It’s been a few days since I’ve been able to blog – we had no internet access while we visited the mountain village of El Rosario. El Rosario is a little mining town that was a boom town in the late 1800′s, but has about only 50 families now. It was quite a trek to get up there on the rutted, muddy dirt road, and we almost didn’t make it. When we stopped in San Juancito, a town at the base of the mountain to ask directions to El Rosario, the elderly man we stopped to ask just pointed to the top of the mountain and said “arriba” or “up.”
La Tigra National Park is accessed from El Rosario, and is a cloud forest that lived up to its name when we were hiking (the cloud part, not the “Tigra” part). The girls loved “running through the clouds.”
Girls in the cloud forest of La Tigra
After spending a couple of nights there, we went back down the dirt road (glad I didn’t see those drop-offs on the way up!), and back to Tegucigalpa airport to drop off our rental car and meet up with another family. This time we were on the other end of the airport craziness, but it seemed a little less intimidating this time. A van was there to pick us and the other family and take us to the orphanage.
We arrived at Nuestros Pequenos Hermanos (Our Little Brothers, NPH orphanage) last night during a power outage. Evidentally these are fairly common at the orphanage, also called Rancho Santa Fe. The Rancho really is like a ranch, complete with livestock, a vegetable farm, a water treatment tank, a cheesemaking center, a tortilleria (to make tortillas), and all sorts of other things that make the Rancho quite self-sufficient.
All the power comes from a generator, but the generator was not working, so we had no lights when we entered the guest house. Luckily, the house has an indoor courtyard and lots of windows, so although it was dusk, we were still able to see where we were going. The lights came back on in about 30 minutes, and with the exception of another brief outage that evening, the lights stayed on until the generator was turned off that evening.
Picklebee meeting Carmen and Sara
Our room is like a small bunkhouse, with 4 sets of bunkbeds and 2 normal single beds. There is an adjoining bathroom with 2 toilets and two showers. Like all the places we’ve stayed so far in Honduras, there is cold water in the sink and tepid water from the shower. Actually, I guess even the tepid water isn’t a constant. After dinner, I heard two different people comment with glee “the warm water’s gotten this far, I’m taking a shower,” so I decided to get the shower while the getting was good. MonkeyWrench and Picklebee took a brief rinse, but declared it too cold for them. The room we are in has no chimney, so the girls are concerned about how Santa will visit tonight. I pointed out the holes in the roof through which you can see daylight, and suggested that Santa could get through there. 
We’re traveling with our friends Carl and Betsy and their two kids, so around 6 o’clock Carl and DaddyFrog went down to the main Rancho kitchen to get our dinner. Evidentally the kitchen cooks food for the whole compound, sending food to the different dormitories in thermoses. If you’re at the guest house and want food, you need to bring some containers and go get it. The dinner was a typical Rancho dinner, beans, tortillas, and some delicious salty cheese. Most of us were still hungry after that, so we had a round of PB+J’s.
We woke up at 5 AM this morning to firecrackers celebrating the holiday (Christmas Eve). Today we took a mini-tour of the complex, starting with the farm, which is amazing – over 1000 chickens, lots of dairy cattle, pigs, rabbits, etc.
MonkeyWrench collecting eggs
The girls got to go help collect eggs and pet the baby bunnies, but Picklebee was a bit sad there were no “elephantes.” The kids had a special day of games today, so we went on down to play. Lunch was a special treat of pork (they slaughtered a pig last week), so everyone was in high spirits. Tonight a bonfire and another special treat of tamales is planned.
Oh, I have to try to include a photo of a game they were playing today, where you blindfold a kid, give them a machete, and then let them take a hack at a huge stick of sugar cane sugar. Whatever they hack off, they get to eat. I think Monkeywrench and Picklebee will have to wait until they are older for that one.
Blindfold machete game
Bandwidth is limited here, so I’ll have to keep the number of photos down, and there’s so much to write about! Have a Merry Christmas!
