Dispatch Number 89 -Two Years: Costa Rica

This is a continuation of a series recapping the past two years of travels through Latin America by car, each Dispatch is a single country summary from Mexico, through Central America's Guatemala-Honduras-Nicaragua-Costa Rica-Panama and through South America's Columbia-Ecuador and Peru. The loose plan is to continue driving to the bottom of the world, Ushuaia, Argentina. These are stories of characters, experiences and hardships.

 

Costa Rica

October

2009

My girlfriend suggested we travel through the country quickly, a nice country, well trodden with lots of Americans living in big hillside homes. A place where retirees retreat to their tropical dream houses and spend the balance of their time shopping, while ignoring both local customs and the native language. She was right, too westernized, too many gringos, too much of what we didn't want.

Costa Rica, sweet and cheery, is one country Americans can name in Latin America and feel safe traveling to. Ironically, Costa Rica has no army or military. I imagined it a place where people sun-bathed in beach-chairs and shielded their cocktails from UV light with miniature umbrellas, while feeling wonderfully rich because everyone around them is colorfully poor.

Volcanoes

Marjolein and I slept under Vulcan Arenal, a live volcano that spewed orange boulders day and night, a couple kilometers away. Lava rocks, not liquid, that made deep percussive sounds as they rolled down concrete-colored chutes. A powerful hiss of gas preceded the rocks before they popped out of the top, like a jet engine, the sound strong and precise. The hiss was tremendous, as if, three 747 Jumbo jets were taking-off at the same time, with their engines funneled into a single exhaust.

Dirty and rough. We stayed in a leaky tent and ate canned food. It suited Marjolein well, she possessed some of the 'boy gene', adventurous and rugged, machete swinging and constantly snapping photos with the biggest camera you can buy, she could also name most the animals and insects in the region.

She stands by the truck. Waiting in a safari outfit: khaki shorts, boots, high-tech synthetic clothes with raincoat and rucksack. To complete the stereotype, wears a machete sheathed in a leather scabbard cracking coconuts open with it. The expensive high-tech clothes didn't work, mosquitoes bit through them and when body odor set in, they smelled awful. An irreversible mix of smells: old sweat-drenched socks, a sour sink drain and wet dog fur. These smells wouldn't come out, no matter how much she washed them.

Source: Wikipedia

We slept beneath Arenal for many nights. Night viewing was dramatic, the chutes of the volcano would light up with orange tracers. I'd be awakened in the middle of the night by a loud hiss of gas, then peer out of the tent to watch brilliant orange fireballs race down the mountain face; a newly minted rock began its life the size of a man, and when it got to the bottom, no bigger than a basketball.

Spacemen

We came to Arenal to watch it blow and instead, met Freddy, a Costa Rican wood craft artist and UFO fanatic. He sold his colorful hand-crafted figurines along a roadside that led to a mirador, lookout. We met him at an abandoned house we paid to sleep in. Freddy, tall and skinny had alive wild eyes. Those eyes, already big, became the size of small plates when we switched to his favorite subject, when he asked, if I believed in flying saucers.

Before I could realize what my answer would trigger, he had me watching a DVD filled with amateur clips of local UFO sightings, See it? See it? he kept asking, pointing to the portable player.

Latin Americans are big on repetition. Every time I answered, No., it was replayed.

I was worried, it came down to the 'correct' answer or the battery. I caught myself thinking about the battery. Marjolein deftly escaped Freddy's spaceman sermon.

Do you believe in UFOs?, he asked.

No, not really, I replied, not in the mood to lie about it.

As a traveler you are inclined to tell white lies to be more agreeable with locals, a sort of traveler diplomacy. In my travels, the most common questions after marital status are, Do you believe in UFOs? and, Are you a Catholic?, but the one that really gets them to pause is, Alone? You're traveling alone?

Latin Americans don't do anything alone, they are accompanied in pairs or groups in everything they do, except take a pee. Doing something alone in these countries borders on criminal, strange and far outside the norm. To the locals, a traveler wondering remote parts is an interesting event, something unique, when they meet a solo traveler it's an aberration. Their reactions often made me feel like I was being diagnosed with a mental disorder.

Do you want to watch? he asked.
Sure, I said, sensing a trap, Freddy, only a few minutes, I have to leave soon.
We view the clips...more than once.
Now, are you convinced? he wanted to know.

His eyes almost sold you on the UFO thing.

In my reckless thinking, I thought I could convince him with my basic and approximate Spanish that they do not exist, explaining that the samples on his DVD were anything but UFOs, proudly pointing out technical problems with the video. Either my Spanish was too vague or he chose not to take my points into consideration, I suspected the latter, as we established our opposition and stopped listening to each other, like two ignorant Missionaries who believe in different books.

Marjolein Groot Nibbelink

Car Parts

While Azulita, my 1986 Land Cruiser was in the shop for maintenance, I met Enrique, a Costa Rican who recently resettled in his home country after twenty years in New Jersey raising a family and running a gardening business.

Why did you return? I asked.
Enrique tells the story, To be closer to my family. We paid the way for relatives to visit us in America and see our home in New Jersey, we can't invite all of them to visit that way. Now, we all live in the same city.
What do you miss most about life in the United States?
In the States it is easy to get stuff. Like at Napa Auto Parts, you can get this distributor rotor in every shop, right now, I can't locate one in Costa Rica, he explains, holding the broken part.
So, you miss the shopping convenience?
Yeah, here in Costa Rica, you go to one shop and a tire costs $49, then down the street the same tire is $32. In the States, the prices are pretty much the same everywhere. It's a lot of work to buy stuff here.

The mechanic who services the truck looks like a fat beer-swollen version of Tuco, the bad-guy, played by Eli Walach in the spaghetti western, The Good the Bad and the Ugly. If you like bad-guys, his character is at the top of the list. Tuco greased the chassis and adjusted the clutch.

Odds and Ends

San Isidro. The market city, where I met Enrique is noisy and colorful. A 'hotel' off the main plaza has bored looking prostitutes that linger on wood benches in the lobby. Worn-down women who've seen too much and cared too little for themselves. Haggard faces and pear-shaped bodies, heavy in the wrong places. The women, with no claim to beauty, look garish in their ill-fitting clothes and thick pasted make-up. Everything a size too small. Faces hard as steel.

