Honduras Travel

Honduras….what?

When booking a trip make sure you ask your travel agent for the best option and deals; always try something new, go somewhere exotic. These options don’t have to be expensive at all, you can travel and explore most of Central America on a budget.

Go beyond your expectation since Central America consists of 5 countries with the most fabulous and diverse scenery in such a small region.

Getting started. Where to go?

Honduras will be my very first option, since it was here where Christopher Columbus first discovered. Home of the Mayan, one of the most brilliant and powerful cultures known to the Mesoamerican period.

I have a bit of a, not-so-secret, obsession with monkeys. Not the kind that throw their crap at you at the zoo, but the small cuddly ones that you could slap a diaper on and tote around like a hairy child. I was on an uncontrollable high when I found out that my dream of holding a monkey was going to come true at Gumbalimba Park in Roatan, Honduras. Seriously…it was as if someone had just told me that I won a brand new car…and gas for a year…and free maintenance. This was going to be way better than the twelve sea monkey farms that I tended to as a child. Yes, this obsession runs deep.

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.”

Honduras is hardly well-known as a tourist magnet, but the Central American country is making an effort to change that. Roatan, an island paradise in the western Caribbean, is Honduras’ claim to tourist recognition.

Already as one arrives at the airport in Coxen Hole, Roatan’s main town, the visitor knows what the island is about: diving, snorkelling, swimming. The plane gets so close to the water’s surface that passengers have the impression that the machine is about to fall into the turquoise sea.

The island of Roatan is some 60 kilometres long, and it has three wooded peaks that rise up to 230 metres above sea level.

I went to Honduras because I wanted adventure, an opportunity to learn more about myself and the world and, most importantly, a year without winter. The bustle and cold of Toronto wasn’t for me anymore.

I’d been there before, a year prior, for a few months of volunteer teaching. Its beauty and its people captured me. I was determined to return to Latin America as as soon as I could.

Tripoli is a little pueblo in the municipio (municipality, which is kind of like a county in the US) of Masica in the departmento (state or province) of Atlántida. We were curious how Tripoli got its name and what the people thought about what was going on in Tripoli, Libya, if they were aware of it.

The 2001 Honduras census lists Tripoli as having a population of 799 living in 180 homes. As the map shows, Tripoli is in a low area, and we found out later that in the early years (1920s – 1930s), parts of it were actually under water and much of it was planted in rice fields. Now much of the area is used for raising cattle and cultivating corn, as well other crops. A current resident estimates that the population may now be about 1,000.