It stopped raining as we left Jungle River Lodge to wait for the bus and started up again just as we approached the entrance to D&D Brewery in Los Naranjos so thanks for that, weather gods. Remind me to sacrifice a goat or two for you later on. Lago de Yojoa and the area around it is firmly on the Honduras Must-Do list. An American brewer set up home in the village of Los Naranjos, opened a brewery then proceeded to promote the absolute fuck out of it.

There’s other accommodation around but most backpackers just head straight for D&D and I can absolutely see why. Our room was lovely, the shower was glorious and hot, it was nice to have a few craft beers bursting with flavour, it’s generally a well set up place. Also, there is a wealth of shit to do and they make it easy for you to explore all of it, either with a guide, or they just tell you exactly how to get there.

So. Parque Nacional Cerro Azul Meambár. We decided not to break ourselves in gently and instead headed here to spend four hours dragging ourselves around a jungle trail in the Honduras heat. It was a piece of piss to get there, just a couple of short buses and a mototaxi which seems to be what they call tuk tuks here. We were deposited at the visitor centre, we paid our entrance fee, then off we fucked.

There are a few trails to choose from but we’re not going to come all this way and not at least attempt the long one. It’s not even that long, this time last year we wouldn’t have thought twice about hauling ourselves and a 15 kilogram backpack around a trail three times the length of this one, but now we’re all like, “If we’re not enjoying it we can just turn back.” I definitely have a bit of extra weight to inflict on my poor knees these days too. I’m 82 kilograms. How did that even happen? I know I’m all tits and cheesecake but fucking hell, that crept up.

So the first 500 metres are a breeze, then the trail splits and we headed left up the Sendero Senai. You know how far you’ve gone because they insist on telling you every 500 metres. This is a blessing and a curse because guys, once the trail splits it starts going up. And up. And up. It’s particularly fucking brutal, especially with the heat and the humidity, and how the fuck haven’t we done another half a kilometre already? Where’s my damn trail marker?

They’re kind enough to provide you with regular benches for you to vocally die on and there are some cracking views to be had over Lago de Yojoa so it’s not the ninth circle of Hell or anything. We laboriously hauled ourselves up until we were two kilometres in and a sign announced that we were now at the highest point on the trail. Oh. Good. Well that’s that then, and it did indeed turn into an incredibly pleasant stroll after that. Plenty of down, still a few up up up sections, even some flat bits. The trail gods were spoiling us.

The trail is a lot less maintained the closer to the top you get, we found ourselves negotiating holes left by trees that had fallen, then we’d have to clamber over said felled tree on the switchback. It was nothing horrific though, no one’s life flashed before their eyes or anything. We got to a lovely waterfall which we weren’t allowed to swim in because it was a drinking water supply or something so that was a shame because I’d quite happily have sprawled in that for a while.

There was another stunner of a panoramic viewpoint then not long after that we stumbled back to the visitors centre, three hours and 45 minutes after we left. We were told the trail took four hours, we assumed it would take longer on account of the fact we utilised pretty much every bench we found so the fact we shaved fifteen minutes off the time was definite cause for high fiving. I WhatsApped the mototaxi driver that brought us here to come and fetch us and we headed back into Los Naranjos.

The Cuevas de Taulabé are… cavey… look, they’re fine, they’re really nice caves and I’d say if they were just around the corner from wherever you’re staying then they’re absolutely worth putting in your eyeholes for the fifteen minutes it takes you to walk to the end and back again. It literally took us three times as long to get there as it took to look at them, then we had to get back. There are some nice formations though, but they’ve insisted on lighting them up with coloured lights rather than showing them off in all their glory with a simple white illumination.

Pulhapanzak Waterfall though, now that was a highlight and only one bus ride away rather than the three bus mission we endured to get to the caves. Once you’re deposited on the main road you’ve got a dusty, fifteen minute walk to get to the entrance where you pay your fee and you’re free to submerge your entire being in fresh, cold water. I say cold, it’s not bastard freezing or anything, your nipples aren’t going to be visible from space but you will incur a couple of involuntary monkey noises when it gets to your belly button.

