Punta Sal and a bit more

Listening: Johnny Cash - Live at Folsom Prison
Reading: Tropical Nature of Central and South America

As I was saying in the previous post, we had an incredible time running around Honduras with Megan's sister, Heather, for the last few days. I'll start with a few choice pictures from Punta Sal, which is a small peninsula of protected land that pokes out into the Caribbean on the northern Honduran coast. We booked a tour of Punta Sal with a local travel company in Tela because you need to cross the bay by boat to get there. This is a shot of the beach, the forest and the thatched huts of a few of the permanent residents that live there. They cooked us an awesome lunch of fried fish (unskinned and complete with fins), platain chips, beans and rice.


We walked through only a small section of the forest, but we came across some amazing wildlife, like this huge spider (we saw at least 5 different spiders this same size).

We also came across a group of howler monkeys that were being filmed by a BBC documentary crew! They live in a section of the forest that contains a lot of mangoes and bananas, and they let us know that they didn't want us there by making their characteristic (and pretty intimidating) howl as we got closer. I got a few pictures, but the lighting wasn't very good so you can't see their faces. Two of them had babies they were carrying! The picture below of Megan and Heather shows a typical section of the forest.


We came out of the forest into a little cove where our boat man was waiting to pick us up. On the shore of the beach, perched up in a palm tree were a bunch of orapendula - a type of bird that builds these amazing hanging basket nests! You can see a few of the nests hanging from the palm branches in the picture below.


After leaving Punta Sal and Tela, we headed back into San Pedro Sula to catch our bus to Copan Ruinas. This is a photo of the cathedral in the center of San Pedro Sula's downtown area.


Once we arrived in Copan it was too late to visit the ruins the same day, so we decided to head over to Macaw Mountain, which is basically a bird zoo filled with Honduran and other tropical bird species. This beautiful toucan was curious enough to let me sneek in for a close up.



We talked with the owner of the place for a while and found out he's an American who has lived in Honduras since 1981. Apparently he obtained his birds from people who had abused them or thought they would be good pets but turned out to be too much work/noise. The park is set in a beautiful section of forest with a stream nearby and many tropical birds and butterflies flying freely overhead in the canopy. Hopefully we'll be back!