(Belize/Honduras)…Flying is not becoming easier, and on every flight I hear at least once a neighbor complaining how long the flight is. Not every passenger chooses to fly, I know, but I suspect the majority do, and I got to wondering if flights are only as long as the passenger’s desire to get to wherever the flight is heading to.
The experience of flying could be better, but it can always be worse, and I always pinch my leg to remind myself how lucky we are to live in accessible, transportation-minded America, in which New Yorkers enjoy even more flexibility, including three cruise ports. Many of those people I see when I travel do not have such advantages. This is not me being patronizing. It simply is true.
Recently, I came across another example of this good fortune, having reached two towns of the same name and linked by history. In the south of Belize, in Toledo District, close to the border with Guatemala, is a small town called Punta Gorda. That’s Spanish for Fat Point. Flying there—actually, puddle-jumping through this country the size of New Jersey from Belize City to Dangriga to Placencia to Punta Gorda—on a small, low-flying plane, I saw a stately Belizean procession of meandering rivers, thick jungles and thin, sand-colored roads, but nothing that looked like a point, fat or otherwise. There is no reason it has its name, except if you consider where its people came from. Its people are the Garinagu, more commonly known as the Garifuna.
They originally hail from the Caribbean islands, or was it Venezuela and Guyana? No one remembers for sure. The British treated them terribly and threw them out of what is now the island-nation of St. Vincent & the Grenadines. They landed, destitute but still not enslaved, on the Honduran island of Roatán, where they established a small town called Punta Gorda, from where the Belizean town got its name.
Some stayed. Others moved along the coast to Nicaragua, Guatemala and Belize, which is its largest population. The second largest is in Los Angeles. Passing a large clock tower painted with national symbols, the bus driver in Punta Gorda, Belize, popped in a CD of the Garinagu music of Andy Palacio. Its infectious beats swayed like wind-caressed palm trees. Palacio died young, in 2007, and is considered a national treasure. “There’s another Punta Gorda in Honduras,” I was told. I knew that. I had been there, and now I had been to both, but I kept silent. It seemed from what I heard that for many Garinagu going to Roatán was a dream, a pilgrimage of return. I felt slightly self-conscious that I traveled to both Fat Points, especially as it was my British ancestors who kicked them out of their 18th-century home.
Additionally, I saw that it is far, far easier and quicker—but not as much fun—to fly from Belize City to Houston and then back south to Roatán than it is to ferry across from Punta Gorda, Belize, to either the Guatemalan or Honduran coasts and then continue by road to La Ceiba, which sits more or less opposite Honduras’ Islas de la Bahia, one of which is Roatán.
In La Ceiba, travelers must make a choice of catching a second ferry or taking a flight. Thus, most Belizean Punta Gordans have never been to their Honduran parent. The Belizean ferry does not run every day, and even if you sail to Honduras, you still have to pass through Guatemalan waters and customs, adding to the logistical nightmare. In Honduras’ Punta Gorda I stumbled, quite by chance, on the 211th anniversary celebrations of the Garinagu’s arrival on Roatán. Even on this small island, getting to Punta Gorda takes some effort. The island has a scrunched-up spine along which travels its one two-way road, but the hassle was worth it. The party oozed exuberance. There was music, food, dancing and colorful dress.
The town stretches along a dusty main street, a white-sand beach, lines of power cables and palm trees and the blue Caribbean Sea. Its wooden buildings are as bright as the costumes worn on this special day and in memory of distant origins—oranges, blues, yellows; West African designs, conical caps and vibrant bandanas. In hindsight it was also memorable for its guest of honor, who landed a short way down the beach, stepped out of a helicopter and sauntered down, to where we all sat eating seafood stew, wearing a large white Stetson hat and shaking hands. Soldiers twitched to attention, but the mood remained happy.
It was Manuel Zelaya Rosales, the former president of Honduras, who at press time still remains in the Brazilian embassy in the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa after his much-chronicled political troubles, coup d’état, exile to Nicaragua and clandestine return. He was supposed to have come with Nicaragua’s president Daniel Ortega, the Sandinista, but did not due to a Honduran-Nicaraguan dispute concerning maritime borders that rears its ugly head every few years. Maybe Ortega wanted to visit beautiful Roatán, but politics stopped him. Many of Belize’s Punta Gorda citizens are halted by expense and difficulty. There is little that should stop us.

