?”), we also became pretty good pals, and it was because of our idiosyncratic little bond that every day at the school was so fun and funny. And so, for her February break, we planned to spend a week romping around Honduras.
What resulted, as maybe could be expected, was a confederacy of errors that made for a whirlwind, but also very fun, week. The mistakes marked the days, and they started right from the start:
Firstly, miscommunication. I got to the airport at 2AM to welcome her to the country, only to realize her flight landed at 2AM the next day, not that day. Whoopsie. Error 1.
Then, back to the airport, right time, woohoo, hello, how’s everything going? Uber to hotel, locked out of hotel. Huh.
There we stood on the dark street of some godforsaken corner of San Pedro Sula at 3AM, which isn’t really rumored for being, you know, safe, calling the hotel phone number and ringing the bell over and over again, with the same non-answer every time. Crap.
“Do we climb it?” E asked. Which meant, “Can you climb it?”
There was a large tree next to the eight foot cement wall surrounding the property. One could imagine, I suppose, an athletic, manly sort of figure scaling the tree with relative ease, dropping down to the other side of the door, and opening the door from the inside. I imagined myself, six feet and one hundred and sixty five pounds of pure athleticism, doing just that. A few swift moves. A heroic opening.
“I got this,” I said.
What ensued looked more like a declawed housecat trying to scratch its way up a greased telephone pole. The baby blue crocs didn’t help.
But I got up there, dangit! And then I got scared about dropping down, and then I dropped down anyway, and then I opened the door from the inside, shaking and making little declawed housecat noises, and we went to the room and went to bed. All told, Error 2.
The next day was a 6-hour long Uber ride along some truly rough roads to see the Copan Ruins. The ruins are the remains of an old Mayan city, now inhabited by scarlet macaws, with otherworldly carvings and stone statues all over. We went there and then explored the cute cobblestone town (Copan), drinking coffee and beer and eating baleadas — the national dish of Honduras: big floppy tortillas filled with refried beans and cheese and cream. We spilled bean juice and cream all over the central square and giggled like little schoolgirls about it.
Copan Ruins looks like this
Error 3 was the 12 hour shuttle the next day to the north of the country, and it was an error because E and I were squeezed onto a little seat with room for 1.5 asses when we have like 3.25’s worth between the two of us (as evidenced by the photo of the tree climb). It was uncomfortable and the road was rough and there was a two hour traffic jam for no reason, and I fell asleep on her shoulder while she patted my head and said, “There, there.” Personal space had ceased to exist.
In the north we stayed in this jungle lodge thing and did a cool, misty waterfall hike, and then after a one-night turnaround we went to the ferry port, just in time for Error 4. There we sat in the terminal, styrofoam coffee cups full of beer, debating whether or not to take Dramamine for motion sickness and settling upon a firm “no.” E ended up puking so hard she blasted through the puke bag, and I put my headphones in and sang Missy Elliott to myself while trying to nonchalantly slide away from her and her widening puddle of bile on the deck. Error 4.
But then we were on the island! We had made it! Just in time to discover that Error 5 was all mine: Jade Seahorse Cabins.
Jade Seahorse Cabins portrays itself online as a sort of quirky, artistic space just outside the hustle and bustle of the main town on Utila, the lesser-traveled of Honduras’ Bay Islands. In reality, Jade Seahorse Cabins was, well, weird. We walked onto the property to find every inch of it covered in strange, psychedelic structures made from concrete and plaster and colored glass. It was kind of like getting dropped into a yellow submarine-themed snow globe, like Alice in Wonderland meets under-medicated sculptor. And then we met the under-medicated sculptor, our charming, totally normal host.
I think I blocked out most of my interactions with the guy, because he was truly odd, and not in the entertaining way. He welcomed us as he showed us the room with a joke about mass shootings (the punchline being that they don’t count if they don’t happen in Massachusetts). Zoinks. It was all creepy side-eye and window-peeking from there. Error 5. Mea culpa, as they say when the pasta’s cold.
Anyway, we didn’t spend too much time in our “Mono (monkey) Lisa” themed room (replete with paintings of monkeys in the Mona Lisa pose). We explored the little town of Utila for a day, then took a ferry out to an even smaller cay island, which looked like something from a postcard. We snorkeled around the reef, the world’s second largest, and saw some cool fish and coral and stuff. I didn’t stay under the water too long because frankly I find it spooky. I don’t think we belong down there.
