The Beginning of the End...and still no Coconut Cake.

Las Ruinas de Copán, Honduras, a World Heritage Site where reside well-preserved remnants of Mayan civilization, temples and giant stone stelae carved with the precision of DNA, is cool. Yeah, I'm not really a Ruins-head. But still cool.

The highlight of the trip from Copán Ruinas to Antigua, Guatemala -- where I was to meet my boy J-Whet -- was a pair of bars somewhere over the Guatemalan border: Bars El Mujeriego, numbers 1 and 2. Which literally translates to "Bar The Womanizer". Classy stuff.

Antigua was a trip. Reunited with J-Whet, my longtime partner in hoopin', Wire-watchin', tree-blowin' and appreciation of the English language, the smile couldn't have been smacked off my face. Though one of those sexy girls strutting around probably should have tried, the way I'd stop on a dime and swivel, following those hips while they walked away, smiling over their shoulder every few steps.

Yes, my game is on right now. And it's so not game. Just gotta drop an "Hola" and stare. Not gonna work in the states. Hell, maybe the game's in my hole-ridden, mud-stained Asics. Maybe little strands of charm are caught in the stubbly beard I'm sporting. Maybe Guatemalans have a healthy appreciation of Kriss Kross, 'cause I'm so de moda in my pit-stained t-shirt flipped inside out. Or maybe it's just that Jackson and I are two Americans walking the streets armed with dos metros, smiles and swag.

And for this I keep defying the rainy season odds, accumulating more kisses than mosquito bites, more at risk for the Human Influenza than malaria. There's the usual clubbing, which usually ends up in sloppy displays on the dancefloor. And then there's the over-40 set, who seem to have a vulture-to-vulnerable attraction to Pat.

Take, for instance, Bethy the street vendor, serving churrascos at the Antigua bus station. Rocking a mustache and a bevy of kids. Jackson and I dined at her stand our first night, lingering at her stand through the meal, beers, and half a liter of Quezalteca Especial, my favorite firewater. Bethy doesn't mind drinking on the job. So Jackson and I promised to return the next day, and upon arrival, already deep into the Quezalteca, I was greeted with a photo. Un recuerdo. Bethy abandoned the stand to buy us a bottle of XL Rum, dragging me along, hand in hand. People in the grocery store kept smiling in our direction, like I was just some visiting John with questionable tastes.

Bethy insisted I take her number. That I take her out to dance. (Luckily I'd already made a date with a married girl.) Eventually Jackson and I managed to pry ourselves away, but Bethy yelled something at a friend about being back in twenty minutes and again left the stand totally unattended, escorting us back toward the hostel. We made it a few blocks and Bethy indicated she'd reached the end. She pulled me halfway down a city block and proceeded to profess love and things of that nature. I sensed she hadn't showered in a while. All of a sudden -- though I pretty much knew this was inevitable -- she enveloped me like a boa and performed her best Species impression, trying lick my lungs. I had to strain to push her face out of mine. When I rounded the corner to find Jackson, a Guatemalan named Carlos laughed loudly and asked, "Did you get it?"

Now I'm back in San Pedro La Laguna, where Jackson is staying with my old homestay family, getting to know all my friends across town, and preparing to study Spanish for several months at my old school. Ah, and trying to figure out a way to get a new bank card or transfer money to a San Pedro bank, thanks to a bus-prowling ladrona who jacked his wallet and ATM card and proceeded to do exactly what I'd do with a stolen card: do some fine dining, Big Macs and fries at McDonalds to the tune of $6. Minimal damage but a hassle nonetheless.

Seeing all my old San Pedrona folk -- mis hermanitos y primos and still more matured women with kids who keep hinting at marriage -- is the perfect ending to this trip. Yesterday Jackson and I ate lunch and then went to the slightly contaminated beach Las Cristalinas with Clarita, Josefa and fam. Amazing people. Amazing Friends. Man, I'm gonna miss this place.

My brain's in your booty.

OK, who's hiding the chili dog? I didn't see anyone board the bus with a foil-wrapped wiener, but my mouth is watering. Hmmm, the scent strengthens when I lean back in my luxurious leather seat, trying to reposition myself in whatever manner will keep my legs from crashing into the next seatback and minimize the poking of metal under my ass. Ah, nothing like riding a US school bus, still with original seating, as an adult. But the scent. Nobody is munching anything except mangos and tajadas. And there's only one guy sitting --- oh, God. There's no chili dog. It's just campesino. One of those it's either really delicious food or pure human filth moments of confusion, reinforcing that my traveling learned lapses in hygiene are relavitely minor. Puro campesino. Coming to a chicken bus near you.

