San Pedro Sulas
Today we went to San Pedro Sula, AIDS capitol of Central America.
Through the bus windows we watched between the big leaves of Honduras: cows, horses, pig trucks, dark girls in pink tube-tops bicycling, smelling of soap and chippering away on pink motorola cell phones; moustached men with cowboy hats and weathered, pockmarked skin; the infinite banana trees, pale blue and green houses, hotels, and internet cafes surrounded by barbed wire; and the fields of crops and crop pickers who all have cousins somewhere up north in the USA, mojado (“illegal”), and sending home the big bucks.
At the airport cargo terminal the chaos came. The price they wanted for taxes, specious guarantees, payoffs, etc, ranged from $50 to $450. We negotiated in Spanish and Jack’s advice was to just keep talking, so that’s what I did for five hours. We finally got it down to $100 total (the $50 mysteriously disappeared as quickly as it appeared) but it was too late, they were closed.
I mean c’mon Honduras.
We are now in a hotel in central San Pedro Sula, where one fast food joint jostles the next. Had I the digital camera, I could show you three-story KFCs with a lifesize Colonel perched Ronald-esque on a bench, playgrounds to the ceiling, and a great fried chicken bucket in the sky.
Listening to: Kenny Rogers. Hondurans love country music. Kenny Rogers and Keith Urban blast out of big-wheeled trucks at the Bojangles. No lie, there are Bojangles.