Tegucigalpa: Recent happenings.....as of a month ago.

It seems like I am always apologizing for not updating my blog. Please do not see this as a sign that nothing new has been going on in Honduras because that is far from true – in fact, these past few weeks have been some of the most exciting and busy days so far.

Let’s go back to Thanksgiving: I spent Thanksgiving riding on a bus from Honduras toNicaragua. My Thanksgiving dinner was a Nicaraguan version of a hotdog. I went with a group of 5 friends and had an amazing time traveling around the country. We started out in Managuathen headed to Granada, a colonial town right on the lake that is extremely gorgeous. We did the typical tourist things such as eating dinner on a walking street while being entertained by street performers, visiting an art museum, and buying souvenirs from street vendors. We also went up into a bell tower of a church to view the city and explored an old prison (now I can say I have been in prison in Nicaragua!). The next morning we moved on again, this time sailing on a ferry to the island of Ometepe. This was by far the best part of the journey. We never planned where we were staying until we reached our destination, then we would pull out the travel books and see what looked good. This time we were drawn to a little hostel located on a coffee plantation at the base of a volcano…..doesn’t it just sound awesome?! The hostel was basically an old barn that looked like it may have been used previously for storing coffee beans. The plantation owners rented out whole sections of the barn to visitors and offered them cots to set up with a sheet and a pillow. The cost for this resort location: $2 a night. Why don’t they offer bargain deals like this in the states? We spent the night playing cards while surrounded by people speaking languages from around the world (we could have pulled off a great Tower of Babel reenactment with people from Australia, Belgium, Argentina, New York, and many more!) The night spent in our cots was much too short, but lead to the next great adventure of the trip: Volcano climbing! We woke up at 4:30 a.m., armed with flashlights and rather large water bottles, and began our hike up to the top of one of Nicaragua’s famous volcanoes. Starting out in the pitch dark was a bit tricky, but made it even more exciting. We ate lunch down in the crater of the volcano then headed back to the plantation to pack our bags and head back to Tegucigalpa. After the hike, we were muddy, wet (since the cloud covering poured down on us the majority of the time we were on the volcano), bloody (from falling on all the sharp rocks), tired, but equipped with lots of new jokes and stories to tell.