The plan had been to stop at D&D Brewery for the night but as you can read in the previous post that was a bit of a disappointment. A 'trendy' place, with 'trendy' music and 'trendy' people where the whole approach seemed to be that we should be happy to be allowed to spend our money… Don't ask questions because the only reply is 'no possible'. I didn't even want to stay there and have a beautiful day in Honduras end that way. So we looked further, only a little bit further in fact, and found Finca Paradise!
Finca Paradise is a coffee farm, which also has cabins and a campground. The main income is coffee though. For campers, apart from great fresh coffee (as I was told by a fellow camper as I don't drink the horrible stuff…), they have proper flush toilets, power and a swimmingpool! The campground is at a beautiful spot on a cleared section in the rainforest, right next to a fast flowing river. The river also feeds the pool, which means the pool is continuously refreshed and free of chemicals. The water comes from high up in the mountains and is refreshingly cold :-)
Breakfast is served from 8 am and lunch and/or dinner are also possible but as there weren't many campers while we were there, the menu was basically determined by what was available… When we were there the Wifi worked and was available right at our tent but the telephone company was updating the internet connection. We used the coffee shop in nearby Pena Blanca instead to send and receive e-mails. Pena Blanca is where you can also find a bakery, a supermarket, veggie stand, hardware shop etc.
Finca Paradise doesn't have a washing machine as such but for a mere U$ 3,- the ladies of the house wash your clothes by hand... as they simply don't have washing machines in these parts of the world. The washing is done thoroughly!
There are several walking tracks around the place, with benches and tables set up at various places making it a good place to have a rest for a while. Which is just what we did!
The only thing that lets the place down a bit is the shower… it's an outside affair and cold… really cold as the water that feeds the shower comes from the mountains. The cabins have heated showers though. Camping is L100 a person (roughly US$ 4.75) while the cabins cost L600 per cabin (US$28,-) which can house up to 4 people. We chose camping as we prefer it over being boxed in, cost wise we only saved ourselves L300 a day (US$ 14.30).
Finca Paradise can be found on quite a few maps, but is unfortunately listed as a Motel only. In case it's not on your map, the GPS coordinates can be found on our skydrive which can be found
here. These can be downloaded free of charge and used in any Garmin GPS or the Garmin Basecamp programme which is freely available from Garmin. How that all works can be found on our blog as well
here. The maps we have used to plot these coordinates into are also free. We used the maps from both Open Streetmap and for Central America we also used the Cenrut map.
For camping, Finca Paradise is a much better alternative over the nearby and better known D&D Brewery. Finca Paradise has ample room for tents and a proper grass site, while campervans don't have to stand next to the road.
At the moment the camping and cabins represent just a small part of Finca Paradise's income. Even so they already present a very good camping option. Finca Paradise comes highly recommended.
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| Finca Paradise at night, beautifully captured by Mike |
