Buenos Noches de Tegucigalpa, Honduras

It's about 9pm Honduras time--according to the locals and our CRS guides it's not advisable for us to leave the hotel at night in Tegucigalpa (and especially in San Pedro, where we'll be the last night--apparently now San Pedro's the most dangerous city in Central or South America), so we're goofing off on the internet.

Getting here was a bit of an adventure. Left Towson at 3.30am, left BWI for Miami at 6am, arrived at 8.30 after a pleasurable uneventful flight. Faced with a miserable 3.5 hour layover, we got through it, then ended up getting on our flight to Honduras and deplaning due to tech difficulties--our 3.5 hour layover turned into a 7 hour layover, and we didn't get here until four hours later than planned. Flying in was exquisite, however--the runway here is very short, and in the mountains, so our 757 had to swoop in very low, bank hard to the left, and land immediately with barely enough time to straighten out. I've never looked out my window and thought "Well, the ground is only two feet away from the wing. I'm going to die!" before. Makes landing interesting. Much hard braking later and we were in the town, which looks beautiful. Exotic birds cried at us from trees next to a BK parking lot, and of course I was instantaneously beset by urchins begging, but we got to our hotel (four stars!--and very swank) fine and had a great dinner with our guides and now we're off to poverty-struck project tours in the West of the country. We'll be incommunicado for a couple days, but I think Wednesday when we get to the Mayan ruins in Copan we may have some electronic access again.

I love this shit; so exciting to be out of the US and in the thick of it. We're surrounded by mountains and beautiful people and strange exotic things and I think the sauce I had for dinner had beef in it--look out. One of the peaks here has a giant Jesus statue next to a Coca-Cola ad done Hollywood sign-style. Too rich. At night Jesus is lit purple and gold.

Later, fools.