Spent a night in downtown La Ceiba (not so hot unless you like chunky hookers and miniature drug dealers).
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jb/Honduras - Jungle River Lodge/April 5/A beautiful thing
We've driven up into the Pico Bonito cloud forest (a mountainous National Park overlooking La Ceiba and the western Honduran coastline). It's breathtaking. More varied than the Guatemalan landscape we came through, it's staggeringly green and fertile, sharply undulating and disappears into mist and clouds.
We've come to stay in a jungle lodge perched on rocks overlooking the cascading Rio Cangrejal. Hemmed in by dense jungle, much of it shrouded in clouds, the water roars through the canyon and on towards the coast. There are rocks to bask on, natural pools to paddle in and the water is warm and crystal clear, a joy to swim in. I hand washed my clothes in a river and enjoyed it. Strange but true.
The photos just don't (read 'can't' because the autofocus is shot on the Canon, that's my excuse) do justice to the sheer scale of the cloud forest and the variety of the wildlife. Kingfishers compete with flycatchers on the river while vultures make circles over the jungle. Monstrous, bumbling insects bounce off you as you sit watching the sunset. Two huge tame macaws commentate on pool matches (seriously, a pool table in the middle of the jungle), and the owner plays trance or banging techno way into the night. It's wierd, but it makes for an amazing and delightfully incongruous night.
We rafted down the Cangrejal today and what a blast that is – terrifying and exhilarating at the same time. There's a really addictive quality to the physical effort and teamwork needed to steer through the rapids. Looking back at one of the five foot drops in particular I still can't believe we came over that in a glorified rubber ring.
We almost skipped this place and went straight to the capital, but I'm so glad we didn't. It's not cheap (about $80 of add-on costs mysteriously appear), but worth every penny. In fact, I'm already regretting that we didn't stay longer.
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jb/Honduras to Nicaragua/April 5/Chicken out...
We're going to catch a flight to Managua (via El Salvador) on the grounds that it's only $30 each more expensive and saves 17 hours bus travel with an overnight in Tegicigalpa. That's the good news, the bad is an overnight there and then a chicken bus (oh, joy) takes us to Granada.
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