Lonely Planet Honduras (Book Review)

Honduras & The Bay Islands. Lonely Planet Publications, 352 pages, c2007, $20, #978-1-74059-150-8. By Gary Chandler & Liz Prado.

Short version: A decent book, well worth the $20 (for the long version, see below):

Even though it is all-but impossible to renew a Nicaraguan tourist visa with a land crossing to Honduras, there are still many reasons to visit neighboring countries. I have a feel for the country in that I have lived off-and-on in Honduras since 1996, and have an apartment in the capital, Tegucigalpa. My wife is Honduran, and we have property and/or family and friends also with properties in places as diverse as the Mosquitia borderlands, Trujillo, San Marcos de Colon, Choluteca, and Santa Rosa de Copan.

This newly updated LP guide is a 2007 publication, coming in at 350 pages, for $20 (retail). It is a good deal, timeliness, coverage, and quantity considered. Printed on good paper with a signature binding (pages are glued and sewn together), which comes in handy if you move around from arid to tropical locales, testing the binding strength, and/or if this volume is in your backpack month after month (I used to say it helped keep the book together were it bouncing around in your car glove-box for a few years, but since everyone I know down here has had their car stolen at least once, this now hardly seems like a point worth mentioning).

Though most all of my "haunts" are not found here (and special kudos to the authors for not finding and revealing them), the book is a decent guide to the country; not 100% fantastic, but surely not in any sense a failure either. In terms of safety, history, and culture, there really aren't any gross errors or omissions. Like most guidebooks for Honduras, it is heavy on the Bay Islands and Mayan Copan - but with good reason, since these have always been the tourist drawing-cards for this fairly large and very poor country.

While the book is quite good on the whole, some minor criticisms seem merited: a map, even a crude one, would be a welcome addition for the national park sections (the LP entries for these Parks usually emphasize how easy it is to get lost in them, especially in the cloud forest, so why mention this and yet not provide a reasonable way around that dreaded outcome?). Also, maps for cities of size should be an "obligation" for travel writers. But, many travel books -usually not LP, and often only some of their competitors- skimp on them. Granted, there are a good number of maps in this volume. Yet, Catacamas, now has more than 35,000 people and while certainly not a tourist Mecca, there should be a map for the city (and any city of this size), as there should also be for Olanchito (nearly 30,000), and Santa Rosa de Copan (this LP book claims 28,000, though it is currently obviously much more than this), etc. This seems an especially valid criticism given that places like Gracias (granted, a nice little place) is just 8,000 people, and comes with a full-page map.

For every oversight or oversimplification there is probably a handful of revelations or unexpected explanations, so the book remains a very useful tool. I found some "facts" rather odd. No reason to list them all, and one example should suffice: There is the claim that most people visit isolated Trujillo (home to "Fusilado" William Walker) as "a day trip". Strange thing is, Trujillo is so far away from most things that this makes little sense, especially since as a beach-hotel city it costs less than Tela or La Ceiba or wherever these people head off to after their alleged day trip. So, there is not much reason to go back the same day, regardless of your starting point, and since the distances are so great, most of the time would be spent on a bus or in a car. Since there are other beach towns to visit, whatever drawing cards Trujillo has, none are so great to lure you there for just a few hours. The authors also maintain that most people who visit Trujillo stay "out of town". This is simply not true, even if you limit the count to foreigners (Trujillo is a beach town for 100x as many Honduran tourists, as it is for gringo tourists). If one wished to be isolated, then that could be accomplished without getting out to Trujillo. This "out of town" point seems almost a veiled advertisement for the fairly recent backpacker hotels located well beyond walking distance from the beach bars and seafood places down below Trujillo proper. Though that is partly their selling point, there is nothing all that much to do at these places, except for hanging out with other travelers; the vagabonds might claim such a locale is rewarding, yet at the same time the cynical might claim that this could just as well be done virtually anywhere else in Trujillo.

While this book is $20 retail not all other comparable LP books will remain that nice round number. I mention this because my new 2007 LP volume for Venezuela is about the same size (390 pages), but costs 25% more @ $25. Hopefully, this is not a trend - because competing travel guides often share the same strategic pricing, and once one jumps a barrier, others usually follow. My recent (c2007, both) Moon Handbooks Guatemala @ 500 pages, and Moon Handbooks Belize @ 340 pages, are still both only $18. Price matters. My new Moon guidebooks listed above, even though they are up to 50% larger than some comparable LP books, are still $18-20. When a Moon book gets up over $20, usually it is fairly massive work - like the new 2007 volume on Argentina, which is $22, but comes in at a whopping 660 pages. Assessments of quantity often do not correspond to assessments of quality, but in guidebooks they often do, since they tend to be a "labor of love" and rarely rampant with bad info, hack writing, or countless errors. In years past, it has taken only one publisher/country to raise the standard price, then all seem to follow.

