Jungle River Lodge

After Utila, I took the ferry over to La Ceiba and headed up to the Jungle River Lodge with a mission to go rafting. There are two trips - half-day and full-day. The full-day costs about double the half day, but you're on the river about 4 times longer. Of course, I opted for the full day. However, I'd been warned the the full-day trip doesn't run very often and there's a minimum of two people.

Maya, a dive instructor at my dive shop in Utila (Utila Water Sports), used to work at the Jungle River Lodge, and her boyfriend Angel used to be a rafting guide (he's now a divemaster in Utila). And they were going to be there when I arrived. From the ferry terminal, it was about a half an hour drive up into the hills to get to the lodge. After leaving town, we were on a dirt road that followed alongside the river and big hills were on either side of the river. It was beautiful.

When I arrived to the lodge, I saw a beautiful wooden building that served as the bar, hangout area, eating area, and, beneath, rafting gear storage area. It was alongside the river, and you could always hear the roar of the water below. I was greeted by Maya and Angel who informed me that I had bad luck, as the full-day trip had just gone out that day. And the two of them were heading into La Ceiba to sleep that evening.

That didn't matter too much, as I wasn't very good company due to the amount of booze and lack of sleep from the night before. I did chat with some people who'd done both the full day and half-day rafting, and although everyone had a good time, the full-day trip sounded much better. I decided to wait around a day to see if anyone else arrived to do the full-day trip.

The next day, Maya got back early afternoon, and we had a good time chatting as we're both in similar places in our lives. That evening, everyone cleared out, and I was the only guest staying there. It was nice, though, because Angel and Maya were there, plus the owner Oscar, two of the rafting guides (Darwin & Roberto), Roberto's girlfriend Rosario, and a Guatemalan who lives in La Ceiba and sells jewelry and dream catchers.

As evening came, the tunes were turned on, and of all things, electronic music was pumping through the speakers. It was kind of bizarre sitting amongst 7 Central Americans (& one Dane - Maya) in a beautiful natural setting surrounded by beautiful green hills and a roaring river, encompassed by flickering candles and some beers and hearing electronic music at high levels. But fun just the same. While we were sitting there, the owner said that he'd run the full day trip the following day for just one person as a favor since I was friends with Maya and Angel. Yay! I went to bed at about 10 and could just barely hear the music for another little while from my bed, but I needed my beauty sleep before a long day on the river.

We left the next day at about 10am to hit the river. We drove about 30-45 minutes to get to the upper section of the river, and then Darwin gave Rosario and me some safety instructions and some info about the commands he was going to give. It was decided that he'd give the commands in English, but other than that, we were jabbering away in Spanish.

The river was pretty low, which meant that some of the rapids weren't as big as other times in the year, and we had to do a bit more maneuvering than usual. A couple of times, we got out of the raft, walked downriver a little bit to check out the next set of rapids, then we got back in to tackle them.... one time, we took a look at the rapid, which was at least a 4-foot drop, and I commented to the Chilean girl in the raft that sometimes it's better *not* to see what you're getting yourself into! However, we made it over safely with everyone intact in the raft.

Further down stream, we went over a rapid, and I swear I saw a body floating on the surface of the water. I looked at the other two in the boat, and they'd seen it too, but I was assured that it was a fisherman. Sure enough he resurfaced after about a minute. Whew! No dead bodies.

All in all, I fell out twice - once was mid-rapids and kinda scary, but I was back in the boat shortly thereafter (after freeing my leg from in between some rocks), and the other was not scary in the least. I've gone rafting at least 5 times, and I'd never fallen out in the past, so I guess there's a first time for everything.

We stopped mid-day for a lunch break, and while Darwin was out getting some food for us from the village up above, kids appeared and took over our raft while we munched on tortillas (still warm!) and guajada cheese. There were about 10-15 kids on the raft at any given time, with a tall and lanky boy at the back of the raft in charge. Somehow, they all managed to fall out once or twice, so there was always some little kid trying to get up the side of the raft. Pretty entertaining.

Near the end of the day, we went down a rapid and parked the raft to go down it just floating in our life jackets. I was give the instructions to "Close your mouth" as you went over because you're dunked for a second and then "Swim hard to the left" right afterwards. Scary at first, but fun in the end.

I'm not sure why, but Darwin decided that we wouldn't get out at the normal place - we would continue down another 5 km longer than usual and finish up directly at the Jungle River Lodge. What that meant is that I saw a helluva a lot of the river (cool!) and I finished up with some sore arms. We started off at 11am, and we arrived at the lodge at about 5pm. We had at least 5 hours of paddling, and I've found some mystery bruises and some scrapes and calluses on my hands and legs, but it was great!

I'd love to go back when there's more water!