10/30/2007

Cayos Cochinos...otherwise known as yet another fantastic tropical paradise vacation taken on a long weekend. Man, do I love my life here!


There are many things that one has to get used to when living in a different country. Language, cultural differences, public transportation, extreme poverty, etc. But one of those things that I do not think I will ever quite get used to are the awesome weekend trips that my friends and I are able to take. Recently, we were given an extra day off school in celebration of Columbus discovering the Americas, and on our three day weekend we lived in up, once again, and traveled to La Ceiba and the Cayos Cochinos (a group of islands in the Caribbean) for what I believe to be the best ever 3-day weekend.

We first started our adventure by once again riding horses from our hotel to these fantastic natural hotsprings where we were able to completely relax under the hot waterfall in the middle of a tropical jungle.


The rest of these pictures are taken from the Cayos Cochinos, which are part of the island chain that form Roatan and Utila as well. But unlike Roatan and Utila, these islands are almost completely uninhabited, which in turn for us means that we were able to play around in our own tropical beach islands without seeing another tourist or having to pay tourist prices. How much did this all cost you may ask? For chartering our own private boat to take us to islands 1 hour off the coast, go island hopping, and have a great fresh grilled fish and plantain meal on the beach, we each paid about $25. We were literally there all day, and the boat picked us up and dropped us off in front of the hotel.


The island where we ate our delicious meal is inhabited by the Garifuna, which are Afro-Caribes who have managed to keep a lot of their heritage. They speak a form of Creole that is a combination of Spanish, English, and native languages. Resources are limited on the island, but remarkably they did have electrical wires that reached the island.

Enjoy these pictures!







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9/24/2007

Shampoo Ginger!....a.k.a. pt. 6 of Weekend Update

A small commercial that Leah and I made while on our weekend adventure. And it really worked too!

pt. 5

pt. 4

9/23/2007

pt. 3

9/19/2007

Weekend Update

Okay, for right now I am just going to post the pictures from my last adventuresome weekend with some brief captions. I promise though I will give a detailed account in the next few days to come, so please check back for more updates!

Woe is me. Yet another weekend relaxing in a hammock in the middle of a tropical jungle.












Weekend out at Lago de Yojoa, located 3 1/2 hours outside of Tegucigalpa. This boat featured here (yes, the one with all of the water in it...rainwater we were told) is what we rowed out for 4 hours into the lake. Leah saw an island in the lake that she really wanted to go to, and islands seem to be much closer than they usually appear.
















Nothing like going to a restaurant where you have to look into the freezer to pick out your very own fish to fry up. Decisions decisions...




Hiking through the jungle and taking in some amazing views as well as some waterfall swims.



Yeah, all of these beautiful (and not quite so beautiful) things grow here in the the jungle. Notice the nice wild blueberries, wild coffee, wild flowers, and wild bugs.




The infamous shampoo ginger. We actually used our bounty of the natural shampoo to wash our hair with while bathing in the waterfall. Does that sound like an Herbal Essences commercial or what??? (Speaking of, please check out our own video commercial in the next post featuring our favorite new product...Shampoo Ginger!)




Walking down to Pulhapansak, the largest waterfall in Honduras. Simply gorgeous.








Before...





And after as I clumsily slip on the observation deck which is continually kept wet, and muddy with all of the waterfall mist. I cannot remember the last time I wiped out so bad. Leah thought it was hilarious and whipped out her camera to take a picture. Just slightly after laughing at me, Leah then fell 2 times on the deck. Gotta love irony.
Good thing I had the foresight to take my waterfall glamour shots before heading to the deck!






9/14/2007

2 little anecdotes...

I often times find myself in situations where I think to myself, I need to write this down so I can remember this funny little memory. Usually, the moment passes or I just completely forget, and so the memory is lost. This time, I happened to remember, so I hope you enjoy.

Yesterday I was in a taxi on my way to meet a friend, and I saw two police officers on the side of the road with a man they had in custody. Since traffic was backed up, I got to sit and watch the scene unfold for a minute. The police wanted to arrest this shirtless man for one reason or another, but did not have any handcuffs on him. So what did this enforcer of the law do? He took the shoelaces out of one of his boots and tied his wrists together with a shoelace.

Later that day, I was taking a taxi back to my house. Here people are pretty expressive with their cars, and taxis are no exception. They will do all kinds of creative re-wiring so that their horns have special sounds or are ultra sensitive so they may play an intricate rhythym on it (sometimes they will re-wire the up/down button for the window to become the horn, or their turn signal, etc.). Anyways, this taxi re-wired it so that everytime he pressed on the brake there was a light inside the car that would illuminate. It just so happened to be a set of praying hands that would light up, and I thought to myself that maybe this taxi driver is trying to tell me something, like that I should pray everytime he applies the brakes. I don't know if that was something that should be comforting or alarming.

