Dispatch Number 33 -Bar

After a day on the dusty roads in Western Honduras I wanted a beer. When traveling alone I am apprehensive entering bars. I had spotted a place that looked open and well lit, safe and had a good view of the park. Sunday afternoon as good as any to savor a few beers in hot weather while taking in the Honduran life. Always one to be cool when I walk into the wrong bar I sat down acted as if everything was normal and ordered a beer.

Sitting at tables crowded around the entrance were a group of men dressed as women. They were tall, cute, fashionably dressed and thin. I relaxed a little and was glad that they felt free to pretend, although I avoided their stares. Unsettled at the surprise expecting a normal bar I fiddled with my beer while the women looked me over something hard. I demurred with a restrained smile. I felt like hunted prey as the tigresses looked me over with long stares and sexy allure. Ahh, how a woman feels when the eyes of sex hungry men descend upon her!

Here in the remote department of Olancho in western Honduras is the heart of cowboy country full of ranch hands that ride horses more than cars, herd cattle and carry pistols. It is known as the Wild West of Honduras and regarded with a certain weariness by the rest of Honduras. Catacamas is at the end of the paved road deep in Olancho in the land of the working man. Marlboro Man kind of land, although Olancho has a great deal more edge than the American west it is similar to what Texas represents to the American. So with transvestites a table away the irony never seemed so complete.

The sun smiles upon us all without difference -it is ones disposition in life that makes it different.

David
Moyogalpa, Isla de Ometepe, Nicaragua

Dispatch Number 32 -Joe

Joe was a recently retired American I met in the sleepy beach town in Tela, Honduras on the Caribbean coast. Balmy and breezy. He built a house and rejoined the Honduran relatives he spent a lifetime away from as a defense contractor for the US government working all around the world. He was unafraid at 62 to make change when many of us grow hardened and deeply rutted, he was also acquiring the language.

I really admired him and learning his story gave my day a big lift. He made me feel hope and pleasure at the human condition when so many are afraid to start anew. Not Joe. It started with him saying, Are you guys Americans? and finished with Its nice to hear an American accent.

David
Leon, Nicaragua

Dispatch Number 31 -Advances in Guatamala

They are not likely to be considered advances where you are from but the point is that all improvement is relative, and relative only to that country with its own culture, government and related structural challenges. Guatemala is a delicate democracy and the changes noted here are very real advances in Guatemala.

• Ballot boxes were made available for first time in small towns in the rural areas. Prior to 2006, a person who wanted to participate had to take a bus to a large city to cast a vote. Often this meant a full day of travel and a day without pay.
  
• In the countryside where there were no schools 15-20 years ago there are now.
• Public health clinics now appear in small communities and their services are free.
  
• Dirt roads once subject to seasonal travel are being paved making them passable year round. New dirt roads are being cut for first time linking remote hamlets that previously were reached only by foot.
  
• Although political murder remains a savage way of maintaining political and business power it happens less often. Considered an equivalent of murder but categorized differently, disappearances still continue but on a much smaller scale. In a psychological sense they are very effective.
  
• Criminal murder is on the rise and the daily papers are full of covered bodies with bored investigators standing around. This is not an advance, however, to omit the trend would be unfair.

David
Leon, Nicaragua

Dispatch Number 30 -A Russian Saying

The only difference between a regular car and a four wheel drive is that in a four wheel drive you get further down the road before getting stuck.
-A Russian saying.


The drive was supposed to take an hour or two to reach the summit on a little used dirt road that wound its way to the top of a mountain that loomed over the Caribbean coastal town of Trujillo in Honduras. We made it less that 10 minutes before Azulita my Toyota Land Cruiser, the one I am supposed to drive to the bottom of the world in, was pitched perilously with the right rear wheel hanging over a storm washout that dropped 2.5 meters into a hole large enough to swallow the truck.

I stood with my travel friends the The Russians, Olga and Dmitriy and New Zealander Michaela staring at the predicament the truck was in. Normally a chatty group, our silence made the pulse quicken. The women looked at each other and their faces said it all. Dmitriy and I studied the scene looking for a way out.

This is bad, were my first words. I have gotten the truck stuck many times in recent past and the escape was always clear. Once Azulita was stuck in sand up to the axles on a beach, another time in the headwaters of a creek with water coming in through the doors. I remember the exhaust pipe burbling under water.

