Tegucigalpa, Honduras—

That’s not a phrase of gratitude to the honduran currency, the Lempira, or the wronged hero after whom it was named, rather, a location: Gracias is the capital of one of Honduras’s western departments, Lempira. Like many settlements in this mountainous country – our orography resembles a crumbled sheet of paper – Gracias sits cradled in a valley under the majestic shadow of the Cordillera de Celaque mountain range, in direct sight of the Cerro las Minas, the highest peak in Honduras at 9420 ft., part of one of our biggest national parks, the Parque Nacional Celaque. In the past couple of years this little town has been getting quite a lot of attention: it has been touted as a destination for eco-tourists and people interested in the vestiges of the colony, and it’s received a major infrastructural boost by the executive power itself, since the president hails from the region. Hip restaurants, renovation of the old streets and buildings, improved security, the opening of a hot springs establishment and of course a revamp of the beautiful national park count as its boons to the weary traveler who’s willing to drive, or take a bus, far enough from any of the two major cities to take the better part of a day to get there. It has even opened a little airport, albeit with a rocky start: the very first test flight out of it, highly televised, had a malfunction and crashed minutes after going airborne. Bittersweet as most signs of progress in our little corner of the isthmus.

But this preamble only tries to paint a hopefully fair picture of a little town that’s received some love from the tourist industry, and high praise from hondurans who’ve made the trek (on a spotless, recently renovated highway), and contrast it with the fact that, even though my family and I have been meaning to go since the president was sworn in and two of my very best friends seem to have been going there quite often since they reached the summit of Cerro Las Minas in new year’s, I just hadn’t been able to translate myself there, until this weekend.

Careful readers who commit everything to memory and have gone at least a couple posts back and read that before this, will vividly remember that on February 13th, a Saturday, I made my very first long distance hike on very demanding terrain under the scorching sun and, being unfit and stubborn, I grimaced in the face of death (or at least the less tragic but infinitely more shameful alternative of puking and passing out), making it out miraculously, and pointedly, alive. Wise readers would expect me to have rested my sore muscles and overtaxed mind the next day, and even the day after since it was President’s day; but alas, too much wisdom seldom leads to adventure, so the careful and wise will be aghast at discovering that the tale that follows starts on the very next morning after the long walk, at 6:45 to be precise.

I’ve never had the scientific privilege to actually weigh some lead and feel its density exert my muscles, but I would wager that the effort it took to open my eyes that morning wouldn’t be far from trying to lift a brick of the stuff; I felt tired, sore, lazy and even a little bit sick from the chill of the morning, but I had committed to receive my friends at 8 and depart, jolly and energized, towards Gracias. So I hauled myself from the bed, donned my hired hat, and, finding much to my surprise that not only did my legs and arms still respond to my commands with as much precision as an early morning allows, they weren’t actually that sore; so on I went to brew coffee, eat some actual breakfast prepared by my saintly mother and then, after successfully exhorting my bowels to confess their sins on a pew of porcelain, took a quick shower and jumped into the same pants and socks as the previous day – which not only felt still clean after 26 kilometers of sweat and despair, they smelled clean, no wonder I’m getting a touch obsessed with these performance fabrics – and received my friends not a minute past 8:30. They had to wait for me downstairs for most of my morning rituals, the poor devils.

After my dad and Carlos achieved the remarkable feat of engineering that was to fit Carlos’s long-bed pickup truck in our modest garage, we jumped into the pristine interior of the recently washed car my family allows me to take to these unkind trips on rugged land and departed, not a minute past 8:45, which is quite early for hondurans, or at least a Borjas: our custom is to leave at the very least three hours later than announced, so 45 minutes felt like just a margin of error.

