Feliz Navidad

If you’re hoping for another shot of either my shoes or a bird’s eye view of my shoes, you’ll be leaving this blog disappointed today. I didn’t use my camera in Tegucigalpa , largely as I heard I would survive about 30 seconds before a crowd of thieves, vagabonds and gangsters overwhelmed me if I ever let it be seen in public.

In fact, I was most in danger of being overwhelmed by the traffic. It was unbelievable.
It was virtually gridlock when I arrived. For some reason, Tegucigalpans seem to think honking their horns will make things better but it doesn’t really seem to work. Maybe it just makes them feel better. Anyway, the jams did provide some entertainment. Most of my friends over the last few days have been taxi drivers and some go to extreme lengths to overcome the city’s over-population of cars. Take Rene: a very likeable man who drove me right up into the unpaved – and relatively traffic free – heights of the shanty towns before careering onto a main highway in the wrong direction and then weaving through mostly stationary car queues to get on the right side. Gulp. He had some interesting stories to tell too. Once he was held up by three pretty girls, one of whom was holding a gun. He said he didn’t believe it was real, so they fired a bullet (not at him). He handed over his cash. Another time he was kidnapped and was forced to drive a gunpoint to an isolated and very dodgy part of the city. He decided to crash the car rather than go up there. He escaped unscathed. The kidnappers got away with his radio.

The dodgiest thing I have come across in the city, however, is the number of moustaches. I actually counted a random sample on the bus journey on the way in (it’s for the book, I should add). 39 % of men surveyed were wearing facial hair on their upper lips. That’s exclusively moustaches – goaties and stubble did not count. Fascinatingly, this means the moustache ratio is even higher in the capital city than it is in cowboy country, where I did another survey of 100 people – only 33 were moustachioed.

Anyway, there should be slightly fewer handlebars where I am now, in a Honduran border town. I went over to Nicaragua today, where the highlights were the ridiculously corrupt border officials and the amount of people that managed to cram the six different forms of public transportation I used today. On one bus there were four people on a seat designed for two US schoolkids. It was topped later on in my final ride of the day in a minibus where there were 5 people on the backseat, including a pudgy kid and his even pudgier mother.

So in the relatively open space of an internet café booth, here’s wishing Merry Christmas to all who happen upon this blog just in case I don’t get the chance to update it again. I will be spending 25 December in El Salvador with the author of that section of the guidebook. Definitely an alternative yuletide. I may even get some pictures of my shoes at some point.

Feliz Navidad all!