Also, there’s a restaurant here so you really can just spend the whole day if you like, and there are changing rooms so you don’t have to head home looking like you pissed yourself which is definitely a bonus. So you can’t swim in the plunge pool but the river that flows into the waterfall is safe for swimming and it gets busy at weekends with families but that’s fine. There’s no risk of being swept to your death, they’ve cordoned it off and if anyone gets too close they’re loudly shamed by the lifeguard who lists “Can whistle loudly enough to be heard on Mars” at the top of his CV. You can also admire the waterfall from afar from two different view points, one from the middle and one from the bottom, but that’s as close as you’re getting, sunshine. Unless…

You can pay extra to be guided behind the waterfall itself. Yes please! Tarrant wasn’t keen at all, she’d slipped a few times on the rocks at Rio Cangrejal and being hurled from a raft does tend to bugger up your confidence somewhat. Then I read a blog that built it up into this big, scary once in a lifetime adrenaline rush with questionable safety standards so she was like, fuck no! I was still keen though and it was absolutely nothing like what the blog said it was.

It was exhilarating and incredible and I regret exactly zero but I would consider it safe. You pay your money, get kitted up in a life jacket and helmet then you head down to the bottom viewpoint where the guide unlocks a big, rusty gate which looks like it has “Apply tetanus to tourists” right at the top of its to-do list. You can pop to the forbidden viewing platform from here, a viewpoint which looks like it might have once been open to the public but no longer, then you slide into a small pool and start making your way over good, grippy rocks with plenty of hand holes.

So far so good. The spray is violently battering you in the face at this point but that’s nothing compared to what comes next. We were instructed to keep our heads down, breathe through our mouths and keep hold of the cable that’s been attached to the wall. You come to a tiny ladder which you can just about open your eyes enough to navigate then boom. That’s it. You’re behind the waterfall. I’d read there were some jumps you could do but I’m not a jumper and the other two didn’t ask about it so we just hung out in the spray which was suitably excellent. It really didn’t take long at all and all we had to do now was go back the way we came. The hardest bit was walking back up from the lower viewpoint for the second time that day.

We booked ourselves onto a guided night walk through D&D which was cancelled the first night on account of the rain, then it stopped raining and would have been perfect but hey, it’s the weather in the Tropics, it does whatever the fuck it wants. The evening we actually went started off dry, and by “dry” I mean the wet shit wasn’t actively falling from the sky but it had rained in the afternoon so we’re not talking the Sahara here.

We walked to Bioparque Paradise and our guide pointed out a few fireflies which I’m never going to get bored of, then he paid our entrance fee and he led us onto the soggy trails as the sky lit up around us. I love a good lightning storm, perhaps less so when I’m in a forest in the dark but hey ho. We were maybe twenty minutes into in when the rain started and in true Tropical style it belted down for about ten minutes before it stopped. Oh. Good. That made the trail even more slippy but the park provides walking sticks in handy racks and we were given one each once he’d chased the spider away.

So we didn’t see a lot, possibly on account of the rain, but what we did see was a frog, some young possums frolicking in a tree, a very damp adult possum hopping onto a low branch and getting the fuck away from the equally damp bipeds shining torches in its face, far too many spiders, a couple of insects, but what made it all worthwhile for us as the rain breached our waterproofs and trickled down our arms was the armadillo. We couldn’t get a photo, it was too far away, but it was shuffling around, minding its own business when we showed up. It tolerated us for a good twenty seconds before scarpering into the woods way faster than I thought the little fuckers could move.

Just before we finished the walk our guide led us into an area with clumps of towering bamboo that was also the camping area for Bioparque Paradise. He spotted a huge chonk of an arachnid. Tarrant asked him if it was poisonous and he said yes, it was, it was very bad for horses. I’m not entirely sure what he meant by that, whether they have a penchant for nibbling on equines or what, but I figure if they can fell a horse they’d make pretty short work of my delicate, human frame and stayed the fuck away from it. We heard low voices from the tent right next to the bamboo stand we were examining. Yeah, fuck camping right now.

