At this point, you must have been living under a rock not to know about my connection to Honduras. In case you have been, when I was 18 I moved across the world to Honduras, right in the middle of Central America, to volunteer as an English teacher in a rural town in the mountains. If you want to read more about it, you can here, here or here.

Bringing it back to this year, I knew I was going to be finishing my job in France in May, or at least I was going to finish teaching classes in May. However my contract was until August which meant I would get paid until then, including an overtime payment in July. I began thinking about what I wanted to do with what was essentially four months of paid time off and the obvious answer was travel. I joked about going back to Honduras but then I thought about it some more and realised that I actually could! The last time I visited Honduras was in 2019 after being in New York with my family. I only went for a week which was just enough time to have four days back in my project in Candelaria but not much more.

A plan started to form in my head, starting with giving myself enough time in Honduras to visit my project and to go back to some of my favourite places in the country. I figured that while I was over that way, I could tick off somewhere else that has been at the top of my list for a long time – Colombia. The more I thought about it, I realised this could also be an opportunity to visit the last country in Central America that I had yet to go to, Panama, which would be perfect as a stop on the way from Honduras to Colombia.

Originally I was planning on going by myself. I feel very at home in Honduras plus I can speak Spanish well and am used to making friends in hostels or just doing things alone. I also don’t like to stop myself from going somewhere just because I don’t have anyone to go with. However, as this plan was starting to come together at Christmas time last year, I was talking to my friend Hannah about it and she invited herself along! I was more than happy to have her. Hannah and I went to university together in Edinburgh but we actually know each other because Hannah was also a volunteer in Honduras in 2016! That meant that the first three weeks of the trip were going to be as special for her as they would be for me and I was glad to have someone to share them with.

In this blog, I’m not necessarily going to be giving specific details about the things we did. There are guides coming for places like Gracias and Utila with recommendations for where to stay, what to do and where to eat. When it comes to my time at home in Candelaria, there will also be a very special blog coming about what it was like to be back there. So without further ado, let me share (a little bit of) those three weeks with you! Buckle up for a bumpy ride (and it’s not just because of the state of Honduran roads!).

2 days travelling UK – Honduras

The journey to get to Honduras was a bit brutal and made me glad that we wouldn’t have to do the return journey for another 10 weeks. We started by popping down from Edinburgh to London which went by in a blink. From there it was onto our flight to Mexico City, long but uneventful. Next we had what felt like the longest five hour layover in the world before the flight to Honduras. It was only 2.5 hours but ended a little unexpectedly! We had started the descent and were pretty close to landing when suddenly the plane started to climb again and we spent another 20 mins circling over San Pedro Sula before attempting to land again. It’s one of the only times I’ve actually been scared in a plane because they didn’t explain it at all so we had no idea what was going on!

We landed in San Pedro Sula, Honduras’ second city after travelling for about 30 hours. We weren’t planning on staying there so after getting a lift from the airport to the bus station from a friend, we were heading to Gracias, a city in the west of Honduras. I have made this journey more times than I can count (albeit seven years ago) and when things go smoothly it should be a four hour journey. But in Honduras things rarely go as planned (a ‘tranquilo‘ attitude is definitely required) and it took us seven hours instead! There was unfortunately an accident just outside San Pedro Sula that resulted in one of the longest traffic jams I have ever seen (that we somehow managed to skip by driving down the wrong but empty side of the road!). More traffic later on and a tropical storm (or at least a very heavy rainstorm) slowed us down a lot so we didn’t arrive at our hotel until 9pm. They were so kind to two very tired and fed up travellers, bringing us fresh juice and bananas because the restaurant was closed and we were too tired to leave in search of food.

3 nights in Gracias

We were so tired that we slept right through the night and might have managed to immediately kick any jet lag. When I lived in Honduras, Gracias was the nearest city to my small mountain town (only 37 miles/60 km but four hours on a bus) so I spent a lot of weekends here with other volunteers and it was a bit of a home away from home (away from home!). Gracias is a popular tourist destination within Honduras because it has a lot to do! There is a fort to visit, hot springs, a beautiful national park and great places to eat. (A Gracias guide is in the works with more information about everything we did!)

