“The time has come to talk of many things” [The Walrus]. In line with Einstein’s theory of relativity the speed of my travels has been exponentially increasing as the length of my blog has lessened to the point of 0; CHRIST has it been a hectic month. Altered landscapes, mindstates and travel mates. Within the last week alone I found Eden, witnessed the Fall of Eve, and overcame a lifelong love of the ground (read: vertigo). But first, ladies and gentlemen: Copán, Honduras.
This pit-stop on my journey to the Bay Islands was picturesque, but ordinary. I was all about strolling the green valley in which this delightful cobbled city was located, gourmet coffee in hand, but the ex-Mayan municipality found just outside was ferociously underwhelming; the unsurpassed splendour of Tikal before it ruined (lol) all subsequent sites for me. Whilst in Copán I decided to check out their scenic horseback tours of the local indigenous communities. What followed was an exercise in animal cruelty on some wretched, moth-eaten nag that barely reached my chest. As we heaved up the valley wall, driven by my guide’s whip and desperate reassurances that this horse was in fact a secret stallion, it quickly became apparent that the tour was not a winner. I did learn a few tidbits about the ongoing discrimination against the indígena in Honduras (for example related to the granting of benefits payments), but it was otherwise uninspiring. THANKFULLY, I quickly moved on to the island of Utila.
Despite fractionally missing the last ferry over there and having to first crash in the damp La Ceiba, Utila itself was a seriously good fun time. Touted as the cheapest dive in the world, it was no Borneo but good to be submerged once more in open water. Plenty reef life and a pretty sweet Finding Nemo drop-off. Casual. A couple days into my stay a German I’d met in Flores made it over and the July escapades began in earnest: Mungo and Valentine’s excellent adventure. Plus a serendipitous American named Steve. With Val’s spear gun we went hunting the king of the ocean: the lionfish. So confident in their poisoned barbs and dearth of natural predators that they just sit under rocks, begging to be impaled. They were delicious, cooked up alongside giant, freshly harpooned crabs. Dangerous eating though - in a postmortem revenge attack I was cut open by a crab leg which took 3 weeks to heal. Our penultimate evening there was fucking sick: starting with a night dive, we entered the water as darkness fell. Under torches rather than diluted daylight the coral was lit up in impossibly pure reds, purples and greens. We even encountered a wreck around 20m down, eery in the dark. At the culmination of the dive we switched off all the torches and excited the water, transfixed by the glowing, shifting galaxy of phosphorescence. Mindblowing. Which segued beautifully into my first acid experience at the trippiest bar in the known world - an adult’s playground of glittering wood, glass and stone; the already odd reality further dissolving with the tab into a fluid world of shifting geometric patterns and diffracted light. An incredible visual experience, but qualitatively different to the more introspective journey of shrooms. Live and learn.
After leaving Utila we furiously schlepped 500 miles south - much of it driven by a grizzled Celine Dion fan - to San Juan del Sur, right at the southern tip of Nicaragua; word had reached our ears of an obscene pool crawl and it sounded the perfect event to usher Val into his third decade of life. It was entertaining and ridiculous; entertainingly ridiculous. Otherwise Nicaragua was… mercurial. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. San Juan was heavily touristic in a fashion that had unpleasantly corroded tourist/local relations, but it also offered a beautifully isolated beach-front hostel retreat; the surfing was pretty solid, but upon our arrival at the playa we were confronted by the bleached, bloated, festering cadaver of a drowned local - interestingly it took a long while for the police to deal with this situation, and the corpse was universally avoided, though we couldn’t establish if that was the result of a desensitisation to death in a region with the highest violent mortality rates in the world, or an unwillingness to confront that same mortality.
Granada was better - a chilled colonial city in a similar vein to the delights of Mexico and Guatemala, but we only stayed a day and a night before doubling back north to experience the top half of Nicaragua from the other side of the bus windows. Infinitely better, it turns out. Esteli, a small town nestled amongst the coffee and tobacco plantations of northern Nica, was a delightful change of pace after the southern madness. We toured a local cigar factory, developing an intense contact high through acrid drying rooms and sorting/rolling human production lines. The sorting of leaves for quality/size was exclusively done by women because of their visual acuity regarding colour perception (through the X chromosome women actually have a percentage chance of being tetrachromats, though I’m sure it was demonstrated ability rather than scientific theory which drove this particular gender role). In the rolling room we got to create our own cigars which was mint. Smoked like Fidel. The Esteli highlight, though, was unDOUBTEDLY ferociously forging up the nearby river-carved Somoto Canyon: hiking, climbing and swimming upstream with our powerhouse guide Franklin who did everything we did. With one hand. Carrying all our dry shit. While hauling a feeble Korean through the more intense rapids. We also got to leap off a 15m ledge in the rock face, and backflip from 12m. Jamblazing.
Our next move, though, was disastrous. On the chicken bus to Léon some bastard stole my $2 Mexican hat - right in the sentimentality - and Steve got his iPhone jacked. An expensively demoralising ride, capped off by watching the volcano boarding tour we’d rushed to catch leave exactly as we arrived. 26 hours later found us hiking the black ashen slopes of Cerro Negro, a young and powerfully active volcano which some enterprising Aussie (naturally) had decided to board down. They now use budget wood and metal sit-down boards with plastic glued under your derrière which has to be replaced after every run. I blitzed down in a mini-eruption of screaming ash, crashing spectacularly at 57 kmh. The cold beer afterwards to wash down my volcano breakfast was more refreshing than a guacamole facial.
However after Léon I was VERY happy to be turning south again, and 12 hours later reached the highlight of Nicaragua: Isla de Ometepe. Eden. It was fucking Eden. A small, twin-volcanoed island set within a massive freshwater lake, and containing something like 16% of Nicaragua’s biodiversity, this place was alive with legions of birds, vibrant flowers and more butterflies than I have ever seen. Magical only just begins to describe it. We stayed at a mint little lodge owned by a ginuwine ex-IRA mentalist named Morgan; the man was a myth. With a solid crowd this was the IDEAL place to get back to nature and explore other chemically-induced realms of human experience. The trip was incredibly positively transporting for all but Eve who had a seriously bad time (names have been changed to protect the identity of Anna Wickstead, Berkshire). The sunrise of my final morning there rocked shades of violet I have never before witnessed. Transcendentally sick. I did, however, have a minor confrontation with a stone wall at some cool springs here. 2 stitches resulted.
From Ometepe the three amigos hurried south to catch a date with a bungee jump in Costa Rica before Val’s departure. Annoyingly our bus actually passed through Monteverde, our destination, during the night, but we were all so sleep deprived that we woke up to the grey dawn of San José. Not ideal. A frantic backtrack was required to get up to the mountainous cloud forests and hurtle terrifyingly towards the valley floor. 143 metres of vertical descent. And ascent. And descent. Ad infinitum. I was first off the gondola. NUTS. This, combined with a pretty sweet ziplining tour of the lush jungle, marked the end of my fear of heights. At least beyond the grounds of reasonable self-preservation. Highly satisfying, and one of the coolest things I’ve ever done.
WELL these broad strokes roughly cover my last month of high-octane madness. Encounters with people, places, and self. It’s been insane. Currently recouping in the islands of Bocas del Toro, Panama, with yet another aggressively underwhelming local lager. My relaxed return to Europe has been somewhat disturbed by the loss of my bank card and all access to funds, but I should survive the next 24 hours. Inshallah.
See you on the other side.