On the cay Evelyn had encouraged me to put sunscreen on, which I refused to do, and Error 6 was evidenced by me freaking out about my tingling pink skin on the ferry back home.
Error número 7 was at the baleada shop when I ordered four baleadas, and the lady told me they were big, which to me sounded like a challenge and an affront, so I replied, “So am I,” and then forced myself to eat too many baleadas, which left me with a two-day stomach ache and a (somewhat) unfounded sense of pride.
And then we had a night out drinking on the island that was mostly just the two of us hollering around (really mostly just E), and then we took the ferry back the next morning and shuttled back to San Pedro Sula, and that concluded Reunion 1.
It was seven-ish days packed to the tortilla’s edge, so to speak. It was a lot of moving, a lot of long-haul busses, a lot of (mostly my) errors, and also a nice mix of mountain and history and beach and relaxation time at the end. To be honest, Honduras wasn’t my favorite place. From our brief glance it felt to me to be kind of rough, but when I think back about it now, it was seven days of laughter and exploring and good conversation.
For me, better than anything we really saw or did was just spending time together and enjoying the dynamics of our weird ketchup-and-toothpaste friendship. The most memorable aspect was having unending stretches of time to talk in a way that felt like being back in her classroom at 7:15 on a Wednesday morning, mostly bullshitting and gossiping until all the 13-year-old demons high on Dunkin’ Donuts Energy Blasts and crullers would rip through the doors.
But it's not always bovine waste and other people’s secrets. A lot of the time, our conversations would be trading stories — E is a super entertaining storyteller — or about why things work out the way they do. Once in a blue moon, we even talked about work junk at those pre-work meetings.
Through all that, the biggest thing I have to credit my dear pal E for is for exemplifying an often-overlooked part of what it means to be a friend: being open.
For me, it’s not always the easiest, most comfy thing – I’ve come to realize that I can be a strange, secretive little man, especially about the things that I deem to be “personal.” I like stuff like me-space, quiet time. I resort to the idea that friendship is being there for someone else, and not burdening, or trusting, others with things I’m going through. It’s all a bit arse-wards, as the Irish would say.
E, in her old wisdom, doesn’t do that. She is a trusting friend, willing and able to share the highs and lows of her life. And I’ll note that to be the ear for a person like that feels good. It feels like she’s saying, “I trust that I can let you into my life.” It feels like a privilege to be thought of that way.
When someone does that with you, you feel encouraged to do the same. I can think of times over the past two years when I felt pretty dang low, and I knew I could talk to her about it. Because she talked to me about her stuff, too. It was the same when we were in Honduras. We shared our funny, wonderful successes of the past four months. Then she told me some of her junk. I told her some of mine. And at the end, it felt like there was a little less junk altogether.
That’s what it means, E has reminded me, to be someone’s friend. To let in and to be let in.
Assorted pics of last days
___
Reunion # 2: G — Medellin
After all that warm and fuzzy mumbo jumbo I was ready to get back to what I do best: some mothalovin’ me time.
So I hopped on a flight to Bogota, popped in my Airpods, and made a promise not to talk to anyone – neither to let in nor be let in – for a solid two weeks. And that’s pretty much what I did.
It helped that when I got to Colombia — a place everyone goes to party — I realized I didn’t really want to party any more. I had partied a good bit in Mexico, and then less in Guatemala, and then less in El Salvador, and then a little more in Nicaragua, and then not at all in Honduras, and I just felt like I was done.
It also helped that something in Honduras, either the four big baleadas or the fried warm-water lobster, had left me with a perpetual stomachache that I couldn’t shake. I wasn’t super ill, per se, but my tummy felt strange and acidic, and that made me not want to talk to anyone. It felt like there were these two lemons down in my gut, and they were duking it out in a pit of mustard, and one kept trying to crawl out the uproute, and the other kept dragging him down and pig wrangling him.
(As a brief aside, on a hike someone told me that artificial intelligence has gotten to the point that you can type in instructions for an image of anything you can think of and it’ll make it, and I’ve been playing with that toy. It’s getting pretty good.)
