If I had known that the 25 mile trip to Marcala from Perquin was mostly dirt road I might have thought twice about attempting it. I knew beforhand that I was facing a three hour ride but what I didn't know was that three hours was the minimum I could expect.
With too late a start on Tuesday--about 3 p.m.--it took about an hour to reach the remote Honduran frontier post where the immigration office wasn't even open but a friendly Honduran policeman waved me through with a bus full of locals headed to the high and muddy villages on the opposite side.
During the notorious "football war" of 1969, El Salvador's stronger army seized this territory from the Hondurans. With the end of the civil war in 1992, the Hondurans took El Salvador to the World Court which ruled in favor of Honduras. El Salvador accepted this verdict but under protest, and therefore it doesn't maintain an immigration checkpoint here.
The people who live in this tiny slice of territory--mostly of the indigenous Lenca tribe--are technically Salvadoran who happen to live in Honduras. This political grey area also happens to be one of the most remote and impoverished of both countries.
By 4.30 I was dropped off with some locals as far as the bus could go on these steep muddy roads near the village of Sabanetas. From there, I was told, I could try to hitchhike the last treacherous 12 miles to Marcala. Or I could walk. There were no more buses that day.
Fortunately there was one "hostal " in a tiny settlement called Los Cipreses where I was able to get a bunk in a cabin with no electric but with outhouse amenities. All the other cabins were occupied by Honduran NGO workers.
The helpful people of the hostal hooked me up with the one gringo living in the area, a young Peace Corps volunteer by the name of "Frank." He is about nine months through his two year stint here, and as his Spanish is excellent he is a wealth of knowledge about the area. We chatted for about two hours.
It soon became clear that it is the rare tourist who passes through this stunningly beautiful region. (Frank said I was only the third stranded backpacker in Los Cipreses during his tenure thus far.) I spent a chilly, rainy night in my candlelit cabin.
The next morning, Wednesday, found me hiking with my gear up and down the kilometer or so to the Honduran army post where I was able to squeeze onto a micro for the 90 minute journey to Marcala, a town of about 11,000--by far the largest settlement around.
There is a surprisingly large number of foreigners here, but not of the tourist variety--yet it's not so surprising once the brain truly registers the immense scope of the poverty of the locals. The westerners one meets are very busy as aid workers for government and NGO alike (when I checked into my hotel I was asked "Who do you work for?").
Marcala has almost no paved streets at all which tells us, at the very least, that there are more pressing priorities on the very limited resources that are available.
Yet the town boasts a couple cyber shops and even a tiny cafe with an espresso machine which is where I met Rachel, a Wellesly College senior who is on a ten week internship doing research for a Yale-sponsored entity called Innovations for Poverty Action. She enthusiastically described her project studying the underground micro-finance economy of Honduras--basically she's researching loansharks and their customers--and comparing that data with the economy of legitimate micro-finance. With the knowledge gained by her excellent Spanish she was able to fill me in on the latest political situation including details of the coup in 2009 and events since then.
Transport from here to my next destination La Esperanza is also difficult and sporadic. If I cannot catch the 11.00 micro today I'll probably have to hitch a ride on a pickup, a common practice here. Usually the driver will charge the going rate, a dollar or so, same as the buses.
But there's certainly no turning back for me now. Thankfully, Marcala has an ATM so I was able to get stocked with lempiras, the local currency, enough to get me Gracias or hopefully Santa Rosa de Copan. It's only after that that I can hope for better, paved roads
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