Gracias is one of my favourite places in Honduras but it could easily slip under the radar behind the more popular and well known Utila or Copán Ruinas. In this guide, I’ll share some of my favourite parts of Gracias and a little bit more about my time there this summer.

A bit of background first, Gracias is the capital of the department of Lempira and was founded in 1536. It is said that the name of the city, which means ‘thank you’ in Spanish, comes from when Spanish explorers arrived through the mountains and exclaimed ‘gracias a Dios, hemos llegado a tierra plana‘ meaning ‘thank God we have arrived at flat land’. A top tourist spot amongst Hondurans, Gracias is home to the highest point in Honduras and also its largest cloud forest.

WHERE TO STAY

Guancascos

It could only be Guancasos! This is as much the attraction to me as anything else in Gracias because it feels like a haven. Not just because it was my home away from home while I lived in Honduras and where I spent a lot of weekends but the hotel itself is blissful. The hotel has its own compound meaning that once you are inside it feels really safe, private and peaceful. There are so many plants and flowers as well which means there’s also lots of birds and other things to see while walking from the restaurant to your room. Another thing I love about Guancascos is that it’s really sustainable and supports the local community. There is an onsite restaurant and bar, breakfast is included in some rooms and they have hot water (not always a given in Central American accommodation!)

WHAT TO DO

Hot Springs

The hot springs are definitely one of the highlights in Gracias. You might think that it’s far too hot in Honduras to go to a hot spring and you would be right, most of the time. This is why they are a popular way to spend an evening. There are a couple around Gracias but the one I like is El Presidente. They are a couple of kilometres out of town but worth the journey so grab a mototaxi from anywhere in town. Mototaxis within Gracias are about 20 lempiras per person (65p) but out to the hot springs it will cost 80L total (£2.65) or 150L at night (£5). It can be hard to find a mototaxi there when you are done so arrange for whoever takes you to come back later.

Entrance to the pools themselves cost 50L (£1.65). Most of the pools are between 36º and 38º and they’re open until 11pm so you can really enjoy the warmth of the water! There’s a little restaurant where you can buy meals or snacks or you can bring your own. We opted to bring some snacks, a bag of lychees for me, and had dinner later. Many Hondurans will wear a t-shirt and shorts into the water and while you can wear whatever you like, you might feel more comfortable doing the same.

Celaque National Park

Celaque National Park is home to Honduras’ highest peak, Cerro Las Minas, but has plenty of hiking for all levels. The park was created in 1987 after a campaign by locals in the town of La Campa, aiming to stop logging that was harming biodiversity. The park has 21% of Honduras’ biodiversity, six of the seven pine species in the country, 256 species of fern and 75 species of moss. There are also 24 plants and 14 animals endemic to Celaque, meaning they aren’t found anywhere else in the world. Celaque means ‘box of water’ in the local indigenous language, Lenca. This could be due to the fact that the park’s nine rivers supply water to 120 villages nearby and the city of Gracias (including Guancascos hotel!).

We paid 120L (£4) entrance fee and arranged for our mototaxi to come back for us at 3pm, when the park closes. I would recommend this unless you want to walk for almost two hours back to town. We were a bit late getting started but the park is open from 8am if you want to spend more time there. There are a few routes you can take in Celaque. There is one that is only an hour long, one that takes you to a waterfall and back in 4-5 hours or the main hike to the highest point in Honduras which takes 12 hours over two days. There are a few off-shoots you can add to the shorter routes as well. We had about four hours but weren’t in a rush to get anywhere so we just started walking until we needed to turn around. We saw lots of cool mushrooms, insects, butterflies and even a cool little lizard.

Fuerte San Cristobal

Fuerte San Cristobal sits above Hotel Guancascos and gives you some gorgeous views over the city and out to Celaque. Admission is about 60 lempiras (£2) and although there isn’t much to see up there other than the tomb of Juan Lindo, former president of both El Salvador and Honduras, it’s still worth the short walk and small entrance fee to see the views across Gracias and over to Celaque.

La Campa Zipline

This isn’t something that I did on my most recent trip to Honduras but I went three times in the year that I lived there and it was one of my favourite experiences. La Campa is a town about an hour away from Gracias where you will find Central America’s most extreme zip line! Thrill seekers, this one’s for you. Six zip lines of 3.6km in total zig zag across a valley 700m deep! This is still one of my favourite things I’ve done in Honduras. The town of La Campa itself is also known for its beautiful Lencan pottery.