(Honduras)…Flying into the scruffy but enjoyable town of Coxen Hole, the erstwhile capital of Honduras’ Bay Islands, on the island of Roatán, I was struck by how green the isle was; and that it had some topography, a definite sylvan spine running down its middle. After the scrubby flatness of Antigua & Barbuda and the Bahamas, I realised I had been luckier picking out first Jamaica and, now, Roatán. It has two main tourist spots, with the more upscale hotels on West Bay Beach and the backpackers and scuba crowd in West End. It is possible to walk between the two, but not at night, as some guidebooks suggest, there being two stretches over rocks close to a cliff face and a steep, metal bridge that crosses a small canal entrance and is missing one or two of its wooden slats.
I am not a beach-lover, but the strand at West Bay, especially in front of the new Infinity Bay Resort (www.infinitybay.com), is gorgeous and has all the criteria that I require: it was curved for starters; had a sandy floor, was warm and had fish of several colours swimming metres from the shore. Iguanas patrolled the sharp jags of the coral to one end, while to the other were two good restaurants, Las Rocas and Bite on the Beach.
Jesus lizards (Basiliscus plumifrons) scuttled around on their back legs like Keystone Cops. To get to the other, eastern end of the island, it is necessary to catch two buses, one from West End to Coxon Hole, the other from Coxen Hole to Oak Ridge, which was hit by Hurricane Mitch in 1998. It seems to have recovered in the subsequent 10 years. It also has mangrove swamps, but neither claim to fame had me accepting the offer of a ride in a boat. Instead, I wandered down a narrow lane that leads to the breakwater that curls back by the sea.
Here I discovered a great little bar and restaurant called BJ’s Backyard (www.roatanonline.com/bj_backyard), which is run by a couple from Alabama, who, I strongly suspect, have been on this island for more than 30 years; and I returned a few days later in the wonderful company of Liza and Pedro, who I met on the island. Its small outdoor, wooden patio sits on the harbor mouth, zipping through which are numerous taxi boats full of schoolchildren. It is a community of both blacks and Hispanics, while up the hill is Barrio Lempira (named after the Honduran currency), in which only Spanish is spoken. I had a Port Royal beer there while waiting for a bus to take me over the top of the spine to Pollytilly Bight, the name of which had me making a beeline for it. This is Garifuna country (more of which later).
The mountains by the nearest mainland city, La Ceiba, are very dramatic, and I was lucky enough to stay at the wonderful Lodge at Pico Bonito (www.picobonito.com), which has kilometres of trails winding up the mountainside behind it. I went swimming naked in mountain pools and was fortunate enough to see two amazing species of birds here, the White-collared manakin (Manacus candei) and the definitely-needs-to-be-seen Lovely cotinga (Cotinga amabilis), which it took me four efforts ranging over five hours to get a sight of. The highlights of this area is walking up the Río Cangrejal, in which you need to wade through water, clamber over rocks and jump off boulders into the swift current. Assuming the safety position of knees up, arms out and feet forward, I maneuvered downstream to where I started whitewater rafting (www.jungleriverlodge.com/rafting.html) on class I to IV rapids, although I suspect that the water level was not as high as it could have been to make it truly terrifying.
The second must-do is the train journey (the last one in Honduras) from the dusty town of La Union to the wildlife refuge at Cuero y Salado (www.cueroysalado). I was told that the true benefits of allowing tourists, not cattle, to use this remaining stretch of track have not been fully realised by the locals, most of whom are not, understandably, patient to wait a full 10 years for the tourism master plan to unfurl in all its developmental glory.
The reserve is a peaceful place, especially the watery passage the locals called Mirror River.
The Bay Island of Útila is not as pretty as Roatán, but it seems more laid back, if more laid back is possible. Two dusty roads lead away from the only town, also called Útila, but disappear into a beach and swampy wood, respectively. 
That said, people come here to scuba dive or learn to scuba dive, it being the cheapest place on earth in which to become PADI-certified. I searched for Whale sharks with no luck, but I did see a group of 50 or so Spinner dolphins (Stenella longirostris), some of which did spin on their tails. Equally aquatic was the inverted grotto that was the Jade Seahorse (www.jadeseahorse.com), a hotel in which the owners have gone to no imaginary expense to decorate: Small pieces of tile of every colour, plastic bananas, seahorse, bottles, shells, arches, a treetop bar, mirrors, you name it, it is probably in this wondrous pile somewhere. 
It only has six rooms, all wonderful, too, but in the ones next to mine were Barrett and Heidi from Seattle and Joaquin (Norway) and Cyncia (Italy) who met in London and now live in Rome. Fantatsic company.