I’m not the best, or most frequent, of drivers, but I try to be careful (after, five years ago, having been involved in two very car-wrecking crashes in the space of six weeks); so it always puzzles me how my friends happily acquiesce to me driving them long distances. Granted, this time we had agreed that someone else would drive since I would be tired, but I felt okay and it feels me with dread and paranoia to give my car to someone else, though I think everyone else was a more experienced driver than me. Drivers, by definition, are irrational, so I really just try to fit with the pack. Nevertheless, the road from here to Siguatepeque, one of the major towns in the department of Comayagua and which sits almost halfway between Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula, and marks the point where one stops going north and heads west, is the very best road in the country: well maintained, well lit, beautifully signed, and actually designed to allow commuting between cities and minimize the likelihood of being involved in gruesome accidents due to narrow lanes, sinkholes, unexpected sharp turns, rock faces, cattle, trucks, impromptu soccer matches, boulders whose final destination seems to have been right where a sharp turn ends, and many other honduran features that dominated this major vein of traffic for many years, until the government decided it would be nice to communicate the two biggest cities without having people obliterate their wheels and collect dents and scary anecdotes on a daily basis. The road is now pretty snazzy and relatively easy to drive in, is the gist of it, so I didn’t completely feel reckless subjecting my friends and myself to my meager driving skills on it.

A drive in Tegucigalpa on a Sunday is a breeze, a drive out of Tegucigalpa and north amidst the beautiful pine forests of the western outskirts of the city with no traffic whatsoever, a blue sky and pleasantly chilly air whistling by as one cruises at the maximum speed allowed (by the easily scared heart of yours truly as well as the government), is paradise in a can. Add to that some enjoyable banter with friends and it’s no miracle that we barely even felt time pass between our departure and our first stop: Granja D’Elia in Siguatepeque.

Granja D’Elia is an italian oasis in the middle of the forests of Comayagua: ever since I can remember, and that’s at least 20 years of memories driving north on this selfsame road, it’s been there offering a buffet, a cafeteria, a bank, a couple of stores with things vacationers may have forgotten, a well-stocked mini mart with local necessities and italian delicacies, a rustic decor half inspired by Honduras, and half by Italy, and, most importantly: clean, working, restrooms (it even has a hotel and a zoo, but in 20 years I’ve never set foot in either, nor have I dipped it in the pool they installed a while ago). Upon writing this I must admit that I’ve never looked into the european genesis of the place, one day, on another trip, I shall. What I do know, however, is that countless hondurans stop here for a meal and a leak, and that’s exactly what I did.

Hungrier than I thought, I choose a cornucopia of food from the buffet, and inhaled it in a manner contrary to my parsimonious modus operandi in regards to eating, while gossiping with my friends about people I haven’t the foggiest recollection of, possibly because I spend the least amount of time possible outside, and socializing is a thing that has been relegated to my trips outside of the country, or, more worryingly, with plants, rocks and the sky as of late. Once everyone’s tummies were full (and a couple were triumphantly unladen), we set off once again.

Now, up until Granja D’Elia and beyond, to the north, I have 20 years of familiarity with this road: I’ve only driven it once have been a passenger countless times, a couple of kilometers after our stop, however, I had to take a turn on the west-bound road and into new territory, and hoped for the best. I should’ve hoped harder: an hour of very hilly, but still well maintained and beautifully surrounded, driving, we hit Intibucá, a department famous for its cool weather – given its placement high in the mountains – and, as if to maintain the department’s fame, we were greeted with miles of ever denser fog, mind you, it was almost noon at this point, so not only did I have to drive on this road for the very first time, I also had to lose my fog-driving virginity. Somehow we made it to La Esperanza, one of the bigger towns in Intibucá, and upon descending to the valley where it sits, the fog mercifully stayed behind.

I have been to La Esperanza a couple of times, at least 10 years ago, and didn’t remember a single thing about it other than its being cold; now, having to drive through it to continue on our way to Gracias, I hoped to revive some memories and bring them to the fore, alas, none did, and the part of the town we had to drive through wasn’t memorable either: a clean but otherwise forgotten colonial town, with cobblestone streets, low houses and throngs of Sunday pedestrians, that resembles many others in the country. More on La Esperanza in a bit, however. For now, we were glad to have left its busy streets and, again, be on a decent road surrounded by mountains.