The authors are actually better on the particulars than on the generalities - which usually doesn't happen in travel guides. I will not list the parts that seem good and on-point; based on the publisher alone, readers should assume they are many and frequent throughout the entire volume. As for generalities that seem a little "odd" to me, here are some:

(1) Eating out? At the outset (p.21) the book indicates this runs $6-8 though, they claim, you can save money by eating street food. Outside of the Bay Islands and Copan, I have probably eaten 5000 meals in Honduras, have only rarely eaten street food, and have almost never spent even $5 per person, with many places being $2.75; this is sometimes even true for monstrous seafood meals on the coast (Honduran seafood costs less than Nicaraguan - though the portions seem equally huge). Putting the high end of the range at $8 hardly does justice to the true costs of average restaurants in Honduras. Oddly, few of the restaurants listed in this LP book include price ranges even touching $8 - and only one of the many for Tegucigalpa does, the overpriced and overrated, "Tre Fratelli". The book, like every guidebook I have ever seen covering the capital, continues to list for Tegus, La Terraza Don Pepe as a recommended place to eat, even though it hasn’t been a decent place in nearly 7 years, and rarely has more than a few tables of customers, most of whom are simply drinking overpriced beer (I doubt any guidebook author -LP or otherwise- actually ate there, and then decided to keep the recommendation in their book). Honduras is loaded with good (and pretty average) Chinese restaurants, though almost none are mentioned in this LP guidebook. San Pedro Sula and the capital Tegucigalpa each have more than 80 full-fledged Chinese restaurants - though obviously not all are truly fabulous. Honduras is no Peru when it comes to Chinese cuisine, and most places lean towards quantity not quality. However, very good food, either Chinese food prepared well or non-Chinese food also prepared well, can be found, and the book is not much of a guide to this side of life in Honduras - which is certainly a way of life for most locals and many tourists. Chinese food is a bargain for all, and when Hondurans "splurge" (payday, birthday, baptism, etc.) it can just as well be for Chinese food as the traditional Honduran faire. Chinese food in Honduras, on average, is far superior to that found in Guatemala, Nicaragua, or even Costa Rica - where it often costs 2x times as much. The book could be much better regarding this aspect of everyday and tourist life, especially since when they do list a Chinese place it is usually not even one of the 3 best places in that barrio, let alone that city.

(2) Taxis? Again, at the outset (p.22) the book indicates that Taxis run $0.50-$1.00 in town and $1.50 out-of-town or at night. Even if authors took the time to explain the difference between "collectives" and "directos", these prices are not reflective of real-life costs here, not at the time of research or publication. Substantial price hikes occurred in 2002-2003 (nearly 5 years prior to the publication of the book). The prices listed are not the costs of collectivos nor are they the costs of directos, and no where in the book is there really good information for night-time taxi use. Since one could easily use 20-60 taxis on an extended trip, the info on this cost needs to be more precise.

(3) Souvenirs? The book mentions t-shirts (p.23) as sought-after souvenirs. For many readers this may seem odd, if not somewhat shallow ("this is the best they have to offer...a frickin' t-shirt...?"). The mention though is not out of place, just outdated. The screened shirts from Honduras are (or at least, were) superior to anything found in other Central American countries. In terms of artwork and materials, the garments were first-rate, and exported versions easily sold for $20-$22, even though in country they were often three for L200 (currently about $10-12 for 3 shirts). The only drawback to the repeated recommendations for the shirts is that fact that the people responsible for these high-quality garments were eventually Hurricane Mitch causalities - and the designers and screeners and best stores disappeared nearly 10 years ago. While you can still find some decent garments in the larger cities and tourist towns, the very best makers are long gone. The same is true for the "Mayan replicas", the souvenir recommendation on nearby pages in the guidebook. In sandstone fashion, Honduran artists crafted incredible miniatures of the stelae found in ancient Copan. All of these excellent artists ceased production circa 1999; what you now find there are amateurish simulations, not the sought-after works of years gone by. The authors never point out this well-known fact. It is possible they were impressed by what they saw in the shops (granted much if is decent), but if so it is too bad they never saw the real thing -as they really were impressive, especially the bookends and medium- to larger-sized statues.

