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| D & D Brewery |
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| Procession in Leon |
Saturday, March 31 2012
For the second night in the row, around 3 in the dang
morning this dang rooster was crowing (Maybe I should quiz the rooster on his
ancestral lineage before throwing a rock at it)! That thing has no idea what time it is! You should see the
place where it lives. The lot is
right next to the one we’re in.
We’re on the third floor so we can look out our window or off the back
porch and down into their trash dump of a yard. There’s this rickety shack that looks like something that you’d
see on the eastside of Charleston, SC, perched on unlevel cinder blocks over
this muddy trash filled swamp. The
dang place is crawling with disrespectful chanticleers and beady eyed rats. So you would assume that no one lives
there. No so, in fact people do
live in that filth. We heard them
approaching one evening as they crunched thru their garbage on what I guess was
their walkway.
Anyway, the rooster was crowing all night. I got up once to go try to kill it by
hitting it with some rocks that the guy next door (from Georgia, the state)
gave to me to throw at it. But who
was I kidding? I was not going to
be able to kill this rooster by hitting it with a rock from the third floor
balcony of the building next door.
So even tho we didn’t get a good nite’s sleep we were still at the boat
dock at 5:45 am to catch the 6:20 Vomit Comet back to the mainland. We boarded the boat and took our
seats. As luck would have it one
of the women that was throwing up on the ride over was on our boat again and
she came and sat down next to me.
It wasn’t long into the wavy ride before she signaled one of the crew
for a plastic puke bag.
Back on mainland Honduras we got our truck and drove 4 hours
west and then south to Lago Yojoa.
New Beige is running better than ever and it’s a great feeling to drive
her smoothly with no operational issues lingering about. Phish’s “Contact” came on by the grace
of MP3 shuffle to celebrate New Beige’s resurgence. The other day a Honduran customs official even referred to her
as “Champagne” colored, which made her blush.
We checked in to a room at D & D’s brewery. This place is a small beer brewery,
restaurant and jungle hotel. It
was set up by some guy from Oregon, the state. We’ve yet to try the beers but I’ll be sure to write up
Marcie and I’s full review. Stay
tuned.
A couple hours later:
The beer list was full of light fruit beers, normally this
is not ok for a respectful microbrewery but in this climate I thot it might be
a good choice. They brot out a
shot glass sample of each of their 6 beers for free. When I tasted them I immediately saw the reason they were
light bodied; they were really watery.
I really didn’t like any of the 6 (raspberry ale, strawberry ale,
blueberry ale, pale ale, amber ale and porter) but I felt an obligation to at
least buy something, so I hoped for the best and ordered the amber ale. When it came my first reaction was: Is
this beer? It was flat and cloudy. It looked like someone handed me a mug of
apple cider. After tasting it I would
have been happy with cider. It was
terrible. I like beer and I’ve not
had one in weeks. Even if it had
just been alrite I would’ve gladly downed it and ordered another. But instead I didn’t even drink half of
it (this is practically unprecedented).
The beers at D & D Brewery reminded me of when a German Wizen Lager
(see Flensburger), originally clear, goes bad with time or heat and turns into
cloudy flat muck. The beers here
are frankly an embarrassment. I
now know why the brewmaster (?) chose to have his brewery in Honduras: There’s
no way that he could sell a beer this bad in Oregon.
~Jon
*Jon’s decided to stop using unnecessary letters to spell
out his words in case you were wondering.
~Marcie
** I’m taking some inspiration from the electronic age of
texting lingo and putting to rest some old English suffix’s like “ough”
(Apologies to Sean and Tim Keough).
Hopefully one of the political parties will put this on a bill sometime
in the near future.
~Jon
Bonus Section!
“A Couple Things I’ve Noticed”
By Jon Palm
In Latin America the style these days for young pansy type
guys is “Hollister” and “Abercrombie and Fitch”. It was really funny in an embarrassing sad way to see this
style come and go in America a few short years ago. But now to see it pass thru the realm of consciousness a
second time is even more insightful as to human behavior. Most of the outfits I see here are
cheap obvious imitations that are nothing more then the brand name spelled out
as conspicuously as possible. I
can’t figure out if this is more or less stupid than paying more for the “real”
brand name.
It’s never fail funny to see someone with your team’s gear
on around here. Do you know where
the shirt that you wore as a 10 year old in Mariner Youth Soccer is now? Its being worn in all its peeling iron
on numbers glory by a 12 year old Honduran kid playing football barefoot in a
dirt lot with palm trees as goal posts.
Every few days I’ll see someone with Red Sox or Patriots (Drew Bledsoe
the other day) gear and go up and give the obligatory fist bump. No one ever turns down a fist bump but
they have no idea what I’m talking about when I mention the team. You see a lot of Yankees gear, some Sox
and occasionally even Steelers’ gear.
Sunday, April 1 2012
We left D & D Brewery after having what according to
Lonely Planet were the best blueberry pancakes around. I make way better pancakes and the
waitress didn’t even bring me butter or syrup. I had to ask for it.
If you’re serving pancakes you need butter and syrup. Geesh. Lonely Planet was way overestimating the coolness of this
place. We purposely made this
place a stop in our schedule because LP said it was so cool (Great beers, pool,
atmosphere, blueberry pancakes). I
think someone got paid for that review.
