72 Hours

I am back from the trip to La Moskitia and currently in La Ceiba. In a few hours I will be on a boat to Roatan, where I will spend a few days relaxing and meeting up with my brother-in-law who is down here on a church mission trip. I don´t even know how to describe this past week...I guess I´ll start with Monday...

Cosmo, Gaku, Marcio and I left El Progreso at 3am to drive two hours to La Ceiba and catch our flight to Puerto Lempira, the biggest city in La Moskitia. When I say ¨biggest,¨ I mean they have a bank, but they still have a dirt airstrip. We were met by Marcio´s older brother (who´s the Chief of Police there) and escorted around town. Well about 30 minutes after we landed, we realized that we were in the wrong part of La Moskitia. Nowhere near the rainforest or Las Marias (the town we wanted to go to). We were able to quickly fix that by purchasing a flight to Brus Laguna, where we could take a boat to Las Marias.

We arrived in Brus Laguna by taking a 5-seat propeller plane and landing in the middle of a field. We were then taken to a hotel, where we promptly passed out from exhaustion for several hours and woke up in time for dinner. There is literally nothing to do in this town, but one family does run a sort of movie theater. That is, they set up benches in a big room and watch pirated DVDs on a 36 inch TV. The first night we were there, they showed ¨Double Team.¨ It´s a Jean Claude Van Damme movie, although we speculated that it´s really called ¨The Colony.¨ Anyway, I had never seen a JCVD movie, so it was a pretty sweet experience! This movie had everything...lasers, tigers, babies, and explosions for 57 seconds of every minute. Quality film-making.

The next day we woke up early and set off for our 7 hour boat ride up the Rio Platano. We took a pipante, which is kind of like a canoe, but it´s 3 ft wide, 3 ft deep, and approx. 30 ft long. The boat is obviously completely open and we sat through a torrential downpour for about two hours. When the sun finally came out, it was so searingly hot that I felt like I was going to pass out. Then, it started raining again for the last hour we were in the boat. I felt like we would never get to Las Marias. When we finally arrived, we struggled up the river bank and were taken to a hospedaje in the center of town. I use the term ¨town¨ very loosely because it was more a scattering of wood homes on stilts and cows. There is no running water or electricity and we found ourselves eating dinner by candlelight at 6:30pm. We then played cards until we were bored, and went to bed by 9pm. Not many options without electricity in the heart of the rainforest.

We woke up early the next day to go on a guided hike. After a pipante ride further upstream, we walked through the forest, getting a good view of the surrounding valley and mountains. We didn´t see a lot of wildlife, but we did hear a lot of monkeys. The foliage was also quite impressive. We returned to the hospedaje that afternoon, and as we were eating dinner that night, our boat driver stumbled in completely drunk. He said hello to us then went into his room. Minutes later we heard him throwing up violently out his window. This lasted for about 10 minutes. We asked if he as alright, and he came out to tell us that he had used some bad cocaine and was now sick. Bad cocaine?! Are you serious?! Apparently another hospedaje owner sold him bad cocaine and got him drunk because he was mad that he didn´t bring us to his hospedaje. So Cosmo is really freaked out, and I´m kind of freaked out and thinking we might not make it out of the forest. Well our driver is sick all night, but fine the next morning and we set out to return to Brus Laguna.

As we load up the pipante, there´s a family of a mother, father, and son sitting on the floor of the boat. I offer to share my seat (really just a wooden plank) with the mother and as we leave Las Marias, I notice that she´s crying. We stop a little ways up the river to load the boat with bananas from the forest and I ask her if she´s alright. She´s holding her two-year-old son and he´s kind of whimpering, so I ask if he´s sick. She says yes and that they´re going to the clinic in Brus Laguna. I gave the baby some Motrin and he ate it, but then started crying because of the bitter medicine taste so I fed him some raisins. He ate a lot of those, but really slowly, and his mother explained that it was the first food he had eaten in six days! This poor kid has a fever and looks miserable, but soon the Motrin kicks in and he´s able to go to sleep. We try to help the family as much as possible through the 6 hour ride back, including giving them a big plastic trash bag to use as a poncho when the inevitable rainstorm hit us. We offered to get them a hotel room in Brus Laguna, but they said they had a cousin there. We parted, telling them to find us if they needed anything else.

The next morning the dad came to our hotel. He told us that their son was worse (I think there was something wrong with his liver?), and that the clinic said they had to go to the hospital run by volunteer doctors in Ahuas. We asked how they would get there and he said it was an 8 hour boat ride, followed by a 3 hour ride in a pickup truck. Additionally, they couldn´t leave for two more days because the boat drivers were not ready to go. We were afraid that the baby would die before they could get to the hospital, so consulting our trusty Lonely Planet guidebook, we realized that they could fly there for about $70 and be there within half an hour. We bought them the tickets and gave them all our extra money to buy food and medicine when they arrived in Ahuas. I have never been so glad to be a ¨rich¨ American. We are waiting to hear if they are alright.

We arrived back in La Ceiba completely drained and somewhat dazed. I have been light-headed since getting back, and I wonder if I´ve caught a disease. Or maybe it´s just the malaria pills. I´m still trying to process everything I experienced. I suspect that I´ll need a few more weeks.