Back in Denver

Sorry for the long gap between posts. We are back in Denver and plans are changing (as they have a tendency to do) as to how the rest of this trip is going to play out. But first:

While in Honduras, we spent a fair amount of time in San Pedro Sula, and I think the following photo sums up San Pedro pretty well:

San Pedro was great for getting work done with the Water for People folks, but left much to be desired outside of work. Its a city that has alot of crime, razor wire, and people with guns. We stayed safe by not going out at night, and limiting how much we walked around during the day. The Water for People folks were fantastic about providing transportation and recommendations on places to go and avoid. All in all, we were safe while we were there, but pretty limited in terms of freedom. The people who live there deal with it every day of their lives…

Of course, on the weekends, we got out into the countryside as much as possible, and had a chance to see some beautiful places in Honduras. The last weekend before we left, we visited the Mayan ruins at Copan. The ruins were amazing and very interesting. The town of Copan itself was a nice change of pace from San Pedro with its peaceful feel and cobblestone streets.

 

After visiting the ruins we toured around the surrounding hills in the bed of a truck on the world’s worst eco-tour. Up until that point, we had been pretty good about picking where to go and hiring guides. This time, however, we paid $60 to ride around on dirt roads in the bed of a truck, sitting on a couch cushion:

Which was fun at first, but after hour 3 or 4 it began to lose its luster. Not all was lost, as we at least got to see some cool stuff, like coffee plantations:

And we tried some ripe coffee beans pre-harvest (very sweet and delicious with a faint taste of coffee):

We ended the day sitting in a natural hot spring:

On Wednesday of last week, we headed back to Denver. The original plan was that we’d head to Indonesia on Friday. But plans changed. 

We were offered a 6 month position in Muscat,Oman by our company near the end of our trip in Honduras. The first thing we did, of course, was google it. After the googling, we spoke to our families, people from work, and other people who have lived and worked in Oman. We ultimately decided to accept the opportunity, and thus we are back in Denver. We will be leaving sometime in the next few weeks to a month. In the meantime, we’ve postponed the trip to Indonesia in order to take care of things with the house and do the stuff required to get ready to move half-way around the world. Since we see this as an extension of the adventure, we’re going to continue posting pictures and stories of our adventures in a country that we hadn’t even heard of until a few months ago.

In the meantime, we’re making the best of our situation with trips around Colorado and the US to visit family, see the sights, and whatnot.

Thats it for now!

Mas Pictures

More pictures from around Honduras......

Pulpanshak Falls near Lago de Yojoa. This place is really popular among Hondurans, it was packed on the weekends. We went on a Monday and had the place all to ourselves though.

This picture pretty much sums up rural Honduras. Pigs, horses, and chickens have free reign over the small villages. Houses like this one are home to 10-15 people.

The village of Los Naranjos on the shores of Lago de Yojoa. Its perpetually misty in the mountains surrounding the lake, which reach up to over 9,000 feet.

Bree hiking through the jungle following the water line down to the village of Tapiquilares. It was steeper than it looks. The general strategy for us was to hang by roots or the water line. The local men, on the other hand, just cruised along like it was no big deal carrying machetes and buckets.

Bree reading outside our luxurious digs in San Antonio de Cortes.

pictures!

Testing the water in Las Colmenas, Honduras

Our interesting tour guide in Lago de Yojoa, Malcolm. Malcolm took us out bird watching one morning. He is from England, but was living in India for several years before he decided he knew too many people there and had to leave. He has been guiding bird-watching tours in Honduras for the last year or so. Fantastic fellow.

Brian in a school room in Las Crucitas where we held a meeting with three communities to discuss options for supplying water to the communities.

Bree measuring a pressure-break tank (rompecarga) that provides water to Las Crucitas and Pimientales, Honduras. The gentleman on the right keeps the keys to unlock this badboy. If these aren't locked, valves are mysteriously turned during the night and people in some villages wake up to no water....

Row boats on Lago de Yojoa - locals use these to travel across the lake to go shopping and hang out on other parts of the lake. We took this picture while out for an early morning bird watching adventure with Malcolm.

Brian assessing a tank in Tapiquilares, Honduras; our co-worker and friend, Don Tulio, sits below....doing goodness knows what.

Return to San Pedro

After a week without running water, its hard to fully explain how luxurious it feels to have running water, A/C, and TV. The budget hotel in San Pedro feels pretty much like the Ritz-Carlton about now. Also, we didn't come back to San Pedro just to watch the heels win the national championship - but it was a nice bonus.

We've been back in San Pedro for two days now, working on the design of the rural water system. The people and town of San Antonio were really nice, but its was impossible to get work done there with the lack of computers & internet. On top of that, the office was closed this week because its semana santa here (holy week). Even when the municipal office was open, the people would saunter in around 9am, then leave for lunch around noon, take a siesta after lunch, and go back to work about 2 pm. Then they would work until about 4:30. So we'll be here for a while, working on a design and a report. Its almost like working in Denver. Almost...

However, the trip isn't all work. This weekend we are heading to a combination microbrewery & hotel in the middle of Honduras, run by a banjo player from Oregon. http://www.dd-brewery.com/about.htm We are VERY excited about this. We haven't really been drinking too much lately. As most of you know, that isn't because we don't like beer. The beer here is pretty horrible. Imagine a slightly lower grade of Corona without a lime. I don't know how people live this way.

We still have some technical issues to sort out before we can put up more pictures, so stay tuned.

Agua por Gente

We are now in San Antonio de Cortes, its our third day here. We spent the beginning of the week in San Pedro Sula meeting with various people from Water for People (Agua por Gente). Our room in San Antonio is pretty rustic - no running water, no A/C, just a concrete floor, a bed, four walls, and a bathroom. The people who own the room bring us two big buckets of water each day for washing and flushing the toilet. There is only water for 2 hours a day here. San Antonio de Cortes feels like the opposite side of the world compared to San Pedro. No one locks their doors here, groups of children run up and down the street playing every day and night, and the people are all very gracious and often invite us into their homes as we pass by. Since our first day, they won´t allow us to pay for most of our meals.

Yesterday we went to the small village that is the focus of the project, Tapiquilares. It is located in the mountainous jungle surrounding San Antonio. It took about an hour on a rough dirt road to travel about 12 miles to the town. From there, we spent the next 2 hours hiking in the dense jungle to get to the spring that is the source of water for several neighboring villages. After reaching the source, we hiked down the route of the water line, inspecting the water line, which took about 3 hours to go 2-3 miles. Several men from the villages hacked away at the jungle with machetes to clear the path in places it had overgrown. The area here is very mountainous, so the water line runs up and down hills about 400 feet tall 8 or 9 times in the span of the water line. They create air relief valves in the line by drilling a hole in the pipe and wedging a stick in it.

Today we are supposed to develop alternate designs for a new water delivery system for Tapiquilares. We will have a meeting tomorrow to show them our ideas and to try to get the surrounding communities to agree to the easiest solution - sharing a tank with Tapiquilares. If that happens, we can develop a more detailed design. After that, we are going to travel around to schools in the area testing the water quality.

We will send pictures of the jungle and whatnot as soon as we can. For now, the best internet access we can get is 56k (remember that?). Bye for now!