Honduras Travel

Residents from local Trujillo, Honduras communities, along with politicians and business leaders joined recently for groundbreaking on a new 50,000-square-foot mainland cruise port, the first of its kind in Honduras.

The facility should help answer the call from cruise passengers who love the Caribbean but yearn for new ports to visit. That need leaves Honduras eager to build the next new cruise port.

“This project has a lot of significance for the region,” said Honduras President Porfirio Lobo Sosa. “The cruise port will be crucial for the development of Trujillo and its surrounding neighborhoods.”

For somewhere offering superb value, still relatively undiscovered, laid back and off the beaten track. Honduras provides a warm welcome from the local people and dramatic, natural scenery.

Three hours from the capital Tegucigalpa, La Esperanza is populated mainly by the indigenous Lenca people, and the town is best known for its traditional Sunday market. The local area is blessed with magnificent scenery and is fantastic for hiking/cycling. There are natural hot springs nearby where you can bathe and will make a change from the cold showers you will have at the home-stays.

Now that it is officially winter season here I have a little more time to do some in-country traveling finally. Recently, a friend and I got the roadtrip itch so we went to the North Coast of Honduras, somewhere I hadn’t been yet. It is truly an amazing part of this country and is vastly different from the farmtown where I live.

It takes a while to sink in.

A few hours pass, and it still feels surreal, as if you’re merely house-sitting, borrowing someone else’s wealthy lifestyle, waiting for her to return and relieve you of your time in paradise.

But after a day or so, the fantasy becomes reality: You’re on an island all your own, the days and nights and sand and sea are all yours, and there’s no one to feel beholden to — not even the family of pelicans guarding the wooden dock in the turquoise water.

On March 19, 1977, I wrote one line in the journal I was keeping on my first trip out of the United States. “Some day, I’m going to live here.” I was in Honduras, Central America. It was a rather rash prediction, you might say, since I had just been through 2 months of homesickness, stomach sickness, faith sickness, just a lot of sickness sickness. But 26 years later, June 26, 2003, the dream came true when I moved for good to a little mountain village in the middle of nowhere called, of all things, Las Vegas, but as different from the “Sin City” in Nevada as stars are from oven lights. By then I had become Miguel, Hermano Miguel to most, my only desire to live and pray with the poor.

I had never heard of Guateque Honduras, and wasn’t sure it really existed. I began my search after becoming a Plan International child sponsor. After close to a year of correspondence, I decided to see the child that was receiving my contributions.

My child’s name was Jose Alberto – I won’t say his last name for privacy – and I wanted to see him in person. So, finding out just exactly where he was supposed to be, we embarked on a short journey to find him.