WHERE TO EAT AND DRINK

Guancascos

Again I have to start with Guancascos restaurant. Breakfast is included daily with a great desayuno típico, a traditional Honduran breakfast of blended beans, scrambled eggs, plantain and mantequilla (like sour cream) with tortillas on the side of course! Another favourite is the yoghurt and granola bowl piled high with fruit. Their fresh juice never misses, particularly the maracuyá (passion fruit) and you can’t go wrong with the chicken nachos.

Kandil

Kandil is a more modern spot, great for pizza, chicken wings and cocktails. A little pricier than the local comedores but worth it if you want a break from tortillas and frijoles. There’s a really nice atmosphere inside and a new courtyard since I was last there.

Plaza Cafe

The best spot in town for a coffee and some people watching, Plaza Cafe is a kiosk at the centre of the main square. My personal favourite is the granita de cafe, like a sweet, coffee-flavoured slushie. It makes a good place for a break while exploring the centre of the city.

Main Square

While I was in Gracias there was a feria (a cross between a market and a fair) happening in the main square where we stopped for lunch. On the menu: pupusas! These are basically stuffed tortillas, ours with quesillo (cheese) or pollo (chicken) but they are also often filled with beans, chicharrón (fried pork rinds) or loroco (an edible plant found in several Central American countries). They are actually a traditional dish from El Salvador but are often found in the west of Honduras that borders El Salvador. We ate it with a tomato sauce, curtido (fermented cabbage relish) and fresh jamaica (hibiscus) juice.

In the evenings, the main square fills with vendors and food stalls. It’s fair to be wary of places like this in terms of hygiene but it’s also where you’ll get some of the best local food like baleadas, pupusas, tacos flautas, fried chicken and more for pennies!

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!

I’m back, back, back again! It’s been a long time since I’ve stretched these particular muscles but I have to say I have missed annoying everyone with complaints and dreary day to day movements… ahem I mean cultural insights and inner observations. But anyway, I’m back for one more blog post and one more only! 

As some of you will already be aware I recently returned to Honduras for a whistle stop visit. I was in New York with my family and in my head New York is pretty close to Honduras (news flash: it’s not, it’s still six hours and several flights away) so I thought I had better seize this opportunity lest I have to wait until after university as I had previously thought I would. I was prepared for going back to be an emotional experience in all kinds of ways and it was – it was a very reflective week and gave me a lot to think about which is why I’m back!

One of the things I was most excited about was being back with my host family. In the past two years the girls, my host sisters, have grown up a lot, especially Antonella who has gone from a few-month-old baby to a walking, (almost) talking toddler! She obviously had no idea who I was but by the end of my first day back she was already calling me tía, which means aunt in Spanish, which I’ll happily take! Jamie and Daniela had also grown up lots in the few years I’d been away. Jamie was my little shadow while I was there, never letting me go anywhere without her. She is a very nurturing girl and really loves looking after her little sister. Daniela, as ever, is the more independent of the two and this quality has really come out in the past two years. 

As great as it was to be back with family, there was a more mournful side to things. Less than two months before I visited, my host dad Jaime passed away after an extended illness. It has obviously been a very difficult time for everyone, especially my host mum Saida. She has had great support from her family and friends in Candelaria and elsewhere in Honduras, now and throughout his illness but it had been frustrating for me being so far away. There was obviously very little I could do other than tell her I love her and give her my support, but even that felt insufficient as I tried to convey it adequately in Spanish. At the end of the day being back, however briefly, was a little more poignant for me and for Saida after this hard time. Just being able to give her a hug meant so much.

During my visit, however short, I was once again surprised by the generosity around me. This was not something new to me seeing as when I first arrived in Honduras and throughout the whole year everywhere I turned I was met with tremendous generosity and such a warm welcome. Now, back again, I couldn’t walk down the street without meeting a friend that wanted me to come round for coffee or go and get something to eat. An especially heartfelt thank you goes out to Saida, who fed me, put me up in my old room and wouldn’t accept anything from me all week. 

