We’ve been in Honduras for six weeks now, and have visited lots of sights around Marcala. However, we still hadn’t been to the nearest tourist sight - the viewpoint over Marcala.
Recommended by the previous cycle’s leader Amro, we decided to don our walking boots and venture up the hill on Sunday, with our tour guide and national volunteer Willander in-town. For the first time in almost a week, the weather was beautiful. Having suffered torrential rain since Thursday, we were glad to see the sun again.
We had the obligatory Michel’s lunch of baleadas, enchiladas and ice-cream beforehand, setting us up for the 25 minute walk to the view point.
The roads out of Marcala are not great. There is a combination of bare rock, lumpy concrete, huge potholes and fragments of rock making walking fairly difficult and slow.
Time for a group photo
The view from the top was pretty amazing! We were able to see the whole of Marcala, and quickly got our bearings, spying the COMUCAP office’s blue tower, the school that we teach at on Fridays, the supermarket and our favourite coffee shop which makes the best milkshakes (el batido de leche). It was great to be able to see how big the town actually is, and we realised how little we had actually visited.
Looking beyond Marcala, we couldn’t help but be taken aback by the dramatic Honduran landscape with rolling hills covered by thick pine forest and sheer cliff faces exposed here and there.
We’ll definitely make the effort to go back to the view point, hopefully with more of the national volunteers.
Written by an ICS volunteer in Marcala.
