bicrom abroad

context is a funny thing. growing up in the uk there is a certain banality about short hops to france or spain; it’s only when you witness the cohorts of wide-eyed antipodeans swarming out of earls court every weekend that you begin to suspect that paris or barcelona  might still retain an exotic charm that has been eroded for us brits by the mundanity of proximity. as a consequence, vicki and i are relatively poorly travelled in europe,  largely because of the failure of weekend breaks to capture the imagination.
shift some thousand miles  to the west however and context naturally metamorphosises into a subtly different thing. the bright lights of miami held a fascination for us that would amuse a native caymanian, used to having this contradiction of a city on their doorstep. similarly,  to minds still not quite fully adjusted to the locale which we now call home, a weekend in honduras seemed the height of outlandish glamour. we weren’t quite sure why cayman airways saw fit to have a direct flight to la ceiba, the third largest conurbation in honduras,  but this was not an opportunity we were going to pass up and thus we eagerly, if a little unpreparedly, wriggled into our seats on a grey friday morning. we didn’t know much about la ceiba beyond the fact that the town itself was a grimy urban fleapit of malaise and mild danger, redeemed by its position sandwiched between grey caribbean beaches and the green peaks of the pico bonito natural park. that thing context again; when you live in cayman grimy beaches do not mean what they once did, so it was an obvious decision for us to bundle into a rickety car which jolted us over unreformed dirt track to our new home deep in the rainforest, casa cangrejal.
the drive into the park gave us a good impression of  what to expect over the following days, the chugging rio cangrejal forcing its way through boulders and rapids below, banked on either side by sheer cliffs covered with verdant foliage. casa cangrejal itself is a happy little place, its turn off currently marked by a yellow church bus which veered off the road and into a ditch (a wise choice; ditch on one side, river on the other) and is now awaiting recovery, either until the holy collection plates aggregate to the price of a godly tow truck owner or the moment when the local residents chose to risk a few more years in purgatory and liberate the vehicle’s constituent parts from their grassy home with blow torches and surreptitious enthusiasm.
being deep in the jungle has the advantage of stunning views on either side, albeit tempered by the unavoidable air of pervading dampness punctuated by all manner of buzzing, crawling bugs. this being one a rainforest and two the beginning of the rainy season we knew what to expect and we weren’t to be disappointed. on our first day a short hike to a mirador rewarded me with a glimpse of an amazing view at the zenith of the trail before the heavens opened and shooed me, slipping and scurrying through the mulchy trail, back to the casa. after  an evening spent discovering that my secretive wife was surprisingly good at darts (more of which later) we woke up refreshed the following morning, peeked out to see a sliver of blue sky threatening the clouds and consequently decided to tackle the four hour walk to the el bejuco waterfall.
rainforest walks tend to blend into one. the trails are almost always narrow tracks, completely enclosed by greenery which our untrained eyes cannot differentiate, and it is only the occasional moments when you go past a viewpoint which allow you to locate yourself by reference to a river or mountain or other sight far below, making you realise that you are in honduras, and not sumatra or the amazon or elsewhere. given the relative functionality of these trails, coupled with the intense humidity and the lingering threat of rain, it is critical that the final destination be worthwhile. the water tumbling out of slits in the pico bonito rockface 80 feet above us may not give iguazu too many sleepless nights but as we gingerly edged our way over treacherous rocks, giving the impression of solidity until you stepped onto them and realised the deceitfulness of this claim, it certainly justified our hike, no matter how hot, sweaty and nibbled by red ants (good work sticky) we may have been. we rewarded ourselves after the hike with a restorative hammock snooze, before the heavens opened for the afternoon having at least had the decency to wait until we were safely under cover.
the following morning we headed over to sambo creek. some enterprising hondurans had set up a collection of twelve ziplines descending from high up in the jungle canopy which made for a fun, lightly adrenaline producing, way of spending a few hours. once you were confident your cojones were not about to be liberated from their rightful home it was an enjoyable hour or so spent zipping through the foliage, watching your head or legs didn’t crack into any tree trunks and trying to be the last of the late brakers en route to the platform.  top off with some scenic hot springs and light masajes, complete with a slathering in the local orange mud, and all in all an excellent way to spend a day.
and that, bar vicki hustling me at darts (double eighteen check-out at the second time of asking!) and an absurdly queue-filled and chaotic sojourn at the airport on the way back, was that: an excellent weekend break which remained undeniably exotic, despite the brevity of the flight from cayman. honduras may be the murder capital of the world but beyond the risks of being eaten alive by bugs or licked to death by over-zealous, massive, guesthouse dogs,  la ceiba proved a textbook place to kill a few days, and exactly the reason that we had decided to move to cayman.