6. Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond: Santa Rosa, Copán, Honduras

Written by: Harry A. Franck, in 1916:

The only other industry of Santa Rosa is the raising of tobacco and the
making of a tolerably good cigar, famed throughout Honduras and selling
here twenty for a real. Every hut and almost every shop is a cigar
factory. The town is four thousand feet above sea-level, giving it a
delightful, lazy, satisfied-with-life-just-as-it-is air that partly
makes up for its ignorance, disease, and unmorality. The population is
largely Indian, unwashed since birth, and with huge hoof-like bare feet
devoid of sensation. There is also considerable Spanish blood, generally
adulterated, its possessors sometimes shod and wearing nearly white
cotton suits and square white straw hats. In intelligence the entire
place resembles children without a child's power of imitation. Except
for the snow-white church, the town is entirely one-story, with tile
roofs, a ragged flowery plaza, and straight streets, sometimes cobbled,
that run off down hill, for the place is built on a meadowy knoll with a
fine vista of hills and surrounded by an immensely rich land that would
grow almost anything in abundance with a minimum of cultivation.

The one way of getting an early start in Honduras is to make your
purchases the night before and eat them raw in the morning. Christmas
day had barely dawned, therefore, when I began losing my way among the
undulating white rock paths beyond Santa Rosa. Such a country brings
home to man his helplessness and unimportance before untamed nature. I
wished to be in Tegucigalpa, two hundred miles away, within five days;
yet all the wealth of Croesus could not have brought me there in that
time. As it was, I had broken the mule-back record, and many is the
animal that succumbs to the up and down trails of Honduras. This one
might, were such triteness permissible, have been most succinctly
characterized by a well-known description of war. It was rougher than
any stone-quarry pitched at impossible angles, and the attraction of
gravity for my burden passed belief. To this I had been forced to add
not merely a roll of silver reales but my Christmas dinner, built up
about the nucleus of a can of what announced itself outwardly as pork
and beans. Talgua, at eleven, did not seem the fitting scene for so
solemn a ceremony, and I hobbled on, first over a tumble-down stone
bridge, then by a hammock-bridge to which one climbed high above the
river by a notched stick and of which two thirds of the cross-slats were
missing, while the rest cracked or broke under the 185 pounds to which I
subjected them.

I promised myself to pitch camp at the very next clear stream. But the
hammock-bridge once passed there began a heart-breaking climb into
bone-dry hills, rolling with broken stones, and palpitating with the
heat of an unshaded tropical sun. Several times I had perished of thirst
before I came to a small sluggish stream, only to find its water deep
blue with some pollution. In the end I was forced to overlook this
drawback and, finding a sort of natural bathtub among the blazing rocks,
fell upon what after all proved to be a porkless feast. The doctor's
treatment had reduced the swelling in foot and ankle, but the wound
itself was more painful than ever and called for frequent soaking. In
midafternoon I passed a second village, as somnolent as the
belly-gorged zopilotes that half-jumped, half-flew sluggishly out
of the way as Iadvanced.
Here was a bit of fairly flat and shaded going, with another
precarious hammock-bridge, then an endless woods with occasional sharp
stony descents to some brawling but most welcome stream, with
stepping-stones or without. Thus far I had seen barely a human being all
the day, but as the shades of evening grew I passed several groups of
arrieros who blasted my hopes of reaching Gracias that night, but who
informed me that just beyond the "rio grande" was a _casita_ where
I might spend the night.

More excerpts from Harry A. Franck's:
Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras
Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond
Honduras, by Harry A. Franck 1916
Will be published every day!