waterfall. La tigra bryon long walk to the cabins. bryon beatiful view. bryon The path to illumination.... bryon yo. karen More Images Get your own free travel journal triptosomewhere

4th March, 2006 // Honduras
OAKS

Friday, Feb.10
On to La Tigra, near Tegucigalpa for the OAKS meeting. OAKS stands for “Older And Knowing Souls,” but they let us play too. We were in Tegus for another medical appointment, and we decided to go to the meeting too, since we don’t do enough traveling here! Someone recently called us “site rats.
La Tigra is an old mining town, dating back to the late 1800s. It’s at a higher elevation and it was a little colder than we are used to, but it was refreshing. The walk up to the national park area took about two hours, all uphill. We passed an old building that used to be the US Embassy, back when the mine was pretty much the only U.S. interest in Honduras. We stayed at a tourist lodging house, which used to be a sort of barracks for the miners. One of the Honduran “watchyman” told us we were eating dinner in what used to be the morgue. I pressured them to tell us ghost stories, but it seemed there were none to tell. He also told us some of the history of the place, including how the mining company used to wrap the gold bars that came out of the mine in silver to avoid paying higher taxes or import tariffs to the US government for gold. Ahh, the resilience of corruption!
When we finally had the meeting, each member had to introduce themselves seemingly justify whay they felt they were qualified to be OAKS members.
Any way the whole trip was pretty cool. Except for a scary bug that flew into my eye during one of the hikes. I spent five minutes fishing the little bastard out.