I also spent a lot of time with my friend Karen Yanina, who came running with me and Amy a few times back in the day. Her son Alejandro is also in Jamie’s class at school and good friends with the girls. She has just had a baby as well as having recently opened a clothes tienda and started taking beauty classes in El Salvador. She was kind enough to give me a tshirt so I could rep Honduras once I got home, do my nails for me and come over to Saida’s and make baleadas – my favourite!

Of course I also spent some time with my other family in Candelaria, Lety and Victor’s family, who in my year were the organisers of the project. From the year after me, they have also been the host family for the next generations of Project Trust volunteers. Unfortunately this year’s volunteer was on a visa run while I was visiting so I didn’t get to meet her. One of the first nights I was in Candelaria, the evangelical church that Lety and Victor belong to was having a special service in the town square with some guest speakers and musician. While I’m not religious, I went along with Karen who is also a member, as church was always a good way to practice my Spanish and I especially enjoy the enthusiasm and music that accompanies any service in the evangelical church. I also obviously couldn’t leave Candelaria without procuring, as per my dad’s request, some specialty Honduran coffee from Victor’s dad’s coffee finca. 

Unfortunately I arrived on the last day of school before the Easter holidays and after the end of the school day so I wasn’t able to go into the primary school and see all of my students again but I ran into many of them all across town, at church or while out playing with the girls. Even though I was occasionally faced with a kid who couldn’t remember exactly which gringa I was, most of them immediately knew who I was followed by a chorus of voices asking where Amy was! I assured them she’d be back as soon as possible, we’ve even talked about coming back together once we both graduate from university in another two years. 

It amazed me how quickly I fell back into old habits once I arrived in Honduras. From the second I landed everything felt familiar, from the oppressive heat and humidity, to being surrounded by Spanish, to the smell of frijoles wafting through the air. Some things came back to me almost immediately – my Spanish for one. This is unsurprising seeing as it had gotten to a high enough level during the year I spent speaking it every day that I can call it back very easily, even if I haven’t spoken it in a while. What did surprise me though was how quickly I fell back into the Honduran way of speaking, not just slang but also the way sentences are phrased and the gestures and body language that accompanied speaking. Eating using my hands and tortilla more than the actual utensils was also an easy enough habit to reclaim, though I have to say, getting used to putting toilet paper in the bin instead of flushing it took a little longer to get used to again!

In the time since I have left Honduras I have often been quite hard on myself, quite critical of my time there. I felt like I could have done more, had more of an impact, made more of the time I had. This visit was able to assuage a lot of those feelings. While I knew I had come away from Honduras with a new family or two, I sometimes questioned if I’d actually made any lasting friends. I said before that every time I was out of the house I would bump into someone I knew and have a chat if not a cup of cafe, proving these worries wrong. I visited my friend Enedina, who lives on the edge of town and who Amy and I made soup with in the early days of our year. I caught up with Eric, the boyfriend of a volunteer from the year before me over a cool bottle of Fresca. I got my hair cut (quite drastically!) by Edwin, the only fluent English speaker in the village, for the bargain price of 50 lempira (less than £2). I bumped into a number of teachers from the kinder, escuela, or colegio on the streets and chatted with friends in comedores, on the football pitch or even the town radio and had others messaging me, even if I wasn’t able to see them. It was incredibly heart-warming to return to a place I consider home with such a welcome. 

Another thing I questioned was whether I had actually made a difference. I want to be careful here not to stray into any sense of saviourism, expecting to change and improve an entire town or culture in one year at 18 years old. That is never what I wanted or expected to do. But as a teacher I at the very least wanted to be able to pass on some new skills and knowledge to my students. There were definitely days while I was still in Honduras that it all felt futile – second grade just wouldn’t sit still, fifth grade wouldn’t stop talking, sixth grade were out of class for the second time that week and no one could remember the same thing we’d been learning for the past month! But there were not as many of these bad days as there were good ones. It was encouraging, two years down the line, to see the kids more confident when I asked them about what they had been learning or quizzed them on some things that I had taught them. Language learning is, after all, an ongoing process and while they may not remember every word I taught them while I was their English teacher, I might just have laid the foundation for lifelong learning, just as I’d hoped. 

In this same vein, it is so great to see the project in Candelaria transforming into something hopefully more long term, as it welcomes its fifth year of Project Trust volunteers after the summer. Amy and I were only the second year of volunteers and thus felt the burden and responsibility, mostly self-imposed, of ensuring the PT volunteers had a good reputation and presence so that this could become something sustainable as we so desperately hoped. At times this felt limiting as we were more reserved, less political, less involved at times than we might otherwise have been. However on returning and seeing the project still running, and hearing about the positive place volunteers now have in the community and how involved and assimilated they have become, I feel like it might just have been worth it. 