Years back in Bangkok, I met a Buddhist monk in-training who said, David, it is the last profession, in the world, a woman chooses.

Down the coast at Trey's place, a comfortable hostel in a sleepy village, I watched a young Swiss woman, who traveled alone, shy and odd, she mixed little and was usually penning in her tiny diary. I looked at her and saw myself.

Osa Peninsula

The German is good company, his Greek wife is a terror. A woman of anger, agitation and pettiness. A female powder keg in a petite body. She trembles with frustration when she talks about the weather while lifting another cigarette out of the pack. When she calls him 'Darling' in German it sounds like she's cursing him. He's a chess player and works for the United Nations in Afghanistan as a police trainer. We debated that war and he told us it was about Democracy and Afghan women winning the right to vote.

I thought, If those are the reasons, then we should occupy ½ the world's countries.

It was, as if, geopolitics and oil (pipelines, there's no oil in Afghanistan) were never a part of the occupation's principal aim.

The irony! Germans working in an American quagmire.

We met them on the magical Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica, a stunning coastal rain forest full of rare birds and mammals, set on the Pacific coast with big surf and abundant animal life. The country was well named, the Rich Coast.

Marjolein Groot Nibbelink

On morning walks I was overwhelmed by exotic bird sightings, unable to keep track of them all, let alone know what I was looking at. Many sat on low tree limbs fearlessly staring with the same patience I would study them. It was one of the most pristine natural reserves I have set foot in, second only to the Upper Amazon in Peru, where I spent twelve-days living on the waterways in a dugout canoe.

I was the accidental wildlife tourist. Marjolein was a mammal and bird enthusiast and only through her was I able to appreciate the rareness of the birds I would spot. She took me on night walks to see a whole other world of strange nocturnal insects and mammals.

The Rains

It was rain season in Osa and the rivers swelled. John the owner of Kapu, where we stayed, gave tips on how to traverse the many rivers on our cross-peninsula drive. The rain stopped, but water still poured from the mountains, turning streams into rivers. On the return we used an ad hoc crossing that forced us to drive 'up-river', heading straight into the oncoming waters. I almost lost it here, the river was high enough to flood the engine, the truck struggled against the current and depth as cafe au-lait water rushed over the hood.

Marjolein Groot Nibbelink

Here at Kapu, animals would come close to our room. Scarlet Macaws, Capuchin and Squirrel monkeys, Great Curassows (ground bird), humming birds, a common black hawk (who stared and stared at us), a pair of Toucans eating berries with their enormous beaks and Blue Morph butterflies. An Agouti (a short stumpy hopping mammal), the long-nosed bat that stayed in our room during the day, black turtles crawled about, and leaf-cutter ants defoliated whole trees, carrying their green booty down 'highways' they constructed on the jungle floor.

Something Between the Third World and a Little Better

While Costa Rica was a pleasant country to visit and easy to navigate it lacked something, it ran smoother and was more orderly than neighboring countries. They cut their grass with weed-whackers instead of machetes, building projects were completed and curiously absent were the rebar spires that adorn the rooftops of every Central American city. There were no flies and the majority of roads were paved. Clean water flowed and the electricity always worked.

Gone were the colorful characters, like the shoeshine boys and other hustlers I'd meet in main plazas of most every town visited before it. I could not find street food and when you took a beer, they gave you the option to have it poured over ice. The remarkable part was that you could even get ice. Costa Rica was advanced compared to its neighbors, but I wasn't looking for that kind of order, I was still excited by the rough-shod, happy-go-lucky ways of its neighbors.

For Select Past Dispatches on Costa Rica hit these select links and look for the Panama summary in next Dispatch Number 90.

Errant Thoughts on Central America-

http://travelingdave-intheamericas.blogspot.com/2009/12/dispatch-number-48-errant-thoughts-vi.html

Errant Thoughts-

http://travelingdave-intheamericas.blogspot.com/2009/11/dispatch-number-45-errant-thoughts-v.html

After a Year: Short Reflections-

http://travelingdave-intheamericas.blogspot.com/2010/02/dispatch-number-55-beer-thoughts.html

David

Paracas, Peru

Dispatch Number 88 -Two Years: Nicaragua

This is a continuation of a series recapping the past two years of travels through Latin America by car, each Dispatch is a single country summary from Mexico, through Central America's Guatemala-Honduras-Nicaragua-Costa Rica-Panama and through South America's Columbia-Ecuador and Peru. The loose plan is to continue driving to the bottom of the world, Ushuaia, Argentina. These are stories of characters, experiences and hardships.

Nicaragua
August 2009
Traveling alone. Stocked up with Pop-Tarts. I stood in the breezeway waiting for the border officer to process car papers and stamp my passport, when I began chatting it up with the shoeshine boys and 'expediters', the young men who hustle a buck helping people move paperwork through border control.

It was the same remote crossing that exiled Honduran President Zelaya, just two weeks earlier, had tried to re-enter Honduras from Nicaragua to reclaim his presidency, he and a throng of supporters were turned back amid a media storm. Third World politics as practiced in Latin American are a form unto their own, colorful and dramatic with ample chest thumping.

Zelaya later, did successfully sneak back into Honduras in the trunk of a car, his hope was for a popular movement to sweep him back into power, but ended on a less exciting note, holed up in the Brazilian embassy for a month. Imagine that, a head of state sneaking around in the trunk of a car! An earlier attempt, before the trunk stunt, his private jet flew to the capital and circled around for an hour trying to land, Honduran authorities refused him by placing army trucks on the runway. In other parts of the country armed men parked old buses on unimportant runways defending against persistent Zelaya.

This day at the border, with it's shoeshine boys and 'expediters', was devoid of activity, empty and lonely.

While my papers were being triple-checked by a third policeman, a prostitute winked and gestured, I smiled and drove on, thinking, A rough and tumble border crossing, like this one, is no place for a moral lapse.

The Price of Rum  
Esteli, Nicaragua. The first night. The price of rum, Flor de Cana, was more in Nicaragua, the country it's made in, than it was in neighboring Honduras. This started an argument with the liquor store owner and two locals who made doughnuts on the side. Over beers, the question of price was left unresolved, while I made friends with the doughnut guys, Merdardo and Pablo.