In the last weeks I've bounced between Santa Rosa de Copán and Copán Ruinas, Honduras, relishing all that which I'll soon be lacking: Baleadas, enchiladas and my newest addiction, tajadas con carne molida o pollo frito; dirtbike treks bumping and jerking and teetering up a down rutted mountain paths and forest-traversing firebreaks; sitting riverside, cliff diving, feasting on wild growing exotic fruits "sanitized" in water that could be teeming with runoff and Hepatitis; "helping" teach English classes at a local university, thanks to daily invites from my new Honduran-American friend Mario, which essentially meant swelling the address book with the real phone numbers of stunning, college-aged, English-studying morenas...oh, yes, and a job offer has followed; above all, social norms that say I can gaze and drool after anything that saunters or struts down the sidewalk. Despite the lust contorting my face as I pause and turn, thumb and forefinger massaging my chin, my head bouncing side to side as I follow that booty down the street, that I've so far refrained from excessively lewd cat-calls qualifies me as a gentleman. I fear my neighbors and the police back home won't be quite so compassionate when I'm admiring their high school-aged daughters. (Can I say that, like my newfound predilections for flagrant horn-honking and pissing in DUDE-there's-people-milling-around public, it's just something I learned in Central America? Will the neighbors appreciate that excuse when I'm making my court-mandated door-to-door introductions?)

Ode to Baleadas

Ay, baleadas. The Honduran national street food. Pick a city and, breakfast to latenight, whenever the craving strikes, you'll find busy assembly-line stands lining the streets. Meet the cast. The all important tortillera, stretching dough wide and thin, tossing it on the comal. She attends the comal, tossing readied tortillas into baskets nearer the women working the frying pans, who, in between stirring the beans, eggs, and meats, snags orders from the hungry masses hovering around. Then you pay the guy who hangs out, inhales the wonderful scents, and collects money. I want that job.

Fat, hand tossed flour tortillas, smeared with an oil-rich refried bean paste, then loaded with your choice of colorful decorations. Scrambled eggs. Crumbled cheese. Avocado spooned from its flesh. Curls of red onions or chimol. Juicy strips of tender beef freshly speared from the oil bath if you're feeling carnivorous. Maybe an extra tortilla, browned with bulging air pockets, hot off the comal. All for no more than L$25 fully decked out. Now my five day binge of nothing but baleadas and the occasional bagged mango doesn't sound so mad, huh?

Not only that, but my favorite baleada outpost in La Ceiba offered this greasy, to my knowledge nameless variation. The flour tortilla was tossed, then dumped into boiling oily depths to brown and balloon, until it looked like the crust of a Personal Deep Dish Pizza. Then it was treated like a baleada, save the folding, loaded with toppings. Like a big, brown and garnished edible sponge of cooking oil. Wonderful.

Currently I'm on a Tajadas con Carne Molida binge. Mountains of fried plantain chips, covered in a sauce of potato bits, sauce, and ground beef. 'Nuff said, no?

I feel like dying

The way Tegucigalpa climbs and crowds from the valleys to the peaks -- crooked wooden planks strung with plastic sheeting fluttering in the wind like flags of poverty, the rusted red of tin roofing cutting swaths between foliage, as bunched as Brazil's infamous favelas -- looks entirely improbable.

It's the type of extreme density that makes more sense in a plane-bound metropolis, hardly so here where steep slopes jut so suddenly and sharply, houses affixed precariously to precipices as if secured by tacks, where it looks like The Hulk raged under the land, trying to punch his way out.

But Teguc was just a blip in a long day busing from Estelí, Nicaragua to Siguatepeque, Honduras, a nondescript city where I passed the night on the way to La Ceiba. La Ceiba is a grungy northern port city on the Caribbean coast, where the population is a diverse brown and black, Latino and Garífuna respectively, and panhandlers can pester you in Spanish or English. Ceiba is Honduras' party capital, where beer flows freely and girls six-to-sixty, fit to flab, can bust out the Punta, the traditional ass-physics-defying Garífuna dance. The Garífuna celebration of God's generous endowment of rump. Awaiting me in Ceiba was La Feria Isidra y Carnaval de la Amistad en La Ceiba, a wildly popular annual festival that hops barrios nightly, culminating tomorrow with the city center Carnaval.