The red brown soil was softened from a full night of rain and gave way under the weight of the truck as I tried to pass a narrow land bridge leaving her resting on the rear axle. It was bad. To attempt to drive it out without help was not possible, any movement would send the truck into the hole backwards. The pull out was difficult, if not done right Azulita would get pitched into the hole with big rocks waiting at the bottom.

We buttressed the earth at the front wheels with a wall of soccer ball sized rocks and built a bridge out of an old solid wood door for the rear wheel to hop onto once the pull was under way. If the guy hesitated on the pull I was doomed. The truck popped out after sinking further into the hole when the hanging wheel found the bridge and came out. We all sighed in relief and began jumping up and down hugging each other.

Back in town we drank victory beers together and I quietly considered the Russian saying.

David
Esteli, Nicaragua

Dispatch Number 29 -Material World

As the driving journey into The Americas becomes an odyssey I evolve and learn a little more about myself; the path of self-discovery, a destination we never really arrive at. Travel brings constant stimulation, everything is new. Guatemala did not come as a series of distractions such as visiting one national wonder after another or drinking myself to bed every night with fellow travelers; it was unrushed time in villages and towns with Mayan and Ladino families (a Maya-Spanish mix).

A unique perspective of daily life was mine. On the tourist trail local people have adapted their lives to serve the traveller. Places where they have learned the automatic smile and how to be photogenic. After a constant stream of oddly dressed wealthy strangers invading their land and their homes they seem oddly subdued and sullen from the experience.

The beaten track is filled with anti-corporate backpackers who demand McDonald's predictability in their hostels and special buses. Whereas, communities off the beaten path where I have chosen to travel offer few services to support the traveler making the experience different, one filled with genuine smiles and questions and people who do not see you solely as a business opportunity. A place to experience their culture and their hospitality.

It was in these places that I saw their poverty, took meals with them and interacted with their children. Their simple homes had very little in them by way of material wealth, an environment reduced to basic needs of a wood stove, a hand grinder to make corn meal, a rickety bench and table and simple platform beds. I had to confront my desire to help them and ultimately chose to just observe their lives.

If I am open and aware self-knowledge is mine. I try. I try to surrender and only observe conditions and try not to move to a place of mentally fixing what I see with my western inbred concepts of order, law, security, insurance, newness, neatness and the need for all things to be excessively sanitary.

In much of Guatemala existence is reduced to bare essential life. Poor families who cobble it together a day or a crop at a time. All of it makes me reflect on the material world I was nursed on with its excess and wastefulness. What I hold in common with fellow Americans is something called the American way of life, an economic system involving the constant purchase of consumer goods on credit to maintain a high standard of living. I try to reconcile myself with my country, the United States the most powerful material culture the world has ever known.

My relatively lengthy stays in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua have reinforced that material prosperity is less important than beauty and friendship, and that as North Americans we may have lost our way. In America we lead lonely, separated and atomistic lives and appear to possess very little spiritual values. Life in North America is easy but empty.

David
Matagalpa, Nicaragua

Dispatch Number 28 -My Corner

Everyone told me to be careful at my corner where two streets intersected at 6th and 6th. Hotel Marina was a clean shit hole with a second floor view of giant pot holes that were mysteriously filled during the night with concrete rubble, it also had street food vendors, an endless stream of taxis, children, beggars and a colorful selection of corner prostitutes.

My openness to see and live in the seedy underbelly of society lent itself well to this corner. The entrance to the Marina had Oscar an armed guard who wore a neat paramilitary uniform and totted a big shotgun held at the ready. In light of the dinginess of the place I found it clean enough, safe enough and seedy enough to be happy with the room. So did my travel mates Alex a Mexican journalism student and Jeff a gregarious Australian.

Jeff especially took to the place the way I did. It was one of those bonding moments and I was glad we were traveling together. We were in San Pedro Sula a rough city in Honduras during the unsettled aftermath of a coupd'état that went down just two weeks before. The country was full of protests, crackdowns and curfews. I felt I was traveling with the right men.

I chatted with the prostitutes who hinted at special pleasures and when I showed little interest they asked me to buy them plates of food from the stand I spent the better part of an evening hanging out at. Life lived out in the open.

In dangerous cities like this one when the children are taken home and are no longer playing on the sidewalks it is a very good sign to get off the streets too. Soon the streets were left to roaming trucks full of police to enforce the nation wide curfew from 11pm to 5am. It was a colorful first night in Honduras.

