The journey to Honda began at the Bogota bus terminal. Cost: 25,000 COPs. You can take a large, comfortable bus or a small and perhaps uncomfortable van, and of course the mid size busetas. The drawback with the bus is the movie, but your view will be spectacular. I travel overland because I can’t afford to fly, but even if I could, I would not want to miss the view. I love the changing scenery: from the eucalyptus standing in rows between the field and the stands of pine to the more tropical profusion as you descend, the bananas and bamboo, to the plane trees (or whatever they are) under which the long-eared, humped-back hot-weather cattle lie ruminant. From the highlands to the bluffs of the valley through which the Magdalena winds is a huge change. Between Bogota and Honda, after Villeta, you get sugar cane regions: the slopes covered with them, the long fronds spread like fans; the roadside shacks that sell panela (brown sugar in cakes) in all shapes and derivations; and perhaps because of the abundant water, a thriving truck-washing industry. Immediately after you cross the Magdalena you are at what works out to the roadside bus terminal of Honda, with all its parasites.
I doubt there are very expensive hotels in Honda, but the ones that look best are about three blocks behind the church that you see right away when you get off the bus. Not far from where the buses stop is one called Asturias Plaza where you can stay for 20.000 COPs per person. Not the grandest, but not the worst. Roaches? Yes, but unobtrusive chaps. A/C? Not a chance, but a really loud overhead fan. Pool and parking? Yes. And in that weather if you take a shower in tepid but abundant water, you don’t mind. My cell phone was stolen out of my room there.
Honda can be hot and muggy, probably usually is. It was a cloudy day, had rained, rained while we were there, so it was mildly sticky. But Honda is an ancient place and has been going pretty slow all of its life. It has a couple rivers that run through it feeding the murky Magdalena. It has a lot of fishing. I don’t know what to tell you about the fresh fish, but you look at the brown and troubled Magdalena, at the fishermen busy along the banks with nets, at the market by the bridge and make up your own mind. We went with the chicken.
Honda has a wonderful market down town which is obviously very, very old. It has columns and high ceilings and gives all the business of an outdoor market and dingy, market beer stands a sense of life that has been flowing on as endlessly as the river. This is a good place to understand a lot of the atmosphere of a Garcia Marquez novel, if you haven’t yet and would like to.
You climb the hill to get to the top of the town where the main church is and find it all old world. Wandering, you’ll see they still don’t have glass in the windows of the old houses. The point is to shut the sun out with wooden shutter when it is shining in, or to open the whole thing up for the air when it isn’t. The streets are narrow and cobbled and wind and slope. It is a very pleasant experience of old world Colombia. You can also find some newer neighborhoods and they are wonderful with shade, with flowering trees, with fruit trees in yards, and all the glories of hot weather. Life there is slung in hammocks and slouching in verandas, staring, smoking and sitting, sleeping with strewn dogs or wandering lethargically toward church.
Sultry and slow, but if you wander around and take a lot of showers or swim a lot, you’ll find it agreeably characteristic. By the way the natives react to strangers, I’d say the amount of tourists they get in Honda is pretty low. And from Honda you can go to Ibague, to Manizales, to La Dorada—another city of that torrid plain—and of course up to the Atlantic coast.
Unknowing 