Hari Kunzru / Dodging downpours for a Mayan miracle

Dodging downpours for a Mayan miracle

An unseasonal rainy spell dampens novelist Hari Kunzru's impressions of Honduras. But things brighten up when he discovers the dazzling jungle life and Mayan ruins

Hari Kunzru
Sunday 20 April 2003 19.23 BST

The picture I have of the island of Roatan is the type tour operators put on Underground posters to traumatise winter commuters. Azure sea, white sand, central casting palm tree. I am supposed to be there, swinging on a hammock in the sun.

Instead I am standing in a striplit hall at San Pedro Sula airport staring out of a window at the tropical storm chucking water on the other side of the plate glass. It seems Honduras, usually dry at this time of year, is experiencing a late rainy season. Roatan airstrip is closed.

The boys at the airline counter wear philosophical expressions and make mention of God. Maybe a plane will take off today, they say. I am getting a kind of long-term feeling from them.

Five hours later and we are all bored, including the security guy and the woman tending the bar. No plane today, not now.

Time to head off in search of San Pedro Sula. I get my case from behind the airline counter and hunt for a taxi. Thus, I become the sole evening patron of the Garden Court restaurant at the Hotel Princess, where the court itself seems to be under an inch of water. It is a place of starched tablecloths, formally dressed waiters, four-line menu items and gilt. Lots of gilt.

Pleased to have a customer, the maitre d' signs for the muzak to be turned up. I listen to 'Bright Eyes', 'I Will Always Love You', 'Cavatina' and 'The Lady In Red', and eat something that may be chicken.

The next morning, I get up sharpish to return to the airport. Juan Carlos, my taxi driver, speaks good English - he learnt it in Indiana where he worked in a carwash, and sold some coke and heroin on the side. He got caught and spent two years in jail. You do some crazy things when you're young, he says.

We stop at a toll booth, where we find out that last night someone shot dead the goalkeeper of the national football team. They take football seriously, the Hondurans. In 1969 they fought the so-called Soccer War with El Salvador, a four-day conflict which kicked off as the two national teams met in the World Cup qualifiers. However, it turns out that this latest incident was just a bungled robbery. No politics involved at all.

Honduras was, of course, the original banana republic, a country governed through much of the twentieth century for the benefit of three rival US fruit firms, who bankrolled political factions and ruthlessly put down union movements.

During the Eighties, with fighting in neighbouring Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador, Honduras was the key to US control over the region, and American aid and troops poured in, a period which came to an abrupt close when it emerged that the rebels were partly funded by weapon sales in Iran.

These days Honduras is back to fruit and coffee, and its fortunes are governed by the ups and downs of the international commodity markets. American visitors are more likely to be tourists than CIA staff training Contra guerrillas.

After a decade of more or less peaceful democracy, the government is looking enviously at the success of Costa Rica, now known as a destination for travellers seeking a taste of the extraordinary environmental riches of Central America but nervous of its reputation for political instability.

With its rich, green landscape of fruit plantations, Honduras does look like a lovely country to visit.

By midday, I am so well settled in the departure lounge it's beginning to remind me of the Sartre play where the characters sit around, and then realise that hell is other people. In my case the other people are mostly mid-Western tourists trying to get out to the Bay island of Utila for the diving. The islands have been a fixture on the diving circuit since the Seventies, and are widely known for having great reefs and cheap PADI courses.

At the moment, though, these tourists are passing the time, playing cards, drinking beer, laughing at their caps' humorous slogans, showing off small, covetable pieces of technology, and reading books with titles like God Is My CEO , and Jesus Inc: Your Share In The Lord. 

They are doing nothing to me, but somehow I hate them. Especially the guy playing a pinball game on his laptop.

There is a flurry of excitement when a plane is announced to Utila. The dive tourists cheer, high-five each other and depart. But 10 minutes later they are back: it turns out that the break in the weather has closed up again.

I find I have certain rather Old Testament feelings about this. But, miracle of miracles, I find myself, just a couple of hours later, taking off. We coast over the water in a 15-seater twin-prop plane.

So, I reach Roatan's West Bay and the promise of the Paradise Beach Villas resort - only to find that water is pouring in a torrent off the thatched roof of the bar. High winds have been sending big waves crashing up the beach, far up enough to fill the beach-bar's sink with sand.

Water visibility is zero, so Liz from the dive school is not at work. The wind has even brought the TV cables down. The barman mixes mojitos for me and Wayne and Glady, retirees from Saskatchewan who have been coming to Roatan's West Bay every winter for the past five years.

The couple tells me it's the same every year - the nice apartment with cable TV and all mod cons, the glassy water, the sun, the good shrimp place just down the beach.

That is, it had been so until this year, when the rain had come down for the past 18 days. Wayne and Glady are booked in for five weeks. They are having doubts.

