Lago de Yojoa, Honduras

June 25: Utila --> D&D Brewery at Lago de Yojoa, Honduras
We left Utila bright and early Monday morning on the 6:20am ferry. We arrived at the bus station at 7:30, and discovered, to our dismay, that the next bus was at 10:30. After several hours of waiting, we finally got on the bus and arrived back in San Pedro Sula, where we promptly hopped on the 'El Mochito,' one of the converted school buses that take you where you want to go. Along the way, we'd stop to pick people up (several times we thought that we couldn't possibly fit more people on the bus, but then we did). After about two hours of climing through the rainforest, we made it to our destination, D&D Brewery. It's one of the two microbreweries in Honduras (not surprisingly, Phil found it). The hostel is basically a bunch of bungalows dispersed through the rainforest, with a pool and a nice covered patio with hammocks, etc where they serve food. They brew their beer in a giant metal shipping crate at the top of the hill, and they had about 6 or 7 beers on tap. And, since you need purified water to brew beer, the whole place had purified water coming out of the taps, which was just amazing. We spent our first evening under the patio, eating some delicious ceviche, and watching a giant thunderstorm roll in. After about 5 minutes of enjoying the rain, the power went out and it got really windy, so we decided to run inside to avoid getting soaked. We spent some time chatting with the owner and trying all his different beers, and then headed back to the room for a hot, pure water shower, which was glorious.

June 26: Bird watching and fish eating

Malcolm and Freddy

Green Heron

This morning we got up bright and early to go bird watching on the lake. Our guide was Malcolm (plus Freddy, our oarsman), a super hippie British expat, who apparently has not lived anywhere longer than 4 months since he was twenty-something, until he got here (he's been living here for 4 years now). After a helicopter flew over the lake, he said my favorite quote of the day, "Helicopters are only good because sometimes they crash and kill everybody inside". Anyway, his hippiness aside, he was a wonderful bird guide and showed us lots of amazing birds (he counted 48, and Phil has convinced me not to type the list here...) I will, however, list some of the highlights, because we saw two species of Toucans! (the Keel-billed Toucan and the Collared Aracari). We also saw several species of Kingfishers and Herons (including one that's rather hard to spot, the Pinnated Bittern.) We also saw some bats, an Iguana and a Basilisk. After we got back, we arranged for Freddy's family to go catch us some fish from the lake, and his mom to cook it for us for dinner around 4. We headed back to D&D, and stopped along the way at a little shack for probably our first taste of 'real' Honduran food. We had some pupusas cencillias, which is basically just a tortilla, stuffed with cheese and topped with pickled cabbage and pickled onions. We also had some tacos, which were essentially deep fried taquitos topped with cheese, lettuce and sauce, simply amazing. Then we had a nap, and headed over to Freddy's for dinner. The fish was simply divine, caught only a few hours earlier and fried, accompanied by plantains, beans, salsa and tortillias. mmmm. Afterward, I even got to feed the fish skeletons to their doggies. Then we headed home for some beers and some sleep.

June 27: Adventures in the rainforest to El Cacao waterfalls

This morning we decided to follow Josh, one of the traveler-turned-tourguides on one of his new adventures to El Cacao waterfalls. He has only taken about ten groups on this hike, which he discovered by asking children on their way home how to get to the El Cacao waterfall. We began by taking El Mochito about 20 minutes up the road, then disembarked and started hiking up a big hill. After about an hour, we started going down, and started going through a few small villages, all which have just gotten power in the past five years. We hiked and hiked through villages and the rainforest and coffee plantations till we got to the river. We then proceeded to hike through the river to the top of the waterfall. We snapped a few pictures there, and then backtracked a bit, and climbed down to the bottom. A big storm had apparently just come through, because usually the pool at the bottom of the waterfall was chest deep, but now it was only about ankle deep. We waded around for a bit, snapped a few pictures and headed over to a local woman's house, where she had a delicious lunch of stewed pork, beans and rice and colesaw ready for us. Then we hiked a pretty easy hike for about 30 mins till we got to the main road. We had barely made it under a shelter when it started pouring rain, so we spent the next 20 minutes waiting for the bus watching the rain come down in sheets. The bus ride back was about an hour long, a good chunk of which I spent trying to explain in broken Spanish to an older, presumably drunken Honduran man why I was 24 and still did not have any children. On return to D&D, we took nice long showers, read a bit, and then headed down to get some dinner.

June 28: Pulapanzak waterfall and river tubing

Today we headed to Pulapanzak, a 43m tall waterfall, and one of the most well known waterfalls in Honduras. We took the El Mochito for about 30 minutes, got off and walked about 20 minutes to the falls. At the falls, you pay a guide to take you underneath the waterfall, which is a ridiculously amazing experience. Unfortunately, we were accompanied by a missionary group from Florida composed mostly of teenage girls who kept screaming and praying that they would come out alive...sigh...Anyway, first you walk down a pathway to the base of the waterfall. As you start approaching it, the mist starts becoming heavier and heavier. Then you leave your shoes, and jump into a giant pool. Then you get out and start climbing over rocks toward the waterfall. At one point you get into water about waist deep, grab the hand of the person in front of you, close your eyes, and breathe through your mouth as you go under the water fall. Then you have to climb over more rocks, opening your eyes every once in a while and hoping that your contacts don't fall out before you climb into a rather small dark cave. Since we were first, we had to wait for the 15 other people to squish in there before we were let out. Then we made our way back to the large pool, and jumped in a few more times before we left. We hung out in the river for a few minutes, and then headed to Peña Blanca, to grab some money from the ATM. Apparently we cleaned out the machine, because our friends after us were not able to withdraw any money (oops). Then I grabbed some delicious fried chicken, and we headed back to D&D for some lunch and some river tubing. There is a small river behind D&D that is extremely cold, and eventually empties into the lake. We grabbed some tubes and went for another Josh-adventure. It took about 45 minutes to get to the lake, and we had to get off our tubes twice, once to go under a tree (we threw our tubes over, and went under the tree underwater) and a second time to go around a bunch of fallen trees. Once we finally got to the lake, which was ridiculously warm, we swam across a small section of it to get to the limestone cliffs on the other side, where a few of us climbed up and jumped down. Then we swam back across, and walked back to D&D for a shower. For dinner, we went back to our favorite pupusa stand, then back for some beers and one more night of thunderstorms before we left the next day.