While some worries of mine have been put to rest after returning to Honduras and Candelaria, I have come to accept others. Sometimes I felt like I should have done more with my time in my town, gone out more, gotten more involved, and so on but after returning I found I had forgotten one very important thing – its bloody hot! I was drinking litres and litres of water every day and was still exhausted just from wandering around town. The sun beats down from about 8 in the morning until at least 3 or 4 in the afternoon, depending if it’s the wet or dry season. And I wasn’t just teaching in that heat during my year, I was doing it in jeans! I understand how most days I wanted to spend my afternoons having a nap until it was a little cooler or sheltering from the high temperatures by sitting in front of the fan. I would never use the word regret when talking about any aspect of my year in Honduras, apart from the fact that it couldn’t have been longer, and I think I need to go a bit easier on myself with a lot of these things.

There is a difference, however, in giving myself a break and looking back with rose tinted glasses. As much as I loved my time in Honduras and wouldn’t change it, I have always made sure to remember the bad with the good, not that there was much, just to make sure I am remembering things realistically. Being back did sharply remind me that I didn’t enjoy every single moment of the year. There were times when I was ill, times when I was homesick (usually the same time), times when me and Amy argued (we lived together for a year though, can you blame us?), times when I felt frustrated with the work we were doing and times when it all just felt a bit too overwhelming. However, you have to take the bad with the good and without it I wouldn’t have had the same experience, taken away the same things or appreciated the good times as much. 

I managed to achieve some tremendous things in the year I spent there. Not only did I gain a home and a family on the other side of the world, I made lifelong friends in the form of the other volunteers, some of whom are still my best friends. I lived away from home for a year, without seeing my family for most of that time, showing myself I can handle things on my own. I overcame challenges such as hospital trips and rowdy children. I became fluent in a language that I still love to speak. I curated a blog which provides a powerful look back on to so many aspects of my year, for me and for others. I became a teacher and experienced everything that comes along with it. I cherish all of these things and endlessly appreciate the fact that I had the opportunity to achieve them. If you are one of the many kind people who supported me in any way to get me there in the first place, thank you again. You’ve no idea what you helped me do. 

I feel like I’ve always struggled between being the person I am, the person I think I should be and the person I want to be. I was never really happy with the person I was until returning from a volunteering trip in Costa Rica when I was 17. After that I felt I wasn’t quite who I wanted to be, but as if that person was in sight, reachable. I had caught a glimpse of the kind of life that I wanted and the kind of me that I could be in that life.

On returning to school, I felt restless. All of a sudden I knew what I wanted to be doing and it wasn’t being stuck in a classroom in dreary Scotland. I struggled to keep myself settled throughout the year and keep my patience with those around me who, I felt anyway, didn’t understand what I was going through. 

At this point I had already applied and been selected for a year in Honduras with Project Trust and, quite honestly, I just felt like I was wasting time until I could get away again. With the exam results I needed in my back pocket, I focused all my energy on fundraising. I jumped at the chance to go to any Project Trust event and whenever I was there, with other Project Trust people, I felt completely at ease. It was the most like myself I had felt since leaving Costa Rica. 

Honduras drew closer and closer and eventually I was right on the verge of leaving. One last trip to Coll to Project Trust headquarters for our training and then I would be off. Meeting all of the volunteers for the first time felt like meeting up with a group of friends. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a phrase used so often but ‘like minded people’ really is the best way to describe the connection I felt with the rest of my group. It takes a certain calibre of person to decide to move across the world to embark on a year of teaching with very little preparation or training and at only 18 years old! It is this part of us that was attracted to the each other when we met, even if we were different in other ways. Around these people, I didn’t have to think about how I acted or care about what they thought of me. I was able to just be me.

It goes without saying that I have gained an inordinate amount from my time spent in Honduras working as an English teacher. Some things are hard to measure, like the confidence I now have in myself and my abilities and the view I have of the world, but others, like the skills I have gained from being in the classroom and my language acquisition, are very tangible. 

