Orlando told Mark where to dive to collect lobsters for our dinner and explained to me how to fish at night in "burning water," when the fish leave phosphorescent trails revealing their location; about the sweetness of Sapodilla Tom, the sixty-five-foot-long sea creature that swims in these parts (ah, a whale shark!); how to read the "baffling winds," which hit your sail in puffs and then disappear, only to come again a little while later. It was late now, and Orlando gently pointed to the sky, high in the direction of eastern Honduras. "See that light moving out there?" he asked. In the sky, where all was still except for twinkling, one small light was moving north. "That's the cocaine plane, making its run," he said. The coast once controlled by pirates could still be called Smuggler's Run. Partly because much of the Atlantic coast is wild, contraband travels pretty easily up the Caribbean corridor to Mexico and then the United States.

Lunch in Miami, one of the tiniest traditionally Garifuna communities sprinkled along the Atlantic coast of Honduras, was a profoundly satisfying moment, when all the contradictions of the world came together. The village lies at the end of a sand barrier, straddling the narrow ribbon of land that seals Los Micos Lagoon off from the Caribbean Sea, west of the small town of Tela. It is just inside the Jeannette Kawas National Park, one of Honduras's largest, a magical mix of cloud forest, estuaries, mangroves, and beaches. Walking through the village felt almost like trespassing; there are no streets, only paths between the small houses, all built of thatch and reeds. The sand sparkles, and there are little decorative gardens around some of the houses. There's no electricity or running water. The cayucos, boats carved from tree trunks, were pulled up on the shore of the lagoon, but if it's early enough in the day and you ask around, someone will take you out fishing or touring the enchanting lagoon. There was a breeze off the ocean, and we sat down at Nany's Place, along benches and picnic tables. I got a green coconut with the top cut off so I could drink its cool water and scrape the jelly out with a spoon. We lingered under the palapa, with the beach on one side and a view of the lagoon on the other, drinking beer and chatting with whoever came by to hang out. Then my cell phone rang—New York City checking in.

This waterfront has been providing subsistence to Garifuna and other coastal peoples for three hundred years. Despite the unaffected feel of the place, there is fighting over the future of all this beauty. Dead palm trees en route to Miami haven't been replaced—perhaps, I was told, because the area is about to be developed. At the behest of the government, the Honduran Tourism Board plans to construct the Los Micos Beach & Golf Resort right here, between Miami and Tornabé, the next village over. The project is meant to be not only ambitious but environmentally sustainable; plans include up to five top-flight hotels, as well as villas, a twenty-seven-hole golf course, an equestrian center, a shopping center, and a marina. Conflict about the project abounds, with different points of view on what constitutes sustainability. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has asked the Honduran government to protect the nearby communities of San Juan Tela and Triunfo de la Cruz, where in the last year masked men forced one woman to sign over rights to ancestral lands at gunpoint and threatened, shot at, and harassed other community leaders. The guy who offered to watch the car while we walked around Miami said that his main concern is whether he'll get a job.