I like big butts

After five blissful days of bouncing butts and street-vended baleadas -- that comida tipica comprising, quite literally, the full extent of my diet besides the occasional bolsita de mango maduro con sal y vinagre -- I decided a change of venue might restore sleep and vitamins to my life.

I bussed from hot and hectic La Ceiba to the-phrase-snail's-pace-would-imply-things-actually-move-here pueblito Gracias (a Dios), Lempira, Honduras. The hotel attendant asked me if I'd visited the old Spanish fortress overlooking the town. I replied yes. "Usted ha hecho todo. Ya conoce Gracias," she said with a laugh, before resuming staring at the wall. I hadn't even sliced my first morning's breakfast, two ripe sapotes.

And yet I stayed another day varying the diet -- tacos y enchiladas, horchata y fresco de Guanabana for lunch; pinchos de cerdo con repollo, tortillas, y papas (boiled in, I believe, oil; not fried) for dinner. And the nightly pint of ice cream and the availability of delicious banana sodas, i.e. Tropical, bred one delicious float. I shot some hoops during the day, smiled at girls, and met a girl working in the market who must've had one of those third world marraige-at-first-sight-of-white moments.

Even with nothing to do but sweat and chitchat with townfolk, it was difficult deciding to leave. Good food + slow pace = great place. I was sitting in my hotel lobby, having technically vacated my room by the appropriate hour, pondering staying another night. A friendly thirty to fortyish mother even offered me a room in her house, gratis. She was so nice. We met, she dropped the Usted form for Tu, and then decided sharing her Skittles by hand didn't suffice, shocking me when she leaned in and tongue fed me candy and saliva. I left town.

And good thing too, because if I'd stayed I'd probably never have seen the rugged, reeking campesino board the bus proudly sporting his clean, cute Motorcycle Slut hat.

Next I hit Santa Rosa de Copán, a rather untouristed city that -- like Gracias, Ceiba and, I think, every city in Honduras -- is dominated by dudes keeping the hair gel industry thriving during these difficult times and female examples of genetic perfection. Honduras and El Salvador, save the coasts, are off the tourist map. Probably because guys are worried about getting caught oogling a gangbanger's girlfriend. And with more salvatruchas and dieciochos and latinas-whose-DNA-you'd-want-to-sample per capita cruising the calles than in any other Central American countries, that's thinking prudently.

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.