SHARON BLOYD-PESHKIN writes:
I'm sitting on a bench, breathing the exhaust fumes from an air-conditioned van idling in the parking lot next to me.
Today, several cruise ships docked here at Roatan. All morning, vans full of westerners on all-inclusive tours have been descending on Marble Hill Farm, where we’re staying. They paw through the organic jams, snap photos of the view, deplete the bathrooms of toilet paper, then board their vans and disappear.
It’s pretty easy to see the down sides of their type of travel. These whistle-stop tours leave visitors with cheap souvenirs and the ability to boast that they’ve been to Honduras, but almost no exposure to the country and its culture.
It’s harder to admit how little we can see of another country in our own attempt to strike a balance between comfort and authenticity. Because the land is so beautiful and the rivers are so irresistible, we spend part of a day whitewater rafting, but we choose guides from western nations because we have American notions of safety. We grow weary of rice and beans, and seek out pizza. Even when we ride with Honduran taxi drivers and hike with Honduran guides, our primitive Spanish limits the depth of our conversations. (Even if we were all fluent, we could only go so deep on one afternoon.)
We would have to stay much longer and work much harder to get much deeper. We skim the surface, barely discerning what lies beneath.