Although he was pleasant to be with, Merardo wore a natural expression of fury on his face that showed in his eyes and cheeks. He grew agitated debating the coup in Honduras and tossed back the last half of his beer with a fury that matched his natural expression. His friend Pablo, watched with curiosity.

Nicaraguans, like Hondurans are passionately expressive and would talk about anything and debate freely, unlike Americans who tend to be fearful of sharing opinions with each other. Merdardo surprised me with a business card, he was a multi-level marketing man; he had his fingers in a hotel, doughnuts and Herbalife. I still get email blasts telling me how I can lose weight and live longer with Herbalife.

In the morning Pablo and Merdardo were making doughnuts by hand for their upstart, Super Donuts, in the kitchen of the hotel. Made by hand without tools to cut or shape the doughnuts, cooked in a large pot of oil that held less than a dozen at a time. Nearly rolling with happiness in the sugar and cinnamon the doughnuts were covered in, I ate them still hot, right out of the cooker.

Coffee Plantations and an Island

Preferring back-country travel with its smaller towns, I avoided the big cities and spent most time in the coffee region with its cool climate, staying at plantations from another era. In contrast to this natural setting of low green hills and the beloved coffee plant, it was here, after nine months on the road, I had my first case of traveler's burnout. I weathered it out by hiding in a cheap hotel, avoiding decisions while watching movies and nursing a bottle of Flor de Cana in a pink room. I half-recovered. 

The second half of recovery came on isolated Isla de Ometepe, in the middle of gigantic Lake Nicaragua, riding horses and taking walks. I gained weight eating Marie's home-cooked food, the only restaurant on my side of the island and spent afternoons playing with her pet monkey. It was a tiny Capuchin monkey with a trumpet-shaped penis, cream colored and always sticking out.

Coping with burnout and conversations that repeated themselves, I needed the small world of island life that let me return to my cat-like solitary ways, a world of walks, books, and journals. I was looking forward to meeting Marjolein in a couple weeks time. Like one savors a fine piece of chocolate, I begin re-reading Dostoevsky's, Crime and Punishment.

The first night on the island, I slept in my truck after drinking aguardiente, moonshine with a group of local men. I met them at a bull-riding contest, it was a comical event, as we sat passing the bottle on the rickety stands; it is an easy to drink, hard hitting sugar-cane liquor. It was rumored that the old men who went crazy, did so from drinking too much aguardiente over the years (I met three or four while on the island, I'd give dialog of the conversations, but could not understand one mad-slurred word).

It was Saturday night and the place was packed with people, beer, loud music, lazy bulls and cheap food. The rides were pitiful: a man would mount a bull tied to a post, then released for a 'ride' on a sad-looking barn-sour bull. It was more akin to a walk, than a ride. So we drank. And I slept in the truck. During the night a drunk tried to break in twice. Once he realized I was inside, he asked to come in to sleep. Island life.

Tarantula

The El Porvenir was set on the slope of a stale volcano, surrounded by raw jungle. In the middle of a lake the island was far from city lights, at night it would turn the darkest pitches of black, like a horrible dream of being stuffed into a sealed closet without a trace of light.

It was two or three in the morning when I got up to pee, remembering to grab the flashlight before I set foot outside the bed. No sooner than I switched it on, a juvenile tarantula was walking the floor. I relieved myself. Went back to bed. And let Junior be. In the morning, I bought stolen fruit from an old man without shoes or money. He was begging for spare change and I wanted something in return and that's when the fruit appeared.

The same routine the next night, a midnight pee, and there was Junior defying gravity, walking up the lime-green wall.

Enough, I thought, If he can do that, then very little stands between me, him and the bed I sleep on.
I was much calmer than I thought I'd be when I released him outside after capturing him with a shaving mug (surely this dates me) and a piece of cardboard.

Friends of the Tarantula

A mouse visited nightly and left droppings throughout the brown-tiled room. A cycle began: black blunty shits left in the night, swept up in the morning by cleaning lady, and repeated on the mouse's night-shift. A giant cricket-like insect, the size of my hand, came out at night and would sit perfectly still on the mint colored wall for hours. The last night I saw her, she laid eggs, or rather inserted, fat wood-like splinters into the sheets and mattress. Life at El Porvenir. I wondered how Marjolein would like it.
 

It was at El Porvenir and Marie's three-table restaurant that Marjolein joined me for three months of travel in Central America. She met the hard-on prone monkey, who promptly peed on her after gaining a perch on her shoulder.

The American Cafe. I parked in front and walked off to do errands in Moyogalpa, a two-road village on Isla de Ometepe, it's where you went for internet and food stuffs. It had several two-shelf food shops and idle taxi drivers drinking beer waiting for fares. I contributed to the evils of drink & drive by buying a group of them a beer while I drank mine. After errands I stood in front of American Cafe, and decided it didn't look inviting, until I saw the Used Books sign. Like a chronic drug addict, lacking any resistance walked in.

Before I could set foot inside the cafe, I was pressed by an aggressive, prickly old white woman with an English accent, Is that your car? You're parked in my spot, that spot is for customers. Are you staying here? Came the blast in a village with fifteen cars.

Her pettiness was out of place, No, just the books.

If you want some good American food, come here, she continued on.

Yeah, but you have an English accent, and you guys aren't known for decent food, I thought to myself.

It was an unpalatable combination: a British cook with American territoriality.

While real estate man and I tried to start conversation, she began interrupting, The books are over there, they are .35 each.

OK, thanks, As real estate man and I tried again over his plate of pasta. We hadn't exchanged a full sentence yet, because of our pesky host.

She hovered over us, We have super chocolate cake, she blared, cutting in, if you want a slice.

No, thanks, I ate, hoping real estate man could finish with how the market fell out and how small plots on the island were hard sells.

How about you, an investment?

No, not looking to buy land, besides I'm a nomad, it just wouldn't work.

Our travels, the first Marjolein and I were to make together, on the Rio San Juan were amongst the most memorable on the Central America isthmus; setting off in boats across the lake and down river to the Caribbean coast staying in settlements along the way. The San Juan is an old pirates highway that runs along the northern border of Costa Rica. The road-less jungle remains undeveloped since the 1850s, when the U.S. government wanted to develop a rival shipping canal to the one the French started in Panama.

