Honduras , La Mosquitia

La Mosquitia is an inhospitable place. It covers 32,500 square miles and to get there you have to get on a tiny plane that lands on a strip of grass in the middle of nowhere. From there, the only way to travel into its bowels is on a cayuco (a dugout canoe) and you can do this for days on end without seeing anyone at all. It's the ultimate jungle trip. It's obviously nowhere near as well-known as the Amazon and this makes it far less visited and much more authentic. The indigenous people you find in the tiny villages dotted along the riverbanks are not set up to receive tourists, they are simply friends of the cayuco owners who transport you from one end to the other. This makes for an incredible journey that exposes you to real indigenous people going about their daily lives as well as an amazing amount of wildlife and environments. One minute you're in your canoe in the pitch black of night crocodile-spotting, the next you're drinking pure water out of a tree branch. There's no other experience like it and while it's not an easy ride, it's certainly worth the effort.