On our last day we figured we should go and have a gawp at this lake then and wandered down to the canal to rent a kayak. We’d been promising this woman all week that we’d rent from her, she’d come belting towards us whilst we were just having a look around, so we kept our word and went to find her. We opted for a double kayak because Tarrant is a glutton for punishment and off we fucked down the canal in the direction of the lake.

We were pretty pleased we’d come out a bit earlier than the masses. As we glided down the canal on the way to the lake was so peaceful, the only human activity being us and the occasional bloke fishing with a handline from a tiny wooden boat. We greeted each other with a buenos dias and a smile. The banks were lined with what I assume are storks, more neck than bird, and other water fowl I wouldn’t be able to name if you threw an identification book at my head.

There were several hawks, or some manner of bird of prey anyway, flying from the trees over the water, dive bombing every now and then, swooping in to pluck something that had the audacity to swim too close to the surface. There was actually a fuck tonne of fish activity too, the surface moved and bubbled and, every now and then, would erupt as tens of fish broke the surface all at once, flashing silver in the sun. It was utterly glorious.

The lake itself is pretty, we stuck to the edges and admired the cool rocks and the trees with so much moss hanging from them they looked like weeping willows, if you were to order the weeping willows from Wish. We didn’t spend a huge amount of time on the lake, the canal is actually more interesting, and anyway my arse had started to go numb. Looks like two hours is my kayaking maximum before the discomfort kicks in so we paddled back to the canal. To be fair, Tarrant did most of the paddling whilst I whinged that my shoulders hurt. By the time we paddled back there were about twenty kayaks, several motorised boats taking people on a pleasure cruise, and one prick on a fucking jet ski. Yeah we definitely made the right choice, coming out a bit earlier.

Los Naranjos is actually not an awful place to kill a few days, by the way. It’s got one main road that’s lined with touristy restaurants and grills along the canal before giving way to local comedores and shops. There are four local places to eat clustered together so we made it our mission to try them all, and try them all we did. We now have our go-to for our morning baleadas and our evening dinner. We’re creatures of habit, once we find somewhere we like that doesn’t completely take the piss with the prices because we’re foreign we just keep going back there. Shovelling local food from local eateries into my facehole is one of my most favourite things about travelling and it’s something Tarrant also enjoys unlike my obsession with local transport.

Scabby Mounds Of Flesh Rot

I usually heal quite well so I’ve no qualms about excavating every single sandfly bite. I’d hack them down to the bone whilst laughing maniacally if I wasn’t so concerned about blood loss, but for some reason this batch I collected on Utila is more into weeping a gross, clear liquid than producing a satisfying scab for me to continue picking at. Before I’d realised what I’d done I’d covered my legs with pussing mounds of flesh rot that weren’t healing. I started getting tiny blisters by the wounds so we spent our first full morning in Los Naranjos at a medical centre in nearby Peña Blanca where a lovely doctor told me I needed an injection.

I started to bring myself around to that idea until she clarified; the injection would be in my arse. Oh no. Fuck no. No no no no no. A whole world of absolutely fucking not. So she wrote me a prescription and twenty minutes later I was stood outside a pharmacy clutching over eighty quids worth of antibiotic products. They did slowly start to heal over the week and I’m sure I’m not going to disintegrate any time soon but when go to Belize I think I’ll invest in an industrial sized flame thrower to keep the bitey little shits at bay.

Jump to “Useful shit to know…”

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Lago De Yojoa, Cortés, Honduras

Stayed at: D & D Brewery, Los Naranjos

Useful shit to know…

How To Get From Jungle River Lodge, Rio Cangrejal, To D&D Brewery, Los Naranjos (Lago De Yojoa)