(4) Crime? It is hard to make money selling very many travel books for a place that is flat-out dangerous. While it is true that visitors rarely get killed in Honduras, that alone is hardly a tourism promo. The authors are careful to point out (p.30) that the lone traveler hasn't that much to fear from violence, while also acknowledging that the murder rate in Honduras is (at the time they went to press), 45.9 per 100,000 residents - one of the highest in the world, and more than 8x what it is in the U.S. For whatever reason, the book lists a well-known and recently defunct (11/07) book exchange & bar in the capital. I know of at least 5 people who wrote to LP in the last 7 years pointing out the fact that the business was the focus of past violence against at least 3 travelers, was well-known for drug use and sales, including the sale of date-rape drugs, and that the North American owner had been imprisoned more than once for incidents involving firearm use inside the establishment and/or attacking non-Honduran patrons, yet LP apparently didn’t take these warnings seriously or perhaps did not pass them on to the authors; it doesn't much matter now since the owner died in 2007, but I cannot see how this place ended up listed, yet again. In the end, true, not very many tourists get killed, but for the record some of the eateries and Spanish schools listed in this LP book have relocated in the last decade, not because they were looking for new scenery, but because of armed robberies and rapes. While tourists might not automatically be targeted, they sometimes engage in activities that increase this possibility. A little paranoia never hurt anyone (not that much).

(5) Drink? One of the biggest curiosities in this book (the Moon guidebook manages to get it just as bad) is a simple, tiny section entitled, "Alcoholic Drinks". Strangely, the guidebook does not even mention what is often referred to as the national alcohol, Tatascan. And, it begins with the claim that while Honduras has two well-known beers (Port Royal and Salva Vida), neither will impress serious beer drinkers. The authors then admit that the HN beers are also popular in neighboring countries. This is a curious admission (I will ignore the obvious question as to why unimpressive beers, exported to other countries, would be popular even though they cost much more than homegrown beers; and, also, ignore the fact that Port Royal is an award-winning export beer, available in many if not most capital cities in the U.S.). Honduras has some of the better beer in Central America. Sit in any border-town bar like Copan where people enter from Guatemala, or Choluteca or Danli, where they come from Nicaragua, and simply listen to tourists, or read about beer, or drink one (or more than one), and this will be confirmed. And, for the record, the book does not mention the best-known and most consumed beer for the last 75 years, Imperial. It also does not mention the beer designed to compete with Corona, namely Bahia (recently renamed Barena). More importantly, it is really rather amazing that someone could spend much time in any Latin country, literally anywhere between the tip of Texas and Tierra del Fuego, and not know what beer is made and sold there. This is definitely not an endorsement for alcohol consumption (which is a serious problem in every Latin American country, perhaps especially so in the ex-pat community). It is hard to believe, not because every single person imbibes, but because drinking-related symbols are the most prevalent icons in the whole country; it takes a fair bit of work not to know what the symbols (and people) all around you actually mean and represent. Where are these images? Well, just for starters: the framed artwork in the airports, the logos on the Cerveceria Intercambios near the airports, countless objects in every souvenir shop, an array of popular clothing, goods associated with sporting events and other competitions sponsored by the brewery, the furniture and garbage cans found in many eateries and bus stations, the signs on the wall in virtually every pulperia in the entire country, the largest advertisements in any given newspaper, the television commercials seen on local programming, the outside walls, inside decorations, and even the front covers of the menus from the some of the very restaurants the authors are recommending!

Again, a trip to Honduras should hardly be chosen due to the beer availability or quality, but drinking beer is virtually the National Sport, and it plays such a large role in Honduran life that the facts in a country guidebook should be reasonably accurate. Not to be silly, but if someone was kidnapped abroad and tossed out of a plane and parachuted into Honduras, while it might take a few days to find an example of the national flag or discover what local slang is associated with a false arrest (hopefully, learned second hand), or what the national flower is, it wouldn't take more than a few minutes to be overwhelmed by the images via the so-called national brewery (South African SAB-Miller now owns it), yet travel-guide authors are somehow missed this.

All said and done, it is like many budget travel books, and almost every LP book I have ever seen, $20 well spent (perhaps a bit more than $20, next time - but hopefully not), though I personally think Moon Handbooks now have an edge on LP per virtually every Central American guide, this is a decent book. The criticisms above are not indicative of problems throughout - and the beer one offered only partly seriously. While tourists in Nicaragua can no longer renew a tourist visa via a quick trip to Honduras, there are still reasons to visit here. The book is a good introduction to where one might want to go, and after all, and not to harp on that "beer thing", but doesn't a country get some free bonus points for having a nearly 100-year old national beer named, "Salva Vida" - with a giant life preserver used as the official bottle logo?