Anyways, these thoughts just made me laugh to myself just a little.

9/12/2007

Hurricane Update

Well, it has been a week since the hurricane passed over Tegucigalpa, and I feel like a detailed account of everything that has happened is due. So, here I go.

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Well, that about sums it up. Nothing. Remarkably, miraculously, nothing. At this time last week I was having to think in terms of how I was going to survive this. In Florida we are used to hurricanes, but we think of them in terms of inconvenience. "It will be difficult to be without power for awhile." "I have to board my house." "Will I really have to take cold showers?" "How long will the phone lines be out?" But after hearing the truly horrifying stories that everyone has from Hurricane Mitch and the 11,000 people it killed (of which there are still reminders on every damaged building/bridge/shantytown that has still not fully recovered 9 years since Mitch wreaked havoc on the country), I began to feel scared. Real scared. This hurricane was a strong category 5 coming right for us, and in a city where a few inches of rain mean lives lost due to flooding and mudslides, the forecasted 25 inches in 24 hours was terrifying. Suddenly I was having to think "What will I do if my first floor of my house is flooded out and I am trapped on the second floor with bars over all of my windows?" "How can 3 girls possibly protect themselves by themselves when there are people desperate and willing to do anything that is necessary for their own survival?" "What will we do without weeks and possibly months of clean water since there is no sanitation or waste system in the country?" Probably the scariest thought though was those involving the children from the feeding center in the poorest part of the city, which is also the area most susceptible to landslides and least accessible to emergency services. When I began thinking about them, my heart began to break. How are people expected to protect themselves by buying extra supplies when they can't even afford the necessities of daily life? How are people expected to somehow buy clean water to drink when they don't even have that luxury during everyday life? How are they ever to be expected to "hunker down" (what does this word mean anyways? People only use it in times of hurricanes, and yet I really don't know what that means...) and ride out the category 5 hurricane when a simple storm during rainy season could wash away their shack of a home? To say that I was scared is an underestimate...

Before ever coming to Honduras to live the one deal that my parents and I had was that if a major hurricane was coming my way that I would get on the first plane out of here, and things happened so quickly to where the night before it was a category 2 storm that was going to barely skim the coast and hit Belize to a full-fledge stronger than Hurricane Andrew & Katrina storm coming directly for me. There was no time to react, only enough time to chase down a water truck with our car to buy some of the last bottled water available in the city.

We prepared ourselves, had a great little pre-hurricane party, and went to bed expecting that when we woke we would be within the midst of a life-altering storm. But as we woke in the morning, there was no noise. There was no rain. There was, in fact, even a little bit of sun. The storm somehow split into a "V" to where the top half remained along the coast, and the bottom half trailed into the Pacific Ocean. It was amazing, and completely puzzling at the same time. Tegucigalpa was spared from having its 2nd completely devastating act of nature in 10 years. Thank you so much for those who prayed for us. I just recently found out that the night of the storm all of the area churches opened their doors to anyone who needed shelter, and that they held around the clock prayer vigils for the impending storm. I think God knew that there was no way that poor little Tegucigalpa could handle something like this, and praise Him that the only thing that came raining down in the hurricane was his mercy. And this nasty smelling fruit from our neighbor's tree that hangs over our patio...but that is a story for another time.

Thank you for your prayers.

9/04/2007

Oh crap.


There is a massive hurricane coming right over us. Category 5. Oh crap.

8/27/2007

Amapala

If only every job could be like this...


We have been working really hard these last couple of weeks setting up our classrooms and preparing for the new school year. For those of you who are not teachers, it doesn't sound like a big deal. But for those of you who are or are married to a teacher can attest to the immense amount of work that is put into beginning of the year set-up. The younger the grade, the more the set-up as well. After all of the painting and repairs that are done during the summer in the classrooms, you basically start from scratch again, even if you are in the same grade and same classroom like I was. I was also nominated grade-level chairperson (not bad for a 2nd year teacher), which meant extra meetings that took away classroom set-up time. After working probably 55-60 hours the week before school started, I was able to finally let out a sigh of relief as my kids walked into the classroom on the first day of school. But oh yeah, they are super little, don't speak English, and puked on my beautiful beaded sandals all on the first week (no joke). I say all this to somewhat justify a small weekend vacation that was taken after two weeks of work. Yes, it was only 2 weeks, but it was a super-hard two weeks in which if a small break was not taken soon, burn-out would occur. This past Friday I was handed a slip of paper that stated there would be no school on Monday due to scheduled strikes within the country. I have mentioned the strikes before, and when groups demonstrate (doctors, teachers, public transportation, etc.) the country really is crippled. So, as to not spend our entire weekend in the house, Leah and I along with our housemate Elisa decided to drive to a small island in the Pacific Coast that proved to be one of the most relaxing weekends that I have ever experienced.


