TRAVEL & TOURISM

Monday, July 26, 1999 Online Edition 167

Back on its feet, Guanaja has more to offer than ever

Special to Honduras This Week

How does one begin to entice tourists back to Guanaja? Do we use the sympathy approach? Guanaja needs you because it received terrible press when Hurricane Mitch struck. Millions of people and travel agents wrote Guanaja off as a lost paradise because of all of the devastation from the storm. The press said there was no vegetation remaining, terrible disease on the Cay, cows floating in the canal, thousands of people roaming about, homeless and out of work and even that the diving was ruined. All exaggerations or temporary conditions but none the less everyone who vacations in the Caribbean or SCUBA dives in the Caribbean read these  misconceptions.

Of course, everyone believed them. After realizing Mitch was a category five storm, it made sense. But the truth is the skies rained pure sweet water on the hillsides almost immediately after the storm moved away and the vegetation came back better than ever. There are bougainvillea, hibiscus, birds of paradise, bananas, mangos, breadfruit, coconuts and literally hundreds of other varieties of plant life that are in full bloom now that the dense umbrella of trees are thinned out. Thousands of trees are being planted in combined efforts by the government of Honduras and foreign contributors to help reforest the Island.

The animals are survivors and are seen in great numbers now that they do not have as many places to hide. Giant green iguanas, black and yellow wishwillies and, if you are on a lucky streak, you might catch them the few days out of the year they all simultaneously jump into the ocean for a swim. Guanaja has butterflies, hummingbirds, wild parrots and hawks. It is a bird watchers world down here.

The reefs not only survived but had a good spring cleaning, removing all of the silt and sand that had settled over the years. The dives are reportedly about three and a half feet deeper now and some great cave openings have been exposed. Larger-than-life fish have come to the area, including small sharks, giant whale sharks, turtles, eels and massive schools of silver-sided fish. The dolphins have decided to make Guanaja their new base of operations and they are now seen playing with the divers and boats on occasion.

The people have bounced back with great enthusiasm and are rebuilding their homes bigger and better than before. The relief efforts by American craftsmen and women has been ongoing and their contributions are amazing. I would venture to say most of the people feel a great gratitude to the visiting foreigners and it shows when they see them on the streets of Bonacca. Many Islanders love to tell tales of Mitch to visitors. What was it like to experience three full days and nights of 300-mile-per-hour winds and to sit in the eye of the hurricane for 39 hours not knowing what it would do next?

The major and minor hotels on the Island began reconstruction immediately and most are back in operation. Cabins are back up with fresh roofs and new decks, new hammocks, new furniture, a new spirit. But there is still one thing missing: guests, that final part of the formula.

At this point we are not proud. I would personally ask travelers to come to Guanaja just to help the economy. Think of it as charity but at the same time I guarantee them a wonderful vacation with plenty to write home about. Bring some odds and ends you don't use anymore and make a trip to one of the outlying villages and play Santa Clause, it is a heartwarming experience.

Prices are extremely competitive at the hotels and even the airlines are helping to get us back on our feet. There is a new airport under construction and the "lift" problems are being worked out with great progress reported. Our ultimate goal will be achieved when you can jump on an airplane in Houston and fly directly to Guanaja. Our time has almost come.

If you are interested in income property or some place to retire, check out Guanaja, the future "Garden Island" of Honduras. Not for official publication and totally unverified, but it seems some of the Planet Hollywood people are interested in a project on Guanaja so you just might rub elbows or brush fins with some of those characters.

Truly, there is something for everyone including the kids, such as snorkeling, ocean kayaking, hiking trails or exercise trails. Take a town tour and pick up a few souvenirs for those friends and relatives stuck back home in the heat and traffic.

Bottom line, please come and visit us, we have more to offer than ever.

