"So many of my friends lose an eye," he explains.  "They go in to get the pineapple, but you have to be careful."  In the headlights, we look out at a thousand pineapple plants.  "If you aren't thinking, you go for the pineapple and you lose your eye and you are blind as a young man."

"Why don't they give them sunglasses?" I ask.
"These days, yes.  Green sunglasses, so they see the pineapple better."

Germán began his career as a ranch hand, and then worked the pineapple fields, and once spent a year off the mainland to repair boats for a seafood company on Roatan.  It was his earlier life in the foothills of the mountains though, that sent him on the path to becoming a senior wilderness guide.  When his mountains became a national park, Germán was accepted into the park service, and his job was to protect the area against poachers, plying its ledges for the secretive signs of hunters seeking to extract the area's biological bounty.

Earlier in the day, Germán described his days protecting the park.  "The bad people are always there, and there are only a few of us to protect our country's nature," he said.  "There are not so many jobs in Honduras as dangerous as park ranger."  He went on to tell me about rangers being beaten and even killed. 

The work helped prepare Germán for his role as a wilderness guide.  He has summited the mountain known as Pico Bonito eleven times.  The peak is not that high by mountain climber's standards.  It is not quite 8,000 feet.  But the jungle so very well protects it that very few people have ever summited Pico Bonito.  An expedition takes a week.  Many of the smaller mountaintops in Pico Bonito have never been summited, and much of the entire park has never truly been explored.