Eco-Escapes to Central America

Our flashlights speared the jungle darkness, opening tiny portals into a riot of tropical vegetation--broad, varicose-veined leaves, messy braids of liana and thick-tendoned trunks--that in daylight would be considered lush. At night it is merely impenetrable.

Sweating in the damp heat, we picked our way down a freshly carved trail, guiding our beams slowly along the latticed limbs, beneath leaves and across the brush-smothered floor. It was the first time my wife, Monique, and I had hiked in pitch black--intentionally, anyway--and the first time we had ever been led by a guide.

We were in search of local wildlife, a long and intriguing roster of nocturnal creatures that includes jaguars, ocelots, kinkajous, tree frogs and glow-in-the-dark millipedes. The neighborhood also houses less savory residents: boa constrictors, eyelash vipers, tarantulas. I was comforted by the experience of our guide, James Adams, a Vermont transplant who once led trips in Mexico’s back country and who has traversed the rain forest here for three years.

His first piece of advice: Watch where you step. His second: Look up too. “There’s as much above you as on the ground below,” he told our group of five as we set out.

Such is the vacation night life in Pico Bonito National Park, a dramatic 414-square-mile swath near Honduras’ Caribbean coast that is at the forefront of the country’s budding campaign to shoulder its way into Central America’s eco-tourism market, now dominated by Belize and Costa Rica.

Anchoring the effort here is the Lodge at Pico Bonito, built two years ago on farmland below the 8,000-foot mountain for which the park is named. Tucked between two rivers about 20 minutes’ drive from seaside La Ceiba, the lodge offered the best of both worlds: a week of muddy-booted fun in a pristine natural wonderland and pampering in luxury accommodations that demonstrated we could have the forest and the frills. After particularly harried months leading up to our January visit, we were in need of both.

Our post-holiday trips have taken us to several out-of-the-way Caribbean spots in recent years. This time we had no plans until I tripped across an article on Pico Bonito in an outdoors magazine. It mentioned the lodge and a region that promised tropical birds, good hiking, white-water rafting and limitless mountain-gazing.

A phone call secured our private cabin: $190 nightly, excluding meals. It would be a splurge, but we had earned one. We booked a flight from Los Angeles to San Pedro Sula, the country’s second-biggest city, and called a U.S.-based travel company that serves Honduras to arrange our air link to La Ceiba, a half-hour away.

As we neared La Ceiba aboard a 19-seater, a lashing rain blocked our view of the Nombre de Dios mountain range, which includes the cleft-topped Pico Bonito. For much of the week, a shawl of ever-swirling clouds would mask the mountain’s crown but not its steep, forested body, glinting here and there with the froth of tumbling wild water.

We were picked up at the little airstrip by a lodge shuttle van. Staffer Ingrid Sylvester explained possible outings as we drove along a plain of pineapple farms, then bumped along a gravel road to the lodge past stands of cacao and coffee trees. As we ascended, the forest thickened. To arrive at the lodge is to be swallowed into a lushness of palms and citrus trees, flowering bromeliads and heliconias. The 200-acre grounds are a color-splashed botanical showcase, landscaped with 80 kinds of palms plus soursop and cashew trees, flaming-red torch ginger and more than 120 varieties of orchid.

The lodge, perched at the edge of the national park, is a trio of airy, plantation-style buildings housing the reception area, dining room, bar and a conference center, plus 21 rooms in 14 wooden cabins arrayed beneath a canopy of cacao, acacia and mahogany trees. The tranquil garden courtyard has a swimming pool and is an ideal vantage point for sipping tropical drinks and watching the shifting mountain cloudscape, as if before an Olympian movie screen. There is also a spa, offering massages, and a short walk takes you to the lodge’s butterfly farm and reptile house. The lodge is owned by a partnership of U.S. and Honduran investors and was the brainchild of Kent Forte, a former Peace Corps volunteer who remains a co-owner.

We were hoping for privacy and got it. Our cabin at the edge of the lodge grounds was within earshot of the Coloradito River and so shrouded by the surrounding greenery that few of the other cabins were even visible. The room was simple but lovely, with a four-poster king bed, stained pine woodwork, ceiling fans and louvered windows. I was at first dismayed to see a telephone but later came to appreciate its main role: ordering breakfast, which was delivered to our cabin each morning. The private deck, with hammock, proved a great perch for a couple of non-bird-watchers like us to try our hand. We saw two toucans.

We were tempted to venture off campus after our first dinner in the lodge’s dining room. The cuisine is nouvelle Meso-American, an inventive mix of fresh local ingredients and modern tastes and presented as if for a photo shoot. During our week, we would feast on grilled grouper and red snapper with fresh salsas, pepper steaks, shrimp dishes, conch soup, curry rice, a variety of steamed vegetables, Key lime and coconut cream pies and flan.

