Honeymoon #4 - Part 2

We arrived at The Lodge at Pico Bonito and were greeted in the open lobby with a yummy, fruity, frilly drink of some sort. It was pink (mine was spiked with rum) and it was tasty.

Front entrance


Lobby

Opposite the front entrance


After we checked in and confirmed some of the things we had planned on doing, we were escorted to our room.

Our trip was basically a mirror image with Miami as the book ends and the Lodge as the prologue and epilogue of our vacation (and the island the main story, but that will be told later). We had the exact same room at both the beginning and end of our stay in Honduras, cabana #5.

You can barely see the number on the wall.


View from the walkway.


Hammock-did lots of reading here.


Our room.


Us-aren't we cute?

The day we got in we were tired from non-stop traveling so we took a nap before heading to dinner. Throughout our stay we snapped many photos of the property. It is very green and lush and very well landscaped and maintained.

Outside the restaurant. Now this is an outdoor patio!


One of the many beautiful wooden walkways.


Inside the restaurant.
The food was outstanding and the tamales were the best thing on the menu. We ate "sopa de caracol" (conch soup) and mixed up our taste buds with both American and Honduran cuisine.


The rock walkways to the room were surrounded by chocolate trees!


Part of the property that has paths to rooms, the pool and walking trails.


Pretty native flower.


Another pretty flower.

The morning of the 17th (we've yet to sleep in) we had to be in the lobby at 6:30am for our Wildlife Refuge tour where the Cuero and Salado rivers meet up with the Caribbean ocean. Getting up that early wasn't too big of a deal...the rain forest animals helped by greeting us with their peculiar sounds. One sounded like a tornado alarm.

Our tour guide was Jose (he was the one who used to pick pineapples) and he escorted us to the entrance of the refuge where we boarded a "train", or what the locals called a burra. In the past it was used by Dole to move produce to the river (where we were going on our tour), but when the plants got diseased, they had to abandon that area and take their crops elsewhere. Chiquita also used that area for bananas and they left healthy plants behind. We saw men filling their trucks with green bananas.
Dold left the train and the locals use it to travel the 9 kilometers to move people and groceries. When it breaks, and it does, they walk!

Our burra, and you can see the Pico Bonito mountains in the background.


Bumper sticker on the burra.

On the train ride to the 2 rivers, we saw a lot of poverty while traveling through the town. There were 55 homes along the 9 kilometers-we saw kids walking to school (in uniforms), a lot of trash (no trash service means you burn what you can and dump the rest), very thin stray dogs, and men swinging machetes in the fields.


The train tracks.


Homes along the tracks.


The horse is carrying milk in that silver container. We also saw men riding bikes with baskets full of milk shouting "leche" and women would come out of their homes and buy two containers of milk...the containers were reused Coke and Pepsi 1 and 2 liter bottles. Nothing was refrigerated and it was HOT out!


Another colorful home we saw.


Woman doing laundry along the river.

On the tour we saw a lot of birds and even got to see and "talk" to Howler Monkeys. We didn't see any manatees or crocodiles, but Jose was very informative and was able to spot things hiding in the mangroves along the shoreline.

Sign to the entrance of the wildlife refuge.


Me playing with my camera before get get on a boat.


The mountains and the river.


Mangroves-the roots are actually coming down from the top of the tree and grow down towards the water.


Howler monkeys. We could actually grunt at them and the males would grunt back. We heard 2 of them.



These guys were quite high in the trees!


Ringed Kingfisher-we saw lots of these.


I forget the name of this bird. I was so amazed by his coloring that Jonathan had to shout at me "get the shot!" and this is what I got! I work well under pressure.


It was a little creepy going down the different mouths of the river. It got quite shallow in some places but the men driving us around knew what they were doing.


Bats


Boat-billed somethings. They are usually nocturnal but we saw 4. Here you can see 2 of them.


Rainbow in the clouds.


This bird is drying out its wings. It just stood like this for a long time. We'd see them fly into the water to get food but if their feathers get weighted down with too much water, they cannot fly.


After the tour we took a jaunt up towards to Caribbean ocean. Not the prettiest here.


The train went into town to bring back groceries for those living near the refuge. You can see all the soda. Its cheaper than water, which is sad.

We met some kids after our tour while eating a snack that the Lodge provided for us. The children stared at us as we ate and Jonathan offered up his cookies to a little girl. She took them and split them amongst her sisters before eating any of it herself. I'm quite certain my kids would have asked for more cookies whereas this little girl made sure others ate before she did.

Jonathan enjoyed speaking Spanish with the kids and we learned that school is only paid for by the government through the 6th grade. If you want to go further than that, your family has to pay. The little kids go in the mornings for a few hours and the older kids go later in the day because they stay at home to help with siblings or work earlier in the day.

~~~

We got back to the lodge, ate lunch and headed to the pool.

The lodge wasn't very busy and we were the only ones there.

We both had massages in our room by a woman named Marta and she saw more of us than any masseuse has in the past. We had her again at the end of our trip and it wasn't too uncomfortable to just "drop trou" and get a massage. After that we read and headed to dinner again. Sounds rough so far, doesn't it?


The pictures behind us are of chocolate and coffee...two things paired together in nature, and 2 things I enjoy eating the most! I'm obviously quite the nature girl. I even had a steak that was coated in both coffee and chocolate.

Jonathan had arranged a candle lit dinner for us the second night, but it was raining so we got this setup in the bar away from everyone else. The servers we had at the Lodge were Marco, Howard, Orlando and one other guy whose name I can't remember right now. It'll come back to me....

Stay tuned for Part 3...our island adventure!