Of Honduras, la Ensenada and more crazynes

There is a place in the wold where people drive terribly, that place is called Honduras.

Here is the proof:

Driving suited to the greatness of Honduras

It is also gifted with Tegucigalpa, an unpronounceable name which has won a special place in our hearts as the ugliest city on the planet!

I've already been through this, but let me pick up on the latest news.

We decided to test the extent of the hidious city and we hit the Dunkan Maya to watch some local footie and test the local brew.

The 3 greatest and 3 newest supporters of Municipal

So where did we decide to spend Christmas if not Honduras!

We bit the departing Natxo farewell (boy do we miss you!!), as he was going to Santiago del Chile to spent xmas with his family, and off we went to the north of the country with a rattling Naughtie Hottie, searching for a little corner of Carribean paradise to chill for a few days on white sand beaches.

Adios Ignacio, we'll miss you a lot and your hair a lot more!

Being the Naughties the adventuress that she is, she appeared bored by the unchallenging roads that the main route to Tela was presenting us, so she lead us on to the way more uneccessible Ensenada.

Ensenada is a road really, calling it a town is a bit much, there are 2 hotels, 5 shacks that sell water in bags and 3 or 4 huts along the beach that roast fish and sell it to the very rare foreigner and pretty scarse local tourists that makes it to a beach which is lost in space and time.

We decided to Splurge as the Lonely would call it and checked into a majestic hotel with 2 rooms which contained 2 double beds and were spotless. The best 12 dollars ever spent.

We then got to know the extremely effeminate Jerry or Gary, we never figured it out, and from there there things started to get extremely surreal.

First of all a brief description: Jerry of Gary is 43, tall, thin, black, 3 children and is completely and utterly gay, which he displays with a very un-heterosexual mustache and by a flamboyant behavior.

So, we left the hotel and went to the went to the beach and sat in the shade waiting for the food to arrive.

So cute you can eat them, but on the menu there was only fish

Gary appear and asks us if the van parked down the road is ours, yep we say and he starts telling us that leaving it there is not a good idea as someone might steal all out beloved belongings. We inform him that we no longer have any beloved belongings after Mexico and Guatemala, but he suggests that we move the van anyway into the parking of the Hotel, which his uncle owns.

So we got to the Van and a tire was flat.
What followed cannot really be described with words, but taking a photo of it would have been considered impolite. I´ll make a long story short:
* The spare wheel is released with a spanner we didn´t have
* The wheel nuts are released with a spanner which is millimetric in a country of inches, which is different from the above one, and which of course we didn´t have...

So Gary started stopping every single car driving by, which of course were all of his family members.
After 15 minutes there were 13 people trying to get the wheel off our van, of which several arguing about which was the best method and several about who owned which land.

Eventually, when so many cars had stopped that people could no longer drive through the town, the town members were racing to see who had the best spanner set that could solve the problem. Finally a mechanic arrived to the rescue with a single tyre iron and changed the wheel in 3 minutes flat.

Changing the tyre took the best part of an hour, and by the time we returned to David and Victoria they were pretty sure we had been killed.

The day continued pretty uneventfully on the beach playing Petanca or how do you spell it, and finally Roque and I decided to head out in search of some Xmas eve fun.

Not all is rotten in Denmark...

What we found was a ridiculously drunk Jerry who's sex drive and flamboyancy had been exulted to the extreme!

We needed to get money to pay for the hotel and for some evening fun, so Roque, Gary and I drove to Tela (the town 3km and 20 minutes away), on the way back we stopped off at a Garifuna variation of a Voodoo ritual where the people dance in memory of the dead and some say the dead dance with them. It was a musically wonderful, but for some reason I just couldn´t bring myself to enter the room where the ritual was in act...

We continued along the deserted and dark dust road and Jerry started telling us about where people were buried, how they´re spirits would jump on his bycicle when he was riding by and make it suddenly very heavy. Not the kind of stuff that would scare someone who loves horror stories, movies and books, but in a pitch black night, with no ligts and a small wooden cross lit up by the lights of a van, it does have some punch to it.

We sat down in a dark hut on the beach listening to him first describe his family and life choices, then his loves, and in what seemed like a descent into madness, eventually describe the surgery he received on his anus and finally listen to him offer sexual favors.

We kindly denied and tried to steer the conversation towards music in the area and the Garifuna way of celebrating Xmas eve. We then met some people who told us that David and Victoria had finally emerged from their cove and had gone for a walk with Karim, one of the spiritual, musical and financial leaders of the community.

So we decided to follow their trail, waling to Triunfo a town 5km away.
The walk was amazing, in the jungle, unlit and untouched except for the light of the full moon shining down past an infinity of stars. Unfortunately the discussion we had had with Gary had opened his flood valves and he was more than a little insistent about the fact that unless you´re been with a black gay man, you can t be sure that you´re not going to like it. In particular he seemed to take a real liking to tall white guys and at every corner, he wanted to please me sexually.

Roque was enjoying in quiet silence the fact that he was not the victim of such terrorism and did everything in his power not to draw attention to himself, although it became quite difficult when he went for a pee and Gary went running towards him offering to get down on his knees.

The walk turned out to be harmless and our heterosexuality made it out untarnished, when we finally arrived in Triunfo, met with David, Victoria and Karim and spent the night dancing Punta in a shack with 6 other people amongst which an amazonian black girl and the wife of the hut's owner who didn´t seem to mind young tourists dancing the night away with his wife.

We returned home listening to Karim talk about the Garifuna rhythms and it was a wonderful experience all together. The next day we just relaxed for Christmas and left early the morning of the 26th to head back to Tegucigalpa.

Naturally the shit Honduras roads wanted to bid us their personal farewell, just 150 kms after we had repaired our spare tyre, they punctured another hole in the Naughty's pained tyres and we were once again forced to stop at a Llantero.

The Honduras death-tracks claim another rubber victim

We bid Victoria farewell at the airport and head east towards our next stop: Nicaragua, new year´s and our first surfing experiences!