COROZAL, HONDURAS—Waiting for a bus again, I sit on a curb in the coastal Honduran city of La Ceiba. I spent 2 months living outside of this city in 2016, but this is a new bus for me, and like all the other new buses I have waited for, I have no idea what it will look like, when it will pass, and how easy it will be to flag down.
A woman fans herself in a small open-front stall behind me. She is entirely dedicated to the sale of dog food which she ladles out in scoops from a single large woven-plastic sac. No customers stop by. No bus appears on the horizon.
I scan each windshield that clunks down the road in the increasingly oppressive morning humidity. Young children hold basins on their heads full of little frozen bags of Coca Cola and pineapple juice. “Juice for sale,” they holler.
I know one windshield will eventually hold a placard reading “Corozal–Sambo Creek”—my ticket to the small Garifuna communities to the south of the city. Twenty minutes pass and my pineapple juice has melted enough for me to drink the final, sugary drop. Finally a white-washed school bus comes to a jolting stop. I board, sit down, and wait for the attendant to collect my fare.
I might as well take this bus ride as an opportunity to explain where I’m headed. You’ve likely never been to Honduras, nevermind heard of the Garifuna people. So, as the banana trees buzz by and the specter of the lush Pico Bonito mountain looms over this small two lane highway running along the coast, I’ll fill you in.
The Garifuna are not like the rest of Honduras. Where most Hondurans are some mix of peninsular Spanish and Central American indigenous blood, the Garifuna have a unique bloodline and a complicated history.
The Caribbean island of Saint Vincent was once populated by Arawak and Carib natives. As the British and French and Spanish and and Portuguese and Dutch sailed across the Atlantic, they fought over the islands, making claims for their own crowns and countries back on the Continent. St. Vincent experienced the worst of it; colonized by the French, the island was then ceded to the British, then ceded to the French, then ceded again to the British. During several hundred years of colonization and war, African slaves were brought to the island, where they mixed with indigenous populations.
Finally, under British rule at the end of the 1700s, the mixed Black Carib population revolted. In retalitation, the British forcibly moved 5,000 of them from their homes on Saint Vincent to the island of Roatán off the coast of Honduras nearly 3,000 kilometers from home.
Since being displaced to a foreign land, the Garifuna people have developed vibrant communities in coastal Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Belize, with a sizable community also living in New York City (mostly in the Bronx.) The community and culture continue to be representative of the mixing that occurred between African slaves and native Caribs on the island of St. Vincent. The language of the Garifuna, for example, is within the Arawak linguistic family—an anomaly in mainland Central America.
What this means, too, is that food and drink in Garifuna communities is not exactly part of the same gastronomical tradition as that of the rest of Honduras.
I head south on the bus to Corozal in search of two typical Garifuna beverages—the well-known guifiti and the more obscure kalahuala.
The white-washed bus pulls off of the paved highway onto a small dirt road. Small concrete houses with laundry hanging outside sit calmly beneath their dainty papaya tree umbrellas and the expansive shade of mango trees. The streets are largely empty as we cut perpendicularly from the highway to the beach where I get off the bus.
Without the manufactured wind of the moving bus, I understand why the dirt streets are vacant. As if in a kiln, my entire body begins to sprout droplets of tepid sweat. A baseball cap goes on to avoid the sharpness of the sun. I seek out the beach wishing for the scent of a natural bay breeze.
Between the town road and the beach is a solid row of houses with bars on the first floor that are divided only by small dirt alleys that run down to the sandy shore. I step through one and round the corner to face the waters of the Gulf of Honduras. The Central American country got its name from Christopher Colombus thanks to these waters. They are deep, honda, and dictate nearly every aspect of life in communities like Corozal. Here, the economy is based mostly on fishing and tourism. By chance, I combine the two as I fall into conversation with a local fisherman drinking some rum under an awning. He excitedly tells me his name. Fernando.
On shorelines around the world, the drunk fisherman gets a bad reputation. While the rest of us are sleeping, the fisherman is beginning his work day in the shallows of the silent morning hours. He spends your REM cycle in the inky darkness of a canoe a couple kilometers offshore. By the time you wake up, his catch is being hauled up the beach. Happy hour ensures. He is ready to wind down for the day, perhaps with a drink while you have your morning coffee. Of course, he is drunk at hours that seem inappropriate to you.