Nightly Ceibeñas and the visitors packing out every hotel stream to the designated barrio, where beer tents and busied aproned women waving skewers and spatulas prod and flip smoking slabs of carne and chorizo on oil-bathed grills line every street, funneling the hordes doing their best to spill as little beer as possible in the storming swirls of humanity swarming and sidestepping their way between any of the various stages scattered across the barrio's intersections. One advancing army -- los rockeros -- hellbent upon seeing someone reproduce amusingly accented Metallica classics. The opposing flow, more agile, avoiding collisions with grace and shimmying hips, gravitates toward thumping basslines, reggae and reggaeton, where smooth-moving masses of dark brown and blacked skinned Ceibeñas groove, sweat glistening, in clothed and standing simulations of sex. I join the white-teed, twisted 59fifty-capped admirers along the edges. Rhythm and booty. My dry eyes alert me I'm not blinking. If I turn around, I can enjoy professional, scantily clad dancers doing 360° revolutions, thrusting their midsections in and out, opposite the movement of their cocked arms. Air sex. Then they're back to back(side)-to-crowd, when preposterously sumptuous posteriors flap faster than Hummingbird's wings.

If there's a good place in the world at this moment to risk contracting HIN1, malaria, or AIDS, it's probably La Ceiba -- for the feria-driven influx of Central Americans, the Caribbean coast location, and proximity to San Pedro Sula, respectively.

Accordingly. La Ceiba: almost dying and going to heaven.

Some words...followed by an idea for discount cribs

Kickin' it in Comayagua with my new friend Eric was a great time. A kindrid spirit (aka closet fatty) in pastry pursuits without weight gain, he's showed me around Comayagua while we walked between ice cream shops and reposterías. The only way my time in Comayagua would be improved would be if I could say I'd accidentally dropped an -a from my friend's name.

Comayagua is another mountain-encircled gem, with 60,000 citizens big enough for big city luxuries like malls, expansive markets, and gangs. But it's also small enough that you recognize people day-to-day and daytime danger is minimal, maybe nonexistant. And while there's a definite lack of street food vendors, the inner-market comedores are cheap and delicious while retaining sufficient mystery as to the sanitation of preparation. Plus Honduran enchiladas (perhaps my favorite food in the world) and baleadas cost mere pocket change at almost any restaurant. Yep, it's kinda like heaven.

My favorite image from Comayagua is a lady on the sidewalk, perched beneath a sun-shielding umbrella, crouched amongst a collection of squeeze-bottle chilis and ceramic dishes filled with salt, cutting and bagging chunks of fruit to sell, her infant child scuttling about at her back, clawing at the bars of his blanket-bottomed crib: the stolen grocery cart in which mom transports her entire operation.

The problems with conscience

A conscience is exactly the kind of handicap that can interfere with many professions and pastimes. Gang member for example. Like when a Peace Corps volunteer related the story of a friend riding a San Salvador city bus when a heavily-tatted, shaved-headed banger snuggled up and proceeded in English:

"See these tats?"

"Yep."

"Know what they mean?"

"Yep."

"Now you're gonna empty your pockets without making a scene."

"Yep."

Five dollars changed hands but, with a stretch of road remaining, and both parties in jolly moods for the opportunity to chitchat in English, conversation ensued.

"So, where're you from?"

"The US."

"What're you doin' here," snarled Mr. Salvatrucha.

"Umm...volunteering, trying to help the people..."

In the long pause the sneer evaporated. "Oh."

At the next stop, when the aisle flooded again with people vending snacks from fruits to cookies to ice cream cones for "una cora" Mr. MS-13 whipped out the $5 and procured snacks to share with his victim.

Isn't MS-13 kinda cute?

(If you're esily disgusted, now's a good time to move to the next post)

Likewise, a conscience makes you a pathetic sex tourist, concerned with the two things sexcessful booty bangers never consider: broken hearts and broken condoms.

Mom and dad, really, would it have been so hard to neglect us as young'uns, fostering an upbringing morally bankrupt?

My Valentine

Why is she asking me for a regalo? "Si," I stammer, "Uh, voy a dejar un regalo cuando salga." Patricia and her friend laugh, trade fives and a fist bump, and one of them squeals, "¡Un bebe!" I'm watching the faces of Patricia's 10-year-old kids, but nothing registers, no disgust disrupts their smiles toward me. "Somos amigos," I insist again, having already turned town a request to be Patricia's boyfriend, nevermind that we've talked for a total of ten minutes in our lives and that I'll be leaving Comayagua within days. To say nothing of the fact that Patricia is thirty, has kids at least ten years old, and is shaped like a cream puff. That she has no education, sells tortillas and bags of green mango chunks spiced with chili and salt for a living, and is openly propositioning me for sex in front of her kids.

