Day 60: Helen's Hotel, just east of La Ceiba, Honduras to Juticalpa, Honduras

With a new route laid out, we headed away from Helen's at a good clip on smooth pavement twisting along between the coast and the mountain range lying inland no more than a mile. It feels good to be back on the road with the hum of the engine below and the ocean air wafting through the open face of the helmet. We headed first southeast and then west before turning due south on Route 41.



Honduras Route 41 is a wonderful road: not a spot of pavement for 100 miles of twisting mountain road that must have taken us to at least 6000 feet of elevation. For the most part it is a wide smooth surface meandering along lush mountainsides but it doesn't take long for you see why it's been built that way: large boulders block half the road in places where the hillside above the road has given way. At one point we came around a corner to see bulldozder blocking our path, purposefully ploughing the remains of a very recent landslide in such a way as to recreate the road.

The little village of La Union was our lunch stop with a typical meal of fried chicken, red beans, rice, cheese, and tortillas. You know when you walk into a place and they have that jar on the table of some delicacy that they know only a few people will try? Well this was one of those places and the jar was full of hundreds of tiny red, orange and green peppers mixed together with some carrots and onions. Of course I had to try one. So with ample food and beverage standing by to help me get through the next 10 minutes, I nibbled at one of the orange verieties and quickly found that the tip of my tongue no longer had any feeling. With the nice woman who ran the place warning me that they were muy, muy, muy caliente, I chewed up the rest of the pepper and held onto my glass bottled Pepsi as my mouth began to burn. If I could have had a couple of these back on Utila, my sinus issues would have been history in 20 minutes.

Who just rode 80 miles of twisty mountain roads?

The second half of the day had an interesting thing to it: everywhere we happened to stop, there was someone who spoke English, and they were Hondurans, not other travelers.