Please visit our sponsor

by Howard Rosenzwieg

"Hey bartender, set me up one last time" -- round two. For the second time in as many weeks, another small rural town has voted to outlaw bars and cantinas. First, the village of Punuare and now the village of Dulce Nombre de Culmi, both located in the rural department of Olancho, have decided to go dry.

Reasons given were the huge social problems brought on by the misuse of alcohol. For many men, a good night of hard drinking is an acceptable practice. Combine this with easy access to guns, personal problems, interfamily and intrafamily conflicts, growing crime and a hearty dose of good old "machismo" and you've got the makings of a serious problem.

This is exactly what we are starting to see in many parts of the country. Spurned on by the growing influence of evangelical churches who advocate the non-use of alcoholic beverages and other "vices," local municipalities are beginning to take the advice of the Hollywood film Network, "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this any more."

Will this turn into a grassroots movement throughout the country? It's still too early to say. But if I was a cantina owner, right about now I'd start looking to diversify my portfolio.

The growing anti-alcohol/bar movement has even made its presence felt in such enlightened and progressive tourism towns as Copan Ruinas, where a fight has been brewing for months now between the municipal government and bar owners. The crux of the conflict seems to be that bar owners want to stay open late (obviously to maximize sales) and the municipality wants bars to adhere to a schedule of closing hours that bar owners qualify as unduly strict and punitive. In Copan Ruinas, last call is 10 p.m. Monday-Friday and 12 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday.

As we are in Honduras, nothing is simple and clear cut, there are always lots of conflicting interests and factors that come into play. Should Copan Ruinas receive special treatment given the fact that the nearby ruins pull in some 100,000 plus tourists from around the world in a good year?

For many of these tourists, a requisite part of their "to do" list while in Copan is to pay a visit (or visits) to one or more of the bars, cafes and restaurants that deal with the tourist trade. The tradition of bellying up to the happy hour bar is a longstanding icon of the vacation experience around the world. Should dollar carrying, free spending, vacation-mode tourists be forced to head back to their hotels at 10 p.m. on a weekday? Remember, for the tourist there is no differentiation between weekday or weekend, it's all one in the same when one is on holiday.

On the other hand, what is the best thing for the community as a whole? If local cowboys drink themselves to oblivion and then get themselves and/or others into alcohol induced trouble, doesn't the community have the right to demand restrictions to try to avoid or at least limit such disturbances? Given the fact that a Wild West mentality prevails in Honduras where the idea that everyone does what they want, when they want and how they want, then you have the makings of a conflict.

In the past, this laissez faire attitude worked just fine, crime was virtually non-existent, there were no drugs to speak of, no gang problems and social and community norms held at least the most aberrant expressions of unacceptable behavior in check. Now however, things are different. The social fabric that has held communities together is ever so slowly being frayed at the edges by a growing crime rate, increased gang activity, a rising drug and alcohol problem and a general deterioration of what can be termed "shared community values."

Obviously we can not cure the ills of society by shutting down the bars. On the other hand it is a proven fact that alcohol (specifically the misuse of alcohol) has helped at least in part to get us in the situation we are in today, where for the first time in villages like Copan, one wakes up in the morning listening to the strains of "Did you hear who got shot last night?", whereas previously the only sounds heard during that first cup of early morning coffee was the annoying crowing of the neighbor rooster.

Things are a changing, Honduras is catching up (albeit ever so slowly) to the big, bad, wide world around us. With it will come good and bad, opportunities and pitfalls, greater prosperity for some and increased poverty for others, more crime, drugs, juvenile delinquency. Since Honduras is still an overwhelmingly rural society, how small communities handle this coming period of change will determine what kind of place Honduras will be. Will there be more Dulce Nombre de Culmis and Punuares? Will the good people of the campo come out on the side of what is good and right? Or will they ever so slowly fall into the pitfall of alcohol-driven social decomposition? The jury is still out.

Howard Rosenzweig, a U.S. expatriate living in the Village of Copan Ruinas, is the owner of the Casa de Cafe Bed and Breakfast. Contact him at casadecafe_@yahoo.com.

