Not a good thing to be first place in the world at

Tegucigalpa, amazingly enough, doesn't actually have the highest murder rate in Honduras!  In 2011, the homicide rate in Tegucigalpa was 102 murders per 100,000 residents, which was high enough for fifth place in the world.  But the first prize goes to San Pedro Sula, the second largest city in Honduras.  It is in the northwest of the country, near the Atlantic Ocean and border with Guatemala.  In 2013, the homicide rate was 169 murders per 100,000 residents, first place in the world for two consecutive years.

Why litter?: Central America's troubling problem

Jairo and I sauntered across a small bridge in Masaya, Nicaragua on our way to his hometown of La Curva.  I noticed trash that had nearly brought the waterway beneath us to a halt.  Looking at me, Jairo shrugged and then looked at the trash disparagingly.  He had already answered all of the questions to visiting Americans that he knew I was about to hurl at him.  He knew Nicaragua had a severe problem with trash disposal and littering.  But as one man, he couldn't educate and potentally sway people into being more responsible with their trash.  

A waterway in Masaya, Nicaragua

During our bus ride down to La Curva, I saw two people sitting right in front of me pull down the windows of the chickenbus and casually throw trash out of the window of the moving bus; nobody in the bus seemed to care.  I saw a young child thoughtlessly toss his candy wrapper on the street in Tegucigalpa, Honduras; his mother did not seem to mind.  I saw various people toss non-disposable items out of the bus from Tegucigapla to Gracias; no one even took a second look.  It was acceptable.  

A stream running through a neighborhood in central Tegucigalpa

An average street in Gracias, Honduras

The side of the roads and highways in Central America are littered with trash.  Trash is enterring the waterways and thus the water-supply.  Trash is altering the way the environment interacts and counteracts with itself.  However, no one seems to care.  Nobody seems to even notice.  Maybe I am have become more aware of our treatment of the earth on my current trip, but the seemingly indifferent attitude towards littering in Central America is very troubling.  In the United States, society as a whole is reasonably responsible when littering is concerned.  People know the issues that arise from irresponsible trash disposal.  Children are taught the correct way to dispose of trash from a very young age.    

Why are there such discrepencies concerning trash disposal between the United States and Central America?  I think I might have a couple of potential answers.  First, the United States basically invented and continues to mass-produce trash!  Most of the trash that is thrown out of the window of Central American buses is sold by American companies.  Bags of Doritios?  They are made by Frito-Lay, an American food company.  Bottles of Dasani water?  They are produced by The Coca-Cola Company, another American-based company.  Since these products were developed and produced in America, the United States knows how to use and dispose of the products better than most other countries.  

Second, Europe is the originator of modern-day trash.  Remember reading about the Industrial Revolution?  That was basically all Europe.  Over the centuries, Europeans learned to dispose of their trash in a responsible manner.  Many Americans have been brought-up in a European-centric culture.  On the other side of the coin, most of the citizens of Central American countries are descended from people indigenious to America.  They have only recently been introduced to non-descomposting trash by way of the Americans and Europeans in the past generation or two.  

Rio Choluteca, a major river running through Tegucigapla

Unfortanately, because of general pollution, the global population has recently enterred a period of extreme change and potential disatrous affects, be that in terms of climate change or damage to the waterways and environment.  I don't want to downplay America and Europe's contribution to these problems; they both have horrendous records.  But Central America needs to fix their littering problem soon if we are going to have any chance of saving our world for many generations to come.

Safety in Honduras

Even though I'll crumble like a bad of potato chips if push comes to shove, I think that I look reasonably intimidating.  I'm tall with an athletic body.  I assume that this is the main reason I have not had any major incidents on the street throughout my travels.  I'm not completely clueless either.  Concerning safety, I won't take ridiculous risks.  I won't go in to dangerous neighborhoods alone at night and will stay away from certain areas that I hear are especially risky.  But, that said, I've had some of my most memorable experiences in dicey regions of the United States and abroad.  The more perilous and questionable a region is, the more I tend to want to explore it.  

But, I have to say, I am a little bit more worried about my trip into Honduras than usual.  I had been under the impression that Honduras and El Salvador were on par with each other in terms of safety before I came to Nicaragua.  However, I have had person after person tell me that Honduras is worse.  Much worse.

Is it really that much more dangerous in Honduras compared to Nicaragua and El Salvador?