Truly a diamond in the rough, the island is inhabited by only about 2,000 people, and best of all, there are no tourists. Once a U.S. naval station and outlook tower during the contra wars in the 1980's (since its strategic position in the bay that allows it to see Honduras, Nicaragua, & El Salvador), after the U.S. pull-out it was left to sort of struggle and become more and more run-down due to the tropical ocean climate as well as the pull-out of money. (Hint: Click on the map, find the Golfo de Fonseca on the Pacific side, and look at the little islands. This is where we were...so small they aren't even labeled on the map!) However, recent attempts have been made though to restore the island, and even in its disrepair, it had a wonderful island charm that allowed us to relax to the fullest as well as swim in the Pacific Ocean once again. Enjoy the pictures!

Mmmmm......Delicious local seafood. This fish, like the island, is not completlely appealing by just looks alone, but as you take it in, you realize just how great it really is.












La Ceiba

After teaching my first week of Summer School, I had the best weekend of my life. Literally. This was the coolest weekend I have ever had, and I feel that if I were to die tomorrow and God were to ask me what the top 3 favorite life experiences, I feel like this would be in there. Since I finished Thursday at 11:30, Leah, Jen & I boarded a bus to the Caribbean coast to the town of La Ceiba, which is a great little beach town that has attractions, yet is not completely Disney-ized and over-run by tourists.


It pretty much took all of Thursday to travel to La Ceiba since it was about 6-7 hours in a bus. However, we have really come to enjoy the bus rides and use them as part of the relaxation of traveling so that from the moment we arrive to our destination until the moment we leave, we can live it up and absorb as much as we can, leaving the sleeping to the busses. Friday morning, after waking up at the beautiful Hotel Canadien
(which cost us each about $9), we had a wonderful breakfast of fresh tropical fruit, beans, eggs, tortillas, avocado, and unlimited orange juice and coffee, all for the whopping price of $2. Plus, the view from the second story deck of the hotel wasn't bad either. After breakfast, Leah, Jen, and I hit the beach for a little time in the sun and in the water. The view was amazing, with cloud covered tropical mountains literally stretching all the way to the coastline. Floating in the ocean and looking out over this sight, I couldn't help but just think of how good God is for giving us such a beautiful creation. Too often we fail to recognize that God is beauty and perfection, and this was just a small reminder of that.


After spending some time relaxing, the three of us made buddies with a taxi driver who offered to be our personal chauffeur for the weekend (for just the right price) and drove us out to the Pico Bonito National Park where we would go white water rafting on
the Rio Cangrejal. It has been a long, long time since I had been white water rafting, but with the water being the perfect temperature and with the coolest river guide ever (Juan Carlos) I knew we would be in good hands. Since we went rafting during the rainy season, the river was about 2-3 feet higher than normal, which made for the highest category for rapids that there is. We had an AMAZING time and felt like we completely got our money's worth on this one. I wish I could completely share just how beautiful it was there within the national park, but I suppose you will have to take my word for it and look at the pictures knowing that they are only more fantastic in real life.
So, if this was all that we did when we were in La Ceiba, it still would have been a fantastic weekend. However, we had one more day and we managed to also ride horses from our hotel up this gigantic mountain and took zip-lines down through the jungle canopy. I have NEVER done anything like this before (both horse-riding as well as attaching myself by a cable around my waist to fly through the air at 35 miles per hour through a jungle), and just thinking about this, writing about this adventure a couple of months afterwards, I still cannot help but smiling. We went down on a total of 13 cables, and after each one we had to unhook ourselves, walk out on the platform, and jump up to hook ourselves onto the next one, and zip through to the next platform. In addition to seeing the beautiful Cayos Cochinos Islands in the Caribbean from our mountain-top perch, we were also able to see natural hotsprings and waterfalls inside the jungle, as well as a variety of plant and animal life that only belongs to this part of the world.


We were also sure to partake in the famous seafood of the area for nearly every meal, and definitely made the most out of our whirl-wind weekend trip.


While I was in Florida during this summer visiting family and friends, the million dollar question was "Macayla, when are you coming back??" Look at these pictures my friends...they will speak for themselves.