Today was a day off, so we headed to the nearest city of La Ceiba, the third largest city in Honduras. We started off the day in traffic, then breakfast, a trip to the Bank to exchange some money, and a stop at a glasses shop to fix Cat's glasses. Christine had fixed them earlier with dental floss, but since we were in the city we thought we would upgrade the floss.

Then, we headed on what turned into a wild goose chase to find Pico Bonito (Beautiful View). I'm going to condense the 3 hour journey because its not worth telling you how many times we went back and forth to find this thing. Pico Bonito is the highest mountain in Honduras, just outside of La Ceiba. There are many entrances into the National Park at Pico Bonito. We found a few of them, but not the one that would have been best... One was the expensive tourist version where the movie stars stay - we heard that Michael Douglas has been there. We got our entrance fee back once we found out all the extras you had to pay for there. The other one was an equally expensive one, but it was of the take advantage of the foreigners kind. When we first arrived at this entrance, they wanted to charge us hundreds of Limpera each, and then we talked them down quite a bit, but it was still too much, so we told them never mind, they weren't going to get anything from us. Ironically, in the end the cost of these two was not so different! There are many ways to rip people off.

We did get to see a beautiful view at the park, but it was in a more unnoficial entrance than either of these. We got word from someone that if we drove down this road to a gate someone who lives right beside the park could show us to a waterfall, so we figured, what the heck! We had a beautiful hike through some woods and then came to a river that we could cross. I didn't make it without getting my feet wet, but we had a blast climbing the rocks and getting up close to the waterfall.

After all of this we decided to go to the beach for a while, so Cappuccino took us to a Garifano village on the beach near La Ceiba. Cappuccino is Garifano - these are people descended from American slaves that escaped to Central America generations ago. They have their own language and culture, so when we were in the Garifano village it was like being in another country!

Then, we went to the mall in La Ceiba for dinner. The mall has all kinds of fast food places, and I think most of the group ended up getting Wendy's. A few of us have gotten sick in the last few days and some US food sounded good to us. I was in the middle of my own bout of not feeling well, so I hung out in the internet cafe at the mall while they enjoyed Wendy's. Finally, after all this excitement we came back to the hotel and crashed for the night.