We had a very relaxed first proper day in Honduras, doing some of our favourite things from seven years ago. After chilling a bit, we wandered down to Gracias’ main square where they have a statue of Lempira, the national hero who the currency and one of the regions are named after. It was pretty hot, up to 30º, and very humid so we sat down in the kiosk at the centre of the park for a cold drink. There was a feria (a cross between a fair and a market) going on in the main square with lots of stalls so we went for lunch at one. Later in the afternoon we went to the hot springs and ended up at an old favourite, Kandil, for pizza and frozen mojitos for dinner.

For our second full day, we headed to Celaque National Park, just a short mototaxi ride from Gracias. The drive up was incredible but the taxi wouldn’t have made it up the road to the tourist centre so we got dropped at the gate, about 2 km away. We spent a lovely couple of hours wandering leisurely around the trails before heading back to town. After being out all day, we ate in the restaurant at our hotel but this was something that we had both been looking forward to. Guancascos nachos are a thing of dreams!

1 night in Yamaranguila

We were off to somewhere very special next – Yamaranguila, the town where Hannah lived and worked when we both lived in Honduras seven years ago! When we arrived, after about two hours on the bus from Gracias, we did a quick loop of the small town, passing by one of the places she used to live, whilst looking for our hotel. That was until we discovered that it was actually a few kilometres down the road! We took a mototaxi there and were pleasantly surprised by the place, clean, peaceful, surrounded by trees and with lots of birds to see (Hannah was very happy!).

We headed into La Esperanza, the big city just twenty minutes away, in search of food. It was finally baleada time! Baleadas are the national dish in Honduras and absolutely delicious in my opinion. It’s a flour tortilla traditionally filled with refried beans, mantequilla (like sour cream) and crumbled hard cheese, sometimes with scrambled eggs but really you can add anything! We wandered around town a little more including up to a viewpoint over the city and then went back to the hotel.

4 nights in Candelaria

We left Yamaranguila after one night. We were waiting for the bus at the side of the road but also trying to get a lift in the back of somebody’s truck (a very normal practice here) and we ended up getting a lift with two Honduran policemen! They even took us all the way to the bus station!

Our next stop was very special to me. I went back to Candelaria, the town where I lived for a whole year in 2016-17. I got to see my host family, my friends and see how the town has changed (a lot). It’s a pretty small town, about 1000 people, but easy to walk around and see everything in the few days we had here. I was excited to introduce Hannah to my town because while I visited her many times in Yamaranguila, this was her first time in Candelaria.

It really is a bizarre experience to go back to somewhere that means so much to me and see people that I love and miss so much. I had a fabulous four days there, catching up with friends, eating a lot of delicious food (none of which I was allowed to pay for!), celebrating Lempira Day, my favourite holiday, and reflecting on the past seven years. Writing about everything that happened in those few days would make this an immensely long blog so you’ll just have to come back and read more about it in it’s own post!

1 night San Pedro Sula

On our way from Candelaria to our next destination, we stopped in San Pedro for the night to break up the journey. It was about 10 hours to get there but overall, it was a pretty easy journey. We even made it in time to go see a 4pm showing of Barbie which had just come out! We got Chinese food in the mall food court after the film which in itself was a throwback to being 18 because this was a regular activity whenever I was in San Pedro back then.

San Pedro Sula has never been my favourite city. It’s also the one that most people have heard of in regard to Honduras’ dangerous reputation. I don’t think there’s that much to do in San Pedro as a tourist so it’s unlikely that you would spend much time there other than at the beginning or end of a trip or in transit like we were. There are areas of the city that are best avoided, it’s true, but that’s the case if you go to Glasgow or London or any major city in the world. My advice while passing through is to take taxis rather than public buses and stay somewhere trusted. Here I’ll shout out our absolute go to – Hotel Dos Molinos. I have never stayed anywhere else in San Pedro. Blanca and her family make you feel so at home, the perfect start or end to your trip. You can also arrange transfers to the airport or bus station with Blanca.