Back on Roatán, I attended the 211th anniversary celebration of the Garifuna people’s arrival on the isle. I was told that originally the Garifuna (actually, technically, Garinegu is the correct plural term) came from the Caribbean nation of St. Vincent & the Grenadines, but when the British took over these islands and following some clashes with the locals, the “blacker” members of these people (like all populations there are those who have darker skin, those who have lighter) were shipped off to Honduras. Of the 5,000 who started the journey, only half survived.
The celebration—we saw Honduran president Manuel Zelaya Rosales (known to everyone as Mel) leave in his helicopter—is in the first settlement that they reached, Punta Gorda, which remains their base. The women were dressed up in colourful dresses and skirts, and a man, wearing an elaborate headdress of reeds (see the photo above) that reminded me of photos I had seen of dances in West Africa, sang a song on a stage. The dance they performed is called a punta (which might explain the town’s name, although in Spanish it can be directly translated as “fat point”), and the music is referred to as bunda, which means “backside” in the West African Mandé language. It was all dusty and wonderful and the perfect soundtrack to my latest journey.

(El Salvador)...This Central American country does not have the range of natural wonders as does Costa Rica, but as the southernmost extremity of the Mayan world, there are several archaeological sites of interest. The most important, Joya de Ceren, was a pre-Hispanic village that like its more famous sisters, Herculaneum and Pompeii in Italy, was buried under volcanic ash. The disaster has been dated to around 600 A.D.; soon after its re-discovery in 1985, Joya de Ceren became a UNESCO site. Many artifacts still are on display, a sauna was uncovered and more than one perfectly preserved skeleton was unearthed. The site was interesting but overall left me cold, and what interest I did have was eroded by the very nice tour guide feeling she had to explain every single artifact and faded poster, and in depth. I sneaked away from her several times to ostensibly look at the Blue-crowned motmots that were flying around and perching on the wires surrounding the artifacts. 
I was more excited to go to Santa Ana, which since I first read of it in a travel book by Paul Theroux, seemed to me one of the places I should one day visit. Its cathedral dominates the town, but the town in turn is dominated by the 2,365-metre Volcán de Santa Ana (the country's highest), my best view of which was from the banks of the country’s largest lake, the Lago de Coatepeque. Back in Santa Ana, I gravitated towards the city's wonderful theatre, which was being repaired. Its creaky floors, heavy door and wooden paneling evoke the ghosts of turn-of-the-century playwrights and actors. It was opened on February 27, 1910.
The city also is home to a spectacular coffee called Aida's Grand Reserve Peaberry, although I highly suspect that this is the name written only on bags intended for export. How much is exported at $25 per 340 grammes, I do not know. It is available in the United States (I just did a search) now, and, equally wonderful, it is produced at a Santa Ana farm called Finca Mauretania, which gave me an excuse to dream about travelling to that West African nation, even though the spelling is slightly different. We drove by the farm — at the time I did not know of its coffee — and I remember being happy at seeing the word Muaretania in El Salvador. Perhaps "Mauretania" does mean "Land of the Moors, a throwback to Arabic influence in Spain, El Salvador's former motherland. Aida has nothing to do with the chain of coffee shops of the same name in Austria, by the way; also, by the way, Aida is finca owner Aida Batlle, a surname also shared by a recent but ex-president of Uruguay, Jorge Batlle Ibáñez, which is the only reason I know how to pronounce it. Actually, four Uruguayn president have been Batlles. That's a lot of Batlles in such a small country. The photo above was taken as I drove back from Santa Ana towards the capital, San Salvador. 
The nearby town of San Juan Opico is noisy and covered with political graffiti, and from its small square several other volcanoes can be seen. One thing El Salvador does not lack for is volcanoes, the last serious eruption being on January 13, 2001; also in October that year, the coasts were battered by Hurricane Iris (three years after Hurricane Mitch), so the people slowly are being haunted from all directions, not least from the scars of the country’s civil war 10 years or so ago. I so hope that the country develops its tourism, but of all the countries in the region it seems to me that this one will have the hardest time achieving it. El Salvador, like Nicaragua, has a rule on its books deeming it illegal to cover over political graffiti that was produced during its years of struggle and civil war. This seems to be especially enlightened, the authorities quite rightly believing that these "documents" are a part of their cultural history and just as relevant and important, and therefore worth saving, as any piece of art or the insides of a church. 
When I arrived back in the capital San Salvador, I went for a walk. I was in the tourism district, where the hotels are, but after 30 minutes or so I found, 800 metres along a tall, white wall, what was literally a hole in the wall. I entered and found myself in an unpaved barrio of narrow alleys, patched-together cars and the inevitable parade of skinny dogs, colourful roosters and smiling children. A huge USA flag was painted on one car, which was parked outside a Seventh Day Adventist church. The priest invited me into the service, which basically was comprised solely of him singing hymns into a microphone. Everyone seemed very happy.
