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Published: September 4th 2008
From Caleta I knew that I had to move fast if I wanted to get to South America. I was a couple months behind schedule, though I didn’t feel any time had been mis-passed. After wandering alone in the hills for a few days, I was happy to be back on the road, nothing but the deafening pounding of the engine firing, banging, spinning, whirring, and hurling out loud bursts of exhaust, the sound of the air moving around me, my own thoughts, sun. I went first to Guerrero, and I passed through Acapulco, which was a nightmare of civilization compared to the peace and even elatedness of Caleta.
After passing through the city I decided to spend the night in some of the suburbs of Acapulco, where there were some very unholy Semana Santa celebrations going on. I asked a woman on the street if she knew of a place to stay, and she took me to her house. It was populated by several gender and racially ambiguous people. They were very raucous in their humor, and the older woman suggested repeatedly that I sleep with the younger woman. I declined each time. I got very drunk and ended up being served delicious food by very sweet and beautiful women while I drank more with rough looking men with tattoos so inappropriate that I won’t describe them here. At some point marijuana appeared as well, as did cocaine, completing the trinity of latin American drug culture.
I slept in an empty room, and woke up the next morning to find the compound I was sleeping in had turned into a fish market. I got several unfamiliar meat items for breakfast and with difficulty rode out of the market.
I arrived later that day in Zipolite, observing many signs of a hippie and expatriate population. Everything was full because of Semana Santa, mostly with vacationers from Mexico City. I met a man named Piedritas, or “little rocks” on account of his trade, which was carving statues out of small rocks. He mostly carved a mushroom deity which he sold to people by talking about Maria Sabina, a woman who I later learned became famous because of her introduction to the Western world as a Mazatec shamaness.
This man was very drunk, and one of the only sentences he spoke that I understood was “illusion is the honey of existence.” He invited me to stay with him and I accepted. We went to his house while he continued to talk to me in flowing drunken incoherencies. I unloaded all of my things and he passed out. Later, we went to visit a friend of his early in the morning. We drank beer and smoked marijuana, listened to Cuban music and talked. The man we were visiting had a beautiful wife and daughter, and the family seemed to embody an integration of hippie/countercultural lifestyle and traditional Mexican life. All glowed with a unique kind of health and beauty, and the arrangement of their house and garden seemed to reveal the potential for an integration of the ideals of the countercultural revolution of the twentieth century with Mexican life.
I went for a walk along the beach, Mexico’s only official nude beach, and saw many happy urban young people. In Mexico, the word “hippie” usually means someone who smokes marijuana, and there were many here. I busied myself reading, walking, and talking to people until Paul arrived. With the two of us, we went to camp in the courtyard of some Quebecois. One of the Quebecois had a hole in his throat, but instead of speaking with his voice machine, he rasped out his words. We spoke in a combination of French, Spanish, and English that made the whistling sounds coming out of his throat even harder to understand. At some point he managed to play on Paul’s insecurities by heaping verbal abuse on him. Paul’s warbling sense of self worth was further undermined by me reiterating my desire to travel alone, to immerse myself in another culture and step out of my cultural mindset for a while. I also told him that I was tired of some of the ego politics between us and the way he ate, and I began addressing him brusquely. He would have fled, but he lost his key. We made amends while he hotwired his motorcycle, and then we rode off together. I could tell his mental state was not good, but I assumed he would be able to manage.
That night we stopped in a small village in Oaxaca and I went to a restaurant to see if I could buy some beans with the 7 pesos I had left in my pocket. The family there said the restaurant was closed, but then prepared a full meal for us and refused to accept any payment for it.
The next day we separated in Chiapas. Paul was going to go a more mountainous and remote route to the Guatemalan border, and I went to take the coastal route. We agreed to meet in one week in San Carlos, Nicaragua. I was very pleased at the turn towards the third world chaos I am most comfortable in upon crossing the Guatemalan border. I explored further the hassle of importing vehicles into countries- it complicates the border crossing process considerably. I had lived in Guatemala for some years in my earlier childhood, and memories began to come back to me through the fog of my mind.
