The great majority of travelers will see San Pedro Sula either arriving or leaving by plane or making bus connections, with at most a night’s stay. A handicrafts market and a regional history museum merit an afternoon, and there are plenty of high-quality restaurants and nightlife for a great evening out. One worthwhile naturalist day trip or campout near San Pedro for those with time to spare here is at the cloud forest of Parque Nacional Cusuco.

The vicinity of Lago de Yojoa is an excellent place to spend a few days in a lush, tropical setting, with plenty of opportunities for naturalist expeditions like boating and fishing on the lake, world-class bird-watching, hiking in nearby cloud forests, visiting pre-Hispanic ruins, and checking out a roaring waterfall. Accommodations are not fancy, but comfortable enough to suit most tastes.

Santa Bárbara and several attractive towns and villages nearby, tucked among the green hills on the other side of a mountain from Lago de Yojoa, are worth spending a couple of days exploring, for a more off-beat experience.

For highway travelers heading toward Tegucigalpa, Siguatepeque makes a good place to spend the night for highway travelers, with lots of low-priced hotels and restaurants, as well as a pleasantly cool climate. Comayagua, just an hour from Tegucigalpa, was Honduras’s colonial capital city, and it deserves an afternoon to admire the art and architecture, or a day to do some nearby hiking as well.

The area around Pico Pijol and Yoro, in central Honduras, is far from the beaten path, where exploration of the small cowboy towns and mountain country requires several days at least to explore.