The dining room was as elegant as the dishes served, with towering beamed ceilings and huge screened windows that looked past the sprawling porch to the garden and, just beyond, the mountain range. (Much of the material used to build the lodge came from trees felled by Hurricane Mitch, which slammed the country in 1998.) Decorating the room and the deck were pots of every size, crafted by Honduras’ Lenca Indians and gathered during shopping trips around the country by the general manager, Michael Wendling, an American who helped launch three other hotels in Central America, including Francis Ford Coppola’s Blancaneaux Lodge in Belize.

Stuffed with grouper and dessert, I still found room for another favorite Central American treat, a rum called Flor de Cana, which I’d encountered before in Nicaragua. Our bartender happily poured one to go, and we trooped back to our cabin for our first night, swathed in a luxury bedspread, in the shadow of Pico Bonito.

After a breakfast of eggs, sliced fruit, home-baked pastries and locally grown coffee, then a lazy morning capped by a fresh-fish lunch, we laced up our boots and set out to explore the trails leading into the mountain park. Lodge staffers seemed surprised that we would go without a guide, a service offered for free, but we assured them we were comfortable hikers and would be just fine with a trail map. (They had none, one of the few lapses we encountered all week.)

The trail entered the park along a narrow ridge that, in one spot, allowed us to glance 500 feet below to the roiling Coloradito on one side and to the equally boisterous Corinto on the other. Rivers in stereo, Monique said. The trails lead, steeply in places, past towering hardwoods, through a former cacao plantation and past vines as tightly coiled as telephone cords. Along the way, the lodge has built three towers that hoist the visitor above the forest cover and a wooden deck that juts over a set of rapids on the Coloradito.

We huffed our way to what seemed the trail’s summit, but, with darkness approaching and uncertain which way to go, we decided to complete the loop the next day. Our descent served up the trip’s first name-that-animal mystery: a brown woodchuck-like critter that scrambled into our path atop spindly, scissoring legs. Once back, Monique headed straight for the lodge bookshelf, with its helpful collection on tropical life, and got an answer. It was an agouti, a Central American rodent we would later see scooting around the lodge regularly.

We made good the next day on our promise to finish the hike, walking in a warm downpour along the Coloradito and to a remaining lookout tower, which gave us an up-close look at the dangling homes of the oropendola, a noisy bird whose nests hang from branches like soggy stockings. Even as we dried out, we already were looking forward to our next outing: a visit the following day to the Cuero y Salado Wildlife Refuge, an estuary that is home to endangered manatees, howler and white-faced monkeys, butterflies and uncountable water birds.

Getting to the refuge was an excursion in itself. Accompanied by lodge guide Nina Polo, a recent biology graduate from Honduras’ capital, Tegucigalpa, we were dropped at the town of La Union half an hour’s drive away. There begins the route of a tiny, narrow-gauge diesel train, or burra, that once lugged coconuts from a Standard Fruit plantation and now ferries tourists six miles to the estuary. Sitting on a wooden bench in our open-sided car, we clattered past the village’s mud-skirted shanties, beside fields dotted with egrets and cranes and through the ghostly landscape of the old plantation. Its trees now are headless stumps--the victims, Nina told us, of a virus that has afflicted crops around the Caribbean in recent years.

Our escort for the two-hour boat tour of the refuge was Jorge Mendoza, a buoyant longtime environmental activist who volunteers for the nonprofit foundation in charge of the 14-year-old refuge. Winning the designation was arduous, Jorge explained in Spanish, and managing the refuge at times has placed the environmentalists in conflict with local fishermen rankled by a ban on net fishing and ranchers who would sooner use the surrounding land for grazing. Though relations are improving, past threats have made the volunteers keenly aware of the delicate diplomacy required here.

In some ways the refuge mirrors the country’s wider, uncertain foray into ecological tourism at a time when Honduran cities have been beset by a crime wave. Here in the mostly peaceful countryside, there is hope that by fortifying the estuary’s role as a draw for nature lovers--only 2,000 people visit the refuge yearly--residents may benefit by adding small-scale lodging to the platform tents available now. At the moment, though, locals are pushing for construction of a road to La Union, now reached only by horseback, bicycle and the little train. “It’s hard work. It’s good work, but we have to overcome a culture of destruction,” Jorge said.