It was the best coffee to-go I ever had. Black water from a Styrofoam cup in a cramped seat of a small fast river boat. The seduction of morning mist over glassy water, the sun weak, and a densely dark jungle with birds in dawn symphony. Coffee, me and no conversation -just the sound of water rushing by and the drone of the outboard motor. It was our last boat on the San Juan.

Before leaving Nicaragua I paid my first bribe to a traffic cop, who graciously opened the conversation with a compliment on wearing my seat belt, then promptly found fault with my car papers. I haggled from $20 to $5 and Marjolein and I were on our way for Costa Rica.

After the exchange with the traffic cop, I thought, They are so flexible, the Latin American legal system rocks!

I learned bribes did not come at gunpoint or under threat of jail, but in Dollars, in a friendly flexible way. The horror stories people back home told with such glee were not coming true.

For Select Past Dispatches on Nicaragua hit these select links and look for the Costa Rica summary in next Dispatch Number 89- 

 

The Cost of Rum with Merdardo and Pablo-

http://travelingdave-intheamericas.blogspot.com/2009/09/dispatch-number-35-cost-of-rum.html

My First Bribe, Glad to see You are Wearing Your Seat-belt-

http://travelingdave-intheamericas.blogspot.com/2009/12/dispatch-number-52-system.html

Reflections on Material Wealth: North vs South-

http://travelingdave-intheamericas.blogspot.com/2009/08/dispatch-number-29-material-world_17.html

Brief Observations in a Short Format, Errant Thoughts-

http://travelingdave-intheamericas.blogspot.com/2009/12/dispatch-number-48-errant-thoughts-vi.html

More Errant Thoughts-

http://travelingdave-intheamericas.blogspot.com/2009/11/dispatch-number-45-errant-thoughts-v.html

David,
Paracas, Peru

Dispatch Number 87 -Two Years: Honduras

This is a continuation of a series recapping the past two years of travels through Latin America by car, each Dispatch is a single country summary from Mexico, through Central America's Guatemala-Honduras-Nicaragua-Costa Rica-Panama and through South America's Columbia-Ecuador and Peru. The loose plan is to continue driving to the bottom of the world, Ushuaia, Argentina. These are stories of characters, experiences and hardships.

Honduras
July 2009

With My Own Eyes
The coup began at 5am on Sunday morning. I planned on entering Honduras around the same time Zelaya, the Honduran President, was forcefully removed from office in a coup d' etat that left him standing on a runway in Costa Rica, still wearing his pajamas. It was Latin America of old, a coup hadn't happened in almost twenty years and I was itching to be closer to it.

I waited another week to assess the volatility, which at the time, was full civil disobedience and international political pressure. Everything was in play, the whole gamut: demonstrations, border closings, a media-storm, clashes between protesters and police with a smattering of political killings.

I was apprehensive to go alone and wanted to have someone who would watch my back with a sense of adventure. I found two men ready to leave Guatemala for turbulent Honduras. Jeff, a talkative Australian who was fluster-proof and Alex, a tightly wound journalism student from Mexico City with something to prove.

We wanted to see it first hand, to talk to the people and confirm or dispel what the press was saying. Jeff and I tended to be the more practical, while Alex's temperament was to run the streets of San Pedro Sula after curfew, when the streets would flood with trucks of National Police that played for keeps.

I attended rallies protesting Zelaya's removal from office and interviewed many about the coup d' etat. At the time, the running argument made by the government, was that Zelaya's removal was constitutionally mandated and this was used to great effect blunting domestic anger. After a few days in-country, Alex managed to find himself a journalism job in the turbulent capital, Tegucigalpa, as an assistant reporter. Jeff and I were relieved to have him go, for Alex had too much unbound energy and was a bullhorn of constant criticism for the two of us. Jeff and I headed for the mellower environs of the Caribbean coast. Along the way, we saw a couple of dead men (due to road accidents, not political violence).

Despite conservative cries from the extreme-right, there was no important liberal movement in Honduras. The oligarchy cried Communism and blamed subversive activities on an unnamed movement (there was none), and the people bought it like docile servants shaking their fists at the Communist threat branded with the flags of Cuba and Venezuela. Watching tv and reading newspapers at the time, felt like it was the 1950s in the United States, when Americans were mobilized against the Red Threat.

Ricardo, a heavy equipment salesman and I argued over dinner, the merits of the coup, (he was in favor of it), while he got a lady friend or his sister (my Spanish was so bad at that time) on the phone and attempted to match-make. My position was that if Zelaya's removal from office was constitutionally mandated, then he should have stood trial, instead he was led out of the country under gunpoint, hardly evidence of a legal mandate.

At the end of my stay, what impressed most was the effectiveness of the state propaganda machine and how it influenced public opinion and people like Ricardo. The lesson: regardless of the facts, tv matters more than any other single media when shaping public opinion. Reflecting on the effectiveness of media in Honduras, I could see how the propaganda model was deployed on Americans during the run up to the invasion of Iraq, how quickly and easily the majority of Americans bought into military adventurism.

Political Epilogue
Since Zelaya was unceremoniously stranded in his pajamas that morning in June 2009, the new government of Honduras has increased the use of political violence to suppress popular movements. The violence escalated dramatically since Pepe Lobo was elected President; union leaders, resistance organizers and journalists have been systematically murdered.

In 2010, Honduras was named the most dangerous place in the world to be a journalist, ten were assassinated in 2010. The United States and Canada are the only countries to recognize Lobo's government; in a rare show of unity, Latin American countries have denounced his government because of the illegality of the coup d' etat and sham election that followed.

People
Hondurans were friendly people with hard faces, until conversation started, then the faces softened. Compared to the overly-polite passive Guatemalans, they were direct and gruff. Greetings in restaurants were rare and when entering a shop or hotel, it was, Diga me, tell me, skipping the usual courtesies.

More people rode bicycles and the women kept their youthful figures later in life, whereas, in Guatemala and Mexico the women turn plump in their early twenties. An enjoyable part of the Honduran character is how open and expressive they are, opinions freely shared on politics and social issues. They were refreshingly direct.

Far away from the protest burdened cities and blocked highways, I met a Dutch woman on the Caribbean coast in Trujillo, not knowing at the time I would fall deeply in love with her. Marjolein and I made plans to travel together in Nicaragua.