Monday, July 19, 1999 Online Edition 166

By HOWARD ROSENZWEIG

While sitting in front of the tube the other day and engaging in one of my favorite pastimes -- channel surfing, I came across a very interesting ad on CNN. The Guatemalan Tourism Institute (INGUAT) is currently sponsoring an ad promoting tourism to Guatemala. The ad is slick, colorful, well produced and gets the message out there around the world that Guatemala is open for international tourists.

One of the best ways to create a positive image, especially in countries like the United States that provide a good chunk of incoming tourism to Central America, is through professionally executed promotion and marketing. Of course, a well done ad on a vehicle like CNN can help enormously in creating that all important "positive buzz." Naturally, high profile ads come at a high end price. Ads on CNN don't come cheap, but the Guatemalan tourism sector, both public and private believe that such outlays of bucks will return dividends in the end, especially when considering that tourism plays such a crucial role in the nation's economy.

It is also interesting to note that after natural disasters such as Hurricane George and Hurricane Mitch, affected nations got the word out that they were open for tourist business by placing high profile/expensive ads on CNN and in U.S. national special-interest magazines. The Dominican Republic did it after their hurricane, Puerto Rico did it (and even used super-mega heart throb Ricky Martin as their tourism damage control spokesman), Guatemala is doing it now, and to a lesser extent Honduras as well, although Honduras was not able to purchase air time on CNN due to fiscal constraints. However, the Honduran Institute of Tourism (IHT) did spend some bucks on full color/full page ads in some major specialty magazines in the United States. A press tour for travel writers to Honduras did not happen, as reported by web editor Ron Mader.

The Patuca II dam project is apparently dead in the water, according to press reports. The project initially called for the construction of an enormous dam on the Patuca River in La Mosquitia in order to provide additional hydroelectric power for the nation. Only problem was that the plan required the flooding of a large tract of virgin forest inhabited by the Tawahka and Miskito indigenous groups. In addition, the construction project would have required the opening of roads that would have posed a grave threat to the indigenous groups living there, since the access roads would permit landless peasants, wealthy ranchers and lumbermen access to previously virgin and inaccessible areas of La Mosquitia.

Copa Airlines, which is now linked to Continental, has opened up two new routes out of San Pedro Sula. There is now daily, direct service from San Pedro Sula to Panama City and San Pedro Sula to Guatemala City.

More about tips. The Honduran Attorney General has announced that restaurants, bars and other establishments that are charging clients a 10 percent service charge on their bill are violating the law. Tips are voluntary and should not be included on the bill. Restaurant workers are not happy with the government ruling, because a good chunk of their monthly take-home pay comes directly from the 10 percent service charged at high end restaurants and bars. Workers Union spokesmen have expressed interest in asking the Congress to pass legislation that would permit restaurants, for example, to include a service charge on customers' bills.

And finally in the "things keep gettin' stranger and stranger section" we offer up a press report from La Prensa (probably the most respected daily newspaper in the country) that sought to analyze why tourist visits were down to the Honduran Pacific coast during the important Easter Week vacation period.

According to the article, the myth of a great marine serpent that devours humans, waters contaminated with pesticides and the high prices of food, say residents of Cedeno Beach, are what kept more tourists away from the beaches. The article quotes Aricely Velasquez, a tourist from Nacaome, who stated, "We came here at 8 a.m. and it's now 11 a.m., we still haven't gone into the water because we were told that a serpent tore off the leg of woman last week and in addition the water is contaminated."

Like I said, "things keep getting stranger and stranger!"

Howard Rosenzweig, a U.S. expatriate living in the Village of Copan Ruinas, is the owner of the Casa de Cafe Bed and Breakfast. Contact him at casadecafe_@yahoo.com.