We then drove around the lake and admired the views. There were many people on the side of
the road with strings of fish for sale.
We drove through the capital of Honduras, which is Tegucigalpa and I
can’t remember ever seeing a crappier capital city. It was fairly easy to drive through with Jon navigating and
me driving. It was then another
hour to the border.
At the border with Nicaragua our truck was immediately
swarmed with the people who try to “help” you through the border crossing
processes. We had learned several
borders back not to get help from these guys so we parked our truck and started
the exit process for Honduras. It
was a fairly quick trip to Customs and then Immigration to surrender our
permits. A gentleman then moved
the chain for us to cross over to the Nicaraguan side to get our tires sprayed
with insecticide, buy mandatory insurance, get our visitor permits and our
vehicle permit. This was also
fairly quick and we started to try to drive through the other chain at the end
of the border area. No way
Jose! One of the guys at the
Nicaraguan side kept trying to tell us something and we just kept showing him
all our papers we just got. No one
could figure out what was going on so the guy took our passports and started
running back the other way. I look
at Jon like “Oh shit, should we have given that guy our passports?” He did have a uniform and was trying to
tell us something so Jon went after him while I waited with the truck. Apparently somewhere along the way we
didn’t go to Nicaraguan Immigration and we still had to pay and get our
passports stamped. After that we
were on our way.
In Nicaragua they use the type of money called Cordoba and
the exchange rate is 23C to $1.
They also seem to not have topes in Nicaragua, which is great and New
Beige is loving driving now. We
drove through to Esteli where we found a hotel for the night and went out to
dinner at an organic place that had many vegetarian options. I got the vegetable mix with cheese and
bread and Jon got the vegetarian lasagna.
A guy that worked at the hotel and showed us where to park
was admiring my bike when he showed us to the parking lot. We had been wanting to get rid of the
bike for some time now since I lost my tire so when the guy asked about the
bike Jon told him we wanted to sell it.
Jon and the guy bargained in Spanish and Jon told him we wanted 200C for
the bike ($10). He only had 100C
on him and said he would get us the other later, which he did. So we gladly gave him the bike. Both of our bikes were good bikes back
when my Dad and Gladys got them for us to go on our bike trip from Pittsburgh,
PA to Cumberland, MD back in 2007.
They lasted for a long time and had been on many adventures. We had unloaded Jon’s bike back in
Mexico for a car wash. Both bikes
wouldn’t shift gears anymore, Jon’s didn’t even have brakes and mine was
missing a front tire, so they ended up just taking up space and being a
liability for theft. We are happy
to be rid of them.
Monday, April 2 2012
Ok, blog blog blog.
I got up early and walked around to scout out the town of
Esteli, Nicaragua and procure supplies.
This city is the hub of an agricultural valley in the dry hi-lands that
produce some of the world finest tobacco (for cigars) and coffee. We got a move on fairly early and
rolled down the road south on Central America 1 and then west on Nicaragua
hi-way 26 to Leon. Yes, Leon.
On the way we drove up to two men in police uniforms at some
kind of a road block check point.
This happens at least once a day, no big whoop. They usually want to see if your papers
are in order and sometimes to look in the truck to make sure that we are not
operating some kind of mobile narcotics lab. These two particular guys started talking to me in Spanish
and I was not getting their meaning.
When I asked them to speak more slowly they spoke more rapidly. We couldn’t figure out what these guys
wanted so we started showing them our documentation for our vehicle that we
just got at the border yesterday.
But something was not quite rite about these guys. I couldn’t see any police vehicle
nearby so I glanced at their holsters to see if they were packin’ (sorry about
that, I couldn’t resist), but their straps were empty. I pretended that I wanted to show them
something on our vehicle permit they were looking at, grabbed it away from them
and handed it back to Marcie for safekeeping. I asked them Que necessitas? They replied, Gasolina, dinero por gasolina por la polica,
or something like that. I was
pretty sure now that these guys were not real cops even though they had
uniforms and badges, so I said Lo Siento, Yo necessito irse, and drove away
watching my side mirrors to see if they would give chase. You can’t usually pull this move with
the real cops so this was the litmus test. They didn’t follow so I guess they were scammers.
We had heard about carjackings happening at fake police
checkpoints. This might have been
one of those. A shakedown in the
daytime and a robbery at nite.
Besides me driving the wrong way on two one way streets we
got to Leon without furthur incident and checked into a hotel in the center of
town. It’s wicked hot here, at
least 90 f daytime high. It’s also
Semana Santa week everywhere in Hispanic countries. So there are lots of Nicaraguan tourists on holiday. As far as I can see the only
attractions are the religious themed processions that march around the
streets. Thousands of people line
the sidewalks 4 and 5 deep to see a bunch of guys in robes walking slowly and
somberly carrying a replica Jesus casket.
We have been seeing pretty much this same thing for the past week in
Guatemala, Honduras and now Nicaragua.
I was bored with it 2 minutes into the first one. There are better floats made in any
American small town high school homecoming parade. I can’t understand the attraction, but it must be some kind
of mass hypnosis that makes all of these people believe that there’s something
much more significant below the surface, because it does not pass the eyeball
test.
It’s 10:30 pm here and still way too dang hot. I’m dripping sweat just typing.
