Leaving Gracias

Up late yet again. Haven't managed to do what I wanted in terms of finishing uploads to flickr and I was hoping that I would get the shots uploaded for all of yesterday for Balneario Aguas Termales, stick insect which is a bit of a joke and into Honduras and the shots of the bus journey from Metapan to El Poy. None of them are complete or have been sequenced as I would like but I guess that this is the case with most of what is online on flickr.

I have spent a little too long online over the last few weeks and should have been dropping myself in the deep end in terms of Spanish speaking. Opportunity arose last night when I was approached by a very friendly waitress who wished to know if I was a 'bachiller', which means bachelor in the educational sense, presumably a bachelor or arts or sciences. She did get my imagination wandering just a little. I assume her interest was in living in a country that didn't have a revolution every fifteen minutes as has been the case in Honduras's history and while I can understand what interest there may be in Westerners I assume a relatively strong counter culture from everyone one in Honduras, and elsewhere in Central America, towards the practice of trying to get a foreign husband in order to be liberated from an economically weak nation. It's a bit much to read into the question, 'are you a bachelor?' but things seem just a little different here than to elsewhere in Latin America in terms of how friendly and direct the women have been. It's not unpleasant to be approached as a man, nor to be the one that the broad and friendly smiles seem to be directed at, though it does strike me as being unusual that this has happened more strongly here in Honduras than elsewhere in Central America so far.

The hot springs were quite a nice venue to reach yesterday and I did like the rather cheeky kids that were playing in them while I was there. It kind of brought back memories of playing in water as a very young child. One kid who repeated jumped into the pools seemed always to look surprised at the fact that he had floated back to the surface after jumping in. His face showed just a little shock when he realised he was out of the water. The walk there and back was not really worth it, some of the scenery was interesting though it would have been worth taking a tuk-tuk or if cycles were available it would have been a good ride on a mountain bike. The water wasn't as warm as the Fuentes Georginas in Guatemala, and the smell of sulphur was not as strong either but none the less it was a good site to have reached. Would have been nice with slightly better food, a pick your own strawberry field en route and cold fresh cream available may not have been a bad idea although the capacity of the site is a present very low - I'd imagine that it would not be that good a place to reach if there were more than a dozen people there - much more than that and it would feel rather crowded.

Made it back to the Posada Don Juan for another night and tried to upload over night through the wi-fi but nothing really seemed to go up. I assume someone else was you-tubing it away into the small hours. Today, to Copan ruinas. Much time on buses and hopefully I'll be able to get some reading done when I get to Copan on the ruins which I only know to be a Mayan centre of culture around the time of dark ages in Europe, the period of 'Enlightenment' which followed. Enlightenment being a term for those who though that colonisation and slavery were a good idea and Christianity a good excuse to carry this out? It's interesting when I read about the poor fortune of the Mayans to be subject to diseases brought by the Europeans who colonised the area. I smell a rat in more than one way, I think this deserves some scrutiny and questions may need to be asked to find out why this took place and possibly consideration given to the question as to whether or not this was a planned military operation. If populations propogate diseases differently, were there not huge numbers of westerners who were killed off by diseases that were previously only threat to Mayan inhabitants of the area? Public health for regime purposes, who can believe the military would take advantage of such information?

Still off to Copan....