Honduras Travels

ROATAN and COPAN RUINAS, Honduras

The woman on the plane studiously memorizes tropical fish. She pores over a picture of a blue tang, contemplates the features of the banded butterfly fish and wins respect by focusing on the mean-looking six-gill shark.

She is a diver, she says, and she wants to know what she is seeing under the sea.

She will see a lot, since the coral reef that surrounds Honduras’ Bay Islands is one of the largest and most diverse in the world, home to as many as 800 different types of fish.

As the plane circles the slim, green, 40-mile-long island of Roatan, the largest of the Bay Islands, the water is so clear it is possible to see the soft frills, the pinks and deep scarlets of the reef and the dark outlines of fish congregating around it. It feels a little like landing in an aquarium.

Roatan is at that delightful stage where enough people know about it that it has an adequate infrastructure — including a couple of luxury hotels — but its beaches and attractions are still blessedly undercrowded. That is, of course, unless you happen to arrive when one of the cruise ships is in port.

The combination of a major cruise terminal under construction, nonstop flights from a rapidly growing number of U.S. cities and a mini-real estate boom raises alarms that sleepy Roatan may soon become wide awake.

While most of Roatan’s visitors take diving lessons — the Bay Islands are said to be among the least expensive places in the world to learn to dive — I tour. My driver shows me his home — a stilt house in a colorful, beachfront village. It has a friendly, old-fashioned island feel. Yet I can’t help noticing that real estate signs line the winding roads. I ask about them.

“Here, I will show you,” he says, pulling into a complex called Parrot Tree Plantation. “They want to charge $250,000 for one of these houses,” he exclaims, pointing toward something that looks as though it belongs in Portofino.

“Well no,” I think to myself, having read the sign. “They want to charge $250,000 for a one-bedroom apartment in one of these houses.” The Americans are arriving, and the bargains are disappearing.

Resuming our tour, we come to an artificial cave littered with pirate decor at Gumbalimba Nature Park. There I learn that the Bay Islands were, successively, visited by Columbus in 1502, a hot bed of piracy, fought over by Spain and England and, for some time, a British colony. Even today, English is the predominant language in the islands, although Honduras is an otherwise Spanish-speaking country.

There is a lot to do here, in a leisurely way. Anthony’s Key, a favorite spot for divers, allows the more timid to swim with dolphins so friendly you could swear they were smiling at you. Coral Cay Marine and Nature Park allows even non-snorkelers to get a good view of undersea life.

West End Beach, a glorious strand of white sand, is lined with T-shirt shops and art galleries and bars. Nearby, West Bay Beach is the place to go to watch the sunset, enjoy a quieter pace and snorkel around a reef only 30 feet from shore.

A favorite stop is Sherman Archer’s iguana farm. Mr. Archer is one of the island’s “English” — people of British stock whose families have been in the Caribbean for centuries, and who speak a dialect that takes concentration to understand.

Some years ago, Mr. Archer decided to protect the island’s iguanas, which were rapidly disappearing into stew pots. He now has 2,700 of these mini-dinosaur-like creatures. They are tame, and thanks to Archer, they will not turn into iguana stew.

Not wanting just to visit Roatan, I added a couple of days to the trip to see the Mayan ruins in Copan. That involved a flight to San Pedro Sula, Honduras’ industrial city, followed by a scenic, winding, two-and-a-half-hour drive into the mountains.

Copan, with its superb collection of Mayan ruins from the second to the ninth centuries A.D., rests in a tranquil, green setting six miles from the Guatemalan border. Here unfolds the rich story of the Mayas, including that of 18 Rabbit (who ruled from A.D. 711-736), and whose handsome face, in full relief, gazes over the Great Plaza.

The side walls of the Ball Court — where games ended in human sacrifice — are decorated with carvings of macaws, sacred to the Mayas. The Hieroglyphic Stairway, built by a ruler named Smoke-Shell, records the lives and times of 15 Mayan kings.

Below: Lloyd Davidson, a native of Tennessee, displays a recovered bird at Macaw Mountain
I walked through two of the many tunnels dug during archaeological excavations, allowing me to get the inside story of a culture that built tall. Each king’s temple was covered by a new one, created by his successor.

The superb Museum of Mayan Sculpture at the entrance to the site includes a full-sized replica of the Rosalila Temple that was found virtually intact beneath one of the pyramids. The replica, covered with stucco and painted in brilliant colors, appears just as it would have in Mayan times. A smaller Museum of Archaeology in the nearby village of Copan Ruinas also contains artifacts from the site.

After visiting the ruins, I headed for Macaw Mountain. There, macaws sport vivid red, yellow and blue feathers.

Native Tennessean Lloyd Davidson, a biologist and businessman who has long lived in Honduras, has created this nature park filled with saved and rescued birds.

“All our birds have been recovered from captivity,” Mr. Davidson said. “People move to Honduras and buy birds and then decide they don’t want them. Some are found injured. Some were decorating restaurants. We bring them here — where they are back in their habitat.”

Today his collection includes more than 200 birds, representing 100 different species.

After meeting the birds, I stopped by the coffee roaster (you can’t miss the aroma) for a cappuccino made from coffee grown on Mr. Davidson’s farm. Elsewhere on the property, there is a full-service restaurant, an excellent shop and an old-fashioned swimming hole, complete with changing rooms.

A Honduran who spent most of her life in Kentucky, Flavia Cueva has also created a very special place in Copan Ruinas, with the opening of the eco-friendly, extremely comfortable Hacienda San Luca — her grandparents’ farm, lovingly restored, in the hills above town.

Guests can ride the hacienda’s horses up into the hills, do yoga in an open-air studio or walk back to the onsite Mayan ruin, Los Sapos. Later, it’s lovely to sit in a lawn chair, watching the sun set over the mountains of Guatemala, just across the border.

Ms. Cueva serves fresh food, made with typical Mayan ingredients. After dinner on the front porch, I wandered back to my room and found it flooded with light from dozens of candles — a romantic moment in an unforgettably romantic setting.

If you go: Honduras

Honduras Institute of Tourism, Box 140458, Coral Gables, FL 33114-0458; 1-800-410-9608; www.letsgohonduras.com.

By Melissa Burdick Harmon
Melissa Burdick Harmon has traveled to and written about all seven continents.