So for three days in Bogota I enjoyed the cold, drizzly weather of the Andean city, running in
the morning and going on long walks during the day. From there I took a long bus to San Gil mostly because I wanted to paraglide and I heard you can do it for cheap, and if there’s ever a place to cut costs it’s on the safety requirements of the gear that suspends you 500 feet in the air. So I went paragliding, which the lemons did not enjoy, and I tried not to vomit from 500 feet in the air above the wide Chicamocha Canyon in Colombia.
From there I took the longest bus of my life, 17 hours to Cartagena. It felt like someone had taken a hot cast iron to my backside and left me totally flattened. For the last hour I didn’t even have enough cushion to make the friction required to keep me seated, and I had to grip the armrests just to remain upright, until finally I emerged from the bus like a two-dimensional paper man.
In Cartagena I continued to go to bed early and live in monk-like silence and run in the early mornings along the old fortress walls of the city. I broke my vow of silence to finally report to a doctor that I had two humanistic lemons in my tummy, for which he gave me antibiotics, and then I went to Minca, a little town on some other mountains on the north coast, resumed my lip-zipper, did an overnight hike, ran to some waterfalls, and sat by the river.
Assorted pics from Bogota, Cartagena, and hikes
It was quiet. It was me-time. I ate vegetables. I read Harry Potter in Spanish. I enjoyed.
And then, Medellin.
Lots of people love Medellin, and they’re all wrong. Medellin can appeal to you for two reasons:
You like cocaine and sex tourism
2) You want a place that is more Instagram than real world, from which you can “digitally nomad” and order your frappuccino in English, forgetting, in your best of moments, that you’re even abroad after all
Alright, it’s not that bad. But I don’t frikken’ like it.
I don’t like it because it feels like a rich kid’s playground. Medellin has developed so much as a tourism hub in the last few years that it really does feel like a lot of the city is tailored to tourists — fancy restaurants and coffee shops with everything in English, entire neighborhoods designed to look and feel more European than Latin, co-working spaces for you to “synergize” with “like-minded creatives.” On top of that, the nightlife is totally crazy, and it seems to feed the limitless cravings of young westerners far from the moralizing gaze of mumsie. It feels like a place people go when they want no rules, and, for as vibrant and alive as the city undeniably is, it also just felt slimy.
For example: I went for a walk one of my first nights into the Poblado Park. It’s almost impossible to describe – huge bars and clubs surrounding a lush green parkspace, massive billboards and TVs reaching three stories overhead. People do coke out in the open, the whole world is sitting out drinking or walking around drinking, crazy music blasts from every corner. It feels like another world; neon and dark, cool and terrifying.
The problem with having a reputation like Medellin’s is that it feeds into a self-perpetuating loop. A place is rumored to be lax on drugs and prostitution. That place attracts people who like drugs and prostitution. The reputation and the demand for drugs and prostitution intensify, and opportunists start to circle.
In its darkest form, this broad-daylight underworld often manifests as white men traveling to Medellin for sex, and child prostitution is rampant. Concurrent is a wave of robberies in which sex tourists are targeted by Colombians, drugged, robbed, and sometimes killed along the way — the uptick in occurrences has led to the US Embassy in Colombia putting out a notice to travelers to Colombia to stay off of dating apps like Tinder.
The situation has gotten so bad that locals in Medellin have started to protest against tourism in the city in general. The mayor went so far as to declare a “war on sex tourism,” which includes suspending sex work in the tourist neighborhood and enforcing a closing time for bars. The problem, of course, is that the demand still exists, and someone will break these restrictions to meet the demand – it all starts to resemble a microcosm of what makes many describe Colombia as a “narco state” on a grand scale.
I won’t deny that there are things about Medellin that are really cool, and that it’s a beautiful, unique city with a lot of energy. And most people that go there probably aren’t going there to behave as though God’s taking a long lunch away from the monitor. To be fair, my mom went there a year ago, and I don’t think she partook in the, you know. There’s a part of me that thinks I’m being hypocritical, or judgmental, or that I’ve just become a big sourpuss from the fighting lemons. But I dunno. Medellin just felt lame.
Medellin
Into all this came my second reunion: G.
G was one of my roommates my junior year of undergrad, and he’s a cool cat – one thing I always appreciated was that he knew how to have fun without sacrificing his sense of right and wrong, and he was always outspoken (and confrontational) about the things he thought were wrong. It was an impressive quality then, when we were certifiable idiots living in a house whose main attractions featured a kudu on the wall and a pair of oft-used inflatable boxing gloves, and it’s an impressive quality now.
