You all know Coons; he’s a man with a plan.
Our journey to Honduras was to start in Gracias where we planned to hike the tallest peak, Cerro Las Minas, in Celaque National Park. We stayed at a beautiful hostel just outside of town called El Jardin where we enjoyed some home-brewed beer and a nice dinner.
We walked to the local grocery store to purchase stuff for sandwiches, water, and extra batteries for our headlamps. It’s better to be safe than sorry, right?
We got a later start than we planned the next day; mostly because when hostels say breakfast starts at 7:30 what they really mean is the staff will arrive at 7:30, mop the floor, take your order, go purchase the food, cook it, and then serve it to you. So at 9:45am, we were on the trail heading up! We got to our campsite around noon, set up camp, dropped anything else we didn’t need for the summit push, ate some lunch, and headed back out on the trail. The second section was tough with switchbacks thinly disguising a steep elevation climb and multiple downhills giving away our hard-fought elevation.
The third section was enclosed by gigantic trees in a very well marked path and a more reasonable climb with a final tough 30-minute push to the summit. Arriving around 3:30pm, we only lasted 15 minutes at the top because it would be getting dark soon and we wanted to take advantage of as much daylight as we could.
However, night fell quickly on the other side of the mountain (helped in part by the newly formed rain clouds) and before we knew it it was time to bust out the headlamps — only Kourtney’s wasn’t working despite the brand new pack of Duracells. So with the iPhone-turned-flashlight in one hand and a hiking pole in her other, we finished the last two hours of the nine-hour hike back to our campsite in the dark, listening to the animated sounds of the jungle at night. Please, Mr. Puma, stay far, far away!
From Gracias, we planned to stop in La Ceiba for one night and take the morning ferry to Utila to start three days of scuba diving. Unfortunately, when Coons woke up the next morning, he recognized the familiar feeling heralding the arrival of an ear infection; something that would make our plans for diving difficult, to say the least. So we asked to stay at our hostel another night and went straight to the clinic. The doctor confirmed his infection and gave him drops, pills, and steroids to speed up the healing process because of our intention to dive ASAP. For those of you counting at home, that’s two months and two trips to the clinic. On the bright side, Coons’ medical Spanish is improving with each passing month. We’re now taking submissions for what December’s trip to the clinic will be…
(#) Blessed with another couple of days in La Ceiba to fight off the infection, we started researching what else there was to do. Of course, the #1 recommended activity… white water rafting! Kourtney said “no” immediately and finally agreed to consult Kristian (her sister and our go-to travel nurse) before shutting the idea down completely. With a thumbs up Snap-Chat emoji and a recommendation for earplugs, she agreed we were good to go! Not one to let a silly infection deter him, Coons dragged Kourtney to the other side of town to Walmart to purchase premium Speedo earplugs (and 36 Nature Valley granola bars!!) and we booked the trip for the next day. The earplugs worked great and we had a blast spending the morning bouncing off rocks and jumping off cliffs into the water.
We (finally) made it to Utila a couple days later to dive and obtain our PADI Advanced Open Water Certification. We ended up finding a great deal with Gunter’s Ecomarine Dive Center that included four nights of free accommodation instead of the standard three! As part of the package, after you finish your certification, you get two free fun dives. We completed seven dives over three days including a navigation, buoyancy, deep water (over 100 feet), a night dive, and a shipwreck dive.
Yup, that’s us going inside of the Halliburton ship that’s been sitting at the bottom of the ocean since 1998!
We really felt like family at Ecomarine. It was by far the highlight of Honduras for us! The diving in Utila is beautiful and the staff was just wonderful. We hung out with Carol, Gustavo, and Chris for a Sunday night movie on the dock and shot some pool at the Skid Row bar across the street. We highly recommend staying with them in you ever find yourself wanting to dive for cheap in Honduras.
When our time was up, we planned to take the ferry back to La Ceiba the next morning and head straight to Leon, Nicaragua on a 15-hour shuttle for some volcano boarding. Shuttle and hostel booked for the next day, we settled in at the bar to relax and enjoy our last night on the island. Later that night, the woman we booked the shuttle with, Natasha, found us and informed us that the shuttle that “runs every day to Leon” wasn’t working (?) and the other shuttle company left only on Mondays and Fridays — it was a Tuesday. Ok, new plan, let’s just take the ferry and then try and get somewhere close to Leon?
The next day we took the ferry and found a bus to take us to Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, and the closest point to Nicaragua we could get on a long travel day (7:00am – 9:30pm). As mentioned earlier, Coons likes to plan things. He had been trying for weeks to find a guide to take us up Cerro Mogoton, the highest peak in Nicaragua. While most other hikes we could do without a guide, this was one we couldn’t tackle on our own. Aside from the trailhead being very remote and impossible to find, the peak is on the border with Honduras and was filled with landmines during a not-too-distant conflict. Fun! Mid-way through our journey to Tegucigalpa, we finally heard back from a local trekking company in Nicaragua with the number of a local named Ramon, a Spanish-only-speaking guide to call who will be happy to bring us to the top. From the corner of a busy bus station, Coons worked his magic on the Google Pixel, and we had a plan to climb it in two days. Plans to go to Leon were scrapped, hostels were canceled, and a new plan was concocted.
Even though none of our original plans worked out, we still got to do the things we love: travel the country, hike, and dive! While these constant changes can be frustrating, our flexibility and hiking-heavy itinerary give us a chance to get off the gringo trail and experience the country the way the locals do which is an important part of this trip for us.
We’d like to thank Booking.com for their flexibility and cancellation policy 😉
Kent
You both are becoming quite the explorers. Being able to read about your adventures are not only exciting but it’s in some ways like being there. Your writing and pictures lend a hand. Where do you suppose you’ll be on the 16th? What’s the time difference? You are having the time of your lives I’m sure. Be safe and get a new head lamp 😊. Love you.