Pulhapanzak Falls

8 July, 2012

I am going to start off by saying that this week was absolutely NUTS. Please prepare yourself for the following blog post. Yesterday the other volunteers and I went on our first official ‘excursion’ of the summer. We drove our old mini bus/van to Pulhapanzak Falls at the top of the mountains. So honestly the first part of the adventure was just GETTING there. We had to stop for jumper cables, just in case, and were told that we might have to get out and push if the mini bus was to get stuck while driving through the muddy, unpaved mountain roads.

We got lost several times and asked practically every cowboy living on the mountain for directions. But finally we got to the falls and this is what I saw:

“Oh! No big deal!”, I think. I can DEFINITELY do the suggested ‘through the falls’ tour. That sounds fun!

Wrong. We pay our 200 Lempiras and are escorted down a very steep hill by a man named Carlos. After trekking down the hill, THIS is what we see:

I’m awestruck by its beauty and completely mystified. Those are no little falls…
We walk down more stairs and I’m not worried because I still expect to see some kind of footpath/railing into the falls. We come to a gate directly in the water’s spray and I feel incredibly happy. …Until Carlos opens said gate and leads us down to some rocks lined up with the falls. He leads us over the rocks and into a huge pool created by the rushing water. The ‘trek’ actually becomes partially swimming and partially climbing wet and jagged rocks into and underneath of the rushing falls.

I can honestly say that I don’t think I’ve ever done anything so crazy in my entire life. It was incredibly invigorating but also had me shaking. The trek ultimately led to the ‘cave’/crawlspace behind the falls.

The whole time I was yelling at Carlos calling him loco and trying to contain my intense fear. And of course at the end of the trek we had to jump into a whirlpool of rushing water, not being able to see the rocks below. By that point I might have been breathing irregularly, but I was not going to let the opportunity to jump pass me by! So…cannonball!