I have probably never been so fit, lean and healthy as during this jungle walkabout with a heady aroma of antifreeze, ethanol, horse dung, sweat, deet and wood smoke. I relive this perfumerie with a smile 8 years on as had a fab time and the high, dwarf cloud forest was beautiful. I could have easily spent another x weeks living in the more basic camps and hiking around on conservation studies with some good company. The average weight loss was 10lbs and some guys pounding the trails did look skinny and I was hungry too at times although good memories of my favourite tortilla meal and the big smiles of the cooks as I requested strong black coffee.
I spent 9 weeks from mid June to mid August with Operation Wallacea as a staff assistant in Cusuco National Park in NW Honduras. OP run conservation expedition projects in several countries such as Indonesia and Peru including this one in Honduras which has been underway for 5 years. The aim is to collect data on flora and fauna, environmental variables such as river geomorphology and economic social factors to ultimately produce a Management Plan which improves local livelihoods and better practical protection of natural resources to match the, on paper, strong environmental legislation.
Cusuco NP lies about 12 miles to the west of San Pedro Sula city in the NW of Honduras as part of the Merendon Mountains. The Park extends to 240km2 as a series of steep hills, valleys and ridges. The lower slopes have several villages and partly cleared forest for cattle grazing and/ or crops such as coffee, maize, banana and ósote’, a flower which is good to eat. There are broadleaved trees on the lower slopes with pine higher up. Overall, a fantastic green scenery with clouds rolling in and out against the sunshine.
There’s a paved main highway from SPS to the small town of Cofradia and then 30km along a rutted, dirt track to the small village of Buenos Aires. OW have 6 jungle camps with the main operations at Base Camp at about 1400m, 3km higher from Buenos Aires which has about 80 houses, couple of cafes and a shop. The other camps are Manacau lower down where howler monkey studies are conducted with Cantiles, Danto, Guanales, Cortoseito and Santo Tomas in the ‘forest’.
The general temperature in the higher forest where I spent most time was like England in summer, about 20 to 23 degrees during the day becoming cooler when the cloud rolled in and could get chilly at night. It reminded me of N Britain when the grey cloud and rain comes in against the pines. The upside is there were relatively few insects unlike lower down such as at Manacau where mossies and chiggers abounded.
Base Camp was the most luxurious in the sense it was on flat ground with semi modern facilities such as a couple of wooden huts which serve as a lab and computer rooms where DNA work etc and film shows occur. The tents were on duck boards to reduce flooding damage, sit down toilets flushed with a bucket of water and cold water showers as well as a kitchen / dining area.
The other camps were more basic but great fun, with an open fire under a tarpaulin, bamboo tables, benches and storage racks and a kitchen area with an wood burning oven made from cement going 15 hours a day. There were tents and hammocks on variable degrees of slopes fluctuating in number depending on the number of people coming through in any particular week. All this infrastructure was made and put up by the guys who along with the cooks etc work for a sub contracted company.
Sanitary arrangements were fine if you just accepted you were ‘in the outdoors’, with a funnel and pipe to wee into surrounded by bit of plastic for privacy and earth slit trenches. There were accidents or laziness as sometimes a pile of poo was found wedged in the funnel or dripping over the sides as well as hidden under a bucket in the showers. Several school pupils who were ill during the night, just emptied their bowels and vomited into buckets and plastic bags with the latter left near the washing stream!
I had no upset innards fortunately as a 2am stumble from your hammock up a steep, muddy, tree rooted and snake infested slope in the torrential rain, thunder and lightning at 2am to try and find the trench 150 yards away was no joke. Last year sounded diabolical with 36 hours of constant, torrential rain and projectile vomiting out of tents and OW were a day away from shutting the Camps. The trench is called the black cat or gato negro as cats dig a scrape and hide their poo. At Cantiles camp one bonus was the quetzal nest in a rotten tree near the trench. Hands are washed in buckets of river water with bleach. I was obsessive about hand and crockery washing which seemed to have paid dividends.
The biggest danger isn’t from snakes but being killed by dead timber and falling epiphytes on over laden branches. One day at Cantiles when there was just me, one guide and a guard during the 2 day camp change over, there was a sudden crash and panic as we wondered which part of the tarpaulin was going to be hit and 10 inch diameter branches landed between a hammock and the medics tent. The guides simply waltzed over to potentially dangerous trees and chopped them down with machetes!
In the first week at Cantiles about 17 of us had a big wake up call from a serious medical emergency , potentially requiring evacuation by the US Army, when the bat team leader who had been bitten by a snake arrived in the Camp at about 10pm. This had happened 1km away with their guide running 200m to get radio contact, for as we discovered later, communications were variable and / or absent in some parts of the forest. The guides were superb in that after a days work starting at 5-6am, they carried her as fast as possible in relays on their backs as the bamboo stretcher couldn’t negotiate the tortuous terrain. Other guides were well organised and out of the camp in under 5 minutes using some of our head torches, as they don’t all have torches as too expensive, and ran the steep and muddy path to help carry her in. At midnight, the medic worked by candlelight to put a drip into her arm for adrenalin to counter any antivenom etc shots.
Meantime, the Camp Manager who fortunately was bilingual and with the help of another guide who ran in 16mins the steep, twisting 1km path to the transmitter in the dark, had been trying for over an hour to get someone to answer the radio at Base Camp and authorise the helicopter. Other guides were about to start chopping trees down with a machete for the helicopter winch, when near 1am, the Manager and victim said it was just a practice. The medic was furious and burst into tears as she, like all of us, thought she’d been fighting a critical time clock to save someone and the victim had all the palpitations, gibberish etc consistent with a bite. From this, I gained a huge amount of respect for our guides who seemingly would do their utmost for us but the OW emergency procedures were weak in parts such as communications.
Another interesting episode was a non military coup when the president was ejected. For much of the time when I was deep in the jungle, the curfews and few riots were of no significance but it affected others in the lower Camps and movement of our equipment between Camps. I only encountered 2 military road blocks on trips via San Pedro Sula where the soldiers armed with US weapons and big cool shades looked like action movies. I was lucky that on both occasions when I’d forgotten to take my passport or a copy that we were not asked for them. This could have caused a lot of hassle. We encountered slow moving traffic / blocked roads on our return trip to SPS as there was another rally to get the President back.. There were lots of people wearing sombreros and some in fancy dress as clowns and it seemed peaceful but there had been violence.
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