We motor-sailed to Honduras (pronounced by a Honduran today as "On-DOO-rus") yesterday and are anchored in Puerto Escondido, on the mainland. There's nothing here except beautiful, dense, jungle covered hills and some mangroves. No houses, town, no other boats here. At the narrow entrance, there is a large rock, not unlike what you see in Maine, that sits just about in the middle. It's beautiful! The trip over from Belize was odd due to fluky winds and large northeast swells from an Atlantic storm.
Coming up on the Honduras coast was so exciting and pretty with the high mountains and bright green hillsides and then this milky, green water that (it became brown once we were near the anchorage) sort of glowed. I'm not sure if things are churned up from all the swells or if this is always the way the clarity is, but the bright green water with the dark rocks was really neat. I hear it's clear out at the Bay Islands but often cloudy near the mainland because of run-off.

The area is part of a national park; one of many in Honduras. There's a trail that you'd never know was there if not for the cruising guide. We took this today for a hike which was fantastic. Howler monkeys, colorful birds, land crabs and lush, large, tropical foliage. Even though the monkeys are small they have a rather loud, deep roar. We looked it up in Encarta and this is what it says "The hyoid bone??"that is, the bone supporting the tongue??"is enlarged and hollow and opens into a greatly dilated
voice box; together they provide two huge resonating chambers for the production of sound." The trail was pretty well maintained and went over to 2 different coves, the second one was a manned park station and had a ranger there who only spoke Spanish of course, but was so warm and friendly nonetheless. We communicated what we could, then he led us over to some hammocks to lay in and enjoy the view. He also cut the top off a yellow coconut for each of us so we could drink the coco water, saying "agua
de coco, es muy buen y natural!" or something like that. Shortly after, a couple of skiffs arrived with tourists from a town nearby and among them were 4 backpacker college kids from Mexico and also the tour guide. We really enjoyed talking with them. The backpackers all go to college in the US so speak perfect English without even an accent, but then they can switch over like nothing and speak Spanish which certainly helped us converse with the ranger. They were all sitting down to a lunch of the
ever-popular Central American meal for 3 meals a day, 7 days a week: Fried fish (usually grunt), fried plantains, stew beans and rice. We've even gotten cole slaw upon occasion. But we watched the ranger and he looked so excited to dig in to that, as if he hadn't had it in months! It cracks me up. Thank goodness for provisions! The day we finish them up will be pretty depressing.

We'd brought our lunch so we ate under the palms on the beach looking out over the water. We had a can of sardines and pondered over the question of just how many cans of sardines dad has eaten over his lifetime! I don't think I can count that high. We hiked back over the steep jungle hill and then over another flat trail that headed to a very long, beautiful beach that was filled with several different types of shells. I'm planning to fix up your shell arrangement mom, so I made some good progress
today. We plan to head back over to this beach tomorrow and walk the length of it- a few miles at least, to where there is supposedly a local garifuna settlement. If we like it we'll have lunch there; if not we'll have one in our pack and we'll eat on the beach, take a swim and head back. If the weather cooperates and these swells die down as they're supposed to, we'll likely head out the following day for La Ceiba which is 50 miles East from here on the mainland. It will be a long day since we'll
surely have some wind on the nose, but hopefully it'll be light enough to motor into. There's a marina there that we can pull into for a couple of weeks to do some inland travel. We've already got some white water rafting, waterfalls and zip line jungle tours on our list. Lots of cruisers have raved about traveling in Honduras and doing some of these things in beautiful jungle scenery at a fraction of what it would cost elsewhere.

Hopefully, our experience today will keep repeating itself. We loved the scenery, the warmth of the people we met and being able to hike around on land. We're also anticipating liking Roatan where the diving is supposedly superb. One thing is, it sure is fun to be seeing some of these places after so many years of wondering what they're like. And, Jon made another great load of bread today after years of us both wishing we could make decent, edible homemade bread. This new advice of using less yeast
than most recipes call for and then leaving the dough to rise for several hours to help develop the flavor seems to be part of the answer. We still have a ways to go, but at least we can actually enjoy eating it!