The mountain roads of Olancho are torturous. Like a washboard carved by the rivulets of a hundred rains, these passages are a challenge for both the body and the mind. Shadows falling across the road sometimes hide crevasses a foot deep and potholes you could hide a VW in. Vaughn took the roads to task and came out on top, finally bringing us safely to the small city of Gualaco, just ten minutes away from our target – the village of Linares.

If you are ever in Gualaco, there is but one hotel that should be on your agenda – the Hotel Mi Palacio. I believe the proprietor’s name is Berta but I do know that she is a hairdresser and barber whose shop is just a couple doors down the block from the hotel. She maintains a clean hotel with gated parking and 24-hour security on staff. It is not what we as North Americans would call posh but it is the Hilton-level accommodations of Gualaco, to be sure.

We would be taking our meals at the home of Digna and Santiago. Digna is a carer educator in Honduras and previously ran a restaurant on the main road that runs through Gualaco. They closed the eatery some time back and now they are “open” only for family and close friends when in town. Their home is beautiful and their hospitality even more so – it was like having momma cook for you three times a day. The kids in Gualaco have learned how to make homemade fireworks and as soon as the sun goes down (about 5:30pm) you hear them going off all over town. They have recently upgraded these makeshift noisemakers to fly up with a load whistle, much like a bottle rocket. The first night we witnessed this, my mind was drawn to the juxtaposition of how Disney would celebrate the day every evening at sundown with several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of fireworks (when we were in Anaheim, California for the SCAA convention a couple years ago). It seemed to be the same celebration of life to me there in that small mountain town.

Gualaco would be our basecamp, our HQ of operations for the next several days as we traveled back and forth to Linares and it served very well for these purposes. More than that though, Gualaco was an opportunity to experience and hopefully better understand life in Honduras in a small town (a small city by Honduran standards). As our presence and faces became more familiar around the place, it seemed to open itself up to us – by “it”, I mean its people – the reality of any community. A town is not buildings and streets. A town is a convergence of lives, a confluence of people that meld to make a qualitatively new flavor – not a patchwork but rather a tapestry.

What we now know as the Republic of Honduras has endured centuries of colonization and external influence by many different cultures. Honduras has seven indigenous peoples as well as Afro Hondurans (as in the Garifuna), but the largest group of the population is called “mestizo”: people whose lineage is indigenous mixed with European. On top of that, there are also substantial pockets of Middle Easterners, Chinese, German and many other peoples. In a way ( and I reserve the right to amend this opinion at a any time as I learn more), Honduras is a melting pot much like the US in some respects, woven into an often cohesive but sometimes partitioned whole. It all makes for an immense spread of cultures to learn about in order to have a good launching point for understanding the complex social and cultural structures of this amazing country. Gualaco was like a case study in this diversity, an aliquot portion of the whole.

Tegucigalpa, Honduras – population 3million+. It is not a safe town if you do not have somewhere to be. Political and gang graffiti color many buildings and I am only just beginning to learn what it means. I don’t know hectic traffic and neither do you if you have not been outside the States. Sure, Atlanta can be tough sometimes, but in Teguc, road signs and centerlines are merely suggestions, to be disregarded as gap allows. Our doors are locked, our windows up. Once we enter the Hotel Honduras Maya, we do not leave again until we are ready to leave town. This is just a one night layover because the sun would meet the mountains before we arrived in Gualaco and we cannot let that happen. Not here.

The hotel was palatial but oddly empty. A room at a place like this in Atlanta would cost $300 to $400 a night but here in Teguc, if you are on the right list you get it for $70. From the courtyard ringed with high walls and razor wire, it was cognitively dissonant to be faced with multiple pools and hot tubs and large patios set with heavy tables and chairs while gunfire echoed from the city. Sitting in the courtyard, this hotel could be in Beirut, Abu Dhabi, anywhere.

All this said, I know for certain that if we were to meet the people that inhabit this place, we would find the same hard-working and honest folks that we have come to know as Hondurans. Perhaps next time.

Here I sit in a room just outside of Santa Barbara, latin jazz on the tv, a single fluorescent bulb above me, trying to get a handle on all that converged to make this day. No promises but I will try.

