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Published: November 20th 2006
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The view from the top
So this is what honduras looks like from 2849m up! (if you zoom in you can see we randomly caught a butterfly in this picture too) The next stop on our trip was Gracias and from there a hike out to the Celaque National Park and Honduras' highest peak at 2894m. We only spent a night in Gracias, trying to organise ourselves for our trip. We had been told that a lot of the hotels rented camping equipment so we went round to have a look. The first two places we went to didn't have anything and then we saw a pricelist for equipment in our hotel but despite having all the prices they had nothing as well! Undeterred we just took our hammock and some warm clothes to sleep in as there was supposed to be some kind of shelter halfway up the mountain.
The National Park entrance was 7km from Gracias and there was no local transport so we decided to walk and maybe pick up a tuc-tuc taxi on the way. The tuc-tucs we passed wanted stupidly high prices which we declined but realised later why they were so high. The road to the park was thick with deep mud that got progressively worse the closer you got to the park. Even if we had taken a tuc-tuc it would have never made The view from the bottom!
This is the road up to the park, note the lack of tarmac! our final destination was the peak on the far right at the back! it, one crazy tuc-tuc driver had attempted the muddy road and got stuck, so we kindly helped to push him out on our way past. Huffing and puffing away on the uphill climb in the sun, we eventually made it to the park, hungry for breakfast. As luck would have it there was a little comedor at the park entrance. Comedors are local eateries serving typical local food at cheap prices - perfect. This comedor was someone's little mountain house and as we arrived we were greeted by a sweet old lady who served us up a tasty freshly cooked breakfast round the tree in her front garden. At first we thought the meal size looked a little small, but she kept bringing more and more out of the kitchen until we told her we could eat no more. Like every good granny she wanted to make sure that we had nice full bellies for our hike and even gave us some extra cooked yucca (like potato) to take away as a snack for later.
Fit to bust we were not sure we could move, let alone hike, but thought we'd better make a move if we hoped to
Hmmm breakfast...
No sausage and egg McMuffins here but it was open and we were "lovin it"! reach camp, halfway up the mountain, before nightfall. No-one appeared to be manning the visitors centre, so we had to make an intelligent guess as to which trail to follow. We had a simple hand drawn map to guide us and the trails were all supposedly marked with brightly coloured ribbons. The ribbons soon appeared and we were off! We were quite pleased to find some ribbons confirming that we were on the right path as two hikers had got lost and died on the mountain in recent years!
Our trail lead us over a small, but fast flowing river, we just had a couple of logs to balance on to get us across, from there the trail wound its way up into the mountains. One of the most striking features of the hike was the way the forest changed; at the base of the mountain it was just normal lowland forest then as you ascended it changed to thick pine forest and the ground had a thick covering of pine needles. This was as far as we got on our first day, we arrived at Camping Don Tomas in mid afternoon and decided that that was more than
The information centre
And what was on the sign was all the info we got! enough walking for one day! The trails had been pretty steep and slippery towards the end of our days hiking but we had ascended to 2000m in a day, plus we had walked 7km before breakfast before we had even started!
Our Camp was just inside the beginning of the cloud forest so their was an earie mist lingering as we arrived. Camp consists of a toilet, or rather a hole, with falling down walls and a stone walled, roughly tiled, mud floor house. Two out of three of the basic beds had fallen apart so we found a nice corner in which to hang our hammock and mosquito net. We then set about making a campfire for tea. As I was collecting water from the river, another couple from Argentina arrived with full blown backpacks, tent and cooking stuff!! I was impressed they had made it carrying all that weight, we'd left our big bags at the hotel. We realised we had actually spotted them earlier on in our trip taking photos at the Copan Ruins - small world when you meet halfway up a mountain. We practised our Spanish over our campfire dinner with our
Crossing the rapids
Tash making her way across the "bridge" new friends Mina and Fransisco. Dinner was courtesy of Big Paul, who very kindly donated some of his army rations to our trip. We had pork casserole and lamb stew, a very nice little taste of England!
Mina and Fransisco told us all about Argentina and we are now super eager to get there, it sounds wonderful!
We all went to bed pretty early as we hoped to start the final steep trek to the top of the mountain just after sunrise. Mina and Fransisco snuggled into the sleeping bags and tent whilst we balanced ourselves in the hammock. Throughout the night, Kev and I tossed and turned as we discovered a silk sleeping bag liner and warm clothes do not actually keep you warm at altitude in a hammock!
Up early, we all had a quick breakfast before heading off in search off the top. Kev and I headed off first, but super hikers Mina and Fransisco had soon caught up and overtaken us! The trail was very steep for the first hour and the trail we followed seemed to be more like rock climbing than hiking, which I was not looking forward to coming back down. Safe on the other side
Kev made it across the river too! One part of the trail had also been blocked by a fallen tree which we had to find our way around and the trail marking ribbons had become a bit scarce. Nonetheless we managed to all reach the second camp up in the cloud forest at around the same time where we recharged our batteries with some chocolate snacks. The first part of the summit trek had already afforded some amazing views across the valley and we were looking forward to reaching the top.
The second camp was at 2560m so we were now walking among the clouds in lush dew-jewelled forest, tall trees tangled in hanging vines, huge ferns and lots of moss covering everything. Our hand-drawn map showed what looked like a nice easy winding path to the top from the second camp but the trail seemed to go on forever and it felt like we were continually going round in circles, up and down, under and over trees before we finally all reached the top. It felt like we were on top of the world. From the peak we could look out through the moving clouds around us at beautiful views across the valley below. It
Its a long way up!
Taking a break on the way up to the first camp was stunning. We laid back in the small clearing to bask in the sun and enjoy the glorious landscape surrounding us.
The walk back down was quicker and easier than I had anticipated - I think we had followed the trails of some crazy hiker ´off-roaders´ on the way up! We decided that we should probably spend the night again at Camp Don Tomas since there was a least another 3 hours of hiking to get back down to the visitors centre and it was unlikely we would get there before dark. Mina and Fransisco were also staying another night at camp which was cool. Aware that we had frozen in our hammock set up, they kindly lent us their fleeces as extra warmth for our second night in the hammock. The extra clothing and new hammock cuddling position we adopted kept us warm enough for a good nights sleep.
For the return journey to the bottom the next day we took a different trail which wove down the side of the valley over streams and back up the other side through beautiful forest, climbing steeply up to the top of Rooster Hill where the orchid-lined trail passed
along the top of a thin peak allowing amazing views to either side of the mountain. The trail then dropped back down through sky reaching pine forests and then meadows back to base. The hiking had certainly been challenging and tiring at times but the scenary had been very rewarding and we had made two new fantastic friends. We celebrated our successful return with another huge breakfast with our little adopted nanny before hiking another 7km back to Gracias town in the heat of midday.
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gem
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wow! u guys are professional hikers now hey?! and yep Fransisco does look like I imagine dad in his youth!!! amazing pics of the butterflies and i particularly like the 5* private bathroom! i assume they handed you towels and moisturiser after ur dump!?!! guess u've already read my email re: getting the job in oxford?! I'm soooo excited! start 4th Dec! anyway, take care speak soon xxxxxxxxxxxxxx