PowerCycle

08/24 In the town of La Entrada I splurged on a rather luxurious hotel room. It was about $30 and was probably a 4 star place. AC in the room (sweet), a fridge and a nice soft bed. The shower wasn’t so good. It was the Hotel Mayaland. Here in Santa Rosa, the only hotel I found (without looking very hard because it was raining) was another Hotel Mayaland. This place is $15 but it should be $5. This will go down as the most overpriced place I’ve stayed. At best its maybe a 1 star hotel.

A couple things I’m noticing about Honduras. Kids yell gringo just like everywhere else but I’ve had a few kids yell out, “Money!”. One kid walked up to me on the street and asked for money (just by holding out his hand and saying “money”). It kind of sucks that these kids were taught to see gringos as cash cows but when the average annual income per person is a 10th of what it is in the States its not surprising. Or when I write something like the first paragraph that doesn’t help either.

I’m pretty clueless when it comes to understanding what it must be like to live in a developing country. If it were me and I saw a guy wearing (mostly) clean clothes, riding a nice bike with a bunch of expensive-looking gear on it and I was living on what amounts to $1.62 an hour, I’d probably see things a little differently. The thing I have the hardest time with is when someone says/does something to make it known they they resent the person being there. This has happened to me a couple times since I got to Honduras. Nothing major–just a lack of trying to help with something like directions. Tourism can be a good thing to a point so not making someone feel welcome doesn’t make sense unless that person is seen as guilty of something by association–the US has backed successful and unsuccessful coups all over the region which, in some cases, led to some unimaginable suffering amongst the population (e.g. Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Cuba, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Haiti). So maybe that accounts for some of the unfriendliness. I still get a huge number of waves, honks and thumbs up from people driving by so all is not lost.

Had a little “encounter” today that I think could have gone bad. At the bottom of a hill a couple guys were picking through a garbage pile off to the side. They saw me coming and one of them started calling out in broken English things like “Hey gringo!”. I did my normal wave back and said hi but when I got past them and started climbing back up another really big hill one of them walked up to the road and yelled for me to stop. It was pretty obvious to me that this guy was probably bad news so I just waved and kept riding. He kind of reminded me of an evil troll that lives under a bridge and when that’s the first impression you give someone can you blame them for not wanting to hang out? Well I was about 100 yards up the hill by now and I could hear him jogging up the hill after me. He was pretty slow so he gave up after he saw that I wasn’t going to stop. I’m sure at some point someone is going to catch me in a spot where I have to stop and the fun will begin but I’ll always try to avoid a bad situation if possible.

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