Before taking the detour to the road that goes all the way to the El Salvador border, Yamil told us a story of how once he got confused and drove past towards the next big town west, Camasca, and, apart from meeting a bleeding hitchhiker who had all the looks of having been the one better off in a brawl, stumbled upon one of the most beautiful vistas in Honduras. Captivated by this, unfairly represented here, tale, we drove on. A few miles in, when the road started getting uncivilized, we parked and, true to Yamil’s tale, took in one of the crispest views of nature I’ve ever had the privilege of witnessing: wide valleys spotted by green patches of farms, a lattice of dirt roads, the shadow of low clouds, a deep blue sky, and a deeply green coat of pine trees festooning the high peaks. Photographs were taken, expletives of admiration liberally proffered and episodes of sehnsucht sighed, all being interrupted by a shady looking truck that appeared out of nowhere in the otherwise deserted road and parked a few paces behind us. Glad to had had the foresight to leave the engine running, we boarded with concealed panic and vamoosed back to the detour to Gracias.

The road to Gracias descends from the highlands of Intibucá to the valley, which means a change of vegetation and climate, a welcome diversion from the restless gray of the pavement. From what I hear, for a while now, a new layer of concrete is being put in place on this road, which means that one of the lanes is closed and incoming or ongoing traffic has to wait for the other to make it before going on, and since the drive is at least 20 minutes, it’s a long wait if you’re on the wrong turn. We counted ourselves amongst the lucky incoming cars that were being allowed by the builders to go on, and passed the poor souls that had caught the stopped stream. And, after about 40 more minutes, started catching glimpses of the mountain range, crowned in clouds on its highest point, and the valley where Gracias sits. On one of the dirt segments of the road, however, we found our last surprise of this leg of the trip: a piece of rope tied to a stick on the far side of the road and being held at windshield height by a child: a road technique I hadn’t seen in many years, meant to make cars slow down and stop and ask the rope-holder to lower it, and be asked for moneyin return. Effectively, a ransom for the public right of way. Or, in darker cases, a way of making cars stop and then, ambushed by a concealed group of marauders, rob their occupants or steal the car itself. Hardened by the many times I found this road-kidnapping as a passenger before, and scared by the darker possibilities, I didn’t stop but merely slowed down enough for the kid to know I was willing to leave him a nasty rope burn in the hand, and he also made the wise decision to lower the rope and save himself the harm, and me the guilt of having hurt someone out of paranoia.

My first impression of Gracias, apart from the mountain I couldn’t stop staring at to the dissatisfaction of my passengers, was that surely there was a proposal somewhere in government to rename it Speed Bump Town: the damned things started on the eastern outskirts of it and were placed yards apart for the entirety of the road to the hostel where we were staying, itself on the westernmost outskirts of town, built annoyingly high and wide to force cars to almost stop or kiss goodbye their tires and suspension systems. Many curses after, we alighted from the car onto the parking lot – right off the highway – for Café Jardín: a new hostel that attracts the young and artsy from the fancier cities: decorated with original artworks donated by urban artists and tastefully furnished, it boasts clean dorm-type rooms, an entire one of which me and my three friends were given: for $12 apiece we were going to stay in a place far cleaner, safer and more attractive than hotels in the bigger cities. And it was a short walk away from the town and easy to reach since it was outside by the highway, not inside the town proper amongst its labyrinthine streets. This piece of cleanness heaven soon appeased my enraged spirits after my experience out there in Speed Bump Bonanza.