As we motored slowly over the placid waters, Jorge greeted scattered fishermen in their dugout canoes and trolled along mangrove-choked shores in search of wildlife. We saw blue morpho butterflies, a turtle sunning itself on a log, a water-skipping Jesus lizard, a 6-foot crocodile and lots of birds, from kingfishers, brown jays and black vultures to the diving anhinga and the odd-looking boat-billed heron. We fell short on our goal of seeing a monkey despite Jorge’s best efforts, which included pulling out a bamboo flute to play a tune he said always seemed a simian favorite. (It was “Greensleeves.”)

The train ride back revealed the savage side of bird paradise when a brawny caracara, a kind of flying Rottweiler, swooped down over the field and seized a fully grown crane, then winged away, the long legs of its prey trailing like streamers. It was awesome to see and a thrilling reminder that this was nature, unadulterated and unfiltered through a television camera.

Ever since my first river-rafting adventure in Maine two summers ago, I had been eager to go again. I had my chance now near Pico Bonito on the Cangrejal River, which has Class III and IV rapids and is considered one of Central America’s best spots. From Monique’s past comments, I understood that rafting for her would rank on a list of preferred activities somewhere between sword-swallowing and slamming her hand in a car door. I would be on my own for this, half an hour’s drive from the lodge. Once delivered to the river guides, it was my good luck to share a craft with Rick and Sue Woolery, warm and spirited Aspen, Colo., innkeepers who were celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary.

Our 12-foot raft at first seemed impossibly small to accommodate us and two guides down the boulder-strewn river, but we sluiced down the churning chutes, bouncing off the granite walls but not once overturning. The only scary moment came during a riverside break, when we were dared to join a bunch of local crazies and their tourist companions in plunging off a 15-foot cliff into the rapids below. Rick and I cinched our helmets and stepped off. Sue, unashamed of her good sense, was happy to watch from the top.

Back at the lodge that night, Monique and I joined a New York couple and Ingrid, the lodge staffer, for the guided night hike. The big cats were having nothing to do with us. Our flashlights at first managed only to produce sightings of a climbing rat, hunkered wide-eyed at the base of a fig tree, and a prehistoric-looking beetle that our guide James said was cousin to the cockroach. (I joked to the New Yorkers that a hike featuring rats and roaches must have made them feel at home.)

James then spied a tarantula crawling into its half-dollar-size hole, and Monique picked out a molting dragonfly as it emerged, pinkish and fresh, from its old shell. Ingrid was best at spotting the pinpricks of light emitted by the luminescent millipedes.

I was determined to locate a snake--a big one, I hoped--lying in repose at a discreet distance. But like the cats, and the monkeys two days earlier, they were not to be seen. They were not here on our terms. We were on theirs--and that, of course, was all the objective we had brought along.

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Guidebook: High Life in Honduras

Getting there: From LAX, connecting flights via San Pedro Sula to La Ceiba, the most convenient city to Pico Bonito National Park, are available on several airlines, including American, Continental, and TACA and LACSA (both Central American carriers). From San Pedro Sula you must change to a smaller plane for the 30-minute flight to La Ceiba. Round-trip fares begin at $630. U.S. citizens need a passport but not a visa.

Where to stay: The Lodge at Pico Bonito, U.S. reservations (888) 428-0221, or direct dial 011-504-440-0388, fax 011-504- 440-0468, www.picobonito.com, is the only hotel at the national park. Rates for cabin rooms are $145-$190 nightly, depending on the season. You can pay for each meal separately or save by buying a daily meal plan: $44 per person, including tax and service, for breakfast, lunch and dinner; $34 per person for breakfast and dinner only.

La Ceiba, the third-largest city in Honduras and about a 20-minute drive from the lodge, has several hotels. The seaside city is said to have a lively disco scene and a few decent restaurants, though we never ventured out of the forest at night.

When to go: High season is Christmas to Easter and June to August, when it’s warm and dry. Low season is the rainy months, September to November. The best months for bird-watching are February to April and July through August.

What to do: Hiking trails lead into the national park, and the lodge can arrange, for an added fee, guided excursions to the surrounding area inside the park and outside. Among the outings are a guided night hike near the lodge, $25 per person; a hike to the waterfalls of the Rio Zacate, $30; a tour of the Cuero y Salado Wildlife Refuge, $65; white-water rafting on the Rio Cangrejal, $75; and a visit to the Amaras Wild Bird and Animal Rehabilitation Center, a nonprofit refuge for wildlife confiscated from the illegal pet trade, $30. The lodge’s farm and butterfly and reptile house are free for guests.

For more information: Consulate General of Honduras, Tourist Section, 3450 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 230, Los Angeles, CA 90010; (213) 383-9244, fax (213) 383-9306, www.hondurasinfo.hn or www.honduras.com.

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Ken Ellingwood is a reporter on the Metro staff of The Times.