All right in Raista

The next morning, we´d recovered sufficiently from the previous day´s travails, and we managed to find a place that would make us coffee (no one seemed too interested in Palacios in feeding us or helping us - it´s an odd place.) We had lamb visit us while we had coffee, wanting to eat the tablecloth. In the end it settled for the artificial plant and its cloth flowers in a pot beside our table. A man named Ovideo came and discussed passage on his small canoe boat to Raista, further into the Moskitio, and the jumping off point to Las Marias, up the Rio Platano, where they led guided trips through the dense jungle. We talked him down from 400 Lempiras to 300L for the two-hour ride, and left an hour later. The ride was comfortable, through winding canals lined with dense foilage and all sorts of birds. The canal opened into a very large lake/lagoon, where we soon stopped in the tiny village of Raista. Ovideo left us at the Eco-lodge Raista, run by a woman named Elma. It was a very nice place, with thatched-roof cabanas on stilts over a central garden area, and the lagoon just beyond. It was very rustic, with no electricity, and only shared cold-water bathrooms, but everything was immaculate, and it all seemed relatively luxurious after Palacios. Dona Elma made us a wonderful lunch of seasoned chicken, rice, beans and plaintains. There was a huge amount of food, but we finished it off with no problem after all the travels and bad food of the previous day.

We discussed with Elma and her family our possibilities for getting to Las Marias, far up the Rio Platano, deep in the Moskitia jungle. The normal, tourist way of doing this, was to engage a man with a motorized dug-out canoe to boat us up 5 hours to Las Marias, where he would stay and wait for us for 2 days while we did our jungle trek. The price tag for that was a bit high, though - 4000 Lempiras, about $220, which was way more than we wanted to spend. We heard of "colectivo" canoes which brought supplies and locals up and down the river, but Elma didn´t know if we would be lucky enough to get one. In the end, after 2 days of asking around, her daughter radioed to Las Marias, and found out that there would be a collectivo going up the following morning at 8am, so we were in luck, though we still didn´t know how we would get back down river...We were a bit sad to leave Elma´s, as her cooking, hospitality and comfortable cabanas were very, very nice.