Lesson 5: How to Experience Nature

Will being nature-y

My primary purpose for being here in Honduras is to teach, but that does not mean I don't get out and explore the country and the nature. I've been having a series of Epic Saturdays including, but not limited to, hiking, birdwatching, various forms of public transportation, meeting new people, and rainforests (in the rain). Oh, and lots of birds.

As previously mentioned, I have a friend here named Will who loves to explore and go birdwatching. We've been taking hikes around the school, mostly up the mountain. We heard that there is a large National Park called La Tigra near here that we should definitely check out.

Will and Frank

We heard a few conflicting messages about how far away it was, but nevertheless, we decided we could make it by foot. Turns out, it is much farther than we thought, but that's not to say we didn't go. Our first attempt ended much differently than we had planned, but I wouldn't call it unsuccessful. We ended up at the house of a friend who is a graduate and employee of the school where we teach. He lives in a house up the mountain with his parents. His dad is an American named Frank who moved here about 25 years ago to start a business. He married a Honduran woman and they've lived here ever since.

The toucanet (he loves donuts)

Their house is spectacular to begin with, but the real draw of it is the multitude of feathered friends who have a routine of stopping by the house every morning to sample the fruit and donuts that are put out for them. This in itself is exciting, especially for a guy like Will who knows all the species types and what they sound like and all that.

That's a Motmot

There are two types of birds that are native to this area and are fairly rare, and they both just happen to stop by this house every morning. One is the Blue-Crowned Motmot, and the other is the Emerald Toucanet. We saw the Toucanet up close as it kept coming back to eat more donuts. Needless to say, it was quite the experience, even for someone who is undereducated in the field of birdwatching. It's always fun to meet and talk to people who are very knowledgeable about a specific subject. I love to learn new things, and I have done quite a bit of that on this Honduran adventure already!

[One week later...]
With our quest of making it to La Tigra remaining unfulfilled, we tried again the next weekend (last Saturday). The school sends a bus every week to go to a grocery store or to the open market.
We left at 6:30am last week to get some fruits and veggies at the market downtown. Will and I and another friend named Susie had a plan that we would go to the market with the group then find transportation to La Tigra from there. We left the market and found a bus, but it was going to the other side of the park. It was okay, since we were planning on walking across the park anyway.

Yeah. We rode in that.

We got on the bus and it took us to Valle de Angeles, a small town right outside Tegucigalpa.  From there we took a taxi (which is code for a three-wheeled golf cart) to a tiny village called San Juancito up in the mountains.

From the bottom looking up to the top...
or trying to peer through the fog...

We had wanted to take the taxi all the way to the park entrance, but as we soon found out, the entrance was on top of the mountain and we were most of the way up but still had to go up the steepest incline I've ever seen that tried to call itself a "road".
So we walked/hiked/climbed up the hill/mountain/cliff, racking our brains to figure out who we had talked to that told us this would be a manageable one-day trek.

From (near) the top looking into the valley

By the time we got to the actual park entrance, we had already hiked about 4 kilometers of extremely steep terrain up the side of the mountain. But, we had come all that way to go on the trails in the park, so we weren't going to turn back.
As an avid explorer of state and national parks in the US, I was expecting a welcome center, maps, well-marked trails, etc. Well, I knew not to expect those luxuries, but let's just say parks here are much more...rugged.  There was a map of the trails, so we chose the one designated as the main trail, which was quoted at being of "moderate difficulty". We must have either accidentally gotten off the main trail, or the Honduran park system vastly overestimated the hiking abilities of its patrons. It was quite the harrowing escapade, featuring narrow, crumbling paths, some dark mineshafts (don't worry, Mom, we didn't go in them!), a waterfall or two, lots of mud, and a stray dog that decided to follow us the whole way.
Oh, and did I mention that the park is in a rainforest? And yes, it rained. Rainforests in the rain. (I should really start a Retrospective Bucket List where I write down the things that I would have wanted to do before I die if I knew they existed, but because they are so obscure and ridiculous, I didn't even know it was something a person could do...)

We did end up making across the park before it closed, we found a more passable "main trail" and survived to reach the other side. By the end of the day we had walked around 15 kilometers (that's about 9 miles for all you Americanos out there...) but we lived to tell the tale and I got some fun pictures out of it!
I fully expect to have more Epic Saturdays, so be ready for more tales of adventure and peril!