David
Matagalpa, Nicaragua

Dispatch Number 27 -Oscar

In the gun totting Olancho Department known as the Wild West of Honduras I met Oscar a Costa Rican small arms dealer who looked like he made his real money peddling high quality leather gun holsters. We were staying at a Hospedaje, Latin America's version of a flop house with clean simple rooms with shared baths and showers. A basic room is $2.50 a night. I spent $5 so I could have the luxury of a fan and a window.

His girlfriend, Dixie was a robust woman who was open and flirtatious asking if I wanted to meet her sister, cousin or a friend of hers. It is a Honduran trait to match make and is an experience this traveller encounters when stopping to talk with people. She asked for my cell number and I explained that I did not own a cell phone. I think she may have taken my reply as a blow off -I mean who doesn't own a cell phone these days?

Late the next night Oscar came by and we talked about nothing then said goodnight. He returned a moment later and gave me a memento to remember him by, it was a baby sandal made of tan leather, he suggested I hang it from the mirror of my truck. A minute later he vanished like a shadow with a rucksack full of possessions and a nylon potato sack filled with the rest of it. The traveling salesman.

I looked at the baby shoe and decided not to hang it. I have read too much true crime and drew up a sinister relationship immediately of a infant kidnapper and how I wouldn't fare well in superstitious Latin America if they took a misunderstanding to it.

No matter how determined you are you are shaped by your environment.

David
Danli, Honduras

Dispatch Number 26 -Roadways

Seeing a dead man in the flesh after meeting a violent end sets a man to thinking. About all sorts of stuff.

On the road 5 miles out of town on the Caribbean coast of Honduras lay the body of a dead man, the odometer read 195 miles. This highway was the best I had driven in nearly a year of travel through Mexico and Central America, it was wide, smooth and safe. In the opposite lane were a pair of powdery fresh, deeply dark skid marks with a 65+ year old man laying face down with his hands pulled up to his chest. Blood ran from his head down the slope towards my lane. It was wet and visibly moving. After slowly passing the scene we grew silent. There were just a couple people standing around and an old woman stood over him in curious posture.

In silence I thought, I hope he did everything he wanted to do today.

By odometer reading 205 my travel partner and I were talking again. This time about traffic laws in our respective countries -was it legal to drive barefoot in Australia or the United States?

Life is delicate and often inane.

David
Danli, Honduras

Dispatch Number 25 -Weddings

I have attended many weddings in my life, even witnessed my own and over time understood I do not like them. When traveling in Mexico an invitation to attend one came my way while I was studying Spanish not far from Mexico City. Taxco where I was living is a colonial gem of a city with whitewashed buildings and cobblestone streets set on a very steep mountainside. The centerpiece, as in most towns in Mexico, was the beautiful Santa Prisca Catholic church that has been the religious anchor in this silver town of 90,000 people for over 250 years.

The wedding ceremony for Gabriel's daughter was held in the incredibly ornate Santa Prisca with gold leaf baroque figurines covering all walls from floor to ceiling. The setting was impressive to say the least. It is a lovely ornate church. I had never attended a Mexican wedding let alone one in a church I admired -with excitement I accepted the invitation.

I attended the ceremony and reception. I had visited and spent time sitting in Santa Prisca on a previous occasion and felt ready to visit it again to witness a wedding ceremony. As anticipated the ceremony in the church was a pleasure, after it was over we set off for the reception across the hilly town in white Volkswagen Beetle taxis. The reception was full of cultural surprises that delighted. In the end, however, for me it was still a wedding -between conversations I wrote this:

Weddings are boring. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Boring. Drudgery at its finest, they can be such dull affairs. People trapped in pointless conversation while others sit still in silence looking dead bored. Trapped here. Weddings -is there a good one? Painful social experience. Painful. They are necessary and one of those things man does and does and does. Like a bad invention or poor product the wedding is never improved upon or revised. An antiquated ritual.

Man effectively manages to improve his highly touted technologies with great rapidity in things like cars and computers, but the wedding party remains unchanged, outdated and horribly dull. I am held hostage at this event for appearances and the prospect of a warm meal. The things we endure for friends and a free meal.

Yes, I know it is the people that make the party and I must take my share of the responsibility for the dullness that ensued. Perhaps my mood was effected by a mild hangover, dehydration and that I was very hungry at the time.

A week later I was in the same grand setting of Santa Prisca in the early evening to listen to a classic guitarist perform. Maestro Atsumas Nakabayashi, a master of the instrument filled the hall with beautiful sounds that gently filled the gold chamber. I thought, David, you can live anywhere in this world -anywhere. There is culture everywhere. The church was impressive on its own, to have attended a solo concert and a wedding in it was memorable.

David
Danli, Honduras