"Like a stranger on a foreign shore"

This is one way to spend 10 days in Honduras:

http://www.moon.com/destinations/honduras/discover-honduras/explore-honduras/the-10-day-best-honduras

...but if you always do only what the books recommend you're not going to get very far, and you're not going to see very much that hasn't been seen. for semana santa this year myself and a bunch of us decided to use Honduras' national vacation-time/semana santa to see Cayos Cochinos, as well as the beach town of Trujillo. These areas are areas infrequently visited by foreign tourists, most of whom instead fly or boat right past these locales on their way to Bay Islands. 

Map of Cayos Cochinos
Map of Trujillo

This was my second time out on Cayos, but this was the first time heading to there for something other than work. Most of the tropical beach pictures that you see in the columns of this blog are from Cayos.  For the two nights we basically had our own private caribbean island with access to snorkel equipment, and the ability to explore this crazy archipelago, located an hour off the shore of Honduras.  we did all this for around 1000 HNL, or $50 per person, but then again cayos is one of those places that is rarely mentioned in guide books. it maybe get's a paragraph in Moon Travel, and it's not terribly easy to get to either. the most common way is to know a fisherman, negociar him down, and then take an early morning hour long ride in their small boat before the ocean is too rough for travel, but that's what makes Honduras so great and so full of unrealized potential. if Honduras has this much to offer, what have i been missing in other parts of the world?

An abandoned lighthouse on Cayo Mayor. "Like a scene out of Lost"

The second half of our tripwe spent in Trujillo, which was just as great, if not better than cayos. got to see a lot of neat historical stuff, like the city's historic cematary and la Fortaleza de Santa Bárbara, which is one of the oldest defensive establishments in the America's and death-place of some random guy known as William Walker. we trekked up some waterfalls outside of town and I definitely sprained a few toes jumping from slippery rock to slippery rock barefoot, and of course we spent time relaxing on the beach when not celebrating a despidia, going out, or night swimming in the Atlantic. it was a pretty great way to spend the second part of my semana santa. 

View from the fort of Trujillo's beach (BR)

Work: When not backpacking through Honduras I occasionally find time to work on the project that has been consuming most of my time since arriving.  Currently, we are laying down the last few truckloads of soil for the field in order to crown the center of the field so that water flows to the sides rather than just sitting on the top of it. at the same time we're reworking the drainage plans, and there is some desire on the muni's end to install an irrigation system, pero vamos a ver. also, i've received word that the grant application for this project has been approved and we should be receiving funds in about two weeks. otherwise I'm also setting up a stakeholders meeting of businesses and residents around the park to discuss their ideas on how the park should be developed, which should happen sometime before June.