Honduras appears to be locked in a time warp in about the 1930's. That may not be fair to say because I only saw the country in a moment of time; progress is being made. As bad as the roads are, it should be remembered that in 1974 there were almost no paved roads, and four years ago the towns like Copan and Trujillo had no telephones. While I was there, the first pay phones were installed, much to the delight of the street kids who played with them all day. Before the pay phones, one had to go to the run- down office of Hondatel and have the operator place the call for you. The post office was easily something out of last century. They were out of stamps for a whole week while I was there and mail takes 2 to 3 weeks. The banks are up-to-date, walk in with a credit card and in a few minutes you walk out with as much money as you want.

The transportation system is very interesting. It mostly consists of old American school buses with the school names still on them. The buses run back and forth between towns picking up people along the road until they're packed with people and any thing they are taking with them: gasoline cans, boxes, and even an occasional chicken (hence the term "chicken bus"). Off the paved roads, the transportation system is pickup trucks. People stand along the road and wave them down. They pay the driver and get in back. Overlying over this, is a good air transportation system of turbo prop planes for those who can afford them. The best thing is the system works. No one ever waits long for a bus or pickup truck--almost no one owns cars and many even use horses.

Everyone complains about the school system. A rural school

may have 50 to 60 students in grades 1 through 5 with one teach for the entire school, no principal, not even enough desks and books.

The country is very mountainous with poor soil except in the river valleys. The fruit companies grow bananas and pineapples along the coast and in the one large valley. The eastern third of the country is mostly wilderness with no real roads and few people. It's called the Mosquitia.

The town of Trujillo sets between the mountains and the Caribbean Sea, on a bluff above a wonderful beach with thatched roofed restaurants/bars, a couple owned by Gringo ex-patriates. The city is small enough to walk across it in 7 or 8 minutes. The streets are so bad the taxi drivers went on strike because their taxies were being ruined, but there's almost no traffic anyway.

The town of Copan is a delightful little colonial town with a nice town square park and cobble stone streets. It's so small that there are no taxis here. It sits in a valley near a major Mayan ruin, a real tourist boost to the local economy.

I went to Honduras to see Central America and to learn Spanish. Both Copan and Trujillo have Spanish language schools. Gringo women own the schools. The teachers, mostly attractive, young women, speak no English, but they're masters at teaching Spanish to Gringos. Classes are one-on-one for four hours a day with homework for the afternoon. Each student lives and eats with a family that speaks no English. After a few days you get good at communicating, but I'm sure it's not pretty. Any-way, in my fifth week, I was talking in the past, present, and future tenses with some difficulty. (Verb conjugation is a killer and requires lots of rote memory.) In the last two weeks, 13 Japanese students came. All university graduates in a government aid program for 2 years. The teachers have a real struggle teaching them because the languages are so different.

Travelling and living in Honduras very interesting. En route from San Pedro Sula to Copan, I hitched a ride with a Canadian couple that had flown with me from the bay islands where we were scuba diving. The elderly Canadians had contracted for an air-conditioned van with a tour guide driver to meet them at the airport and take them to Copan to see the ruins. I felt very lucky to be going straight from the airport to Copan in air-conditioned luxury. But, after an hour and half drive (half way to Copan) we were stopped in traffic by a civil disturbance in the towns along the road. They were not letting anyone go through. The government had promised them a water system and they were upset because it never had been built. When I asked to have my picture taken with the protestors, they handed me a sign and laughed while someone used my camera to make a picture. Then we turned around and went back to San Pedro Sula were I got a hotel and took the 6:00 a.m. chicken bus to Copan. So much for my luxurious ride in a van. After changing buses for the last two hours to Copan, we came upon a man in a ditch, face down, with what appeared to be his hysterical wife standing over him begging for help. The bus stopped, I thought to render assistance, but we picked up an old lady, closed the door, and drove on, leaving the man that I'm sure was dead and his hysterical wife along the road.

I met lots of interesting people. Some have stayed in my mind long enough to write about.