On the State Department website, there is a stern warning about traveling to Honduras.  "The Department of State continues to warn U.S. citizens that the level of crime and violence in Honduras remains critically high, although it has declined in the past two years... Honduras has had one of the highest murder rates in the world for the last five years."  In fact, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Honduras had the highest rate of intentional homicide in the world in 2012, with 7,172 intentional homicides or 90.4 per a population of 100,000.

The intentional homicide rate was the highest in the world in 2012 in Honduras

From Jairo and his cousin to a cab driver in Managua to a middle-aged woman working in a clothing store in Estelí, native Nicaraguans have told me about the danger I will experience once I've crossed the border into Honduras.  I pressed the taxi driver to explain why there was so much violence there as opposed to in Nicaragua.  They only thing he could come up with was that people in Honduras are much more aggressive than people in Nicaragua.  When I pressed him further, he shrugged his shoulders.  I left the taxi feeling like he had implied that there was a recognizable difference between Nicaraguans and Honduras, especially when it came to violence.  

I'll be interested to see if there is a noticeable difference between Hondurans and Nicaraguans

However, few Nicaraguans I talked to have even been across the border and much fewer have spent a couple days in Honduras.  Even Jairo just took a bus straight from Guatemala to Nicaragua.  Maybe these Nicaraguans have no rational reason to be speaking so poorly of the safety in Honduras.  Or maybe they are preaching the truth.  Whatever the answer is, I will find out what the answer really is in the next week or so!

Cigar Factory Tour

I have spent the last five days in Estelí, Nicaragua relaxing and catching up on various tasks before I head into the mysterious and at times problematic Honduras.  Estelí is a town of about 130,000, the third largest town in Nicaragua behind Managua and Leon.  It is in the mountainous region of Nicaragua, a thin slip in between the vast expanses of the Pacific and Caribbean lowlands.  Because of my hatred towards humidity, I assume I will stay in the highlands for the rest of my trip to Central America.

A couple of days ago, I spontaneously decided to go on a cigar factory tour.  I arranged the tour with Treehuggers, a local tourism office.  The only other people on the tour was an older German couple.  Our tour guide was a 24-year-old woman originally from Matagalpa, another reasonably large city in the Nicaragua mountains.  She had moved to Estelí three years ago for school.

The comprehensive tour took place in Tabacalera Santiago, a cigar factory in the center of Estelí.  There was a room for every step of the cigar making process, including box construction, packaging, leave sorting, and production.  Karen, who only spoke Spanish throughout the tour, told us that a Cuban owned and operated the factory.  I found that interesting considering Cuba is still a strictly communist society.  However, maybe Karen was strictly speaking about the owner's origin, not where he currently resides.

Street sign for Tabacalera Santiago factory

Cigar box construction

Cigar box art room.  That's Karen in the foreground.

Leave-drying

Leaving-sorting

Cigar production

Packaging

There are about 120 employees at the cigar factory.  Depending on whether they worked on the production line or in other, less knowledge-based areas, they generally made between 6,000 and 8,000 córdobas per month, working six days per week.  In American dollars, that adds up to about $240 to $320.  In Arizona, with a $8.05 minumun wage a worker would make $322 per week if they worked 40 hours.  Reasoning how relatively expensive general commodities cost in Nicaragua, it was hard to imagine satisfactorily supporting a family of four on a single person's salary.

However, everyone who worked in the cigar factory seemed relatively happy and content.  Many laborers had a lit cigar close at hand while they worked.  Although I believe that this wasn't an actual Zona Franca, the factory was similar to how I had imagined a large business in Nicaragua operating.  In general though, Nicaraguans - not just in Estelí but throughout the country - seem mostly content with their situations in life.  Although national wages are generally low, violence and corruption seem to be relatively tame.  This is perhaps one of the reasons that the United States has very few Nicaraguan immigrants compared with Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Mexico.

A content worker

One day with Jairo

Whenever I'm traveling through a new area, I usually try and find someone who has lived in and knows a good amount about the area and is willing to show me around.  My friend from Tucson, Kim, lived in Nicaragua for 15 years and suggested to me that I email her friend, Jairo.  She told me that Jairo lived just outside of Managua and worked as a kind of social worker, teaching children certain life skills through the medium of painting.

When I got in touch with Jairo, he told me that he lived in Masaya, a town about 40 minutes southeast of Managua.  He suggested we meet in Managua, but I proposed meeting in Masaya.  I had read about Masaya in my guidebook and it seemed intriguing.  Masaya is beneath a hulking volcano and is the center of Nicaragua's artesania production.  