On a rain soaked mountain road along the Caribbean Coast was my worst get-the-truck-stuck pickle to date. A land bridge, barely as wide as Azulita, my truck, gave way and crumbled from under us as we tried to cross it. The truck settled on its axle, at the edge of a hole large enough to swallow it.

Before this episode, I had some experience getting stuck, in Mexico trapped on a beach, buried in sand, another time, semi-submerged in a small river with water running inside the cab; all of them workable situations, but this one was bad. There was nothing we could do on our own, to move it forward or backward would send the truck into the hole.

The Russian couple, Dmitriy and Olga went down the hill for help, we needed a pull-out. He came back with a old Toyota FJ40, and after we built a rock ramp with a tree and an old door to help it pass out of the hole the yank out went well. The big Sunday drive I promised everyone was spent getting unstuck. We made it two kilometers up the road.
Dmitriy an adventurer in his own right and a survivalist trainer put it this way, The only difference between a regular car and those with four-wheel drive, is in a 4x4 you get further down the road before getting stuck.

After I left the Russians and New Zealander, Michaela at the edge of the Mosquito Coast, where the road stops, I drove into the Wild West interior of Honduras, Olancho Department, known for rough-hewn ways, it is the same region where exiled President Zelaya came from. A region modeled on the old west of farmers and cattle ranchers linked by dirt roads and dry dusty towns.
Men worked on horseback, Real cowboys, I thought.

I met Oscar in these remote reaches, a traveling salesman who sold guns, but I could only see him hustling leather-holsters. We both stayed in a hospedaje that had cell block rooms with shared bathrooms for a few bucks a night.

After gun talk with Oscar, I got bored and thirsty, and was tired of yellow dust in my mouth, and went for a beer on the plaza. Without local guidance I was at the mercy of the place, I had set foot in cross-dressers bar. Even the owner was a feminino. It was the last thing I expected to find in Marlboro country. They stared at me like fresh meat, I steeled myself for my mistake and ordered a beer.

They had hunting lurid eyes. I squirmed and was conscious of every move, making nervous tick after nervous tick unable to mask my discomfort. A group of cross dressers sat at a table looking my way whispering, smiling and winking.
Is this how women feel? I'm sorry, I'll never do it again, passed my thoughts.
My bravado had to be propped up with a second beer, leaving after the owner told me to come back at seven when he'd have a nice girl or guy for me.

Strawberry Pop-Tarts
After months of craving Strawberry Pop-Tarts, I finally found them, in Danli, a small city known for cigar making, near the border with Nicaragua. I ate them for dinner and for breakfast the next morning in bed, crumbs all over my chest. I stocked up and refused to let other travelers see them. The secret supply ran out soon enough, left deprived, the cravings started over again and lasted for months, until Marjolein found them in Panama City. I had all but given up on seeing or tasting them again. In every city I stayed in, during my walks, I would search every grocery store for Pop-Tarts. Once, I found fig newtons. I dreamt of care packages with Pop-Tarts in them.

Did you know:
In 2001, the United States' military airdropped 2.4 million Pop-Tarts in Afghanistan during the US invasion. Cultural and political imperialism comes in many forms.

Today he said, more than ever before men had to learn to live without things. Things filled men with fear: the more things they had, the more had to fear. Things had a way of riveting themselves on to the soul and then telling the soul what to do..

-Bruce Chatwin, Songlines

For Past Dispatches on Honduras hit these select links and look for a Nicaragua summary in next Dispatch Number 88-

A Colorful First Night in Honduras-
http://travelingdave-intheamericas.blogspot.com/2009/08/dispatch-number-28-my-corner.html
Presidential Coup with Alex-
http://travelingdave-intheamericas.blogspot.com/2009/09/dispatch-number-36-alejandro.html
Presidential Coup with Jeff-
http://travelingdave-intheamericas.blogspot.com/2009/12/dispatch-number-51-jeff.html
With Love from Russia-
http://travelingdave-intheamericas.blogspot.com/2009/12/dispatch-number-50-drinking-with.html
When I Almost Lost the Truck-
http://travelingdave-intheamericas.blogspot.com/2009/08/dispatch-number-30-russian-saying.html
Oscar the Gun Salesman-
http://travelingdave-intheamericas.blogspot.com/2009/08/dispatch-number-27-oscar.html
The Cross Dressers-
http://travelingdave-intheamericas.blogspot.com/2009/08/dispatch-number-33-bar.html

David
Ayacucho, Peru

Dispatch Number 86 -Two Years: Guatemala

This is a continuation of a series recapping the past two years of travels through Latin America by car, each Dispatch is a single country summary from Mexico, through Central America's Guatemala-Honduras-Nicaragua-Costa Rica-Panama and through South America's Columbia-Ecuador and Peru. The loose plan is to continue driving to the bottom of the world, Ushuaia, Argentina. These are stories of characters, experiences and hardships.

Guatemala
April 2009

Lowlands
I usually began looking for travel partners a couple days before I left a place. During my stay in Mexico I was surrounded by friends, in Guatemala I decided to go alone, seeking a different experience aimed at being closer to local culture and people. My Mexican friends were terrified of Guatemala and openly feared for my life, to them, Guatemala was the Wild West, never-mind they themselves were in the midst of a large scale drug war along the border with the United States with bodies piling up daily.

Rather than soft-peddling the point, I did discover, or rather observed, Guatemala was a dangerous country. Countless examples showed me the Letter of the Law meant little, while criminal and political killings were the norm.

I was nervous crossing the border alone, for first time all decisions were mine, No backup, as an American would put it. At the crossing I discovered, it was nothing as the border guard came out of his shack, stamped my passport and raised the red and white striped bamboo pole.

What about car papers? I asked.
Don't worry about it. replied the gun-less guard.
From the frontier it was all quiet back-roads to Tikal, the heart of Maya country. Oddly, during the drive, Strawberry Pop Tarts came to mind and would haunt me for months to come.

Guatemala was armed to the teeth, banks had firearm lockers with guards that made those with weapons surrender them. I never saw so much civilian armaments in the open before. It was like the Wild West. The smallest shops in Santa Elena were guarded by shotgun armed men at the ready; the brake parts shop I was in, had a private guard with shotgun and sidearm. We talked. As an American I am expected to like, even love guns. He had pride in his weapons, declaring the shotgun belonged to the shop, but the big pistol was his, as he closely watched a car turn the corner behind the shop.