Please visit our sponsor

Monday, July 12, 1999 Online Edition 165

By HOWARD ROSENZWEIG

From the looks of it, the Puerto Cortes, Honduras-Puerto Barrios, Guatemala corridor will eventually be linked by a highway to be called CA-13. The hamlet of Corinto on the Honduran side of the border is slated to receive a converted container to be used as an aduanas (customs) office and 157 meters of Bailey bridge left over from Hurricane Fifi (which hit Honduras in 1974) will be put into service near the Guatemalan-Honduran border to span the San Carlos, Moroquera and Cholulo Rivers. The Honduran government is reportedly seeking financing from international lending institutions to construct CA-13.

Once completed, the roadway will link the two most important Central American ports on the Atlantic and provide a crucial trade and commerce link between Honduras and Guatemala. San Pedro Sula, the manufacturing capital of Honduras, will benefit greatly by easing access to Guatemalan markets. San Pedro Sula with its 174 maquila assembly plants, which export everything from women's lingerie to jeans to car parts, along with the rest of San Pedro's light manufacturing sector produce 30 percent of the nation's gross national product. In addition, tourism will benefit by opening up access to Honduras' North Coast from Belize and Guatemala.

Many times in this forum I have advocated the development of tourism infrastructure on the local level. Small comfortable, environmentally conscious hotels and lodges, good restaurants, and locally-based tour and guide services, to name but a few. Of course one major stumbling block has always been financing, who's gonna put up the bucks? In a country where the average person is living on the edge and just makes ends meet, there is little room for projects, especially those concerning tourism. But there is one possible remedy to at least partially help along the process of locally-based tourism development, and that is to take advantage of locally-based financing.

Now, you may ask yourself, in a country where the average wage hovers near the $5 per day mark, where are those bucks (and lempiras) going to come from? Well, here's one option: remesas familiares, or in other words, monies sent to Honduras by Hondurans living in the United States. According to the Honduran Central Bank, it is estimated that Hondurans in the United States send some $800 million per year to family members in Honduras, making it the largest single source of capital flowing into the country. Most of that money is used to purchase essentials as well as luxury goods like television sets, stereos, cars, etc. But just imagine, for a moment, if that even just a portion of that $800 million was invested in developing small, family-based tourism projects. In a country like Honduras, where tourism brings in a paltry $150 million per year, and ranks as one of the top money earners for the nation, an infusion of a couple hundred million into the tourism sector by the private sector has the potential to really make an impact.

Now, back to the real world. Is it possible, you may ask, for Hondurans receiving monthly checks from family members in the States to forgo the here and now and today and dedicate a portion of those incoming monies to more long-term investments that may not yield fruits today or tomorrow but will provide a long-term, secure investment? Unfortunately, the prevailing cultural mindset is working against us here. It is difficult for people to think long term when the here and now of daily survival is the number one thing on your mind. In addition, Hondurans have not yet quite picked up on the fact that their country has the potential to become a major player in Central American tourism. Costa Rica, for example, will host some 1 million visitors next year, the economic benefits obviously being enormous.

There are dozens of North Coast Garifuna villages that boast some of the whitest sand beaches in the western Caribbean. Combine that with a vibrant, living Garifuna culture complete with its own language, foods, customs, crafts, stories etc, and you've got the makings of a tourism destination (and a pretty decent investment for local Garifuna inhabitants). Interestingly enough, an extremely high percentage of the North Coast Garifuna have family members living in the States, most residing in or near New York City. Wouldn't it be grand if the Garifuna could take the initiative and put those remesas to work, especially in the area of tourism development in their seaside villages?

According to the Minister of Tourism, four cruise ships will visit Roatan each week. Last year, some 80,000 of these so called one-day tourists disembarked for a day of fun, sun, beach barbecue and the requisite try at the limbo pole. Although these one dayers, came, saw and left (quickly) they managed to pump some $4 million into the local Roatan economy (which is no small change). This is the beauty of tourism. Tourists come, have fun, spend money and the local people come out winners, then the tourists leave and the process repeats itself. In a nation struggling to improve the standard of living for its people, tourism may not be the holy grail of economic development, but it certainly can play a positive role.

