To Copán, Sunday 18 June
I have been fortunate in choosing the right months for travel. The road through Zacapa to the Honduran frontier crosses country that Paul Theroux writes of as dusty desert. Now vivid green hillsides quiver beneath a breeze that flutters emerald growth on the trees. The river flows full between irrigated patches of field. Storms have torn boulders from the slopes. I ride with extra care on a road that twists through narrow valleys.
Guatemalan and Honduran immigration officials share a low building. The Honda and I and our eventual goal of Tierra del Fuego are a great source of shared laughter. I negotiate the exchange rate up a few points with a money man in a white Stetson. The money man photographs me with the Honduran and Guatemalan immigration officials.
Documentation at Honduran customs takes less than ten minutes. However, the customs chief has the football World Cup on his office TV and insists I join him for a cold beer. France are playing Korea and I am delayed an hour.
I ride into Copán in late afternoon. A truck pulls alongside. The driver hands me a card. He owns a hotel. The room is fine.
The Maya ruins have made Copán affluent. It is a small, pretty town of perhaps fifty blocks divided by cobbled streets. Domestic architecture is mostly single-storey Spanish colonial, freshly painted and in fine repair. I draw cash on my debit card from an ATM at one of the banks on the central square and find an internet café. The manager, Isabelle, plies me with coffee while I read and write my mail. Dinner is beer and a steak with the normal trimmings: tomatoes, fried bananas, black beans, avocado, green salad.
Copán, Monday 19 June
I intend to catch up on my writing and am up early, walking down to breakfast at the restaurant where I ate last night. Quarter past seven, and I order orange juice and coffee with eggs. This is Central America: the eggs come with refried beans, fried bananas, avocado. The coffee is good. Have I finally reached coffee heaven? Or is this glory particular to Copán? Breakfast is served on a terrace that gives onto a jungly garden.
Replete, I wait, sitting on the curb, for the internet café to open. This is a town of hope, wonderfully refreshing after Guatemala. Householders and shopkeepers are out sweeping the pavement and watering the cobbles to lay the dust. Passers-by greet me. A new Hyundai pickup delivers five-gallon water bottles. Three-wheeler suicide scooter-cabs gleam. The Isuzu refuse truck is new and polished.
The women of Copán celebrate their wealth. Plump-voluptuous is the figure, T-shirts stretched at breast and belly. I greet a woman, mid-twenties, wearing a gold belt wide as a cummerbund. A roll of silky brown belly breaks free of a short tight black top and spills over the belt. She strolls with swagger, proud of her girth. No place here for Kate Moss. The generous townsfolk would think her starving and pursue her down the street with stuffed tortillas.
I ride my bike the mile to the Maya ruins. Guatemalan cops remain expressionless as they stare. Here a cop armed with a rifle waves at me from the roadside. The entrance fee to the ruins and the museum is fifteen dollars. I prefer sightseeing at my own pace and buy a guidebook rather than join a tour group. Big parrots greet me. I take their photographs. Delighted, the parrots nod and squawk.
The ruins are great as ruins go. The setting is magnificent, the surrounding bowl of mountains green this time of year, as are the huge trees and cropped grass between the pyramids and ball courts and acropolis.
I sit in the shade on the lower steps of a pyramid and face the sloping side of a pyramid some thirty metres high. A pale young blonde woman slips on the descent behind me and twists her ankle. She is a missionary, wouldn’t you know? From Minnesota. She and an older male of the species are in company with a Guatemalan doctor, female, and two others who translate for the missionaries the word of God. The doctor requests a bandage to wrap the ankle. God is off duty. I provide the bandage I wear on my right leg when biking.
The missionary’s mishap has destroyed my ability to concentrate on or be impressed by the Maya gods. My guidebook recounts that succeeding Maya kings destroyed many of their predecessors’ monuments and rebuilt on the same sites – each succeeding pyramid taller and more impressive.
The kings built?
Kings don’t build. Their subjects build.
I know the system well from having lived in Cuba: The following will volunteer …
Imagine cutting those thousands of stone blocks in the quarries, cutting them without steel. Imagine transporting the blocks without the benefit of the wheel. Imagine the thousands of bent backs and broken limbs and crushed fingers.
I walk a little, sit a little, admire the grey of the stone so well presented against the brilliant green of the rainy season. I talk with an English woman and her father: she is teaching at an English private school in El Salvador. Later I notice what I mistake for leaf insects beside a path. I look closer and discover a column of ants carrying freshly cut leaves on their backs. Leaves are lighter than stones and easier to cut.
I fall in with a Puerto Rican and his girlfriend. She is small and the steps up the pyramids are steep and high. We decide the height of the steps was designed to so exhaust the sacrificial victims that they would find relief in having their hearts gouged out with an obsidian knife. We listen to a guide joke about human sacrifices as he explains the ball game to a noisy troop of North American students.
My guidebook is Honduran and doesn’t mention human sacrifice.
One of the North American students is unaware that he has dropped his camera in the long grass. A Guatemalan with the Minnesota missionaries calls to the student. The student turns back, picks up his camera and walks on. The Guatemalan’s spirituality takes a knock. Turning to her companions, she says, ‘Nice of him to say thank you.’
A group of Guatemalan daytrippers gather at the entrance to the ball court. One asks where I am from. He and his companions are members of a small manufacturing cooperative in Zacapa. The co-op is being bankrupted by Chinese imports. They need to retool but nobody is willing to invest. Investors have lost faith in the future and fear the violence.
His companions agree that the Chinese are the great threat, the Chinese and the violence. The violence in Guatemala City is very bad. Even out in the small towns. One man claims that the violence is deliberately fostered by the government to destabilise democracy. The rich want another general.