Through a series of events so unlikely it defies happenstance but too long to give proper attention to at this late hour, Jacob, Vaughn, Joaquin and I arrived at Cafe Beneficio San Vicente – the dry mill of the Paz family. The Paz family are industrious, determined and warm and they invited us to tour their mill, warehouse and packing facilities. Guided by Benjamin Paz, a handsome and educated young man, we were taken to another facility of theirs: a place formerly owned by a coffee co-op that went under and was now in the possession of the Paz family. They will be developing this location to fully house all of their specialty coffee processing. While we were there, we met one of the most impressive people I have ever come across, Manuel Tavora. He was welding a piece of machinery that I recognized as a coffee pulper. It turns out that from a few pictures, Manuel built this huge machine by hand (except for the motor assembly which was bought), welding the most intricate steel work I have ever seen up close with absolute symmetry and precision. There were at least a couple hundred welds, all pf them super clean. He was a large man with bright intelligent eyes that were green like the rain that gathers in a rock quarry and ringed with gold. He is a man full of skill and brotherhood and I felt privileged to meet him.

At some point during all of these amazing coffee processing sights, Benjamin motioned upward and said, “See that cloud resting between those two mountaintops? We are going there if you like, to a farm or two.” I was struck when he told us that the farms were Nacimiento and Cielito Lindo, two coffees that we at Safehouse have revered since we first tasted them.

After a climb up the mountain in low geared 4 wheel drive (which is a novella in itself), we reached the end of the road at the front door of a stout, barrel-chested man called Jobneel. Now I cannot fully relate it to you now, but this is a distant and inaccessible farm that few people are likely to set foot on. It was very hard to reach. We will be posting a farm and family spotlight on Nacimiento and Jobneel on dirtyCup.com after we are back home, but let me say that Jobneel is the epitome of work ethic and I cannot wait to go back, hopefully for harvest next February.

After leaving Jobneel’s, all of us plus Benjamin ate fish on the banks of Lake Yajoa and shared pictures of our families. I showed him my sweet love, Amanda and my beautiful son, Ira. It wasn’t like when you look at someone’s pictures on face book. I was really showing him my family and he was really looking at them with wonder and appreciation in his eyes…  In 11 years of marriage, I have never been away from my wife for a single night – until this trip. Showing the pictures to my new friend, I was suddenly overtaken with emotion and with not a little effort managed to not completely dissolve right in front of him.

We finished eating and took Benjamin back to San Vicente to say our goodbyes. It was difficult and we didn’t want to leave. Upon walking up to hug Ben goodbye and on the verge of tears again, I told him that I have fallen in love with his beautiful country. He looks back at me with the same intensity and says, “It is your country now, too, Hunt.”

Jacob and I started this morning by meeting Vaughn for breakfast in the hotel’s small dining room – just a few tables with chairs in a room with natural tile floors and, surrounded with windows. The morning’s light was streaming into the room from all sides and it felt, well, different. We are closer to the equator here and the oxygen content seems much higher than in Georgia. Even though this is Honduras’ second largest city (population 3 million), the air is an upgrade from metro Atlanta, despite the proliferation of diesel vehicles.

Breakfast was unbelievable: eggs, beans, tortillas, papaya, pineapple, plantains and the local queso fresco. I ate until I could eat no more. The food here is substantial in a way I have never experienced before – no hormones or antibiotics – the eggs taste like eggs, the chicken tastes like chicken and in a way, I feel like I have never actually tasted either before.

As we left the hotel to go pick up Joaquin, or guide and translator (more on Joaquin later), we were met with the hotel security, a young man with a street sweeper and a big smile.

He was mugging for the camera a bit here but smiling in Honduras is generally a full body involvement activity – eye contact, head bob, friendly salutary gesture and all the teeth you’ve got = smile. I like it.

