Tegucigalpa, Honduras—

I refuse to believe a Sunday morning in Honduras can be truly chilly. So I try to brew some coffee in my underwear and don’t feel entirely comfortable, so I reluctantly don a light fleece and a base layer I use as pajamas sometimes. It’s a few minutes till seven and I’m scrambling to get some food before taking a shower: Carlos will pick me up at 8 and, amongst all my friends, he’s painfully punctual – I’m the exact opposite, though I guess “pleasurably late” isn’t really it. When I come out of the shower, I see a message from him saying he’s on his way; I hustle to get my clothes on – which thankfully I picked out the previous night – and try to leave some minutes for my foot-care routine: while hiking, your feet are your most precious asset. I’m sporting a new hiking attire this time around: the gaiter trousers I pined after for a long time, thin liner socks plus coolmax lightweight quarter length socks, very comfy nylon boxers and a new shirt. I have to confess I get extremely excited about gear, which is why my 35L pack has a few new things inside as well: the cool and scarily sharp norwegian Helle knife that T gave me for my birthday, collapsible trekking poles, a lightweight emergency kit, an ultralight down jacket if it ever gets chillier, a water filter, a waterproof match container with only 14 – also waterproof, matches – and extra socks; in addition to the gear I always take: my light rain shell, my emergency bivy sack and tarp, extra batteries and duck tape, compass, small gorillapod, my small camera, hat, neck gaiter, sunscreen, food and four large trash bags to clean up the trail a bit: this particular trail suffers from irresponsible visitors more than the official ones in the national park.

Las Golondrinas used to be part of the trail system in La Tigra national park, unlike the other trails which are close to the summit of the park’s highest mountain, this one is closer to the populated areas of the “buffer” zone, and that proved to be its undoing: after doing work opening trails near the river and small waterfalls that occur there, and the always mysterious remnants of the mining operation from the 1800’s, the park’s administration decided to close it due to criminal activity: kids from the nearby villages and farms decided it was quite an easy source of income and goodies to mug visitors, oftentimes with a machete, ax or other tools of the field. I haven’t heard of any fatalities since after all these seemed to be inexperienced, young kids trying to make a buck out of people they were sure they would never see again and who wouldn’t be able to trace them in that mountain. The trails are still present though at places covered in vegetation, and a medium-sized group can feel somewhat safe in there: oblivious to the criminal element, my first hike with a handful of friends was in this very place, and it was beautiful: the parts that are near the river feel wild and remote, some scrambles near the water are demanding but also rewarding with beautiful vistas of impenetrable forest, a mysterious old quarry full of orange rock and colorful mud, waterfalls that soothe the weary ear and occasional mine shafts and derelict trail markers and barbwire.

Carlos arrives 10 minutes before eight, I’m still getting ready. Water bottle and lunch bag go in the pack (my mom fixed me a couple of “burritas”: delicious concoctions where layers of single tortillas are interspersed with fried red beans, scrambled eggs, white cheese and sometimes either meat or chorizo; a delicacy best served “sweaty”: moist with condensation after spending a couple of hours in a pack under the sun). Carlos announces that we’ll be picking up three gringas of his acquaintance, I feel a pang of misanthropy but acquiesce, and we end up getting slightly lost trying to find their very secluded and guarded apartment building in a fancy part of town. They end up being very nice high school teachers from somewhere in middle America, and we talk a bit about how I visit NYC sometimes –how one of them visited once, as well– and about their hiking experience – they have way more of it than us.

I’m not sure if it’s the Colin Fletcher books I read (in addition to The Complete Walker IV, I recently finished reading The Secret Worlds of Colin Fletcher), but this morning I’m torn between the undeniably good experience of spending some time with friends and the desire to be alone with the green world. This is probably exacerbated by the fact that this outing was publicized via a facebook event and about 14 people said they were attending, being more of a social thing than a nature thing, which is hard to digest for my idealist curmudgeon self. I’m not even sure if it’s idealism, laziness or something not really good, not wanting to meet new people while hiking, not being in the disposition to entertain and get to know, I feel weary and wary of my own kin and, like a child for whom preposterous plans are not working out well, I sulk just a tiny bit inside. Well, maybe not only inside: before picking up the three new girls I told Carlos I didn’t really want to meet new people, and I had told Yamil, who we call from the road as Marie and him were already near the site, the day before. Which is why when our two cars reached the meeting point – 30 minutes too early – we all sort of decided to just go to trailhead and start hiking, and the others would just find their way.