G was in Medellin because his graduate business school program decided to go there for their spring break, and they descended onto the city like a swarm of mosquitos with upturned collars and boat shoes and a need to “consult” on “systems inefficiencies” – which it turns out just means getting paid to tell the higher ups to fire half the workforce.
I joined a group of eight of them at this upscale pizza and beer place, which is kind of a funny thing to do in Colombia, and I listened as they used all their collective Spanish to order nine beers at a time, and they talked to me about what it’s like to be in a top business program back home, and I talked to them about what it’s like to live out of a backpack and never ever bathe. I smelled, I’m pretty sure, like a wet dog, and I had to fight the urge not to eat all the leftover pizza since rich people and soon-to-be-rich people, whose company I was amidst, always leave food on the table. (If you want people to think you’re rich, go to a restaurant and order something and don’t take a single bite.) I sat there, about as conspicuous as a rat with a cardboard box on its back at a turtle party, thinking about how out of my usual crowd I was.
And that informed the takeaway: back in undergrad a part of me always felt like I never measured up to the business kids, like they were playing a game that I couldn’t play. And now, talking to G as adults, I felt that gap – which I hadn’t really paid any attention to since leaving school – and it felt wider than before. Simply, I didn’t really understand any of the crap they were doing or why they would want to do it, and I’m pretty darn sure by their reactions they didn’t understand the crap I was doing, and especially why I would want to do it (“A bedroom with 12 other people in it? You don’t just stay in hotels?”)
But it also felt like it didn’t matter as much as it did way back when. G told me about his goals to end up in aerospace consulting (I asked – you can still work from Earth). I couldn’t make sense of it. But it fired him up, and at that upscale pizza place I couldn’t afford, I mostly just felt happy that he had found the thing that he was passionate about.
And G asked me about my job, and I couldn’t really vocalize that career isn’t the thing that drives me the way that is for him, and I knew that because of that, I kind of fall off the radar. And I wasn’t really bothered by it. I left the pizza place firstly wishing I had taken all the leftovers, and secondly just okay with the fact that G and I were different people: we were each doing our own thing, and it might not make sense to the other one, but it sure was better than either of us trying to do something that didn’t fit.
He is him. I am I. We is different. It’s okay. That was it. Reunion 2.
___
Reunion 3: Julian: Medellin
Número 3 is an old fan favorite: Julian, the German guy who pulled me out of the lake in Guatemala. It’ll be brief, because it was a brief reunion: he was in Medellin with his girlfriend Diana, the tattoo artist from Mexico, and we hung out for a pair of days, and then we briefly met up again for a night in the coffee region of southwest Colombia. We didn’t really do anything this time around (no water sports) – we mostly just ate and drank and walked around, and it was still a good time.
I don’t have much of a takeaway. Since his trip was winding down, our conversations were more about what’s next, as he tries to decide where he wants to live and work and how he and Diana can continue their relationship. As we sat under the pulsing lights and twenty-foot TVs of Medellin at an outdoor bar, I got the impression that the two of them would probably get married in the nearish future, and they would start a family, and their lives would do that thing that people’s lives do – follow down some unknowable path, developing and continuing and becoming set along their twists and turns, all of it uniquely and unknowably theirs.
It was a funny feeling. We said our adios-es. That was that.
___
Reunion 4: Sarah, Salento
Reunion 4 was meeting back up with Sarah, the tall Canadian basketball player who embarrassed all the grown men in Nicaragua on the court and then invited me to sing “All Star” at karaoke with her. Because when you watch a tall Canadian basketball player embarrass all the grown men and then sing “All Star” at karaoke, you make plans to meet back up.
The reunion took place in the coffee region of Colombia south of Medellin. We spent six days between Salento and Jardin, two colonial little towns up in the mountains, and it was a great six days – definitely quieter than the first time around in Nicaragua.
In Salento we did a big hike to see the largest palm trees in the world, teaming up with a group of hostel friends. They definitely dragged the pace down, but they made up for it by including a bubbly Frenchman wearing a fedora who thought it was a cowboy hat.
“Texas,” he would say with a grin.
“Yes,” we said.