At the first major town I stopped in, I needed to have some adjustments and repairs made to the motorcycle. The shop I took it to bought me lunch and then refused to accept payment for their services. Guatemalans as a national character are curious, and the indigenous influence is visible in many aspects of their interaction with the world. It is a character that is more incomprehensible to my mind than the Mexican, quieter. The land itself is lush and green, and there always seems to be a volcano or dramatic mountain nearby. The land exudes a unique brand of tangible magic. I stayed at a hotel one night and met a teenage boy who had grown up in both LA and Guatemala, and he mirrored my feelings about these two place. “Here,(Guatemala) I like it better because it feels more…. free.” I understand this sentiment exactly, thought it is hard to explain to someone unfamiliar with it.
Traveling rapidly by land causes one to develop a strange kind of knowledge about a region. You see the geology, flora, fauna, and culture change gradually each day, and in a few short days a very broad but superficial understanding develops of a large area. I went quickly though El Salvador, surprised at how much it had changed since my visit fourteen years earlier. It’s currency was the US dollar, something about which every person I spoke to commented that it had made life worse for the poor and better for the rich.
Entering Honduras was moving down a step in terms of economic development- this border rivaled almost any I had seen in Africa in disorganization and inefficiency, but the corruption for me as a tourist was non-existent, or at least entirely state sanctioned. I also hadn’t had a motorcycle in Africa, and the motorcycle was the source of almost all the grief at this border. I met some other American bikers on Harleys on their way to Costa Rica where one of them lived. I started a conversation with him, and learned about his work on an oil platform, his hobby of hunting, heavy drinking, and machining. I decided not to broach the topic of the US fearing him to be in line with the archetype of his hobbies and work, but talking to his daughter, I learned that his aversion to the US government/corporate/industrial complex was just as violent as mine. The beast makes enemies in every subculture!
Honduras felt lively compared to Guatemala. People seemed louder and more outgoing, and some attractive young women whistled at me in the street and giggled, something that I couldn’t imagine the generally very modest Guatemalan women doing, at least the ones I had just been around. In Mexico I had burnt my arm on the hot exhaust pipe of my motorcycle, and as I took a taxi to buy a new chain for my bike, the driver saw the baseball sized blister and insisted I lance it. I tried to argue with him, saying I would let it resolve itself, but he prodded me again and again until I relented. I tore the tissue with my fingers and at least a quarter cup of liquid exploded over the inside of his taxi. I was shocked, but he was un-phased and pulled a towel from somewhere and began cleaning up.
As soon as I got the new chain on I was off to Nicaragua, on schedule for my meet up with Paul. I was excited to be in Nicaragua, a place I had wanted to visit for a long time. I was considering buying land there with some of the excess funds from my student loan check. Someone at the border recommended Matagalpa, so I went there. The land was arid but fertile, and the roads were empty, due to the poverty. Sometimes on riding into towns children would jump up and dance for my arrival. There was a passion and exuberance in some of the people that reminded me of Italy or Greece, but in Latin America. The food took a slight turn for the worse, with my luck guiding me to many items slathered in ketchup and mayonnaise. The main method of transport in Nicaragua was the yellow school buses from my childhood, imported from the US and bought by entrepreneurs who create the public transport network for Nicaragua. These were usually my only companions on the roads.
I spent my night in Matagalpa in a bar, drinking first with illiterate farmers who were very difficult to understand, and then speaking with a physics professor at first in my limited Russian, since he had studied in the Soviet Union. Then we spoke in Spanish and I watched his courtship of a prostitute. I drank more and more and his friend started to tell me about his days as a revolutionary when he refused to accept my last cigarette. He said “Always save the last one for yourself” telling me that that was a tradition during the war, that all the revolutionaries saved their last bullet for themselves so that they could kill themselves rather than be captured. I was interested on his perspective on violent struggle, and I asked him if in retrospect he thought that it had been worth it. He replied that with the benefit of hindsight, no, it had not. He had evident difficulty answering this question.