We met the following afternoon in Masaya.  We went to the town center for coffee.  Jairo, in his late 30s, has lived in the Managua area for all of his life.  He, unlike most Nicaraguans, has traveled extensively.  He has spent time in Guatemala, various states in Mexico, and about six months in the United States on two separate trips.  Basically all of his traveling has been funded by certain art-related foundations.

When we got comfortable at our outdoor table, Jairo told me he was actually not from Masaya but from a smaller town called Niquinohomo about 20 minutes south of Masaya.  When I brought out my iPhone map, he came clean.  He was instead from a small, lesser-known, rural pueblo just outside of Niquinohomo called La Curva  He invited me to come spend the following night with him in his pueblo; we agreed that I would go the following day to La Curva and stay the night at his parents' house.  Niquinohomo - and especially La Curva - were not in any travel guides, giving me the impression that I would have an onobstructed view into average Nicaraguan life.  In fact, I would soon find out that it was rare for anyone from Jairo's family to invite people to spend the night at their house.  His parents were a little suspicious of me throughout my visit.

The next day at 10 in the morning, Jairo met me at my hotel to guide me to his pueblo.  We walked across Masaya, through the market, to the bus depot.  He bought some fruits and vegetables along the way, I assumed for his family.  When our bus reached La Curva, we exited and began a short walk along dirt roads to his parents' house.  La Curva is at a higher altitude than Masaya or Managua, making me very content, at least for a night.  "No more humidity; well, at least for one night, anyways," I thought.  As we walked by various ramshakle houses with children playing in the road, I noticed that the only vehicles traveling down the side streets of La Curva were three-wheeled taxis.  Rides cost between 10 and 30 Córdobas, or about 40 cents and a little bit over a dollar.

When we arrived at Jairo's parents' house, we walked through a steel gate, enterring a vegetable garden and what seemed to be a miniature farm.  His mother raised chickens, roosters, cats, and dogs, all for various uses, I presume.  In fact, that night, a dog would give birth to a puppy, surprising Jairo's entire family as they had no idea that the dog was even pregant.  

Soon after lunch - which for me, a vegetarian, included gallo pinto (a dish almost synonymous with Nicaragua), rice, and avocado - we set off a couple of bicycles lent to Jairo by his neighbors.  We rode through downtown La Curva, which included a couple restaurants and an internet cafe. We rode through other small towns outside of Niquinohomo, including Pio XII and Nandasmo.  We visited Jairo's cousin's house.  As we peeled and consumed fruits very similar to tangerines, I was told by Jairo's cousin and his wife about their work in a Zona Franca.  Zona Francas, which tend to be located in poorer communities in rural Nicaragua, are massive factories specializing in various products.  They are usually owned by Chinese or Korean business people.  From my view, they tend to be very similar to maquiladores, the manufacturing factories located across the Mexican border in poorer Mexican communities.  Both types of factories, being located in poorer countries, are able to pay their workers far less by comparison to factories located in first-world countries.  Jairo told me about the various abuses of that the Zona Francas imposed on their workers.  These stories reminded me of what had heard from various Mexican laborers in the maquiladores through the years.  Jairo understood that Zona Francas provided income (granted, small income) to people inside his community and was reasonably ambivalent about the existence of Zona Francas in general. 

 

Since the night was fast approaching, we pedaled back to Jairo's house.  We ate dinner and enjoyed ice cream as we talked with Jorge, a 19-year-old student of Jairo's.  Like Jairo, Jorge wanted to become an art teacher.  Jorge currently plied his trade as a construction worker alongside his father but hoped to become an art teacher by taking classes at a local college.  Soon after Jorge left, we went to bed, retiring to our separate rooms.  

Oh, the humidity!

I landed in Managua on Wednesday, Feburary 25.  Immediately when I walked out of the airport I could feel the humidity wash over me.  It was midday, with the sun blasting from above.  I could already tell that I wouldn't last long in this climate.  When I went to Mexico for about four months earlier last year, I spent my first couple weeks traveling down the west coast.  All of the places I visited were beautiuful in their own right, from the monster waves on Boca de Pascales, Colima to the breathtaking view from a hut I rented in Maruata, Michoacan, overlooking a near-vacant beach and stunning bay.  But after two weeks, I had had it with the humity plus the heat.  I headed up into the mountains where I stayed for the rest of my trip, only traveling back to the coast in Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco for three days for a wedding of a friend from Tucson.  

