Luna Jaguar Spa Resort: A Funny Feeling

Of all the things I did in and around Copán Ruinas, Honduras with Stephanie during my trip there, the one I feel most compelled to comment on is our trip to the Luna Jaguar Spa Resort, an open-air spa and bathing facility made possible by the natural thermal water that pours out of a hillside not far from the town of Copán.

Stephanie’s guidebook, the Lonely Planet guide to Honduras and the Bay Islands, mentioned the hot springs as a possible side trip, and also mentioned that the site had been or was soon to be bought by an Italian or Italians who were thinking of developing it as a resort. That seems to have already come to pass, and I wanted to write this to add to the record that I’ve been to their facility and that I have my doubts about what they’ve done and how they’ve done it—to the point that I regret having supported the Luna Jaguar Spa Resort with the price of my admission. But the best way to approach this, I think, is to tell a story.

Hot water mixing with cold river water in the lower (undeveloped) portion of the hot springs at Copán. Picture by Stephanie.

Luna Jaguar, and the hot springs themselves, are pretty close to town. Stephanie and I rolled up late in the afternoon with our companion, who lives nearby. We’d been told we were going to the hot springs, and we were psyched. It had been a long day of walking around, and we needed a bath. Besides that, I’ve always loved geothermal baths of all kinds; one of the best things about going to college in the Pacific Northwest was the hours I logged at Bagby and Cougar hot springs, to say nothing of the anonymous warm, muddy holes in the ground my friends and I located using soak dot net.

The hot springs are on a nicely manicured piece of ground, with a parking lot that gently slopes off down towards the river. There’s a ticket shack, an outdoor cold shower, a place to change into your swimming clothes, and typical lush flowers and plant-life all around. It was a national holiday in El Salvador, so the lot was full of cars with Salvadorean plates. The mood felt festive but mellow, just right for a group bathing place. We went into the ladies’ area, changed, and came back out to meet our friend. He explained that there were a few concrete pools of different hotness on this side of the river, and that on the other side of the briskly flowing but wadeable stream, hot water poured down from the springs above, making a nice warm but not too warm area where it mixed with the cold river water rushing past. The spa part, he said, was up above, but we didn’t have tickets, so…

There was an awkward silence. Stef had heard that the upper part was amazing, and

A Lovely Day in Honduras

I used my snapshot camera as a video camera one day in Honduras—and uploaded my first YouTube movie. Giggles, dizzy angles, and drop-dead gorgeous plants on the porch of the main house at Finca el Cisne in Copán Ruinas. Thirty laid-back seconds of life. It was taken from a hammock.

On Blogging

As I was just telling Meg, I now have Google Analytics installed. So I can track this blog’s meteoric surge in popularity, of course.

Zuboff on ‘the Frozen Economy’

I’m digging Shoshana Zuboff’s column in Business Week (actually, to my surprise, I’m finding a lot of swell stuff to read in Business Week) about observing the economic panic of her neighbors in Maine.

She invokes the Great Depression and dramatically, but also bravely, she proposes opening our conversation about the economy way, way up:

"Discontinuous change will require a bold reexamination of our social contract and the rules of wealth creation in a global system. Thawing the frozen economy will entail reinvention of our public and private institutions, especially as they bear on health, education, finance, and energy."

She’s a former Harvard Business School professor and she has a book out called The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism. Anybody read it? I’m thinking of adding it to the Goodreads queue.

I’ve found myself thinking about the economy a lot as I walk around New York City these recent days. The last time I felt personally touched by the cold, clammy hands of macroeconomics was back in 2001 when I was living in Oregon, which was particularly hard-hit by the burst of the technology bubble, which primarily had the effect on me of making it tough to find my first real job.

This time I’m a little older and I feel more a part of the adult economic world. I’m not sure how current developments are going to affect my choices, or if they will; for now, the economic situation mostly occurs to me, like a mantra, as I walk around and look at all the commerce that’s so in-your-face here, as my eyes graze over a sunglasses-and-pashmina stand on the street, while I’m at the farmer’s market and the grocery store, while I’m noticing that the fall stuff has come into the clothing stores. ‘Hey,’ goes the mantra. ‘We’re in a recession!’

2001 was rough but it seems to have passed. I wonder how bad this one’s going to get. It seems to me that people are invoking changes in the whole world-system this time, in a way they weren’t back then. I wish, not for the first time, that I had been able to take some econ classes in college.