Departamento de El Paraíso

The first full days riding in Honduras. It is stunningly beautiful. We started out on a major road in town which was extremely busy at 7am. Noisy and polluted with large trucks, mopeds, tuk-tuks, the odd horse and cart and lots of old bikes. Then we got onto a major highway - thankfully there was a hard shoulder that we could ride on. The surrounding countryside was beautiful - very lush and green and looked like quite a lot of ancient pine trees.
We passed over a big river and looked down to see a large truck in the river and next to it there were guys standing in water up to waist digging sand from the riverbed and putting it into the back of the truck. On the other side of the bridge there was a school bus in the river with a driver giving it a wash.
We stopped at a small roadside vendor and there were 3 really sweet kids that Catharine spoke to in Spanish - Jennifer, Angel and Maria.
Lunch was delicious as usual with lots of lovely salads and we emptied the stock of soft cold drinks from the fridge of the cafe the TDA group had set up at.
After lunch we set off and John almost immediately had a puncture so he returned to lunch stop to fix it and Catharine started the 15km climb with Hubert. It was phenomenally hard and hot and John caught us half way up. The long steep climb took us to our rest day in Valle de Angeles in the Tigre National Park.Read more