As with any job, there are myriad skills to be gained from the experience and a year with Project Trust is no different. After a year of doing nothing else, I am obviously considerably more comfortable standing in front of a class and teaching and my ever present organisation has been put to good use but I have also developed others skills that have not been so strong in the past. Tolerance has definitely been key at various moments throughout the year, sometimes with my pupils if they won’t stay quiet or focus on the task at hand but also with myself, when the limits of my language or previous experience as a teacher restricted my ability to deliver an effective class. My people skills, while not necessarily lacking when I left for Honduras, have been enhanced by not only having to deal with people in a different language but also with different social cues and expectations. 

One of the more unexpected but most significant areas I have developed has been in my adaptability. Before Honduras, I would let small issues stress me out and everything had to be on time, arranged in advance and I had to know everything that was going on. After living the chaotic lifestyle that is Honduran to the core, I have learnt to adapt a more tranquila attitude. Things happen when and how they happen and there’s not much you can do to change that so why worry about it? This has been somewhat hard to translate into life back in the UK but I’m trying.

Spanish was a crucial part of my decision to spend my gap year in Latin America. My aspirations to become near fluent had an effect on my university decision as well – I chose to study French with Chinese instead of Spanish – so it was important to me that I learnt as much as possible. Language is an integral part of any culture so not only have I improved an invaluable skill, it has also enhanced my understanding of the people and the way of thinking of a vibrant country and region of contrasts. 

There is so much more than this however. The understanding of Honduras that I have achieved after living there for a year is the the kind of understanding that can only be attained with this kind of total immersion in a place. This has exposed me to the thoughts and motivations behind a clearly different style of life to my own, which is something that most people, even those who have travelled widely, may not ever get to see. Understanding a culture means understanding its language, its history, its landscape, its people and so much more. 

Meeting so many people from across the globe while travelling has also shown me there are so many options in life. There is not one set path – life does not have to be school, university, then work. I have seen the many paths you can take and working in the role I have has confirmed the path that I want to take. In my head, my future has always held travel. As this thought grew to become more realistic ideas for a career path, I expanded on that to three criteria: I wanted to travel; I wanted to learn foreign languages and use them; and I wanted to do something to help other people. My trip to Costa Rica introduced me to the idea of working for overseas organisations but it was still vague at best. I now know that I do want to work in this field with charities and NGOs, specifically with education, social development and women’s empowerment. 

As I have said, I have always felt caught between the different versions of me that there are and could be. If Costa Rica opened the doors for me to become the person I wanted to, Honduras had me stepping through those doors. It amazes me how much my self confidence has grown in just a year and with all the changes I have faced I feel more ‘me’ than someone else. It’s like I’ve always been this person but she just needed the right opportunity to come out. I used to feel very self conscious, something not a lot of people might have realised because I was quite good at pretending I didn’t care what anybody else thought of me. Now I actually don’t – I realise how many different types of people there are, either in appearance or personality, beliefs or ambitions, and that all of these should be celebrated. 

Coming home was the hardest part of the year by far. I can see the difference in myself after this year and leaving behind the place responsible for all this positive change pulled at something inside of me. The other volunteers that I had spent the year with had become my family and have been big influences on me. Saying goodbye to my Project Trust family was hard because I was worried that I would be saying goodbye to all the ways I’ve grown this year and I don’t want to. Moving backwards makes it very hard to move forwards. Fortunately this doesn’t seem to have happened, so far anyway, and I’m hanging on tight to make sure it never does!

Being back in Dunblane has been strange. It doesn’t make sense to my mind that I’m back where I was a year ago after having everything be new and exciting. I feel like I’m 17 again and still figuring out who I am and who I want to be. Now I feel like I have that at least partly figured out, being back in Dunblane is making it very hard to reconcile the two feelings. I know I don’t want to go back to how I was before but I feel like Dunblane sits on the new parts of me, the more outgoing, relaxed, adventurous parts and says ‘Sorry, there’s no room for that here’. It’s suffocating and I have been eagerly watching the clock counting me down until I move to Edinburgh for my next adventure. Dunblane will always be my home but I’m not sure I fit here anymore, or that I necessarily ever did.