I looked for another way out of the community, but if there was a second door, or perhaps even a road, I did not find it. I did find myself later on walking up a dead-end path that led to a bottom of a cliff, a few ramshackle houses and a half-destroyed gazebo where a little boy kicked a football and shouted out what sounded like "Beckham, Beckham," after the English player David Beckham. In order to get back to my hotel, I had to walk all the way down a hill until the cliff disappeared, but in that way I did find a really cute café with Santa Ana coffee, although I am pretty sure it was not from Finca Mauretania.

(Costa Rica)...Two friends of mine were going to go to Costa Rica in August but decided instead on going to Kaua’i. I have written about the latter destination, so here I go with the former, a gorgeous country that I have been fortunate enough to visit on two occasions. I headed north to the Caribbean coast and was honoured to be among a group who were the first people in 10 years to ride a passenger train in the country, the system having been destroyed in 1991 by an earthquake. The start of the Caribbean Jungle Train trip was in Moín, its length progressing 65 kilometres inland to Siquirres, along the Caribbean coast and then through banana plantations and the foothills of the Cordillera Central. The three carriages, built in England in 1890, retain many of their original fittings, with small, curved wooden planks lining the interiors; Chicago’s Pyle Company built the engine many decades before. From my perch on the outside edge of a carriage, I watched the beautiful scenery unfold and felt myself literally moving through history.
This, as I write, seems overly melodramatic, but I was very aware that that journey was a notable moment for Costa Rica, one that it was not my place to be experiencing. The hot, dusty land unfurled slowly, the line curling around fields of bamboo and grazing land of gaunt cattle; the train did not move fast, which was good. The first 15 kilometres (perhaps still the service exists?) hugged the Caribbean Sea. To the other side, the Tortuguero Canal began its 80-kilometre journey to the turtle-breeding grounds of the Parque Nacional Tortuguero, and on to Nicaragua. Luxuriant – and, more importantly, alive – jungle comes down to the many rivers that the railway crosses.
The train driver stopped at several of the bridges so we could gaze at the scenery and watch the lazy vultures await their moments on the river banks. At the village of Boca del Pantano (Swamp’s Mouth), the line takes an ninety-degree turn inland, with the best halts being over the broad Río Matina and the Río de la Madre de Dios. Lunch was eaten 20 metres above the Río Pacuare. The chances of another train coming up behind were extremely remote; young children leapt off the bridge into the crocodile-less water below.
Next to Moín is Puerto Limón, the capital of Limón Province and the main port of Costa Rica; it was built by American produce concerns to ship out the Costa Rica's main exports: coffee and bananas. The city, which dates from 1871, sits on the site of the Indian settlement of Cariari, which Christopher Columbus visited in 1502. It was he who named the new land Costa Rica, although it turned out to be a little less rich than he had hoped. Just east along the coast is a thin strip of coastal land that eventually ends at the neighbouring country of Panama (I have since travelled along this corridor on the Panamanian side, almost to the border of Costa Rica).
The first sizeable town is La Cahuita, which has a national park, a thin ribbon of jungle and beach that contains Howler and Capuchin monkeys. The park was also the site of a rebellion of sorts, the towns-people occupying the park so as to force the central government to give them more say in how the park was run and how any benefits were distributed. I took a flat-bottomed boat out across the corals and spotted needlefish and rays, while next morning, at about 5 a.m., I walked along the pristine beach (some of which is composed of black volcanic sand) for a couple of kilometres.
Another worthwhile trip in Costa Rica is to Cartago, which for more than 300 years until 1823 was Costa Rica’s capital. It is not really any more impressive than San José, the capital now, but I did visit the Basílica de Nuestra Señora de Los Angeles, which contains a tiny black figurine, La Negrita, which legend has it kept returning to the church despite a little girl’s attempt to make it her toy. Finally, someone persuaded her not to take it home again, and today it is crowned in gold and honored every August 2 with a mass and pilgrimage. From Cartago, I took a bus to the coffee-producing valley and city of Orosí. This is a beautiful part of the country.
Orosí contains the oldest Catholic church in Costa Rica, built in 1743. Called Nuestra Señora de Ujarrás, it has an adjoining museum of artifacts and sits on one side of a square, which in turns leads to a pedestrian suspension bridge that crosses the Río Reventazón. This was the river I followed up to reach the Tapanti Parque Nacional, which has the largest amount of rain fall and cloud forest in the country.