The rain comes and goes for the next two days. Even when it isn't falling, it's still grey and cold. With the beach out of action there's not much to do in West Bay so I drive into Coxen Hole to run errands with Bob, the laconic Texan manager.

Bob knows those animal species which make a good boot; he's the proud owner of footwear assembled from the skins of boa constrictors, moray eels, elephants, sharks, alligators and unborn calves. Eel wins out for general use, he says.

Bob knows those animal species which make a good boot; he's the proud owner of footwear assembled from the skins of boa constrictors, moray eels, elephants, sharks, alligators and unborn calves. Eel wins out for general use, he says.

At its best, Coxen Hole would be an unlovely coagulation of tin-roofed houses. With the rain sweeping household rubbish off the hillside and its streets churned into muddy ruts, it presents a particularly unappealing face.

Most tourists hate the place for its stray dogs, loafing drunks and one-room family shacks built on stilts to escape inundation by the sea. But after 48 hours in holidayland I am happy to be back in a real place, a place where you can buy a plastic bucket at the Wordy Boutique or get your hair cut at Shear's Delight.

I watch the Coxen Hole cops parade outside the station and help Bob buy provisions at a supermarket owned by one of the local families who have made a killing out of the tourist boom.

Land here is shooting up in value, some of it being developed for hotels, but much of it for retirement homes. Several units at Paradise Beach are owned by elderly American couples, the wives with leathery tans and small dogs, the husbands with the grizzled look of men who may well have got to know this place by doing 'government work' in the Eighties.

The day I leave, Roatan shows its other side. The sky is cloudless, the water tauntingly still and blue. I snorkel out to the reef and swim with brightly coloured fish. Then I let the sun dry me off, drink a farewell beer and reluctantly head for the airport. A party of Italians has arrived. They are laughing, promenading on the sand. I leave the sunshine on the beach and head to the jungle - where it is raining.

But I now have an opportunity to compare and contrast various styles of rain. Jungle rain has a different character from island rain. In the national park of Pico Bonito it comes off the hills, rolling down as mist and then disgorging an unimaginable volume of water over the beautifully landscaped grounds of the Pico Bonito Lodge. I'm back on the mainland, near the town of La Ceiba, staying in a hideaway for affluent eco-tourists, 20-odd discreet cabanas that offer immense comfort while giving the illusion of roughing it; no television in your room, but the magazine left by your bed advertises Fabergé pen trays and $2,000 alligator golfing shoes.

There are five guests at the lodge. Two American honeymoon couples and me. As far as I know, we are the only tourists wandering around this particular zone of natural beauty. (So what are the statistical chances that if you hike out to a river, strip naked and dive in, by the time you get out to the middle, all the others will have arrived on the bank?)

The next day the sun comes out and my companion and guide Herman ('I am jungle man') leads me to the 'Unbelievable Falls'. We wade through rivers. We scram ble up steep banks. Covered in mud, I enjoy myself immensely. On the way we see toucans, woodpeckers and other bird species. Unlike many of Pico Bonito's guests, I feel I can't get very worked up about birdwatching, and even though some of the small brown ones are rare/sing/behave unusually/can get you on the guest list for parties and so on, they don't really float my boat like a good toucan.

We pick cardamom, coffee beans and wild coriander. Agouti flee into the bushes as we squelch and slide our way up the path. This is the real point of a visit to the Honduran forest. If you're a keen naturalist, it must be like Christmas.

The staff at the lodge are knowledgeable and disarmingly enthusiastic. Over breakfast I had a long discussion with Kent, the manager, about the exact definition of a bract, with reference to the banana family. It doesn't rain the next day, either, so I leave to hike up into the hills, to the ruined Mayan city of Copan. Along with Tikal in Guatemala and sites such as Chichén Itzá in south Mexico, this is one of the top archaeological treasures of Central America.

Every stone here seems to have been intricately worked, and in the main ritual zone, pyramids and a ball court are laid out according to spookily-precise cosmological principles. The symbolism of the carvings is complex - rulers representing themselves emerging from the jaws of serpents, surrounded by corn spirits, figures of ancestors, crocodiles.

The Mayans are thought to have bound boards to the heads of their infants, to give their young an appealingly receding brow. They are also thought to have viewed crossed-eyes as the height of attractiveness - although my guide does concede it possible that this was actually due to incest, not to aesthetics.

Even the names of the kings - Eighteen Rabbit, Smoke Shell - give a sense of distance, a feeling that this was a society with profoundly different values from the one now organising coach tours to view the ruins. At the same time, it is true, certain local phrases and traditions are directly traceable to the people who abandoned this place in 900AD.

It is with reluctance that I leave this wealth of culture to fly home. As I leave for the airport the rain is coming down again.

THE GUARDIAN