It was the same thing at pharmacies, agricultural supply stores, banks and the Toyota dealership. Only barber shops weren't guarded, at 50-cents a cut there was little to take from the barber. With all the guns and guards tittering on a shootout, I began to wonder if I would witness one in the dusty crumbly streets of Santa Elena. Each time I used the ATM, I thought I was going to get robbed of my fistful of Quetzals, I'd scurry to the truck, lock the doors and get moving. Foreigners were told to stay out of that side of town and stick to the tame side, Isla Flores, the safe sanctuary of the tourist zone. Travel is about launching oneself into the unknown, I went to Santa Elena regularly.

I was never at ease after the brush-off over car papers. At a regional airport I asked a Guatemalan immigration official the low-down. The airport looked so much more formal than the tin shack with the striped red and white pole.

Don't worry! This is Guatemala, you don't have to worry about this stuff. Relax, said the voice in the snappy blue uniform with bars on the shoulders.
I made him tell me five or six times, until satisfied.

Three months later, at the Guatemala-Honduras border, while requesting exit stamps, the Guatemalan border official demanded car papers I didn't have. With the help of two friends from Australia and Mexico we sneaked the car through to Honduras and promptly applied for car documents. Already, Jeff and Alejandro, 'Alex' were proving their worth as travel partners, the hard part was ahead.

In the steamy lowlands, I spent considerable time exploring and camping at Maya ruins in the region. At El Zoltz, using nannying gestures the archaeological workers directed me to set foot inside a newly excavated tomb, in the El Diablo complex that had been sealed for 1,500 years -I breathed its rarefied air and stared at pristine red and white plaster walls before crawling back out through the tunnel.

Not until later, did I learn it was a royal tomb believed to contain the remains of King Chak who ruled in the late 4^th century AD. He was interred with the remains of six sacrificed children, aged between 1 and 5 years old. Who is afforded that status these days? They dragged President Reagan, the Republicans lock-stock idol, all over Southern California, but at the end of that laborious procession he was buried alone.

The workers probably told me about King Chak and I probably nodded in affirmation with my elementary Spanish. It is clear, as I look back at this and other events: I am the accidental tourist who comes across remarkable things, but does not comprehend the significance of them until later. That's right, no pictures. I often walk without my camera.

In a nearby village I looked for a cheap place to sleep. If I would take my meals at the restaurant I could sleep in my tent for free behind the house with the chickens. A lot of chickens. The old man raised cocks and sold them to surrounding settlements. I didn't know if he raised them for fucking or fighting, cock fighting is normal in these parts. They would wail at all hours, the most shocking session was when they began crowing after I had been asleep for those precious first two hours. I jumped awake. I thought they were in the tent with me. Minutes later, I lay smiling as other chickens in the village exchanged crows in a long relay one after the other across the settlement. It was 2am.

A week earlier we pitched the tent at a Maya site not open to the public, set far from the villages where they harvest chicle, natural gum. The site was in its original state with stones turned up by deeply rooted trees. Gardeners kept the jungle cut back, it was modern man's only touch. My guide, Ephraim smoked pot, he claimed it dulled his pain over a dead girlfriend, he was twenty. It took us hours to find the site and almost gave up the search in the heat of the lowlands.

I took a hit too, then lost touch with the rationalism needed to drive that led to a flat tire, I carelessly sheared off the air-stem after clipping a fallen tree. The tire emptied in seconds. Stoned and sweating, while Ephraim watched me change the tire, eventually he hopped back into the truck to avoid the bacon cooking sun.

In Latin America it seems, most everyone believes in god, jesus-christ and other trees of mystery, and so the question came, Do you believe in god?, as we stood atop the main temple. The disappointment in Ephraim's face registered clear. Before dark we made camp in the main plaza amidst sacrifice stones that rested in their original positions at the foot of each pyramid-shaped temple, these giant moss covered aspirin were used to chop and stab other humans to fulfill perceived obligations to the gods.

I learned from my stay in the region that the Maya built most of the great sites in Mexico and Guatemala, the Incas came later. Their great achievements: built massive scale architecture, were one of four civilizations to invent writing, and were masters of astrology.

Even though I held only thirty-percent of the conversation with my basic and approximate Spanish, the twelve year old kid made conversation with ease while he peddled jewelry.
The hostel owner, who preferred to spend his time watching soccer matches, said of the kid who made his own jewelry, He's a petty thief, stay alert. Emphasizing it with a local saying that implied the boy was clever too, Only the eyes of God can see what he does.

I still gave the kid a ride to Tikal where he spent the day selling a bucket of Mangoes for his mother. Remembering the warning, I kept my eyes on him. Real close 'cause I wasn't convinced god was nearby.


Tourists don't know where they've been. Travelers don't know where they're going.

-Paul Theroux

On the subject of the Maya, I met many travelers with their noses in Armageddon-themed books based on the Western idea that the Maya calendar will end on December 21, 2012, and in turn, bring about total global collapse by way of super-volcanoes and asteroid strikes. It is a crude high-jacking of a highly regarded culture.

I didn't know it at the time, but I was beginning to stumble on the spiritual tourist who would trapeze Latin America in search of something he hoped to find in books and Shamans. An easily stereotyped traveler, one could quickly see they seldom looked at themselves for answers. I could not find one Mayan who believed in a 2012 doomsday, those I met were more concerned with the next rain.

While crossing the country on remote back-roads I met and made fast friends with an American Peace Corps worker and ended up living with him for a couple weeks. Tall lanky Ted lived in a rustic isolated settlement with 300 people, he worked on an Eco-tourism project and spoke K'iche', the local language. I learned a great deal about the customs and governing practices of small communities through Ted. He taught the local kids a new game, baseball, and they'd knock on his door daily, begging to play a game. We played. With bare hands, a tennis ball and wood clubs.

While living with Ted, I met and promptly fell in love with a Guatemalan biologist who did not fall in love with me. Unconsummated love. I was hopelessly enamored with Andrea, she looked more like a sexy librarian than a biologist. Nothing seemed to happen in the small settlement, especially when Andrea wouldn't agree to see me. Ted and I would drink beer and eat eggs for dinner.

