Is It Really Real, Son?

Saturday night. I'm just getting over a little "bug" which made me ill for the past few days, so while the girls are out dancing I'm home alone. It's just you and me tonight Blog.

It's been a few days now that images of my little adventures in Honduras have been popping up and I think it might be worthwhile to write about them. So here I go.

After visiting with my dear friend Meg who's in the PeaceCorps in Nicaragua, I made my way up to the north coast of Honduras. My goal was to spend about a week on the Bay Islands, a supposed backpacker's paradise with great SCUBA diving and the cheapest prices in the world. I was travel weary and I had great expectations of sitting my ass down on beach and sopping up the tropical sun.

Anyways, I get there and rainy season has set just set in. I'm usually pretty good with rolling with it, but for some reason I just could not help being a "poor-pussy." I moped about the dreary, drizzly little town. The towns people with their Creole banter about whose "mondongo" (cow innards) was cleaner than whose, made me sad. The attractive and cool looking white people who seem to be everywhere made me sad. The roaches in my room made me sad. I wished I had chosen to go to Roatan instead of Utila. I should have picked a different dive shop to stay at. Why couldn't I make friends with any of these cool looking white people? It was the first time in a great while that I have felt so sorry for myself, so full of regret. Realizing how weird I was being, I said enough is enough and I took the next boat off the island.

I think it's enough to say that after I arrived on the mainland, I was led into the rain forest. A cast of characters (unforseeable a priori) presented themselves, and a series of events lined up and next thing I knew, I was hiking deep into the Pico Bonito national reinforced for four days. It was an incredible experience which I won't bother to bore you with, except for a quick snapshot. One morning I woke up in the densest and wettest part of the jungle. We needed water so I grabbed the bottles and the machete and hacked my way down the gully to the small creek running near our camp. Squatting down on a rock in the middle of the creek to draw water, I looked around only to find myself completely taken by the sight, sound, and smell of the forest engulfing me. Everything around me was sopping with wetness, with green and wild goodness! How else could one's soul respond but with a mixture of gratitude and awe and terror? "This is Real," was all I could whisper to myself. "This is Real, and it is Good."