Tela
and Punta Sal National Park, Honduras, Central America
Tela is located on the North Coast of Honduras,
about 2 hours west of La Ceiba. A quiet town located on a long, beautiful beach,
it is a great place for adventure tours and eco-tourism enthusiasts.
There are
several hotels from the elegant Tela Mar, the moderate Cesar Mariscos, to budget
accommodations, such as the Maya Vista. Garifuna Tours has an office in Tela from
which visitors can embark on river rafting tours, boat excursions, and tropical
rainforest hiking adventures.
A little outside Tela and right on the beach, enjoy The Caribbean Coral Inn Bed & Breakfast, for comfortable cabins with delicious, authentic Garifuna cuisine.
Tela has plenty of restaurants and bars, both in the hotels and on
their own. One of my favorite Tela restaurant/bars is Luces del Norte. "They"
say, that at one time, it was a favorite hangout for "gringos", but
I didn't see any other North Americans there during my recent visit. Luces del
North serves simple breakfasts, lunches, and dinners with ice cold drinks. My
favorite menu item is the "coco" which is a plain old coconut taken
from the refrigerator; they use a machete to chop a hole in the top for a straw.
The chilled coconut water is delicious and refreshing on a typically hot day.
Another favorite restaurant is the Pizza Bambino
located right on the corner behind the Hotel Sherwood. The pizzas are surprisingly
good and very reasonably priced.
The picture to the left is a view looking
west along the beach at Hotel Cesar Mariscos with Hotel Sherwood glimpsed just
past it.
My favorite hotel in Tela is Hotel Cesar Mariscos. This small,
family-operated hotel is very clean and pleasantly decorated with reasonable prices.
The restaurant is great, right on the beach, covered and can be enclosed when
the weather demands. Iso, Cesar, and Giovani, and the rest of their family are
very pleasant and helpful, making visitors feel very welcome and comfortable.
This picture was taken right in front of Restaurant Vista Mar which serves
ice cold beer very cheap!
The purpose of our trip to
Tela was to visit Punta Sal, a Honduran National Park with a diverse eco-system
including rocky land formations, sandy and rocky beaches, lagoons, rivers, coral
reefs, untouched jungle and abundant wildlife. We arranged with Garifuna Tours
for a day-trip which cost U.S. $22 per person.
The tour group gathered
at the Mango Cafe, a cute riverside restaurant with an internet cafe and tables
over the water. There we met our tour guide and boat captain and were cautioned
to have insect repellent with us. This turned out to be excellent advice as there
were millions of hungry mosquitoes in the Park. Also, it is a good idea to bring
bottled water and sunscreen.
We boarded our boat (probably about 25 feet long with the capacity of 3 persons
sitting side by side in 4 rows) and started the short distance under two bridges
and out to sea. A funny thing is that the river is so shallow at its mouth that
the guide and boat captain had to jump overboard and push the fully-loaded boat
over the sand about 20 feet. That was nothing -- on the return trip in the same
place, EVERYONE had to get off the boat and help push it about 50 feet back into
the river -- this required waiting for waves to give the boat some lift while
we all pushed!
To get along to the interesting stuff,
we saw dolphins swimming near us on the boat ride to Punta Sal. After a 45-minute
ride, we arrived at Punta Sal. We boated up to a small beach where everyone disembarked
and put on walking shoes and mosquito repellent. This was the beginning of a walk
over the peninsula that took about 3/4 of an hour. We walked through a swamp,
dense jungle, and about 255 feet up (the highest point in the park) and over the
ridge down to another small beach where the boat picked us up. On the walk we
saw and/or heard howler monkeys, iguanas, a golden silk spider, lots of crabs
and many unusual trees and birds. The guide pointed these out, but there were
too many to remember.
After the hike, our boat took us out and around several large rocky
formations in the water which housed thousands of seagulls. Then we were taken
to a very nice beach for an hour or two of swimming until lunch time. Then, it
was back into the boat and down the coast a bit more to a very small village (one
family?) where we bought ice cold beer, sodas, and a typical lunch of beans and
rice, fried plantains, and a fish, maybe a blue tang, but I don't really know.
Here, we ate, relaxed, and visited with the others in the tour group. With us
were a group of Americans involved in a construction project, an Italian couple,
a Spanish couple, and some Hondurans who had been living in the U.S.A. Everyone
seemed to be enjoying the Park tour. Most of us spent more time swimming after
lunch, but the water was beginning to get a bit rough.
We piled into the
boat around 2:00 and headed back to Tela. By this time, the sea had become quite
rough and, this is no exaggeration, we were all soaked with sea spray all the
way back to Tela. About two-thirds of the way back to Tela, we spotted a boat
floundering. Our guide and boat captain talked to the men in the boat, and we
ended up taking four very frightened women and small children into our boat and
back to Tela with us.
The picture below left is Tela's beach taken from my balcony
at Hotel Cesar Mariscos. And here is a link to the Garifuna
Tours website where you can see photos of Punta Sal and other interesting
places in Honduras for rafting and hiking tours. The picture below left is a view of the Caribbean Coral Inn Bed & Breakfast in Triunfo, just outside Tela on the beach.
Tela
has, in the past, been burdened with a bad reputation for tourism; robberies and
attacks reported. On my recent visit, I noticed many Tourist Police on foot and
bicycles through the downtown area and on the beach. It appears that the government
has decided to make Tela a safer place for people to visit and enjoy, and the
town seemed to be enjoying plenty of tourists. At night, we stayed in the well-lighted
areas close to our hotel and had a wonderful
visit.
