3.15.2005
Digging yucca with the locals
"Twenty years after I’d last set foot in San Juan de Tela, a palm-shaded village on the north coast of Honduras, I ran into a man who said he remembered me. He proved it with a question: Didn’t you go with Doña Matilda one morning and dig yucca? Yes, I said, stunned. One of the village women had let me help her dig the roots that are a local staple. The man had been a little boy then, but he remembered because that was something tourists never did. There’s a moral here: Get involved in the places you go. And travel sensitively — you never know whose memories you’ll end up in."
So observed Catherine Watson, former Travel Editor for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, reflecting on her favorite destinations from her 26 years of writing for the paper.
Photo by Catherine Watson.