As I sit on the cusp of my next adventure, it may feel like my Project Trust adventure is over but that is definitely not true. I will not, and cannot, let go of something that has given me so much without giving at least a little in return. Project Trust has done so much for me that I will never be able to adequately put into words and I know that a large part of what is to come will be a result of the experiences I have had throughout my year in Honduras. I want to thank them in a million ways for the effect they have had on me but nothing seems enough. Thank you for this opportunity, thank you for my life-long friends, thank you for giving me a family on the other side of the world, thank you for bringing me out of myself and into the world. Thank you. 

Don’t worry I’m still here! I have been back in Scotland for a month now and it seems like my time has been split between wishing I was back in Honduras and pretending I am by doing a PT road trip to see Amy in Surrey, Jesse in London and Lucy in Edinburgh. 

The last step of the Project Trust journey, after the inevitable, crippling reverse culture shock, is Debriefing. It’s our last chance to get up to Coll and spend a few days surrounded by the only people that are still willing to listen to gap year story after gap year story. It’s not a compulsory course like Training but out of our 20 Honduras volunteers we managed to get 16 of us there – Hannah, Eve, Alice and Norome, you were missed. We were reunited with some of the volunteers we were on Training with who went to Zambia and also had Malawi, Japan and the Domincan Republic volunteers with us. Because we have such a large group, even with our missing members, we made up more than half of the total number!

I took the train up to Oban for the first time, having had a lift and then taken the bus for my previous journeys, and it was incredibly beautiful. There was a big group of us on the train and we were reunited with everyone else in the beloved Backpackers Plus hostel. 

We had two full days back in the Hebridean Centre. The first day was based primarily on looking back on the year we spent overseas. We worked in our country groups with our Overseas Coordinator to look back on our best bits and the challenges we overcame while away. We ended the day with a trip to the gorgeous beach (only gorgeous because it was so sunny!).

Day two focused more on looking forward to how we, as returned volunteers, can stay involved in the PT community. The sense that you get as part of one of Project Trust’s many groups of volunteers is very much one of family. These people that you have been sent away to the other side of the world with you quickly become your family but on coming home it’s like meeting all the extended aunts and uncles and cousins that are all there for you. Just like in Honduras, everyone is related! There are Facebook groups and reunions and local meet ups and professional opportunities all to be found among the 7,700 and something returned volunteers, dating all the way back to 1967!

It has been almost a week since the ‘official’ end of my year overseas but definitely not the end of my involvement. Project Trust are always looking for people to go into schools and talk to pupils about their experiences, inspire the next generation of teachers and social care workers and adventurers for them to send all over the world. With Global Citizenship being such a large part of going overseas with Project Trust, returned volunteers also go out to schools and run workshops on this in primary and secondary schools. With the experience I have of this from my fundraising, I think if I hadn’t signed up I would have been chased from Coll and told never to return! Finally, as part of a new scheme, you can become a mentor to a volunteer who is in the process of fundraising for their year abroad – you can share your top tips and secret strategies as well as all your best stories (probably best to keep the bad ones under wraps to begin with!).

As ever, no Project Trust course or visit to Coll would be complete without a ceilidh to finish things off in style! What with there being two Latin American countries in attendance, traditional Scottish dancing soon morphed into a reggaeton/bachata party!

Leaving Coll the next morning was a sad affair, though I hope to be back next year as summer staff. Once again, the train back down to Glasgow was filled with PT people. Amy stayed one more night at my house before flying back down to Surrey. This was our final goodbye for the summer, after having seen each other three or four times since getting home. I know it won’t be that last goodbye however, as we already have plans for a trip to Prague at Christmas with Jesse and Lucy and Amy is coming up to Edinburgh for a rugby match in February.

As for the rest of my Honduran lot, there were a few goodbyes in Oban and some more when we got off the train in Glasgow. A few people stuck around in Edinburgh for a few days and we had one last night out together before we all went our separate ways.  However, apparently there’s already a reunion in the works and I’ll be at uni with Hannah and Eva in Edinburgh, with a lot of people not far away in the likes of Glasgow and Aberdeen.

Coll is such special place because of all it embodies. It is an integral part of any volunteer’s Project Trust journey. It is there for you on Selection when everything is filled with excitement and you can’t wait to get started. It is there on Training when you are are wondering what you’ve gotten yourself into. It is there to welcome you home on Debriefing, showing you that it’s not all bad to be back. It encompasses the heart of Project Trust and all the people you meet along the way, from the staff to the other volunteers even to the people you meet in your project. Coll is a place I love and will always love for I will forever associate it with the best year of my life.