The next day our group did a mountain bike tour, which was cool but also strangely uneventful since this guy drove us to the top of this mountain to then bike down. Early on there was a big waterfall, and it was chilly and drizzly, but Sarah and I both stripped down to our skivvies and dunked in, and it felt like we were in our own adventurous little world together. The next day the others moved on and we had a day to ourselves, and we spent a good chunk of it on a downhill run, getting stuck at the bottom of the downhill, and hitchhiking a ride back to town.
At some point we took a very strange bus over a very narrow mountain pass to get from Salento to Jardin, and in Jardin we did another full-day hike, this time dodging the company of our slow friends and being joined by a little dog for most of it instead.
“He probably thinks he’s going back to Canada,” I joked, as we headed back down.
“Can you imagine?”
But the dog really followed us all the way down, and then he stuck around as we called a tuktuk to take us back to town, and then, to our amazement, he started chasing the tuktuk as we pulled onto the main road.
“Oh my God,” Sarah said.
We laughed about it, but mostly because it was kind of heartbreaking. The tuktuk revved his scooter engine, the dog’s little legs couldn’t keep up, and we left him panting on the side of the road. It felt like something out of Air Bud. But neither of us wanted a dog.
That final night we got ice cream and then met up with the old hiking group again, this time at a taco restaurant. The guy running the restaurant brought us a box of hot pepper powders, which rose in spiciness from mild to extreme. Sarah and I sat at the end of the table and played our own version of Hot Ones, trying each of the powders and asking questions through the heat. We giggled and went red and everyone ate their tacos at the other end of the table.
Then there was a thing with a real cowboy. We stopped at a bar for a last drink, and Jardin has all these actual cowboys who ride their horses into town and sit along the main square and drink. One of them was out on his horse, and Sarah, confident and with no Español, communicated to him that she wanted to ride the horse.
“Si,” he said, and someone from the bar brought a chair over so she could get on.
It was about that moment that we realized that the middle-aged Colombian cowboy who had our friend stuck to the back of his animal was absolutely hammered. He bobbed and weaved as they took off into the distance, and for a minute we scratched our necks thinking we would never see her again. They came back eventually, though, to the cheers of the bar people, and he kissed the top of her head, which was kind of weird, and then he stumbled off to wherever drunk Colombian cowboys stumble off to.
And that was our last night.
Hanging with Sarah was good fun. She’s a thoughtful, kind person, the type of person to pick up a random dog and let it sit on her lap at breakfast. That’s pretty neat. It was nice to have more time together in Colombia, and more relaxed time together, too, going on hikes and sitting down for meals and feeling like you could really learn about someone. It felt meaningful to get to know her in a truer sense, especially since we’re both doing the travel thing with its quick, surface-level hellos and goodbyes.
The next morning I took an early bus back to Medellin and caught a flight out. And that was it. Honduras and Colombia.
Tall trees, party bus, sad dog, group on the mountain
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Gray Matter Goulash: Final Thoughts
There’s been a lot of reflections in this one, and I already feel exposed to an extent that borders on indecency, so I’ll keep this final part brief:
One time, way back at the start of this blog, I wrote about saying goodbye and multiple universes and wishing that I was in the universe where I didn’t have to say goodbye to who I was then saying goodbye to.
But I was all arse-wards.
We’re all just little electrons, pinballing around in a vacuum reactor. We bounce into another, and then bounce off in a different direction, and there’s no telling what the mad scientist at the helm will make happen next. Rather than lament the unlived possibilities, though, or fight the current for a little more time, like I tried to do six months ago, I'm trying to just be grateful for the bumps.
Maybe there are infinite realities, like my marijuana metaphysician friend C would argue, one for every possibility. But we only get to experience one. Amidst all the millions of whizzing atoms and the infinitude of possibilities, I got to collide with some pretty great people for a time. And that’s something to be thankful for.
Hasta pronto,
-David, airborne
Yessss!! Been waiting for this to drop. Way to built up the anticipation David 😒
Davie! Hey mate, some cool stuff there and a few nascent rays of light/ insight... Life is all comings and goings, goodbyes and hellos. I loved this image: " I sat there, about as conspicuous as a rat with a cardboard box on its back at a turtle party." Noice... Have fun, stay safe. Post more "deep thoughts.." Manly hugs, UFO (Uncu Franny Overseas..) ;-)
Anonymity can't hide how handsome G is.