Baby, It's HOT Out Here!

Oh, my goodness gracious – I think I’ve finally discovered what true summer weather is like in La Ceiba, Honduras….

Generally, I leave by the middle of April in order to go north and start preparing gardens for our cool 60 day growing season but this year I made up my mind to stay for La Ceiba’s Carnival held the third weekend in May. I’ve witnessed Semana Santa a number of times but have always heard about the outrageousness of Carnival and want to experience a small taste of it for myself. But I digress…

I’ve become accustomed to the apartment ranging from 30C to 35C during the days but got curious about what the temperatures were out in the full sun. As you can see from the photos this is extremely hot!

It’s the heat. It envelopes your body, leaving you with a most unattractively slippery persona and completely numbs your brain; your wrists stick to the keyboard, the mouse pad gets soaked and the laptop attempts to overheat and shut itself down. You shower innumerable times during the day to get the stickies off, change and wring out clothing countless times and loose all sense of motivation for the basics of life like cooking, eating, moving or carrying on a conversation.

The heat is indescribable if you haven’t lived in the tropics and survived it yourself. The world feels like it has slowed to an incredibly marginal pace, the noise levels drop to barely noticeable levels, the concrete streets radiate BTU’s and you feel like you are living in your own personal, body encompassing sauna no matter how loose or marginal your clothing is.

Yet life continues, with children going to school, women cooking, doing laundry and housework, buses running their routes, taxi’s cruising by, pulperias taking deliveries and making sales, vendors walking the streets selling goods and construction workers mixing concrete in the street. Surviving the heat is new to me and I’m very fortunate to have an extremely basic life style but I am amazed by the resilience of the locals. Life simply goes on, with folks seeming to take it in stride, albeit much more slowly than usual.    

There’s a lot to be learned about developing a level of acceptance and patience with reality if you’re going to be living here! But in the meantime, I’m going to make another jug of icy lemonade; hmm, maybe it’s 5:00 somewhere and the beer is cold now…..