Hola! This little ditty is to describe my first hitchhiking adventure of my life. I know, especially as a college kid, a lot of my peers who have travelled around the U.S. as hitchhikers, and I've read On The Road, by Jack Kerouac, so it's always seemed one of those alluring, dangerous activities that both draw you and scare you at the same time. But it's those activities that often thrill us the most (like climbing a mountain, riding a roller coaster, or watching Javier cut a parasitic worm out of a little girl's head). But in the States, hitchhiking is not exactly condoned, unless you're my Grandma, who seemed content to scare the begeebers out of my brother and I when we were young by picking up the sketchiest-looking hitchers she could apparently find on the highway.
Nevertheless, I've always wanted to hitchhike, longing for that weightless feeling that a gypsy must feel, drifting from place to place like a leaf in a stream. So in Honduras, it's, like, status quo to hitch rides all over the place. Thus, on one occasion when I spent the day at the school in San Marcos, I got my first opportunity. We never get rides from the ranch to San Marcos for some unknown reason, but the school workers are dropped off every day at the highway by Las Palmas at the bus stop. Unfortunately, the buses don't start running for about two hours after we are dropped off at the stop, and I have yet to have a busito stop to pick me up. So, it is usually up to us to get ourselves to San Marcos, sans Holman and our faithful Land Cruiser.
Shanna, Seth, and I set out one morning on foot along the road, hoping that a pickup truck (the ideal hitchhiking vehicle) would cruise along and pick us up. However, despite our despondent looks as we held out our arms to signal a ride, no one stopped. After more walking, more "courtesy honks" by passers-by, and plenty of smiles from Hondurans in the backs of trucks, a lone fruit truck slowed to a stop ahead of us and we ran to it. We ran to it, yes, only to find out that it had stopped to back into a little dirt road off the highway, we just happened to be there at the right spot at the right moment. Grrr. So we continued on.
About five minutes later, this same fruit truck pulls alongside us and the driver shouts something to which Seth replies in Spanish. Apparently, they're going to San Marcos, so we hop in the back. And by "hop in the back", I mean climbing 12 feet or so up the wooden rear of the truck and into the bed with about seven other Honduran teenagers. They are all perched high atop the rickety sides of the truck, and I join them, many feet above the bed of the truck. Everyone is eating mangoes as the truck speeds off, and it is curious to listen to all of the wild cries that the teens shout to pedestrians as we rocket down the road. At one point we stop and all the teens shout as fast and as loud as they possibly can to some young gal who apparently was going to come work with them, but changed her mind as she reached the highway, turning and walking hastily back the way she came. We started driving again, and I watched the girl ahead of me carefully for cues when to duck my head as we drove under precariously low-hangin, butt-huge tree branches. She apparently had them all memorized, and I was glad that she was sitting in front of me!
Eventually, we reached San Marcos safely and Shanna, who had ridden in the cab of the truck to Seth's and my dismay, emerged unscathed and all right, and we continued walking to the school. We shouted "Adios" and "muchas gracias" to the driver and they sped off again. My arms were pretty tired from holding myself on to the knife's-edge thin wall of the truck, but I was all jacked-up to know that I'd successfully hitched a ride in the back of a fruit truck in Honduras. It was thrilling all right!! Yet another anecdote for the annals of "TIH."
-- Dylan Wann
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