After we parked in the small soccer field that sits in the end of the road that also serves as a section of the trail, my paranoid self remembered the criminal element that allegedly existed here at some point, and I move the knife from my pack to my pants pocket and feel precisely zero percent safer. This actually unleashes a whirlwind of unsavory thoughts that refuse to go away as we hike up to the broken barbwire that we’ve discovered to get away from the road and closer to the river and forest; vignettes of wondering how the seven of us could overpower any marauders and how they would be armed, or trying to make a mental inventory of what exactly I had packed should I lose my pack and have to buy everything anew, or if I had backed up my phone recently, or if I would attack someone with a knife and put everyone in jeopardy by inciting to violence what would’ve until then been bluffing, if we had it in us to harm our fellow man and leave them badly harmed, or worse, for something as commonplace in this country as petty crime. In short, everything from materialistic concerns to deep soul searching about human nature and violence took hold of my attention so strongly that I think I didn’t quite pay attention to the first half mile of the hike – only feeling somewhat safe in the barren emptiness of the quarry near the beginning of the wild side of the trail, for some reason.

The quarry leads to the river, and a after short walk upstream – with some fun wading of an impoverished part of the river – we reach the familiar small waterfall. Here, a strange phenomenon greets us: cows walking on the steep hill that comes from the road, crossing the river and walking up to a mysterious trail that we determined led to private property last time, almost pushing us off the river on their way, herded by a genial old man. We waited for the slower cows to finish their hike, and uphill we went, after a bemused photo session of our bovine hiking comrades. As we walked to the section of the hike that actually was a trail (the river bit requires some bushwhacking), complete with trail markers and steps carved out of tree roots, Yamil and Marie got a phone call from the people we left behind: they’re there, and they don’t quite know the trail. They go fetch them, while I stay with Carlos and the three girls: I feel bad and queasy about these two kids, but they’ll be going down what looked like a busy and innocuous road, whereas we don’t know what lies ahead, and the idea of tourists being attacked doesn’t sound great either. Maybe that was a rationalization, however, maybe I wanted to stay with the larger group in case something went awry; this latter explanation is what my guilt accused me of on the trail ahead, and again the whirlwind takes over, fearing for my friends who left and my new acquaintances and friend who are oblivious to the imagined danger I fear surrounds us. We push on through the forest to the site where the waterfall hits the river below, amidst tall and beautiful rock faces and very tall trees. We’ve been collecting trash all along and have a bag that’s almost full, so we leave it on the other side of the river before climbing down to this site, and it was there – unscathed – when we came back and walked uphill through the steep trail to the source of the waterfall.

We take the familiar road down to the source, and leave our bag on the large clearing that made a great lunch spot for some other hikers we encountered last time. While there, we decide to cross the river again and walk through the forest, see what’s out there. We find a small flat area that looks secluded amongst tall pines and decide it’s a great spot for lunch. As we put our packs down we hear a single howl, a single, youthful, excited, confident, inequivocally human scream. Carlos and I are startled, I tell him in a brisk sentence about my fears and suggest that we try to move along before whomever that was finds us. I see someone’s shirt and legs through the bushes. My heart races, I try to act nonchalantly and put my trekking pole on the side of my bag and secure it: don’t want to lug two items around if we need to scramble – or be in some sort of knife fight I dread and secretly look towards with morbid curiosity. I take another look at the direction where I knew the stranger was coming from. It’s Yamil, and the rest of our group. I’ve never felt such relief.

The new guy in that contingent of our group, José Luis, kindly tells us it wasn’t cool to leave them behind, and we agree: my guilt and foreboding weren’t announcing violent crime in the middle of the forest, they were an internal reprimand for wanting to leave people behind. A friend of Marie’s is there with her kid, a very energetic young lad who seems to be ecstatic to be in the forest. We take our lunches and, starting to feel chilly, decide to go to a mine shaft that José Luis knows is just paces away across a small tributary of the river; we reach it within minutes after negotiating some surprisingly slippery rocks. He tells us that one can actually go inside and sighs are proffered about not having a headlamp, but I have one, so the younger members of our group, kid and his mom included – the others being Karen and Rey, whom I met via Yamil and while teaching in college, respectively – go ahead to explore. The rest of us take group pictures, the atmosphere somehow much lighter now that we’re all accounted for, and the presence of José Luis, a local who explained that the muggers are other locals that wouldn’t dare attack a large group, less so if someone that knew them was with them, also dispels the reveries of violence that assailed me all morning. After the reconnaissance group returns, in awe of the glittery innards of the mine shaft, a couple of us decide to go and turn back after a few minutes of crouched spelunking: a ways in, a thick layer of mud and small puddles announce sad boots and sadder socks, and no one wants to pay that price. So back we go, trying to console ourselves with the fact that it was still pretty neat to see a mine from somewhat inside.

