We arrive at the lodge, exchange farewells, and I head for the bar. 

Nobody is at the bar, maybe because this is an off-day in the off-season during an international recession.  But this serves me just fine, because I have the two bartenders to myself, yet another night.

Danilo already knows my drink – dark rum, no ice.  And since there is no one else at the bar, no one will mind if I lay my camera equipment out on the bar table, to clean my lenses and pull twigs from the bellows.  I explain to Danilo that Germán and I attempted to photograph the Caribbean coast from the mangroves at sunset.  And that we had boated deep into the mangroves, where we waited silently looking for kingfishers.

While Danilo tells me a story about a boa constrictor that ended up wrapped to a rafter in the main dining hall, I pull out my moleskine and work on the sketch I started of the mangroves.  The mangroves on Honduras' coast are the exact same species as the mangroves in the northern Bahamas, which I have come to know so well.  But here in Honduras, these same plants tower to eighty feet in the air, with thick prop roots spanning dozens of feet, and creating a world that is both jungle and ocean, river and cave.