The Talamanca Mountains start their journey here and rise up between 1,200 and 2,540 metres above sea level. Huge, bright butterflies, toucans and frogs are evident. A Dutch couple, recently moved to Costa Rica, gave me a lift back to town. The young girl playing the drums was part of a workshop that I attended in Puerto Viejo, in the north. A man gave an overview of tourism in the area, but he was forced to abandon his speech several times when others in attendance complained that he had mentioned his own hotel far too often for their liking.

(Panama)...In April in Panama, I left for a walk away from the very pleasant hotel in which I was lodged during a hotel’s grand-opening celebrations (musician and actor Ruben Blades was there, as was the country’s president, Martin Torrijos, son of former president Omar, who brokered the deal with U.S. president Jimmy Carter to get Panamanian control over the Panama Canal; by the way, that’s two Martins in as many blog entries). I turned left up a path called the Sendero del Bosque (“Path of the Woods’) that rises quickly and stops first at the hotel’s water tank. The scenery got better. Up and down the path went, and I saw wonderful creations such as Geoffroy’s tamarin (a monkey) and Snowy-bellied hummingbird (quite obviously a bird). After 30 minutes, including one very steep ascent that someone had tried to make easier by placing concrete slabs as steps, although the ones at the top have long since tumbled down to dusty deaths, the path reaches a right angle next to some leftover U.S. army ordinance to become more and more inconclusive. Ants ran rampant. Just as it exited to a road, I saw one of the most amazing, if not the most amazing, birds in all my travels, a Lance-tailed manakin, with a black body, powder-blue back, scarlet head and two small, sticklike (well, lancelike) tail feathers.
The Long-tailed manakin is exactly the same, but with a much longer tail, so perhaps it is more spectacular than my find, but I was impressed nonetheless with the way nature rarely gets it wrong.

The hotel's website— the inn I stayed at being the InterContinental Playa Bonita — is this: http://www.playabonitapanama.com. The road the path fell out onto is a busy one, with cars, buses and lorries spouting carbon monoxide as they make their way from Veracruz to Panama City. I walked to Veracruz, about four miles in distance.
The road travels through a treed area before dropping down to an attractive beach lined with tourist-season restaurants with outdoor eating areas. An island to my left could be reached at low tide. The Restaurante El Darién seemed interesting, as I have always wanted to go to the Darién Gap bordering Colombia. I tried to organise a visit on this trip, but the dates of excursions there did not gel with my schedule, and warnings of the dangers of travelling there alone — ne’er-do-wells, Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia guerrillas, deadly poisonous snakes, etc. — have I think not been consistently documented just to waste time and ink. After 30 more minutes I met Eduardo, a dentist who spoke English and worked for many years in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He warned me of the delights in store in Veracruz.
According to his conversation — he accompanied me on his morning, swimming-costumed walk along the beach before driving to Panama City where now he teaches dentistry at a university — Veracruz is not too far behind Darién in its general nastiness. When the United States bombed Panama in 1989 (Operation Just Cause was its wonderful name), he continued, it decided to concentrate its mighty arsenal on the very poor neighbourhood of El Chorrillo, hardly a place any of then-Panamanian president Manuel Noriega’s henchmen would be languishing. Many people were made homeless, and in the confusion, many people suddenly found themselves sprung from jail. Eduardo claimed that this fringe-living mix of life’s unfortunates was packed off to live where no one could see them and presumably the Panamanians could keep an eye on them, that is, Veracruz.
Eduardo also warned that it was the main portal of drugs entering the country. It seemed perfectly pleasant to me, but I was there at 10 a.m. Two Kuna indian women, from the Panamanian-Caribbean islands collectively called the San Blas, walked along the street, children played and an Irish woman who grew up in Tanzania warned me about the snobs now buying property in Boquete, in the west of the country, who were hated by the über-snobs who moved there 10 years before, who were hated by...All seemed to me to be excellent.
I stopped for an espresso and two empanadas at a dirty, roadside stop within which the El Salvadorean flag fluttered. Who could guess at all the myriad tales of all of these refugees? I walked up a side street and took a photo of an old, toothless man wearing orange who patted down his hair and shifted to the side of his door when I asked him if I could photograph him. (When I had the photo developed, I noticed the man’s address in the top lefthand corner of his door, so I sent him a copy; perhaps he got it.) He’s from England, this man told a passer-by, who shrugged his shoulders, not at all interested, which is just the way it should be.