The glossy veneer of the over-enthusiastic traveler who says, Everything is great! was stripped away when an American priest was killed in a roadside robbery just 2 km down the road from Ted's place. We watched them drive by moments before the attack and was the same road we ourselves had driven hours before. We all die, it's more a question of how we live.

Highlands
We stayed at a Refugio. In an isolated settlement without roads, set atop a cold mountain with flocks of sheep and goat. We hiked for two days across this barren environment of high plains and small settlements. I was with Ted, of Peace Corps and one of his buddies, Gunther cut in the figure of a lumberjack. Gunther was infected by Ted's experience and was soon off to Africa for his own Peace Corps engagement as a water engineer.
It was in this rocky landscape, I thought, Only in these extreme environments, those most stingy with life that the goat can thrive. From the hottest desert to coldest mountain range the goat can make it. No other animal can do it.

At the Refugio, we made friends with a group of Guatemalan kids and played futbol, soccer on a lopsided field with representative goal posts and an undersized, under-inflated unresponsive ball. My American technique of play contrasted with the finesse of the Guatemala-style, one based on soft touch and good passing, of which I possess none.

I passed and shot hard trying to catch the goalie off guard with booming shots and that's when my boot flew off with the ball towards goal. I was hopping around on one foot trying to keep out of the black mud. Playing at 10,000 feet was exhausting, as we chased the ball around in our mountaineering jackets and heavy boots with kids that wore sweatshirts and flimsy sneakers.

It made me think of the Westerners spirit of necessity, I can't climb that mountain without a Northface jacket. Ha!

Near the end of my stay in Guatemala I began to develop a better understanding of NGOs and GOs (non-government and government organizations) that operate in third-world countries like Guatemala, in the name of helping the helpless. In the case of Peace Corps, a US government organization, they use a field model where a worker is placed in the community alone.

To realize the project he must rely on others within the community. The Peace Corps model encourages him, by way of necessity, to get local buy-in for project development, and whose role is intended to be that of an adviser, rather than a know-it-all. Communities tend to become invested, and this provides the crucial chance for a project to be successful after Peace Corps pulls out. A worker invests dearly, spending two years on-site, often in primitive conditions. For those back home ready for a change or stuck in a crappy job, Peace Corps has no age limit.

On the other side are the many NGOs and GOs operating on a we-know-what's-best-for-you philosophy, using a push down model telling the locals what to do and how to do it, often without their input. It is humiliating to the community and fosters a hand-out mentality of, Just give it to us. These projects are the ones frequently abandoned by the locals after an NGO leaves.

Sadly, there are far more push-down NGOs than those that integrate into communities. After talking with many NGO workers and volunteer tourists I began to sense that their work was a form of psychotherapy. Many had difficulty answering the most basic questions about how their NGO integrated and delivered projects in the communities they served. But, they were proud to lead with, I'm volunteering... or …I'm doing NGO work...

During my stay in Coban, Guatemala, I met a Belgium woman who was a member a six person team (all Belgium) that worked in an insulated office in Guatemala City, providing social services to gay men, teaching them life/work-skills, so they could take 'regular' jobs and get out of the violent world of the sex-trade. In their office, they decided what to do, then took the program to the people. Sure, in one sense it was a worthwhile project and fair to assume it did have a positive social impact.

After seeing with my own eyes and interviews with organization workers, while traveling through some of the poorest parts of the country, it became abundantly clear Guatemala's priorities: clean water, waste water systems, nutrition and housing. Distantly followed by: health services and electricity. Extreme poverty. Most live on dirt floors in adobe-brick houses. It is about priorities. And when I made this point, she grew agitated and defensive.

It seemed to me that many visitors, not the simple tourist, deceived themselves as to their own motives and emotions. They use Third-world counties like Guatemala as a kind of psychotherapy, not to achieve self-knowledge, but rather these counties are for them a Disneyland of horrors, where the attraction is not delight, but moral outrage. I suspect they are dissatisfied with their lives at home. With marriage, crime, or the meaninglessness that material comfort brings, all unsolvable. But in the Third-world it is possible to be on the side of the angels.

On a Sunday morning, I was eating apple pie made by Don, a chain-smoking Pepsi drinking American who ran a hostel in Nebaj, when a CNN news flash hit the screen: Honduran President Zelaya, the legal standing President, was flown out under gunpoint and dumped on a runway in Costa Rica. This would effect my plans, while I waited to assess the mood in Honduras there was apple pie and other savory American foods to eat. It was Latin America's first political intrigue in almost twenty years and I was itching to see it. The Australian and Mexican, who helped me sneak the car through at the border were the ones I was entering coup-rife Honduras with.

For Past Dispatches on Guatemala hit these select links and look for a Honduras summary in next Dispatch Number 87-

2012ers: Armageddon is on the Way!-
http://travelingdave-intheamericas.blogspot.com/2011/03/dispatch-number-84-2012-survivalists.html
Matt the Super Swimmer-
http://travelingdave-intheamericas.blogspot.com/2009/04/swim.html
Hippies the Great Traveling Artists-
http://travelingdave-intheamericas.blogspot.com/2009/07/dispatch-number-23-hippies.html
Cemetery or Playground?-
http://travelingdave-intheamericas.blogspot.com/2010/02/dispatch-number-57-cemetery.html
The American Priest, shot dead-
http://travelingdave-intheamericas.blogspot.com/2011/02/dispatch-number-83-dead-things.html

David
Tarma, Peru

Dispatch Number 85 -Two Years: Mexico

This is a series covering the past two years of car travels through Latin America that began in the fall of 2008. Beginning with Mexico and on through Central America's Guatemala-Honduras-Nicaragua-Costa Rica-Panama and South America's Columbia-Ecuador and Peru. The loose plan is to continue driving to the bottom of the world, Ushuaia, Argentina. These are stories of characters, experiences and hardships.

San Diego, California. I slept in the parking lot of Bob's Big Boy. That night sleep came with dread and reluctance as plans to drive into Mexico with a friend fell apart, I was about to go alone. Today, I write this Dispatch from South America in Peru, two and a half years and 20,000 miles later. I began travels as a tourist, then became a traveler and eventually found myself on an odyssey.