• The local bus passes Jungle River Lodge four times a day at 6.55am, 7.55am, 9am and 12.45pm (only 7.55am and 12.45pm on Sundays) but they can be thirty or forty minutes late.
• We were warned that the first bus on the Monday might not stop as it’ll be too full but we had no problems and it wasn’t even that full.
• It takes 35 minutes to get to Estación de Autobuses San Jose and costs L30 each.
• Empresa de Transportes Cristina came highly recommended as a safe option to get to San Pedro Sula and their office is a five minute walk from the bus station on Avenida 4.
• Coordinates are 15.779541, -86.80088 or you can search them on Google Maps.
• Buses leave for SPS at 4am (not on Sundays), 6.30am, 8.30am, 10am, 11.45am, 1pm and 4.30pm.
• When you enter the office your small bag will be checked, and it will be checked again before you board the bus.
• You buy your ticket inside the office and your big bags are loaded underneath the bus.
• It cost L180 each and took just over four hours.
• Cristina will drop you on the upper level. Head to the bottom level where you’ll find a row of ticket desks.
• You’re looking for Empresa Tima which will have “Mochito” written across the top in huge letters and the “D&D” logo bottom left.
• Buy your tickets there, it costs L70 each, then head to the platforms and look for the bus with “Mochito” written on the front.
• It took about 2 hour and 15 minutes.

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Parque Nacional Cerro Azul Meambár

• To get to PANACAM from Los Naranjos, take a bus to Peña Blanca.
• It costs L15 and only takes ten or fifteen minutes.
• Buses aren’t super frequent, you could find yourself waiting up to 40 minutes, but the mototaxis are only L20 per person. They’re just a lot less comfortable on that potholed road.
• 14.967649, -88.025667 is a good place to stand to get a bus to La Guama.
• This will cost L25 and takes about twenty minutes.
• If a Santa Bárbara Mochito bus goes by then that will take you all the way to La Guama without having to change in Peña Blanca.
• The bus will take you to the road that leads up to PANACAM where there will be mototaxis (tuk tuks) waiting.
• We’d been told it would cost L150 to L200 total to get to the national park entrance.
• Our guy charged us L150, it was 25 minutes up a really shitty road.
• He gave us his WhatsApp so we could contact him when we were ready to return.
• I didn’t have signal on Tigo but there’s WiFi at reception which they were happy to let me use to send him a message when we were ready.
• The entrance fee for PANACAM is L180 each for foreigners.

Cuevas de Taulabé

• See above for how to get to La Guama.
• You’re continuing south so stay on that side of the road and flag a bus bound for Siguatepeque or Tegucigalpa.
• It takes twenty to twenty-five minutes to get to the caves depending on how much of a maniac your driver is.
• It cost L40 there but only L30 to get back so make of that what you will.
• The caves are US$4 for foreigners, about L96.
• We didn’t spend long in there at all. We probably spent twice as long getting there as we spent looking at it.

Pulhapanzak Waterfall

• It’s one bus from Los Naranjos, jump on the “Mochito” bus bound for San Pedro Sula.
• It took about 45 minutes as some of the roads are horrible and we waited a while in Peña Blanca.
• It cost L35 each.
• Coming back, rather than wait for the Mochito bus we jumped on one bound for Peña Blanca (L25 each) then took a mototaxi from there (L20 each).
• It cost L100 to get into the waterfall.
• If you want to go behind the waterfall it’s L400, and the zipline is L550.
• To get on these activities you need to head to the hotel reception. When you enter you’ll see a sign saying the restaurant is to the left. Follow that and walk beyond the restaurant until you find it.

Kayaking

• There are several places along the canal that rent kayaks much cheaper than D&D.
• You won’t have to look to hard, someone will approach you, probably at speed whilst yelling, “Kayak??”.
• We paid L100 each which got us a kayak for as long as we wanted.
• We had a choice between two singles or one double.
• You can, apparently, get it even cheaper if you ask around but that road turns to slush after the nightly rains and the woman we rented off is before the quagmire.
• She’s around from 8am if you wanted to get a super early start.

• Los Naranjos has some small pulperías and a couple of little pharmacies but for anything bigger you’ll need to head into Peña Blanca.
• It’s only ten or fifteen minutes away by bus (L15 pp) or mototaxi (L20 pp).
• There are plenty of places to eat in Los Naranjos ranging from local comedores to tourist restaurants and grills.