The presence of the toddler means that we can’t really bushwhack further up as we originally planned, and the local says that we wouldn’t find the rest of the national park for three more hours anyway. Not wanting to split the group and lose the safe cocoon of humanity we had constructed, we go back on the main road.

At this point we’re lugging three bags of trash, and we didn’t collect a lot more near the waterfall that was dangerous to reach. On our way back, since it’s a road that people actually use to go to their places of residence, there’s a plethora of garbage, in particular recurrence we find coca cola bottles and bags of a brand of chips I hadn’t seen before, but which seems to be all the rage up here. When we reach the populated part of the road, a lady that eyed us for a while as we walked down offers to take the garbage; we’re about to accept her offer as there’s still about a mile of descent to go, but her addendum to the offer made us queasy about it: she added that she was just going to burn it, which didn’t sit well given the amount of plastic we were lugging around. We decide to soldier on, and we fill new a jumbo garbage bag in the process.

Back to the cars, we decide to drive up to a spot that only José Luis knows: it’s an easy hike on a small trail that leads through a natural tunnel and towards some abandoned mining instruments (this ends up being a single instrument: an old ore filter). There are surprises in this short hike, however: a beautiful view of the valley that one can see from El Rosario, mysterious luscious houses and a cabin where a beautifully haired black dog barks at us incessantly behind a fence, a horse that’s tethered to a pole in the middle of nowhere with whom the kid shares an apple, beautiful dancing trees and two sections of the forest that are the mirror image of the trail that leads to the tall waterfall within the national park (I could’ve sworn they were those spots, but I checked my phone and we were miles from that trail, strange how nature sometimes reuses patterns). On our way out, we hung out at an outlook that has a beautiful view of the foregoing valley and a nice flat area where it looks like the owners hold summer barbecues. José Luis knows them and says it’s fine to hang out here and take pictures, and even shows us an area further down the hill that looks perfect for camping.

I’m in a fully social mood at this point, so I actually look forward to driving back to Valle de Ángeles and having some pizza at an artsy joint where an avant garde violinist regales the few Sunday patrons with improvisation. We drink some micheladas and engorge the colorful pizzas that are set before us, while English and Spanish conversation goes around the table and I make Karen and Rey laugh uncontrollably with shared memories of our childhoods. We all part ways tired but content, and Carlos and I drive back to the city with a backseat full of sleeping americans and Bowie’s music accompanying us back to a Tegucigalpa bereft of traffic on this early Sunday afternoon.

Back home, I reflect on my dichotomies: how I looked forward to this hike all week, sometimes lost enough in my reveries about it to ignore work, how I also fantasized about being alone – or just with my old friends – out there, how I wanted to “learn of the green world” and lamented the hand of man: violence, garbage, water pollution, roads and houses so close to the forest – the awful image of a beautiful and tall tangerine bush is tarnished by the fact that all the ground around it is covered with trash. And, as often happens with any sojourn out there, the questions that these conflicts made arise don’t quite find answers immediately, they just float around making me dither between feeling satisfied about how the day turned out despite my expectations and initial impressions and feeling unaccomplished by not having a “big day out in nature”. Today, however, I feel the outlines of the lesson slowly arise: can I balance “work life” with the life outdoors, instead of setting them against each other in a strife for some imagined freedome? Can I reconcile the presence of man in the world with the silence and timelessness of the wild, instead of seeing the former as a blight upon the latter that should be purged swiftly and absolutely? Can I find solace in the silence of the wild while in the company of others, new or otherwise, without feeling that humanity taints wilderness? Can insights come from these hybrid experiences, are they actually the only sources of insight – real, unexpected life events – versus idealized, easy, lonesome eucharists in the forest? Did I take anything away from this day for my anxiety-ridden existence of late? I’m starting to think I did, after all.