- On my second night in the country, I had dinner with a Frenchman and a Canadian. The Frenchman, Pierre, had traveled in 126 countries. He is famous for his book about being adrift at sea for 58 days. (His companion had already died.) The Canadian, Dereck, is an adventure travel guide in the Mosquitia area. He has kayaked all the rivers to their source and is considered the person most knowledgeable about the area. He has lots of stories and writes travel books. One weekend a friend, Dan, and I went to see Dereck, by the worst chicken bus, 3 hours down a dirt road, in a Garifuna village on the coast east of Trujillo. In the village, the young Garifuna kids came by to see the Gringos. One four-year-old girl was white and blond. That night over dinner in a smoky hut (there's no electricity there), I asked Dereck about the little Gringo girl with the black kids. He said she only speaks Garifuna and that he was told that she and her parents showed up in town about two years ago, then the parents disappeared. He suspects they wondered into the Mosquitia and crocodiles got them crossing a river. Anyway, a Garifuna family took her in and she appears well cared for.

- Some of the students show up on motorcycles. One French Canadian couple came down from Canada and after two weeks of school were going on to Panama and home. But, the most adventurous person of all was Bruno. Bruno is from Switzerland. When he came on his bike, I invited him to dinner with some friends. Over dinner he produced several motorcycle magazines with his articles in them, he was on the front cover of one. He left Europe through the Czech Republic, across Russia, Mongolia, China, India, Bangladesh, Thailand, where he had his bike shipped to Australia, New Zealand, (shipped the bike to Los Angeles), Canada, Alaska, and then south all the way to Honduras. His destination was the tip of South America and then home. When asked why not go to Africa, he said he had done Africa on a previous trip.

- Maury came for several weeks of classes. She was a free spirit from Northern California. She was in her mid-forties, had cold blue eyes, raven black hair, very white skin, (she was beautiful), and a slight British accent from having gone to English boarding schools as a teenager. Maury was friendly, though a private person. She never said why she was drifting around Central America and the Caribbean islands, but she said no one knew where she was, "she had fallen off the face of the earth". One trip to a water falls, Maury simply took off her clothes and jumped in. (I, of course, averted my gaze!)

- While out in the islands, between schools in Trujillo in the east and Copan in the mountains in the west, I was adopted by a wonderful group of scuba divers from Virginia. At the resort, we noticed an eleven-year-old Gringo boy who went on the dive boats and generally hung out with the dive crew. When asked about himself, he simply said, "My mother left me here." One night at the bar, I asked the resort owner, Donna, about Adam. She smiled and said, "Let me tell you about that." Adam came to the resort with his mother and grandmother with the intention of finding a house and moving to the island. But, the grandmother had a stroke and Donna had her transferred to the mainland to a hospital where she died. The mother decided to bury her on the island, so Donna arranged to have the body prepared and transferred to the island where she was put in one of the hotel rooms since there is no funeral home on the island. Donna then took the hotel staff to the cemetery and dug the grave, had a minister say some words, and they, with Adams help, covered up the grandmother. Adam's mothers said she needed to go to the States for six weeks to conduct business and asked if she could leave Adam there. The six weeks was almost up and Donna had not heard from Adam's mother. She said, "We run a full service resort, but we did not intend to do funerals." Anyway, Adam was living every eleven year old's dream and did not seem to care if his mother ever came back. The dive crew is going to teach him to dive when he turns twelve and Donna is going to put him in school if he stays there.

- The street kids in Copan are almost the only non-Gringos that speak English. They carry the tourist bags and sell things. Two girls, 13 and 14, were putting pressure on me everyday to buy statues from them. One night as I walked out of a restaurant, one of them reminded me that I had only two weeks left and must buy before I left. The other girl said that when Gina came, she had to buy from her. It turns out that the girls knew everything: when I was going home, where I lived, when my "novia" was coming, etc. Gina, my "novia", came the last week and learned more Spanish from the family and street kids than I learned in school. All the kids were the nicest, politest kids I had ever met. At the waterfall, when Gina did not want to climb up to the top and along the stream with the rest of us, two little boys, 7 & 8, stayed with her to be sure she was okay. They spoke no English, but Gina and the boys talked in Spanish and laughed like the best of friends. When Gina gave them a Tick Tack, one asked if he could have one more for his sister.

If I learned anything from this trip it is this: The world is in much worst condition than I had thought. The Camposinas, country people, live in mud huts without electricity or water, and have 8 to 12 children each. Most do not send their kids to school. Everyone in Honduras has a relative in Houston and everyone wants to move there. Crime has is rampant and even the Coca-Cola truck has an armed guard in the right seat. If we think we can absorb the illegals from Latin America, we need to think again. In ten years we'll be completely overwhelmed by them.

I also learned how spoiled we are. After seeing the wonderful, hard working children of Honduras, it was a culture shock to see our kids hanging out at the malls.