Valle De Angeles

About three miles from our homes in Las Cañadas lies a tourist-friendly town known as Valle de Angeles. The downtown area of Valle is fairly small (only a couple square miles or so), but it is very beautiful and has some decent stores and restaurants, and has become a favorite ‘hang-out’ location for the volunteers. We don’t go every day, perhaps just a few times a week at the most.

Getting to and from Valle is pretty fun in and of itself. I meet up with whoever is accompanying me right up the hill from my house, which is in intersection where mototaxis drive by frequently. These are essentially covered motorcycles with a passenger section in the back (which from what I have discerned, are apparently made in Asia and have become popular in parts of Central America). As with much of the things that happen on the roads in Honduras, mototaxis would definitely not be legal in the States. They don’t really have doors, and of course there are no seatbelts. If it came down to a collision between a bus and a mototaxi, the taxi wouldn’t fare much better than a squirrel getting run over by a pickup truck.

Needless to say mototaxis are a lot of fun. I really enjoy the open air, and the drivers often take some interesting and adventurous routes to the destination. I felt like it was all part of the adventure once when we turned a corner in a narrow road only to realize we were face-to-face with a bus. Guess which vehicle had to turn around when there wasn’t room for both? Also, can you guess which vehicle doesn’t drive in reverse? I derived a strange amount of pleasure out of the situation when I had to stick my leg out of the cab and help to push the taxi backwards.

Anyways, most of the restaurants in Valle are pretty good, and the extra security in the town makes the whole area more tourist friendly than other places in Honduras. Also, beer is cheap at any of the restaurants. It’s nice to take a little trip to Valle after a long day of classes, having a couple drinks at about $1 or $2 each. However, as cheap as things are, sometimes we have a hard time keeping in mind that we only get paid $3 a day from Peace Corps.

As for the stores, there are plenty of useless souvenirs to buy, though I am quite proud of the Honduran soccer jersey I now own. It was selling for what equates to about $7, but I was able to barter the cost down to $6. It wasn’t much, but I felt pretty accomplished when I finally got the store owner to concede to my offer (as she was really putting up a fight, and my Spanish was still quite limited). The shirt is pretty high-quality, and it would easily sell for about $30 in the states. Though I look like even more of a tourist sporting my Honduran colors, I wear the jersey with pride.

The one catch about Valle is that even though it is so close, it’s definitely not safe to make the three-mile trek homewards in the dark. Additionally, the mototaxis stop running around 7:30 at night at the latest. Thus, we can only really visit during the day, and afternoon visits are very condensed. On one of the nights a couple of my friends and I had trouble finding a taxi after hanging out in Valle for a couple hour. The driver that brought us there earlier had told us there would definitely be a taxi waiting for us, but this was not the case. We walked the street where the taxis usually drive by, but to no avail. It was surprisingly dark for 7:45PM and the streetlights were going out one by one. Creepy drunk people started coming out of the woodwork as we made our way to the entrance of town, where luckily we were able to find one last mototaxi filling up at the gas station. Though I’m sure things would have turned out fine either way, I’d rather not think about what might have happened if we didn’t find that taxi.