I woke up after this evening of heavy drinking and smoking with a sore throat that blossomed into a painful cold. I set off riding again along the seemingly sparsely populated eastern shore of lake Managua. After riding all day I stopped to buy some dinner of sardines and bread, my heavy traveling treat. I stopped and had a glass of water with the family who owned the remote store where I bought the sardines. The road was one of the most unpleasant and poorly maintained I had yet seen anywhere, especially for motorcycle riding, due to the many small boulders in it. Imagine spending hours with your body vibrating so strongly that you cease to be able to sense the location and the integrity of your skin and bones. As I took a much needed rest the husband complained to me about the price of cooking oil, a basic necessity. He said it had doubled in the last year and that it was making life much harder for everyone. I later found out that this was due to increased ethanol demand- actually a much bigger factor in third world hunger than the US mainstream media is allowed to report.
In my luggage I carry a small waterproof duffel, a sleeping bag and an inflatable sleeping mat. I planned on just sleeping somewhere alongside the road, but I remembered how any time anyone I meet needs a place to stay I usually at least offer a place, and I thought, why would any one else think differently? So I stopped at a house as the sun set and approached. I saw a family watching a black and white television screen connected to a car battery with a makeshift wire antenna. The film was Jackie Chan in Shanghai Noon dubbed into Spanish, badly. They looked surprised to see an obvious foreigner on a motorcycle ride up, and I explained that I was on my way to San Carlos but I was tired and needed a place to rest for the night. The oldest woman, possessed of a strong, rural beauty like many of the women in the area, simply nodded her agreement and told me that I could sleep in the hammock she was sitting in. Then she gestured to one of the children to give me a chair. I accepted the chair and the child sat down on the ground and continued watching the television.
This was the first time I accepted hospitality in a foreign country and was asked neither my name or nationality. They asked me how my traveling was going and if I was tired or hungry. I said that I had brought my own food and they nodded. I ate my sardines and we all watched Jackie Chan. When the movie was over, I asked them if the TV was solar powered and they replied yes. Then we all went to sleep. I slept well and was awakened at dawn by what was truly a cacophony of ducks, piglets, turkeys, chickens, puppies, and kittens all making their individual noises and battling amongst themselves, presided over by a sky lit up with the colors of the sunrise. Several of childrenin school uniforms looked at me curiously as I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and packed up my belongings. I said my thanks and left for San Carlos.
I arrived later that morning, one day late for my appointed meetup with Paul. I found a very, very Spartan room near the river, for a little less than a dollar a night. I went to the internet café and sent an email to Paul telling him about my whereabouts. I waited two days and received no word from him, so I assumed he had gotten into something else, so I sent him an email telling him I was going and would check in for word about his location and meet him later.
Leaving Nicaragua and going to Costa Rica was almost as much of a shock as going from the first to the third world. San Carlos is a dismal town compared to others in Nicaragua that I visited, and Costa Rica glowed with wealth by comparison. The roads I rode on to San Jose were all smooth and well maintained, there were many air conditioned buildings and well-stocked supermarkets. It was also much more expensive than Nicaragua. The deepening density of the tropical forest and increase in the number of different kinds of tropical birds I saw continued to mount as I continued southward.
Everyone I met in Costa Rica was very kind and friendly, and the mountainous cloud forests had a definite charm and beauty, but the sleek nature of the infrastructure, very heavy foreign influence, and the high prices made me feel out of place. I hurried to reach Panama, one step closer to my longtime desire to visit Colombia.
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tom
non-member comment
what happened to Sasha?
Is travelblogger #846 Sasha Alexander ok? He hasn't logged on since about Sept. 7. I think someone else logged onto his site Oct 6 because I tried to send an e-mail to him and then immediately someone logged onto his site but I don't thinkit was him. Anyways he was riding a motorcycle through Costa Rica and dissapeared. Please reply