Yes, Fernando is drunk around 11AM. Yes, it strikes me that he often is drunk. His hands are thick and calloused from a life of hooks and nets, but his body is leathered and shrunk by a life of meals forgotten thanks to countless bottles of cheap rum. I ask him if he could point me in the direction of someone who makes or sells a drink called kalahuala. I have heard that the Garifuna make a kind of sweet drink by the name, but no one seems to know the details of what the drink is exactly. Their root-infused rum, guifiti, is much better known.
Fernando gets up from his reclined position and offers to walk me around the town. “Be careful or they will rob you here. If you are with me, no one will do a thing,” he tells me. He’s right—Honduras is not a safe place for an uninvited foreigner to wander around a small town, but I wonder what level of security this man can provide me. I consider my options and follow him into a small alley heading back into town.
As we wind through alleyways I would not have trekked alone, I see that most folks are lounging the heat away in hammocks hung in darkened doorways. Black pigs and street dogs slink around the dirt paths nosing at discarded wrappers before disappearing down other alleys.
Fernando calls at different houses and asks in Garifuna after kalahuala. Heads pop up from hammocks and look curiously at the drunk fisherman and the foreigner. It isn’t the season for making kalahuala, but some people freeze it as a year round refreshment. They suggest a restaurant that might sell the drink. After walking the length of town, we arrive at a small bar on the beach where they make and sell kalahuala.
For 90 lempiras, less than $4, the Garifuna women frying fish at the bar pull a bottle of half thawed orange ice out of an old freezer. The plastic bottle is re-used and its bottom has been forcibly distended by the expansion of the frozen drink. As it thaws in the blistering heat, the liquid becomes brownish orange and surprisingly opaque. I buy Fernando some fried plantains and chicken and we sit beneath a palm-frond awning with two small cups.
The cold kalahuala is a suitable antidote to the Honduran summer. It tastes like fermented tamarind juice. Like a light vineger, it has a signature fermented flavor, but also has a more robust and fruity body. The ladies at the barstand explain that they make it from a hard palm fruit which they shave down and soak in water to allow it to ferment. Others in town say that the recipe can include sugarcane juice.
Having achieved my goal, I thank Fernando and he wanders away back down the beach with a take-away box of plantains and chicken in hand. I sip my kalahuala and look out at the rows of canoes pulled up from their morning fishing excursion. This community has roots from somewhere across that water. This drink, however, might be Central American.
The women who sold me “Kalahuala” in Corozal said that it was made from a kind of palm fruit. It seems that this version of Kalahuala could be a kind of vino de coyol, or coyol palm wine. The fermentation of these palms is common throughout Central America, including in non-Garifuna communities in Honduras.
True calaguala, however, is a particular herb that is an accepted part of medicinal botany around the Caribbean region, Central America, and South America. It is the name of this herb that has given a voice to the beverage and other preparations. It is also not entirely standardized. The drink that the Corozal Garifuna write as kalahuala has also been rendered into text as kalawalla, calaguala, and kalaguala.
Specifically, calaguala refers to ferns of the genus Polypodium which are native to Central and South America. The ferns contain the saponin calagualine and other phenolic compounds that can be used as medicines by humans. Usually, the ferns are used topically to cure vitiligo or protect the skin from the sun. When consumed as a drink, the herb acts as an anti-inflammatory.
Yet, in the Garifuna context, it seems that this sweet, fermented kalahaula likely contains other ingredients. Some reports have noted that calaguala root is included in the famed medicinal rum of the Garifuna, called guifiti. The lightly fermented drink I purchased in both Corozal (and later in Sambo Creek,) however, has sweetness and fruitiness even if it contains a quantity of the medicinal root.
In this context, I would guess that kalahuala could contain the herb calaguala, but it is more generally a kind of general description for a local chicha which may use sugarcane or other sweet fruit to produce a lightly fermented refreshment. To make any confident conclusions would be irresponsible, but the Garifuna make a variety of drinks that the rest of Honduras does not make. Hiyu is a cassava juice, guifiti is a medicinal rum, and kalahuala is a drink I found thanks to my fisherman friend, Fernando.
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We pass the bottle around the fire, swigging happily and reveling in the burning sensation that the liquor gives the throat. Soon, we are laughing at the wind and our bodies warm up to the idea of sleeping on the side of this volcano. We look from the fiery peak of Fuego to the clear bottle glimmering red in our campfire.
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