Our original plan was to go explore a hill full of mysterious holes in Intibucá, but since we took it easy and neither Carlos nor I had been to Gracias before, we decided to change out of our hiking clothes and into our regular-people attire and go get lunch in Kaldi’s, the in place in Gracias according to our guides, Marie and Yamil, lured by the promised of a cold Michelada and a choro pizza. Choros, I discovered that weekend, are a species of edible mushrooms native to the west of Honduras, and which form part of the cuisine of both Lempira and Intibucá; I also discovered that they’re delicious, and developed a lustful relationship with the Kaldi’s way of serving micheladas: in oversized beer glasses reminiscent of german biergärten, as well as inhaling – again – a sampler of appetizers which included the most decadent chicken wings I’ve had to date. In short, Kaldi’s more than makes up for the long drive, the speed bumps, the shady kids with ropes and the strange white dust that baptized my shoes on the short walk here. This most welcome solace, was not, however, the end of our pilgrimage.

Revitalized and slightly imbibed, we strolled across the park and up to the San Cristóbal hill on the outer rim of the town: on top of it sits a star-shaped fortress that the Spanish used when Gracias was an important city in the colony (its primacy was taken by Antigua, Guatemala), and from whose beautiful white walls that contrasted, Greece-like, with the pristine afternoon blue sky, one can see the whole of Gracias and the mountains behind and beyond, under the shadow of the still cloudy Cerro Las Minas. We spent some time in the fortress, taking pictures and making fun of the couples who chose to hike up their to celebrate Valentine’s – we had forgotten about it, until we saw a fourteen year old regale his honey with a rose and a handmade banner whose most certainly corny message we never were able to see, as they hid in one of the little towers and, hopefully, treated themselves with less corny and more bodily boons. On our way down we stopped at the park and realized there was a blackout, and, not wont to walk the half mile to the hostel in the sheer darkness of an unlit highway, we made our way there before sundown. But, still, we weren’t done with the Sunday.

Weary and relaxed, we decided to go check out the hot springs a few miles outside of town, owned by the president’s brother and reputedly cleaner and less crowded than the old hot springs on the other end of town. We were greeted by a cheery security guard who informed us that there was no power, but that they were open if we didn’t mind a badly lit setting. Not caring about such earthly concerns and, at least on my side, secretly hoping to see some couples taking advantage of the twilight to cavort in the altogether, we drove beyond the gate and down into the establishment. As promised, it was dark and dimly lit by a few scattered oil torches, which gave it a romantic and eerie atmosphere, and, after taking advantage of the headlamp I packed foreseeing darkness everywhere on account of the blackout, soon after we emerged in our swimming trunks, ready to bathe in the very sulphur-infused lifeblood of mother Earth.

We must have spent an hour or so just gossiping and relaxing in a pool we had all for ourselves, reveling in the warm water and letting the eyes get used to the darkness, and then foolishly decided to move to a hotter pool and found ourselves standing around on a crowded, decidedly lukewarm, pool full of people who had tried the hotter pool and failed miserably, and decided it was time for a quick shower on unheated mountain water, a change of clothes in the dark and back to the hostel.

The people at the hostel, bless their hearts, had cool beer and gas-stove cooked viands for us to dine with, and dined we did, sipping gossip and babbling beer until we felt warm inside and cold outside as the temperature dropped. And, with a merciful return of power halfway through our dinner, we all retired to the room for a bit of more banter and much needed sleep, before which I settled my dinner and lodging bill with the owner and drunkenly discussed the virtues of being a headlamp owner.

At some point in the wee hours of the night, I woke up with irrational night terrors about ghosts, or aliens, going through the rooms and inspecting the lower of the bunk beds, I even had a short episode of sleep paralysis, all the while I was begging myself to abandon fears I was too old for and to go back to sleep: my rational mind was more worried about getting enough sleep than aliens, but that wasn’t the one in control during that short episode. Eventually I fell back asleep and woke up early for a blessing of the sewage system of Gracias, a bit of a read and a pleasant shower, after which my roommates started waking up, too. I felt elated: not only had I gotten enough sleep and survived an alien invasion, I had for the first time been that one person who smartly wakes up before everyone, does his morning ablutions and is spared the malarkey that is to share a restroom and be as desperate as the other to use it. We had decided to wake up before 4:30 to drive up to one side of the mountain and see the sunrise, so of course I had woken up at 7 and everyone was ready by 8:40.