I realize I'm from Tucson, where the sun beats down on us throughout the year.  But people are right when they stress the importance of dry heat versus humidity.  I have spent almost my entire life in relatively dry heat.  I'm accustomed and used to a warm but dry climate.  Whenever I go into a climate where the humidity is high, I feel like my entire body is constantly melting.  Maybe I feel that way because of the place where I was raised.  Maybe it is a symptom of me being a climate snob.  Whatever it is, I have slowly realized that I can never live in a place like Managua for an extended period of time.  I like my dry heat.

Managua

I decided that I would at least spend a couple of days exploring and diciphering the intracacies of Managua, the capitol of Nicaragua.  I'll begin by giving you a few stats and figures about Managua and Nicaragua so that, if you have never been there, you can better imagine what it's like.  Managua has over 2 million residents, about 1/3 on the entire population of Nicaragua.  Managua is the second most populous city in Central American behind Guatemala City.  Fifty-four percent of the population of Nicaragua is urban; it is the largest Central American country by landmass.  However, it has only 33 people per square kilometer, small by Central American standards.  

Now a little bit of Managua's history.  During the dictictorial Somoza regime of the 20th century, Managua grew at a rapid pace.  New governmental and independent buildings were constructed and new universities were established.  However, the multiple earthquakes - especially in 1972 where 6,000 people were killed and 250,000 were left homeless - and the fighting between various political factions in the 1970s and 1980s left Managua in serious disrepair.  Only in the mid-1990s did Managua once again begin to make strides in development.  More than 300,000 Nicaraguans returned from abroad after fleeing the wars in Nicaragua.  These people included the "Miami Boys" of Nicaragua, members of wealthy Nicaraguan families that returned but continued to appreciate all things American.

I made it through customs without a hitch and hailed a taxi outside of the airport.  My cab driver was very personable.  He was about 50-years-old, had a bald head, a potbelly, and sweat dripping down the side of his face because of the constant humidity.  He drove me through the hectic streets of Managua.  Traffic was probably on par with Mexico; worse than the United States but better than Southeast Asia.  We drove by Lake Managua, sometimes referred to as the most comtaminated lake in Central America.  Since the 1920s, the sewage from the city has been dumped in the lake.  Although a modern wastewater treatment plant had been built in 2009, it only is currently able to treat about 40 percent of the entire city's wastewater.  The rest of the sewage still primarily seeps into Lake Managua.

My cab driver had a couple grown children with kids of their own.  He was very proud to be married to the same woman after 30 or so years.  He told me that he had never been out of the country, not even to Honduras or Costa Rica.  Most people in Nicaragua haven't ever ventured outside the international borders.  They tend to be content with where they are.  Unlike in the Northern Triangle of Central America, Nicaragua doesn't have the same economic or cultural forces pulling them towards immigration.  However, with an ever-expanding global world, I wouldn't be surprised if the younger generation in Nicaragua feels the same attraction to traveling as many of us do in the United States.  

The cab driver dropped me off in Barrio Quezada, a neighborhood where travelers - specifically backpackers - like to stay because its easy access to multiple bus stations.  It's also close to a lot of interesting places that tourists generally frequent in Managua.  Barrio Quezada is known as a relatively dangerous part of Managua, especially at night.  However, I didn't notice anything out of the ordinary, even when I went for solo walks around the neighborhood after the sun had gone down.  I talked with a gentleman about the not-so-friendly neighborhoods of Managua, and he told me that one existed two blocks from my hotel!  I walked around that part of Barrio Quezada (not at night, though!); some people would stare at me for a little bit longer than usual, but I think that might have been because they didn't see too many white folks taking leisurely strolls around their section of the neighborhood.  Actually, the only place in Managua I didn't feel completely safe was at a bus station.  When I arrived at the bus station in a taxi, the doors immediately opened on both sides of the taxi.  Three men were shouting at me to choose their bus over the others.  I was taken aback; they were a lot more aggressive then people at bus stations in Mexico.  However, I soon regained my presence of mind and calmly chose a bus.

Urban areas around the world often get bad names for themselves do to traffic, pollution, absence of nature, unappealing landscapes, crime, and general corruption.  Although Managua had bits and pieces of all of those stereotypes, I found it an appealing city with very friendly people.