We drove up through the dizzying streets of San Pedro Sula and scaled the driveway to Joaquin’s house (I will omit certain identifying details about Joaquin and other locals for security purposes during these posts). As we pulled up, Joaquin’s lovely wife was just arriving as well and that lady just exuded love. I really wanted a hug but I’m still getting my bearings with the cultural ways of such things. So there we are in the truck, Vaughn behind the wheel, Joaquin riding shotgun (now I know where that phrase came from), Jake and I in the back seat, all of us peering out above cracked windows tinted so black you wouldn’t believe it – again, security measures. What we needed to do was exchange our US dollars for Honduran Lempira. Sounds simple right? Yeah, welcome to a developing country.

San Pedro Sula will give you a false sense of what Honduras is all about. On the surface, much of it looks a lot like south Florida, but there are little details that create a cognitive dissonance that picks at your nerves until you pay attention enough to set them in order. Case in point: we head over the massive and modern City Mall right in the thick of San Pedro. KFC, Pizza Hut, Wendy’s, LCD TVs, iPhones and designer jeans abound – but then the water in the men’s room doesn’t work. Like this simple example, easily overlooked, some things are just odd and out of place, like the priority list got scrambled somehow. That is, by my North American thought structure, but is it really out of place or scrambled in relation to being a developing country? I don’t know yet – I’m here to learn. I can’t help until I understand. Back to exchanging the money – “What currency do you have?”, Joaquin asks me. “All twenties,” says I. Vaughn and Joaquin look at each other and then back at the road without saying a word. Was it something I said? Turns out that in San Pedro Sula, the US twenty dollar bill is the currency of drug dealers and has been heavily counterfeited of late. They will likely not take them at any of the banks but we have to try. The only recourse is to go back to the airport and do a very exposed money exchange out in the open where everyone can see – security risk. So we find the bank in the mall that Joaquin has an account with and as we walk through the entrance and guard with bullet-proof vest and automatic rifle falls in step with us. He escorts us briskly to the inner door to the teller room and we get in line. There were four tellers working with customers and we waited about 10 minutes for our turn. Joaquin and I walked up to our teller and he told her in his beautiful and fluid Spanish what we needed to do. Immediately, I could see that she was not down. It was like we were trying to sell her frozen seafood out of an igloo cooler in the back of our truck. As Joaquin continued to reason with her, I noticed that the man at the next teller had trained his attention on us. Now, he had been at that teller since we came in and been exchanging packet after packet of US dollars for lempiras the whole time. What happened next happened very quickly and I followed Joaquin’s lead. Two minutes later, this businessman next to us had exchanged my money for his lempiras at half a point on the US dollar. He made nine bucks and we were saved a four-hour ordeal at the airport money exchange. Problem presented? Problem solved. That’s Honduras.

After all of this, we went to Digicell and procured a Honduras cell for Jake and I which I have since learned, I did not put enough minutes on as I did not realize the nuance between sevenTEEN and sevenTY minutes that came on the phone. I burned through that in no time (well seventeen minutes, actually) setting up meetings for the rest of this week.  Then we all went down to the food court and had a lunch of plantains, yucca fritas (eternally superior to french fries), some wicked hot picked jalapeños, onions and carrots, and grilled chicken with tortillas – killer. Finishing up, we stopped by the Espresso Americano and I had the hottest, most frothy cappuccino that has ever passed my lips – seriously, like lava. Surprisingly, the espresso and milk still had some legit sweetness to it and was good since I haven’t had coffee in almost two days.

Dropping Joaquin off at his house, we ended up walking the property and talking for about and hour. Joaquin is a man full of love and desire to affect positive change in his country – open to casting wild wishes yet pragmatic and grounded to the realities of how time softens all plans. His place was lush and heavily treed with old growth mango, avocado and banana. The house was built by the Baptists in the 60s and had been empty for a couple of years before Joaquin and his family moved in. He really is a good man and I’m still hoping for a hug from his wife before we leave the country.

We said our goodbyes for the day went back to the hotel to make some calls and finish planning the week.  After several phone conversations, we have our agenda for the week that includes seeing several coffee farms and a couple of wet mills by Wednesday and then heading to Linares for several days of working in the village.

San Pedro Sula is an area of Honduras focused on business and industry and acclimating to this section of the country has not been very hard. However, tomorrow we head to villages around Santa Barbara and Lago de Yajoa – different departments, different world.