Feeling good about La Campa

Amanda and I just returned from a refreshing, yet exhausting trip to visit Michael, one of our SALTers, in La Campa. Refreshing, because La Campa has to be one of the quaintest and most relaxing towns in Honduras. Exhausting because it required two 10-hour travel days (2 hours of which were spent in the back of a truck on very bumpy roads) of traveling to get there and back to Tegucigalpa.

It was worth it, though, to see Michael, and to participate in a good, old-fashioned campo cow slaughtering.

The festivities started on Sunday at 4 a.m. with a deep jab to the jugular. I missed that part, thankfully, but was present and fully awake for the subsequent skinning, gutting, dismembering, and sale of the beast. It was pretty amazing. At 4:04 a.m. it looked like this.


Here he was at 5.

And at 12:30 p.m.

(That's him in the bowl in the middle of the table.)

We ordered two pounds of rump roast, but they grilled it up for us so it was kind of chewy, but very fresh and local.

Otherwise, we enjoyed a morning in Gracias, Lempira; two hikes through canyon country; two nights at our favorite bed and breakfast; and some good discussion with a prominent member of the community about local-government corruption. For an interesting blog about that, check out Michael's blog entry.

Anyway, here are some pictures from our time in La Campa.