Virginias finest?

This is a true story of last night that doesn´t really fit anywhere else on the blog.

After dinner, I was sat in the hostel when I was invited to join couple of Argentinian girls for a drink, they offered me their last shot of rum and we sat chatting for a bit. After a while one of them anounced that we should go and find ´the others´ so the three of us and an American set off on a tour of Copan visitin the usual cafes which were all closing up for the night.  We were just giving up when a small tuktuk loaded with police rolled past going at something less than walking pace and oviously no use for a high powered police chase.  Then a crowd of gringos appeared, wh oturned out to be the others we were searching for and who were on a mission to find cigarettes and I decided to tag along and see what happened. We headed downhill stopping at ever corner to ask directions from the families who were seemingly spending the night on their fron porches.  Always someone whould point further along the road and off we would go again.

 

Along the way I picked up bits of stories, someone had been forced to attend a cockfight earlier in the day, another guy has once crossed from Colombia to Panama by boat and discovered on arriving that the captain of the boat was a drug dealer and the customs officer for the Panamanian port he had landed in.

 

Small children and dogs wandered around in a quite frightening way, I think the children belonged to the families we passed but can´t be certain, the dogs were certainly strays and were ignored to the extent that they wandered in and out of shops and houses without any response.  One of the dogs attached itself to our group and a few people began to pet it, I stayed back, remembering the stories about rabies but it seemed calm.

 

Eventually we arrived at a small shop that didn´t sell cigarettes but did have two small children running it and an old man asleep on the pavement. An American wih a stragly beard touched the old mans shoulder and anounced that he seemed settled for the night as his trousers were undone.

 

Two policeman were stood outside one with a motorcycle the other with a huge bag of crisps.  After establishing that there were difinitely no cigarettes one of the Argentinians spoke to the police officer on the bike, he handed her his radio and shet talked into it for a bit then shook her head and handed it back and asked something else.  The policeman took off at high speed, after ten minutes he was back, then off he went in the other direction.

 

Only when they had exhausted the resources the police department in their search for tobacco did my companions give up and we all started to head back to the hostel.

As we passed a street light another dog awoke and snarled and the one following us which snarled back and chased the second dog up an alley. The bearded American standing nearby said "hey he´s a battler even with his throat ripped". In the street light I could see for the first time that the dog had a recent bite wounds on the neck.  I decided to leave before I found anything more unpleasant when there was a shout from a balcony where dreadlocked man sat smoking, the conversation I heard then went like this.

"Hola"

"Hola, tiennes cigarillos"¨

"You want cigarettes man"

"Yeah dude, hey where you from"

"West Virginia"

"I´m from Virginia Virginia, you know it"

"Yeah man its cool, here cigarettes" he threw down a few cigarettes which were picked off the floor and lit, a cigar also appeared from somewhere.

"Is that your room?"

"Yeah its our room"

"Is it in like a hostel?"

"It´s in like a kind of a hotel"

"Wild, hey man, you got anything else to smoke?"

"Maybe, you wanna go somewhere"

"Maybe, you wanna go somewhere?"

"Can you invite us in?"

"No they´re really sketchy"

 

It was at that point I decided it really was time to leave.