7 nights in Utila

Our last stop was another very exciting one (although I could say that about all of them!). After a bus from San Pedro Sula to La Ceiba and then a ferry, we arrived in the Caribbean paradise of Utila! Honduras has three islands collectively known as the Islas de la Bahía or the Bay Islands, Utila, Roatán and Guanaja. During my year in Honduras, I visited Utila three times (including once for Christmas with all the other volunteers and once with my mum and twin sister) and Roatán once, when my dad and younger sister were visiting. Utila is known for pretty much two things – scuba diving and partying! My twin sister Amy had actually been working on Utila for the previous five weeks, gathering data for her tropical marine biology masters thesis and leading undergraduate dissertation students in dives. It just so happened that we crossed over! (Or maybe it was planned this way…)

Once again, there is a Utila guide coming so for now I’ll do a little summary of how we spent our whole week there, including a few highlights that won’t be in the guide. We had a very chilled first day, recovering from the two days it had taken to get there. However, in the evening we went along to Amy’s dive centre where she was holding a ceilidh (a traditional Scottish dance) for her students! It was so fun and they picked it up really quickly. It was nice to be able to hang out with Amy at various points during the week. Hannah and I went to visit her, she came down to Underwater Vision and we spent her day off together. We had been able to spend a few days together at home after I moved back from France and while she was up from Essex but before that, the last time we spent any more time together was at Christmas.

The rest of the week was filled with a handful of dives, including a refresher because Hannah hasn’t dived since she was last here in 2017 and I haven’t brushed up on the skills in a while. We were staying and diving at another favourite from seven years ago, Underwater Vision, which is where Hannah and I both initially learnt to dive. Some of the highlights of our dives were seeing lionfish, a stingray, a cow fish, some shrimp, lots of flamingo tongues (a type of sea snail) and a moray eel. From the start of one of the dives, we had a little remora swimming around our legs and it was with me for almost half of the dive. It’s one of the little fish that hangs around a shark but had gotten lost. To be honest, even when you ‘don’t see anything’ (meaning anything bog like a ray or a shark for example) with the coral and the wee fish that live there’s always enough to look at. Utila is on the second largest coral reef in the world which is what makes diving there great! As if the dive wasn’t good enough, we had the most special experience during our surface interval. If the conditions are right, between dives Underwater Vision will take you dolphin spotting! We were lucky to find a school of 15 or 16 rough toothed dolphins (I think) but they were swimming really deep. A few stayed around for longer and were curious about us so they got really close. We were in the water snorkelling with them for about 45 minutes!

Because we were in Utila for a whole week, the longest we stayed anywhere during our whole trip, by the end of our time there we had built a lovely little group of friends. Underwater Vision is a really friendly and welcoming environment so it’s really easy to start talking to people, whether they are staying there too or are just visiting the bar and restaurant. In fact, I got talking to two Irish brothers and somehow we stumbled upon a family connection! Not on my Northern Irish side as you might expect but through my family on Lewis! It turns out their uncle, who I happened to have met in the Uig museum the last time I was in Lewis in 2022, is related to the Morrisons of Geshader (that’s us!). What a small world!

A final highlight that I’ll include here happened on the way back from a night out. Hannah and I stopped at a street stall to get her a baleada and I started talking to the girl making them. I told her that I wanted to learn how to make the tortilla so I could make baleadas at home. She invited me around to the stove to make one myself! She showed me how to flatten it in my hands first which was hard and then using a bit of tin foil. She made it into a baleada and gave it to me for free! I can confirm that baleadas taste even more delicious when you’ve made it yourself.

We got up to so much more during our time on Utila but you’ll have to wait until that blog comes out!

3 nights to get to Panama

And that brings us to the end of our time in Honduras. Utila was our last real stop in Honduras and from there we began our epic journey down to Panama. It took four 10-12 hour days on buses with stops in Tegucigalpa (Honduras), Managua (Nicaragua) and San José (Costa Rica) before arriving in Bocas del Toro, Panama. There will be many blogs about Panama eventually but for now, there’s still a string of Honduras posts to come!