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Outside Magazine December 2001

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Honduras Adventure
Jungle Gym (Cont.)

About 40 minutes east of the lodge, on the far side of La Ceiba, the Cangrejal River carves thousand-foot-deep gorges through the park. Our group paddled two hours on Class III-IV rapids around gigantic granite boulders, and even in the bone-dry early-summer season, the river was frisky enough to unseat me twice from my inflatable kayak. Another good way to get wet is an excursion to the Cayos Cochinos, the least developed of the Bay Islands and close enough to La Ceiba for an overnight or weekend trip. While the reef around the Cayos Cochinos Marine Reserve has suffered from bleaching, it's slowly making a comeback. But the best reason to visit the Cayos Cochinos is for their isolated ambience. The solitary lodge, the Plantation Beach Resort, has the only phone, and, better yet, the only bar.

I covered a lot of territory in one week, but seaside, barside, or hanging in my hammock, I was lured by Pico Bonito urging me to come on up and have my butt kicked.

Lounging barside or poolside, I was lured by Pico Bonito urging me to come up and have my butt kicked.

So I called Kent Forté, an American expat who'd helped build the lodge and had offered to put together a bushwhacking team for a three-day trek into the backcountry. The team included Salaverri, who was not only an expert bird caller, but also handy with a GPS and a topo map; German Martinez, a young local guide from the lodge; and our head machetero, a campesino named Ramón. As we set out with loaded packs from the banks of the Cangrejal, Ramón warned us about El Sisimite, the Honduran version of Bigfoot. According to him, the hairy beast had been scaring off park intruders lately.

"Sí, para arriba," Ramón said, cocking his thumb across the Cangrejal and up—straight up—to the top of a cliff where a 264-foot waterfall, El Bejuco, twisted and braided in the breeze from the coast.

What I wondered was how El Sisimite got up there.

It looked impossible but turned out to be the best sort of semi-life-threatening scramble, half hiking and half tree climbing. We stuck to the shaded understory, using saplings for ladder rungs and kicking steps into the soft duff as German and Ramón slashed open a seldom-used trail. At high noon we skidded down into the streambed at the mouth of the waterfall—a little Eden of cool repose. An iridescent blue Morpho cypris butterfly flitted about in the sun-dappled updraft where El Bejuco cannonaded into the abyss, misting us in the shady bower. Combined with my incipient exhaustion, dehydration, and vertigo, the seemingly endless view of the white-capped Caribbean, clear out to the Bay Islands, gave my goosebumps goosebumps.

At the top of the first ridge, a thousand feet above El Bejuco, the trail was a surreal hybrid of lichen, fern, and brush, springy as an old mattress. You could plunge a stick through it, or walk a stout limb out over a gut-sucking drop. Confident as German and Ramón were, they also knew we were following the trail they had been lost on during a previous scouting mission. Only a handful of people, Forté among them, have summited Pico Bonito.

An hour before dark the guides hung a tarp and started a fire to drive off the few mosquitoes, and we settled in for the night. Though we'd seen only feathered wildlife on the ascent, unseen things scuttled in the leaf litter beyond the campfire. Chattering michos de noche—night monkeys—crept close to us in the can-opy above. Every few seconds a click beetle with a pair of bioluminescent antennae, looking just like two little truck headlights, would streak out from the dark tree trunks. With a cool breeze blowing, the fire glowing, it was wonderfully peaceful up there, as luxurious in its own way as life back at the lodge. "El Sisimite, eh, Ramón?" I said. Ramón just winked.

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