We took breakfast in the hostel, a delicious típico breakfast containing fried red beans, fried plantain, avocado, fresh cheese and cream, scrambled eggs and homemade tortillas, accompanied by fruit smoothies – I must confess I’ve been feeling quite hungry writing about all these delicious meals, so expect a break in the flow of the story as I will surely jump out of my bed and down some form of pastry soon. Replenished and satisfied with the beautiful day outside, we paid and vamoosed towards the national park.

The road there is still under construction, but the park itself has a very convenient pair of cement tracks up the mountain to the visitor’s center, and the center itself is a beauty: tall, angular structures made out of unpainted concrete with wall-doors resembling tall wooden windows: the “blinds” being long, thin sections of wood that still has the bark, mixing the modern with the rugged, a symbol of what a visitor’s center should be: a point of transition between the man made and the organic designs of mother nature. Rudy, the ranger, briefly told us about the trails using a very informative map as visual aid, next to which I couldn’t help but noticing a sign warning people not to bathe, wash clothes and defecate in the river that runs next to the nearby sections of trails and which originates high up on the mountain. That visitors had to be comically warned by way of a very explicit drawing to not drop their turds on virgin waters served as a reminder that, despite our abundance of natural beauty, outdoor education was sorely lacking in Honduras and Leave No Trace was a philosophy for silly tourists for a lot of people – I’m looking at you, despicable polluters of La Tigra here in Tegucigalpa.

We went on the third longest trail in the park: not as incredibly long and demanding as the ones that go up the mountain, which require camping and a guide, but still quite a challenge in terms of constant altitude gain. I have to confess I was feeling very cocky after having walked 26 kilometers in one morning and survived, so I figured three kilometers up a mountain, no matter how majestic, would be a piece of cake. 1 kilometer in my clothes were drenched in sweat, my gatorade bottle – only source of hydration I brought – half empty and my trekking poles deployed and already making my arms sore. It was a helluva climb. But having seen the river and the changing vegetation, and the tall mountains ahead, made up for it. We pushed on another kilometer to the second rest area, on a beautiful plateau bedecked with liquidambar leaves ranging from green through brown and all shades of yellow and red, with the liquidambar trees themselves forming a breathtaking overhead mosaic that soon effaced all my travails and, in the short rest, filled me with the breath of the universe that one comes to the mountains to seek. And yet again, this time enlivened by life itself, we walked up an incredibly demanding kilometer, huffing and puffing, to the trail end: a lookout perched on a side of the mountain, across of which one can see a majestic waterfall, deep inside the park on the next mountain over, so far that only a very faint, and probably imagined, purr can be heard, but framed in such impressive rock faces and seemingly virginal forest that hours of staring are the least it demands. We took off shoes and food packs and ate chocolate and seeds as we tried to capture this majesty in photographs, and were soon swarmed by curious black bees who covered any warm surface that sat still for long enough, but, thankfully, didn’t seem prone to sting like their feisty yellow and black relatives; and thus, ineffectively dousing ourselves in insect repellent, we spent a bittersweet long rest lamenting nature and adoring it.

