Lancetilla Botanical Garden

Today, Christina and I went on our first tourist adventure. We decided to ride our bikes to the Lancetilla Botanical Gardens. It is the 2nd largest tropical botanical garden in the world (and the only one in Honduras). It began in 1926 by the United Fruit Company to to research banana plant diseases (I am in the banana republic after all). The garden even has a tragic irony: The founders' wife, also a great botanist, died in 1932 after eating a fruit from the poisonous ackee tree. She is buried somewhere in the garden but Christina and I couldn't find it.

So we start off riding our bikes. It was a short ride from our house to the entrance gate. We even got in for the resident rate (half price: $3) since we are living and teaching here. From the gate to the actual garden entrance was down an insanely long, rocky, dirt road. It was a million degrees. I swear, Christina and I stopped about 50 times along the way to wipe our sweat away and drink our precious water. We thought it would never end. We even had to walk our bikes for half of it because our legs were too weak to get up the hills.We finally arrived. We were urged to hire a guide for a 1 hour tour but quickly found that they spoke poor English and all we wanted to do was find the swimming hole anyway. Thus, we declined. We found the bamboo garden and followed it to the Lancetilla River.

And we jumped in. It was a bit chilly but after our tortured ride, it was refreshing. The water was really clear.The we heard about another bigger swimming hole 2km (that's right kiddies, we get to use the metric system here) up the road. So we checked out some plants and scenery along the way (Gotta turn your head, sorry). (Reina...I think this is the same plant you order from Suriname...very pretty). Then we found the other swimming hole. It was a bit bigger than the first but still chilly. So either we melt in the sun or freeze in the water. We decided to get in.
The garden was beautiful. It is much larger than shown here but we were too hot and tired to explore it. When we were ready to leave, we both agreed there was no way we were going to ride/walk our bikes back down that unforgiving road so we got a guard to give us a ride. It was hilarious watching the guards try to shove our bikes in the back of the jeep without them falling out. They ended up using our bike chain to hold them in. At the main road, we got out and rode home. By the time we got home we were extremely exhausted. And it was only 3:00pm. Time for a nice, cold bucket shower.