CENTRAL AMERICA – WEEK 4

Our first day back in Antigua was a rest day.  After scaling San Pedro, we weren’t in the mood for anything but a quiet stroll.  On Sunday morning, we took our guide’s advice and feasted on a delicious buffet breakfast at a five-star hotel, Casa Santo Domingo.  It was well worth the price.  The Casa is located in a former convent that looked like it was partially destroyed by an earthquake.  The ambience was very special: Gregorian chants, white sheer curtains blowing in the breeze, sharply-clad waiters, ancient ceramic tile floors, and thick stone walls.

After breakfast, we boarded our latest new form of transportation, a four-wheel drive Mercedes two-ton truck, and drove to the coffee plantation owned by Roberto Dalton, reportedly one of the richest people in Guatemala.  According to our guide, some twenty-two families control most of the land in the country with the rest being owned by small holders: not much different than the way things were on Prince Edward Island two centuries ago!

The guide invited us to look up at the houses on the hillside above the plantation.  He told us that the families who live in them harvest the crop, by hand, one ripe coffee ‘cherry’ at a time during the period between November and March.  He explained that the average daily haul is a 100-pound bag for which the picker is paid about $10 Canadian.  Think about that for a minute!

I did, and I also looked up the per capita incomes for the Central American countries, to compare them to Canada’s, and to the richest in the world.  Oil-rich Qatar’s is the highest, at $102,000.  We rank 24^th at $41,500.  Of the Central American countries, Panama and Mexico are tied at $15,300; Costa Rica comes next at $12,600; then it’s Belize at $8,400; El Salvador at $7,700; Guatemala at $5,200; Honduras at $4,600; and, finally, Nicaragua at $3,300.  Albania, the poorest country in Europe stands at $8,000.  We have much to be thankful for and little to complain about.

At the plantation, we met a couple from Cleveland.  She was a retired nurse and he a retired doctor.  They were in Guatemala accompanying 50 medical students, and were leaving the next morning to set up a clinic in a village in the mountains.  The people there have little other access to medical care. 

Once again, it got me thinking about the best way to help people in the third world.  On TV, we’re bombarded with ads asking us to contribute to aid organizations the world over.  Elva and I refuse to, because we don’t feel confident our money will get to the people who need it most.  There is a great deal of corruption in the countries we’ve visited, and too many can steal a piece of the action along the way.

What the couple we met are doing seems to be one of the best ways to help: by providing a service the people desperately need and wouldn’t otherwise be able to get.  The other way that makes sense to us is by spending our tourist dollars on services provided by locals: guides, hotels, restaurants, excursion companies, and transportation providers.  We like to feel our cash is going directly into their pockets.  Whether they claim it as income is of no concern to us; as long as there’s no middle man involved.

We left Antigua, and Guatemala, glad to put our hotel behind us.  It was one of the worst we’ve had on the trip.  No hot water to be had, and one of our party had to leave his room after being bitten by bed bugs.

We crossed into Honduras on a pot-holed stretch of road in the middle of nowhere.  Thirty minutes later, we drove into the town of Copan, our home for the next two nights.  After a short stroll down to the town square, we withdrew our needed stock of Lempiras from an ATM, watched closely by a guard with a fearsome-looking pump-action shotgun.  Surprisingly, one gets used to the sight of armed guards, and they do seem to serve as a significant deterrent to petty crime at least.

The Lempira is the currency of Honduras.  In Mexico, it’s the Peso, in Belize, it’s the Dollar; and in Guatemala, it’s the Quetzale.  Only one, the Belize currency, is tied to the American dollar.  The others are free to ‘float’; and float they do.  At each border crossing, you find several money changers who are only too happy to exchange the currency of the country you’re leaving for that of the country you’re entering.  Not only do they skim off as much as they can on the exchange, they try to cheat you on how much you’re owed.  Calculator in hand, I try to come out of these transactions as well as I can.  I don’t think I’ll live to see the day when the region is organized like the European Community, with seamless border crossings and a common currency.  There is too much conflict here and no evident onus among countries to cooperate.

On our full day in Copan, several members of the group went to visit the Mayan ruins of the same name.  We had opted not to.  As it turned out, Elva contracted food poisoning at a restaurant on our first night in Copan and was very sick through the night and well into the next day.  Rather than follow the group, I stayed behind to look after her.  Not that there was much anyone could do; the nasty malady just had to run its course.

Copan is a pretty little town, clean and friendly.  After two nights there, we drove across the northern sector of Honduras, from west to east, bound for Roatan Island.  We left early in the morning and drove all day, then took a ferry, and arrived at our hotel in the early evening.  Along the way, we passed through lush and beautiful countryside; past cattle ranches, corn fields, and plantations of coffee, banana, pineapple, and coconut oil palm.  While there were a few prosperous-looking properties, most of the people seemed quite poor.

Before arriving at the Carribean coast, we passed through the city of San Pedro Sula, the murder capital of the world.  Wikipedia says the murder rate there is 1.6 per 1,000 per year.  Converted to Prince Edward Island’s population, that would mean 225 murders per year back home!  The high rate is the result of a flourishing drug trade.  A large percentage of drugs originating in South America passes through Honduras on its way to the United States.  We stopped for a pee break near the city and I took this picture of a guard post at the entrance to the gas station.  A second man with a shotgun stood guard at the entrance to the store.  Scary stuff!

Roatan Island is a classier version of Caye Caulker, much larger and more developed.  The place attracts many North Americans because of its climate, and the fact there are regularly-scheduled flights to the airport here.  Many come to scuba dive on the world-class reefs.

We awoke to a nice breeze and sunshine.  Elva was feeling a little better, so we walked along the beachfront street to a small restaurant where I was able to take in some CBC coverage of the Sochi Olympics.  For the rest of the day, I had a good book to read and a comfortable hammock on the deck.

On our second day, Elva finally felt up to a decent breakfast after spending a quiet night.  For three days, she’d been forced to follow Jack Nicholson’s third rule for older men; poor thing!  After breakfast, we rented a scooter and drove all the paved roads on the island.  Although it’s quite beautiful, there’s great poverty here.  It reminded us of Guadeloupe. 

After three nights and two days on Roatan, we weren’t ready to leave!  But, early Saturday morning, we boarded the ferry and drove to Comayagua, our final destination in Honduras before crossing into Nicaragua.