Our Honduras Story - the Beginning

This is June 20, 2009 and 3 years into our project in Honduras. The photo is our, "Villa Del Mar Caribe" on our 1 acre lot, with 83 ft. of beach front on the North coast of Honduras. It is currently our vacation villa and vacation rental and will some day be our rental and guest villa as we continue to develop this beautiful property.

I will first try to give a little background information on how we got to where we are today and where we go from here. This is our journey from our first desire to buy a beach property to finding the right place and bringing our hopes and our vision to fruition. It is also the story of our new second home of Honduras.

If you have ever dreamed or have aspirations to do something like this someday then you will probably enjoy reading our story.

We spent most of a year searching the Internet for properties for sale in different places, Mexico, Belize, Dominican Republic and others. We were sure we wanted to buy a home that was already built and ready to move into. The prospect of building a in a foreign land seemed overwhelming to us even though we are somewhat adventurer's at heart.

We decided to travel first to the island of Roatan in the Bay Islands of Honduras in November 0f 2006. It seems we had arrived on the first day of the rainy season. It started raining the evening we arrived and didn't stop but for moments for the next two days. We found that the street that we drove into our little cabana the next morning to look more like a lake than a road. This was after a night of being serenaded by the tree frogs of which it was their mating season. We had never heard anything like it; it was like a city full of horns honking continuously for hours on end. The sound was all encompassing with that in combination with the rain. It was amazing and beautiful in its own way after a couple of nights of adapting to the noise!

We had an appointment with a real estate agent the first morning to show us around the island a bit. He drove us about through the different size lakes that use to be roads the day before to different properties and areas on the west end of island. It was informational and interesting, but we felt the next day we needed to explore on our own. So after another night of rain and frog serenades we set out in our rental "car" for a day of sightseeing and hopefully seeing some of the properties we had seen online.

Word to the wise if you travel to Roatan or probably any third world country where the roads are more or less a suggestion of a course than a well defined road it is a recommended to drive a 4-wheel drive SUV type vehicle. Honduras (Roatan) in particular is very mountainous and roads can be very steep and narrow. Well we did fine in our little car although our butts and backs were a little worse for wear and tear by the end of the day. We drove the length and breadth of this (approximately 35 mile long and 5 mile wide) island that day and were amazed at the beauty. We had basic map of the island with towns and ports marked and roads somewhat marked. We didn't find any of the properties we had seen online there are no addresses and most roads are not signed. We did find some beautiful areas that were developing and some that were not. We drove into areas I was sure we would never return from as our little car would get hopelessly stuck and we would be lost in truly the middle of nowhere. The only persons we saw for much of the day were native Garifuno walking the roads as they foraged for fruit or wood or other things from the forest.

We did manage to find a place for lunch and bathroom breaks, etc. as we drove through this mostly unpopulated island. The west end of the island is very populated and even crowded in areas, but the east end of the island is mostly untouched other than a few scattered ports and villages. It was too us the most beautiful part of Roatan. Mountainous jungle and Caribbean Sea makes quite a dynamic duo.

We spent a week on Roatan and drove over many miles of terrain and took in all that we could in our 7 days. We left here with mixed emotions, seeing so much beauty, but somehow not feeling a connection.

While Internet shopping for properties in Roatan I kept coming across listings for the mainland. After returning home and mulling over all that we had seen an experienced in Roatan we kept coming back to the mainland in our minds. We had never been to the mainland and didn't know anything about it. We did what research we could online, but as it is developing its tourism it is quite away behind Roatan it was hard to find really good information. It is for the same reasons less costly to purchase a piece of "paradise". The Bay Islands are quickly becoming too expensive for many who would like to buy where as the mainland is still more accessible.

In July 2007 we decided to take a trip to La Ceiba, Honduras on the mainland. Watch for my next article, I will pickup the story from there....