All good things must come to an end, and it was getting quite late, about 2 pm, we had started at 11 am, so we swiftly made our descent in terrain so easy to traverse it was hard to believe it was exactly the same trail that had almost made my heart explode on the way up. Carlos and I were of one mind: get out of there quickly so we can reach the better lit and maintained main road in Siguatepeque before sundown, but Marie and Yamil, nursing running knee injuries, ended up making it to the visitor’s center about 20 minutes after us, so all our hurrying was moot. During our descent, amidst the rhythmic assault of my trekking poles on rocks and unsuspecting leaves, a topic that had sprung to mind on the Saturday trek reemerged: it seems like mountaineers who go to the hills for sport, instead of my vague quasi-religious fletcher-inspired, walking for the sake of walking and escaping the linear world of man, attack the hills with fury: the fury of speed, the fury of not being late, the fury of making their bodies stronger, the human fury of conquering it all; my rapid descent felt furious: I didn’t stop to contemplate the trees, to seek the origin of a birdsong, to take in the changes in light and vegetation, to hear the murmur of the river, to feel my lungs expand with the exhalation of the myriad trees around me; no, it was a race, against nature instead of with it, which I found myself on one hand proud to be seemingly fit enough to achieve, but on the other hand sad to be engaged in: it seems necessary to get into such a frame of mind to cover long distances, to, paradoxically, be away enough from humanity to abandon its fury. Writing this I realize it taught me that sometimes that fury which appears loathsome and wholly undesirable, may indeed be used to transcend our human prison: to use our own traits to go beyond ourselves may be the blessing that hides beneath the many less lofty consequences our ambition has fostered; that perhaps even our human ambition, our fury, our ability to conquer were neutral, tools that could bring us beyond and together with nature and the rest of life with the same thoroughness we’ve used them to tear us asunder.

And with these thoughts in my mind, we departed Gracias.

Tired, I let Yamil drive – and boy, does he drive fast, fast enough for a lazy cop to stop us, see his papers and let us go – and in a bit over an hour we found ourselves parking in La Esperanza and walking to a restaurant Carlos recommended.

And we were glad to have done so: they had a whole menu of dishes prepared with choros, served with delightful sides such as steamed yucca and fresh red beans, in addition to a regular menu which featured no fewer than three dishes containing bull’s testicles. Not wanting to just let it be a curious but unexplored path, Yamil went ahead and ordered them, and let us all have a bite: they were actually delicious, more on account, I’d say, of the heavily seasoned preparation than their intrinsic flavor, with a texture reminiscent of kidney but surprisingly slightly less revolting. Having ingested a bite of another mammal’s gonads and quite a big strip of its consort’s flank in a choro sauce, accompanied by another winning michelada, we went off to explore La Esperanza briefly. At the end of the main street, embedded in the hill that overlooks the town, is a small shrine to the virgin of Lourdes, quite a curious sight in itself, and on top of it, reachable through makeshift steps carved in the rock itself, is a small outlook from which we watched a beautiful sunset behind the now far-off western mountains, bathing La Esperanza in all the hues of dusk, and letting us now that we only had about an hour of very dim light left, which was our cue to continue our trip.

The drive back to the soutbound main road was mercifully devoid of fog, but sinuous, dark, and unfamiliar, enough to make me achingly alert, and making me use the high beams almost constantly, and almost as constantly switching them off for a few seconds as I passed other cars. I was thankful, about two hours later, to finally reach Siguatepeque and get fewer turns, actual illumination and actual reflective signage that allowed me to navigate with my low beams only. Driving back home after a tiresome trip gets you in a strange trance: you know your body is exhausted, and the dangerous announcement of sleep periodically reminds you, yet your mind has to constantly convince the rest of you to remain alert, promising rest soon if the work is done swiftly and efficiently, and thus a sort of hyper-concentration kicks in: you feel as if you’re performing perfectly, passing slow cars, returning to the right lane right after, negotiating turns without invading another lane, maintaining a cruise speed, breaking with enough space to maneuver and other minutia of driving on a highway; however, you’re maybe sloppier than you want to think: on one segment of the road when I was trapped in the left lane and the car behind me started harassing me with their high beams, I decided to get off their way by swerving back to the right lane without looking, and having Carlos – bless his heart, so alert, everyone else was asleep – tell me to stop: another car was passing me at that very moment, and we had almost hit them. Apart from that, however, the rest of the driving, while tiresome, was smooth – or at least, by lack of further evidence, successfully maintained the illusion of smoothness.

And thus, after dropping people off and dropping other stuff at the facilities back home and taking a much belated shower, I dropped my own frame on my bed and slept for, effectively, a week.