PICA PICA

Javi and I recently got ourselves a nasty case of poison ivy, or “pica-pica” (itch-itch) as the Hondurans call it. At the moment we are both quite miserable, constantly dosing ourselves in calamine lotion and staying heavily sedated on Benadryl.

I thought poison ivy was only a bane of the Northern Hemisphere, but it is alive and well here in the tropics.

However, HOW we came into contact with the vile plant was WELL worth our current suffering. We saw monkeys, in the wild, and got to talk with them! (well, communicate)

We traveled to Danli (near the Nicaraguan border) this past weekend to spend time with some friends who live there. Annie and Luke set us up on a fabulous trip to head into the mountains with a friend of theirs, a man who owns a coffee farm and a 100+ year old hacienda. We watched as he washed his coffee and we got to ask him all kinds of questions about growing coffee. He would later go on to sell his coffee that day for about $120 for two hundred pound sacks, still wet. ($.60 a pound) It sure does get a lot more expensive by the time you buy a cup at starbucks! Food for thought when you read one of their "fair trade" brochures they hand out at their coffee shops.

Anyway, Rene (the owner) led us through the mountain side (literally straight up the side) to a spot where we could find monkeys. He left to go back to work and we stayed and had a great time interacting with the monkeys.

I took a video as Javi was “talking” with one of the bigger males:




On the way down we got a bit off track and had to end up climbing down the mountain side through vines and jungle thicket. And that is where we found pica-pica, I’m sure.