My intention to travel by land and sea have gone well, using only paper maps and asking locals for directions at nearly every intersection, since road signs are unusual. Dusty bumpy back-road travel done in an old, 1986 Toyota Land Cruiser, without a GPS gizmo, cellular phone or a computer. Locals often ride with me to the next town, sharing area attractions and what local crops are grown. The regions I stay in tend to be agrarian communities made up of subsistence agriculture, where majority of the day is spent securing life's essentials. A world without vacations and manual labor to the end.

I take occasional Spanish classes while living with host families absorbing local customs and culture. If categories matter, I am a rural tourist or in more extreme cases the anti-tourist. The intent when I left the US, was to see how another part of the world lived, and to see it off the Pan American Highway system, beginning in Mexico and running to the bottom of the world in Ushuaia, Argentina.

Here is the briefest recap of the journey to date, country by country, starting in October 2008 when I entered Mexico with a sinking feeling in my belly.

Mexico
October 2008

My cellphone rang, it was Stephanie. I wasn't at Bob's Big Boy anymore.
Can you wait another day for me to get there? I want to go with you into Mexico.

I was so relieved. Not alone. My dream of driving the Western Hemisphere was launched when we crossed the border into Mexico through Tijuana. I had trouble remembering how to drive through Tijuana like I once knew as a youth, when friends and I would go there for day-long beer drunks on the beach. I'd awake after passing out over the backgammon board sun-burned and head blazing in pain.

A green traveler excited by it all, I exclaimed just about everything and everyone I came in contact with as, Great!

I suspected my enthusiasm irritated people. When I entered Mexico I spoke no Spanish, learning essentials along the way from gas station attendants and restaurant owners.
You don't say 'Gasolina Maximo', it's 'Lleno por favor' for fill 'er up, said one Pemex attendant.
It was seat-of-the-pants learning that suited me well. Stephanie traveled with me for two months, taking back roads everywhere we went, making remote desert camps across Baja California.

We met Richard, an outlaw living in Bahia de Los Angeles, who escaped from the US before the feds caught him for large-scale pot growing in California, some mysterious friend in the US smuggled money to him periodically. A born storyteller, he dazzled us daily with tales of his past. His eccentric side was kept hidden until we went to town: he wore down-feather house boots and Bermudas to the bar in 90+ degree heat. Taking a Coke, he looked far-out with his unkempt silver hair and those booties. He taught me how to make lemonade and ceviche from the fish we caught together.

While in the desert I found a recent plane crash, one that overshot the runway a few days earlier during an emergency landing. I opened the aircraft door and went inside the twin engine air ambulance. In the medical kit I took blue surgical gloves as a memento. I felt criminal, however being at the site of a crash and able enter the plane unimpeded was too tempting. Where were the investigators and yellow tape, like on the news?

Months later in Taxco near Mexico City, I attended my first of many Spanish schools in Latin America. At the midpoint of the language program, I invited a class-mate to go with me to a village to visit an old man I gave a ride to weeks earlier. Looking for Mr. Rodriquez. A seventy-something compact man with a wrinkled face, who grew medicinal plants and had extended an invite when I dropped him off.

My classmate and I rolled into the small village and asked a group of Sunday beer drinkers, one that included a boisterous bull rider, If they knew where we could find Mr. Rodriquez?
No, we don't know who that is, came the group reply after a minute or so of discussion between eight of them.
I brought out two bottles of beer and joined with my friend Katka, who looked displeased to see me drink at this hour. Thirty minutes and six one-liter bottles of beers later. Suddenly, the oldest and fattest in the group blurts out, That's my uncle! Rodriquez, is my uncle! He hasn't lived here in two years.

Southern Mexico

Don't go there. Zapatista country is dangerous with kidnappings, robberies and murders, they said. They are usually the ones who never go, but rely on repeated stories of mayhem that may have been accurate ten years back. When it comes to human adaptation people hopelessly cling to the past. I think animals in Darwin's world adapt faster than humans do. The warnings filled me with resolve.

Zapatista (EZLN: Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, Zapatista Army of National Liberation) is a political-social movement for the under-represented indigenous class in Mexico and is based in San Cristobal de la Casis, a place that draws intellectual revolutionaries the world over. While hardly revolutionary, the colonial city with its low skyline felt entertaining and heavily touristed. As a commercial revolutionary from the north, I bought an EZLN coffee mug.

Only while traveling with Matt, an excellent surfer from Australia, in the heart of Chiapas along the border with Guatemala, did things begin to feel revolutionary. A region where communities rejected national government, preferring self-rule based on Zapatismo Ideology. These communities posted black and red hand painted signs outlining the manifesto. Anti-Federal graffiti was everywhere, often in the form of murals on school walls. This region felt tough, but not unsafe to the outsider.

It was in this region, we found small Maya communities set in the jungle, some said they had undiluted Maya blood -they did look different, a lot different. Matt and I camped at one spot on a swim hole playing backgammon and swimming with locals. For a couple days we puzzled over the relationship between the caretaker/owner and his young helper. Matt, finally broke the silence that summed up our confusion, She's the plumpy wife-daughter.

Mexican culture is vibrant, lively and proud like few others countries in Latin America. They had blood in their veins. Mexico possesses an incredible treasure of Spanish-era Catholic churches, unrivaled by any other I have visited in the Americas. Its food among the best in the hemisphere, Peruvian fare comes a distant second. I had set the tone in Mexico, living a third-class life, staying in dumpy hotels and eating comida tipica, local dishes to make the money last, and it has been that way ever since. I don't want to come home!

Alienation was my natural condition, I was a stranger everywhere I went. With everything familiar stripped away, I felt childlike, defenseless and dim, and having to acquire a language. Mexico helped me understand what I wanted: to immerse in local culture and not patronize the locals.

David
Chiquian, Peru

More on Mexico: select Dispatches-

Joe and Red Light District-http://travelingdave-intheamericas.blogspot.com/2009/02/dispatch-number-8-joe.html

Bull Fighting, I'll Go Again-http://travelingdave-intheamericas.blogspot.com/2009/07/dispatch-number-22-la-coleta.html

Richard the Outlaw-http://travelingdave-intheamericas.blogspot.com/2009/02/dispatch-number-11-richard.html

Lampoon the RV-class-http://travelingdave-intheamericas.blogspot.com/2009/01/dispatch-number-5-rv-park.html

Churches & Weddings-http://travelingdave-intheamericas.blogspot.com/2009/08/dispatch-number-25-weddings_03.html