5 Weeks Later

Andrew and I have been here for over 5 weeks now. We are in our third country now (Guatemala, El Salvador, and now Honduras). At the moment I'm feeling that life is pretty dang easy here. Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of days. Travel days are spent on a series of cramped, hot, and often stinky American school buses as we ride from one arbitrarily chosen destination to the next. At the beginning these journeys were pretty rough, but I think both Andrew and I have gotten used to them. We typically read, sleep, and/or listen to podcasts, music, and we recently finished listening to Dreams from My Father (Obama's first book) which was really good. Most days we wake up in a hotel/hostel in a city, town, village, etc. and determine what we'd like to do that day. Some of my favorite days so far have revolved around swimming in cool water after being out under the hot sun. We've swam in giant mountain lakes, rivers and creeks, and the big beautiful Pacific Ocean. My proudest moment so far was jumping off a 40 foot bridge into a river (to his credit Andrew jumped first). Often, we spend a good deal of time searching out good and cheap food that comes in huge portions. I think I've had enough beans, rice, tortillas, and fried chicken to last me through the remainder of 2011. We are buying fresh produce (pineapples, oranges, tomatoes, avocado) on the street pretty regularly and even bought apples from the Yakima Valley recently! The signs of globalization are ubiquitous down here. Almost everyday I buy ice cream of some sort- never eaten so much before. Today, we caught a few buses to a big waterfall where we swam, saw multiple species of lizards (some that were nearly a foot long), found some sad caged monkeys, and watched vultures fly overhead.

To slaves of The Man this lifestyle may sound pretty sweet, but as with all things, it can feel boring and is hard to appreciate at times. Funny the way that works. Andrew and I were hoping to be volunteering before we meet up with Steven in Nicaragua January 19th but all our opportunities kind of fell flat. True to character we definitely procrastinated a little too much. Some friends we made while traveling told us about an organization on the coast of Honduras that works with orphans and teaches English to children. They volunteered with this organization for a few months and had a good experience. We are applying over the next few days. I'm looking forward to living in one place for more than a few days, finding a sense of community again, and having something close to a schedule.  In the meantime we are going to spend the next two weeks criss-crossing Honduras.