Howard Rosenzweig, a U.S. expatriate living in the Village of Copan Ruinas, is the owner of the Casa de Cafe Bed and Breakfast. Contact him at casadecafe_@yahoo.com.

Monday, July 5, 1999 Online Edition 164

By HOWARD ROSENZWEIG

For many travelers one of the highlights of travel, especially in the developing world, is to really get away from it all. Away from traffic, computers, pollution, noise, cell phones and all the other trappings of daily life. Since you are reading this column, this probably indicates that you have either 1) made a trip to Honduras in the past or 2) are considering making a trip to Honduras in the future or 3) that you reside in Honduras.

Now, if you are planning a Honduras adventure in the coming months and are looking for an out of the way, get away from it all vacation, then you should definitely consider a trek out to La Mosquitia. The Honduran Mosquitia is the most remote, most isolated, most pristine area of the country.

For proof of that just look at the government stats on car ownership. La Mosquitia, a huge area populated by some 50,000 Miskito Indians and a small number of ladinos, boasts a grand total of 134 registered vehicles. The fact that La Mosquitia has virtually no roads to speak of, save a dirt track from Puerto Lempira to Mocoron probably has a lot to due with the corresponding lack of vehicles.

Most transport with La Mosquitia is via the rivers, where small outboard powered dugout canoes provide the region's main form of transport. Getting into La Mosquitia from the "more developed parts" of Honduras is really quite easy. There are daily flights in small prop planes via Sosa or Islena airlines.

Once on the ground in La Mosquitia you will be met by the realization that La Mosquitia does not run on Honduran time. Time out here really does stand still. Transport is when you can get it and everything moves at a slow pace.

The Mosquitia is a place to see nature up close and personal. It's also a place to get to know one of the last great indigenous groups in Central America, the Miskito Indians. Most of our impressions of the Miskitos have been influenced by two main factors. The well-known book (and subsequent Harrison Ford film) The Miskito Coast and by those of us who are old enough to remember Ronald Reagan and his now famous ramblings regarding U.S. logistical and military aid for the Miskito Indians of Nicaragua back in the dark, waning days of the Cold War.

The fact the movie the Miskito Coast was actually filmed in Belize and that Reagan's lack of knowledge about Honduras was legendary tells us that very few outsiders have any real idea of what the Miskito Coast is all about. All we have are a bunch of vague Hollywood/White House (and back in the '80s there wasn't a heck of a lot of difference between the two) inspired cliches and vague notions of endless white sand beaches fringed with palm trees, guerilla fighters and slightly out-of-touch wayward gringos fleeing Uncle Sam and the computer revolution.

I could tell you all the typical tourist stuff (where to go in La Mosquitia, what to do, where to stay and all the rest), but in reality La Mosquitia is the kind of place to just have to dive in and experience first hand for oneself. It defies simple, trite travel tips and gringo/expat travel writer essays. It's a place to experience. Sure, you may get your feet wet, sweat buckets, swim in the sea on a stretch of beach that hasn't seen a tourist since the times of the British buccaneers, trek through forest thick with trees, get bit by an undetermined number of flying and/or crawling insects, etc.

But it's also a place where one can rediscover what the simpler (and often the most important) things in life are. Life out here is on the edge: foods are simple yet hearty, the people, warm, friendly but at the same time the difference in culture makes them seem a bit distant and hard to read. The weather plays a crucial factor in whether or not you will in fact reach your destination today, tomorrow or the day after.

To know La Mosquitia it needs to be experienced, because as we all know, experience, especially travel experience is one of life's greatest teachers.

Howard Rosenzweig, a U.S. expatriate living in the Village of Copan Ruinas, is the owner of the Casa de Cafe Bed and Breakfast. Contact him at casadecafe_@yahoo.com.