La Ceiba

After teaching my first week of Summer School, I had the best weekend of my life. Literally. This was the coolest weekend I have ever had, and I feel that if I were to die tomorrow and God were to ask me what the top 3 favorite life experiences, I feel like this would be in there. Since I finished Thursday at 11:30, Leah, Jen & I boarded a bus to the Caribbean coast to the town of La Ceiba, which is a great little beach town that has attractions, yet is not completely Disney-ized and over-run by tourists.

It pretty much took all of Thursday to travel to La Ceiba since it was about 6-7 hours in a bus. However, we have really come to enjoy the bus rides and use them as part of the relaxation of traveling so that from the moment we arrive to our destination until the moment we leave, we can live it up and absorb as much as we can, leaving the sleeping to the busses. Friday morning, after waking up at the beautiful Hotel Canadien

(which cost us each about $9), we had a wonderful breakfast of fresh tropical fruit, beans, eggs, tortillas, avocado, and unlimited orange juice and coffee, all for the whopping price of $2. Plus, the view from the second story deck of the hotel wasn't bad either. After breakfast, Leah, Jen, and I hit the beach for a little time in the sun and in the water. The view was amazing, with cloud covered tropical mountains literally stretching all the way to the coastline. Floating in the ocean and looking out over this sight, I couldn't help but just think of how good God is for giving us such a beautiful creation. Too often we fail to recognize that God is beauty and perfection, and this was just a small reminder of that.

After spending some time relaxing, the three of us made buddies with a taxi driver who offered to be our personal chauffeur for the weekend (for just the right price) and drove us out to the Pico Bonito National Park where we would go white water rafting on

the Rio Cangrejal. It has been a long, long time since I had been white water rafting, but with the water being the perfect temperature and with the coolest river guide ever (Juan Carlos) I knew we would be in good hands. Since we went rafting during the rainy season, the river was about 2-3 feet higher than normal, which made for the highest category for rapids that there is. We had an AMAZING time and felt like we completely got our money's worth on this one. I wish I could completely share just how beautiful it was there within the national park, but I suppose you will have to take my word for it and look at the pictures knowing that they are only more fantastic in real life.

So, if this was all that we did when we were in La Ceiba, it still would have been a fantastic weekend. However, we had one more day and we managed to also ride horses from our hotel up this gigantic mountain and took zip-lines down through the jungle canopy. I have NEVER done anything like this before (both horse-riding as well as attaching myself by a cable around my waist to fly through the air at 35 miles per hour through a jungle), and just thinking about this, writing about this adventure a couple of months afterwards, I still cannot help but smiling. We went down on a total of 13 cables, and after each one we had to unhook ourselves, walk out on the platform, and jump up to hook ourselves onto the next one, and zip through to the next platform. In addition to seeing the beautiful Cayos Cochinos Islands in the Caribbean from our mountain-top perch, we were also able to see natural hotsprings and waterfalls inside the jungle, as well as a variety of plant and animal life that only belongs to this part of the world.

We were also sure to partake in the famous seafood of the area for nearly every meal, and definitely made the most out of our whirl-wind weekend trip.


While I was in Florida during this summer visiting family and friends, the million dollar question was "Macayla, when are you coming back??" Look at these pictures my friends...they will speak for themselves.