Up early, had breakfast, paid our bill at the hotel, then went to ViaVia tour company, dropped our bags off and dad bought a new pair of sunglasses for 50 lempira. He keeps dropping his old ones and they broke.
Had a shake at ViaVia and booked the shuttle to Leon, Nicaragua for Thursday. She needed our passports to book the shuttle, remember the look on dad face when he realized he had no idea where his passport was, no recollection of putting it anywhere. He did find it between his clothes in his backpack.
About 10:20, a mini-bus came and picked us up for a rough, dirty and windy drive over mountains and valleys and through small villages, for about an hour, before stopping at a somewhat rundown looking building. We unload and go into the building, there are two locals in there, neither speak English. They show us two rooms and we pick one. We're the only ones there. The lady drags a bucket of water from outside to the toilet and indicates we have to pour water from the bucket into the toilet to flush. She turns the tap and there's no running water. The rooms look a bit run-down, paint peeling, and there's lots of spider webs and dead insects in them running up the corner of the room. Andreas, the guy at the guest house, takes us out back to show us some cocoa bushes. Then he herds us into the bed of a pickup truck where we stand in the back holding on to metal railings, as he drives towards the ranch. He makes a detour along the way and drives part way up a mountain and stops at a coffee and cardamom plantation and explains to us (in Spanish) about them.
We then continue on to a rather nice estate house where two women make us a lovely lunch, but once again no English. We keep being told about this guy, Carlos, but we have no idea who Carlos is.
After lunch, we have no idea what we're supposed to do, so we just sit and walk around the house and yard for over an hour, until someone tells us otherwise.
At this point, I'm a bit upset. I didn't pay $145 for this. No direction, no english, a crap "tour" of coffee and cardamom plantation, no running water and a kinda run down guest house. This was rated most excellent on TripAdvisor and in my mind I'm already formulating my very unflattering review of this piece of crap place.
After over an hour of hanging around, another guy comes along and introduces himself as Carlos with perfect english. He says "Let's go ride some horses!" He then laughs, saying when he heard it was a father and his son, he was expecting a younger guy with his 10 year old son. Haha.
Anyway, after meeting Carlos, everything changes. He's very friendly and personable, huge smile on his face. It ends up the woman who served us lunch was his mother. He apologized for the "no running water" situation at the guest house, apparently the town is having water supply problems at the moment. And Carlos usually picks his clients up in Copan himself, but it was his father's 76th birthday yesterday in a town 6 hours away, so he was late getting back from that, hence the mini-bus that picked us up.
Carlos takes us to the stables where the horses are all saddled up and ready to go. We mount them and take them around a large open area for a few minutes, then "vamos"...let's go! We did a 2-3 hour tour of the ranch, paste coffee plantations, through wide open cattle and horse fields, through forests and streams. We stopped in a field where Carlos explains that a horse is not well. The horse is 25 years old (they live between 20-30 years). The horse is very skinny, laying down in the field, barely able to move. As Carlos was out of town, he hasn't seen the horse in a couple of days and was dismayed to see it in the condition it's in and was a bit upset with the ranch hands for not taking care of it. He told them to go back and get water and food and get the horse to eat and drink, as he doesn't feel the horse is ready to die yet. After they leave, Carlos told us that it's a lot of work for the ranch hands to deal with a dying horse. They'd rather just leave a dying horse to die, but Carlos has a soft spot in his heart for horses and wants to do something for the horse. He told us if the horse makes it through the night, he'll have them put the horse on an I.V. drip tomorrow.
The ride is pretty amazing, actually! It was nice that it wasn't just a trail ride along predefined trails and we could take our horses out for a gallop too. My horse (Princessa) was being a "bitch" (Carlos' words), seeming to be anxious and full of energy and cutting off dad's horse and stuff, finally Carlos asks me to take Princessa for a bit of a run, burn off some of that extra energy she has.
Agro-tourism is the term Carlos uses for what he does, runs a ranch and coffee/cardamom plantation along with tourism. He needs to diversify, as coffee prices can fluctuate. He took the ranch over from his grandpa and dad, his brothers went in a different direction (one is a doctor, the other one was more interested in getting a business education and going to the big city). His sister still has a small stake and has many horses at the ranch, however.
About 5:30, back to our rooms to get our swim trunks and we headed to the natural hot springs.
The hot springs were super nice, naturally coming out of the side a mountain. They have developed the area very nicely, with probably two dozen small pools scattered around, all of varying temperatures, amongst the forest. Very nice indeed. There are also a couple of larger pools that they have for swimming or soaking (not unlike Radium, for example), but everyone soaks in the small jungle pools.
When Carlos was showing us around the hot springs, he told us numerous times not to touch certain parts of the springs, as it's very, very hot, almost boiling, stay in the man made pools, as they're temperature controlled. Shortly after Carlos left us, the next thing I hear is "Owe! That's hot! I think I burned myself." Just after Carlos told us not to stick body parts RIGHT THERE, dad thrust his whole hand RIGHT THERE. I said to him, "Did you not just hear Carlos tell us NOT to touch that?" He replied with two excuses, 1) he didn't think it'd be that hot, and 2)...I forget, but whatever, he was warned numerous times in perfect english, so it's his own fault!
As it started to get dark, we showered up and headed back to the guest house for supper, which was amazing!
Everyone left bout 8:30, and dad and I had the whole guest house to ourselves.
Remember all the spiders with a reflective "eye" on them in the grass, when we shone our light into the grass. Pretty cool.
This was a really interesting post, Todd - really enjoyed it. I was 'cringing' when you described the room - peeling paint, spider webs, dead insects, no running water. I'm afraid I wouldn't last five minutes on a trip like that but glad you and Dad are having such a fantastic time. And, I have to smile when I hear different interpretations of things between your posts and Dad's posts, ha. Don't you know that Dad wasn't around when Carlos told you not to touch that certain pool - ha, ha.
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