She says she'll be my girlfriend even if I leave tomorrow. I have her phone number.

We're sitting on the curb and she keeps brushing my thighs with her fingertips, which is actually less comfortable than when she stands and starts gyrating her gelatinous jiggler at the level of my face, rotating like the food carousels she's obviously raided one...million times too many. I swallow a terrible prediction for her adorable daughter's fate, but stop myself from washing it down with another sip of water, sipping being a nervous tic, when I recall Patricia's lips sharing the bottles rim.

(Later, instead of spending an extra seven Lempira (US$0.40) on another refillable bottle, I'll rinse my bottle with a substance that advises swallowers to contact the nearest undertaker upon ingestion, as backpackers will momentarily forgetting that I'm not stricken with the poverty I so regularly observe.)

Ahh, shit, on the other hand, in Patricia I could've had a Valentine's date for the first time.

Sometimes I don't want to be bothered with titles

The more agreeable temperatures in Alegria's altitude allowed me to retain fluids, quickly shifting my urine's color from desert sunset orange to clear. With that healthy boost I returned to running, resuming the calf-and-quad killing hill training that has characterized my every run in El Salvador. And when I say hill training, I mean that in the most literal sense. Hill training. A single hill. As in I'm way up in the mountains, so running means flying down then climbing back up. Like 22 minutes straight up. By the end casual observers think I'm running in place. Jabba the Hut slithered by yesterday and looked like a comet in comparison. (What he's doing in El Salvador I'm not sure. I was too out of breath to inquire. Or care.)

From Alegría it was time to investigate Perquin, an old FMLN stronghold near the Honduran border, an area afflicted by ghastly military attrocities during the civil war. It's another tiny blip on the map, nestled high up in the mountains...blah, blah...but with an interesting Museo de la Revolución. (I didn't make the hike to El Mozote, a nearby village that was the site of a wartime massacre, but I plan to trek it with an ex-guerilla guide when I return.)

Perquin is notable for a few other things. We hung out with Peace Corps. volunteers gathered to translate for a group of kindly geriatrics working for Eyecare, enjoying free pie, beer, and wine for our whiteness, thus the assumed association with people affecting the lives of more people than pupusa vendors. We also discovered that not a single person in Perquin -- not even the tourist police or tourist information office -- understands the bus schedule. After waiting for two hours for a bus that, quite simply, never came, someone casually advised, "A veces, cuando el bus esta corriendo tarde, lo no viene aquí.."

Oh.

So we ended up stuck in Perquin for another night, which was far from a tragedy; rather, another "last chance" for pupusas, a circumstance, I'm convinced, was willed by Lord Pupusa so I could stumble and gorge myself upon pupusas de res. With at least four other pupusa variations rumored to be smacked out nightly in remote corners of the country, I'll be back to hunt before long. But first I have to zip to Costa Rica for a few hours to reset my CA-4 (Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras) Visa for another 90 days.

Yesterday morning the bus to Marcala, Honduras decided to show, so we endured what I imagine feels like a four hour earthquake while crammed inside a tight metal closet as we traversed the 50km stretch from Perquin, El Salvador to Marcala, Honduras on a fully-packed chicken bus. The unpaved mountain pass cost a bit more than usual, perhaps, but I attribute that to the fact that the bus driver has to buy a new bus after every trip. The border crossing was the only interruption in the trip, a stampless excuse for border officials to extract an unofficial cash sum from any passing foreigners. Technically, all CA-4 border crossings are free. But on Friday the 13th it cost $3. Hardly worth disputing and feeding the Central American legacy of disappeareds.

In Marcala lunch was devoured and another country's tasteless Pilsener was chugged for a pocket change $2.75. Then I connected to La Paz, told Emma I'd terrorize her cute, single friends in Chile, and ended up in Comayagua. Fresh of the bus and girl-travel-partner free, I was basking in the well-kempt beauty of Honduran city babes. Trying to find a hotel I fell into conversation with a mango-vending 30-year-old with a litter of kids, whose husband has bounced sometime in the last year, and she insisted I take her number within a few sentences of revealing that information. If the kids call me "Dad" the next time we cross paths I might have to cut short my stay in Comayagua, which, regardless, is but a short stopover for baleadas and enchiladas hondureñas on the sprint to reset my Visa.