The Guatemalans depart and I sit a while, flipping back through my guidebook. Why was each of the great Maya sites abandoned? I think of the ants – and of bees swarming and moving on. I imagine the work entailed in endlessly building bigger and bigger pyramids. Perhaps sovereigns demanded too much of their subjects and self-glorified their kingdoms out of existence.
In the site museum, I am entranced by a collection of small heads sculpted in clay. Maya art is stylised, and yet sculptors have sneaked in a smile, glance or grimace totally familiar to me from my own social existence. Dominating the display is a replica of a temple in its original colours. I imagine myself a Mayan peasant. The vastness of the pyramid would stun me. I would tremble at sight of the grimacing god with his ghastly fangs. Centuries of rain have cleansed the stones of their rivulets of human blood. Age has mellowed the sculpture. However, we should remember, we tourists, as we wander the clipped lawns, that the original purpose was to terrorise.
Many travel books relate ordeals: breakdowns, fevers, bandits, ghastly food, horrid people. Good days are boring. So, yes, I enjoy my day in Copán. However, permit me my grump: I am writing in the internet café this evening. A group of students from the US charge in, yakking at each other, shouting the length of the café. We, the staff and those already seated at a terminal, are made to feel as if we are non-people. The Hondurans in the café judge the students as typically arrogant gringos.
Tomorrow I will be off early. Maybe I will find a TV somewhere along the road on which to watch the England–Sweden World Cup match. I could, of course, return to the Honduran frontier post and share a cold beer with the head of customs.
Wrong road to Macao, Tuesday 20 June
I ride out of Copán early and stop at Santa Rosa for an excellent breakfast. Santa Rosa is as clean and pretty as Copán, low Hispanic houses neatly painted. Breakfast is slices of beef skirt with eggs, beans and cheese, a huge glass of papaya juice and excellent coffee.
I have been riding through lush ranch land. Poverty is less obvious than in Guatemala. There are fewer mud hovels. The main highway is decorated with banners warning of banditry and that silence is the bandits’ friend. The gas station has guards, one armed with an automatic rifle; a second sports a .45 revolver, bullets massive in his belt. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘there are many robbers.’
I reach Gracias at noon. Gracias has little to be grateful for. A side road leads off the main highway towards Esperanza. The road cuts through mountain country. The tar ends. I hope this is only for a few kilometres. Wrong. It is rough dirt all the way, deep potholes and ravines gouged by the rains. Strange that a bum can be both numb and hurt.
My guess is that Esperanza is so-called because the founders hoped that it would improve with time. It hasn’t. The stores on Main Street sell third-hand clothes. All the stores. The stores on side streets sell fourth-hand clothes. Half the trucks in town appear to have broken down – hardly surprising given the state of the road. My Honda rates as a Rolls Royce. I stop at an air-conditioned Chinese restaurant on Main Street to watch the England–Sweden match. I have a cold beer and delicious Chinese barbecued beef. The match is a disastrous draw. Enraged, I ride on into a massive thunderstorm and sulk for an hour beneath the inadequate shelter of a pine tree. Sun breaks through and I dry as I ride.
The dirt road is tricky, not only because of the wet; some stretches are bare rock, others no better than a riverbed. I ride much of the way in second and even first gear. Glorious vistas of pine-cloaked mountains compensate for the discomfort. The river valleys in this area supply much of the nation’s vegetables and there are few signs of poverty. Houses are square with peaked pan-tiled roofs. The centre section is an open space without doors, front or back, and channels the breeze. Sometimes the space is furnished. More often it houses that most important member of a Central American family: the double-cab pickup truck.
Horses graze small patches of greenery. I catch glimpses of horsemen between the trees and pass them on the road. My brother and my adopted daughter are horse-mad and my thoughts are with them much of the day. I rode on horseback across chunks of Afghanistan both before the Russian occupation and during it. In those days I dreamt of riding with my brother north through Chitral in the tribal areas of Pakistan. Such rides were possible. We would have met kindness and hospitality. No longer. That world is closed to us.
Macao is a larger version of Esperanza. A small river divides the town. The folk of Macao are attempting to dam the river with refuse. Two heifers stand in the water beneath the bridge on Main Street and graze the grassy bank. I ride around town a couple of times in search of a hotel. Available are roach- and rat-infested hellholes that Dante would have imagined as stopovers on the descent to the Inferno. I pass through a pleasant square on the outskirts of town where a kindly policeman directs me to a modern hotel hiding in a big garden court-yard. The Medina has comfortable rooms for ten dollars – a reduction of two dollars for a pensioner. Creepers clamber over the walls. I look forward to hot water. An electric storm hit earlier in the day and the electricity is off. I take the manager’s advice to walk around town while they fix the power.
I stroll the streets, get caught in a deluge and am holed up in a pool saloon for an hour. Drunken Honduran pool players are unnerving. I chat with a sheltering schoolteacher whose niece works in Spain. The niece has been to Frankfurt for a week’s holiday. Was that near Barcelona?
‘Not very,’ I say.
Meanwhile thunder crashes and lightning flashes on streets transformed into rivers in spate and drunken Hondurans yell at each other across the pool tables dimly lit by paraffin lamps.
Will this do as a proper adventure?
The rain thins and I make a dash for a Chinese restaurant on the same block as the Hotel Medina. A few candles supply the light. I face a table of four – three men and a woman with a dipping neckline who keeps her mouth shut. One of the men dominates the table. He is big, shorn scalp, gold necklace, gold bracelet. He possesses a big voice and has charge of the controller for the TV – as I discover when electricity returns. Is he a local gangster or a short-order cook back on holiday from Nueve Yorke and determined to impress?
Massacre tourism, Wednesday 21 June
Three travellers over the past weeks have stressed the pleasures of Perquín in northern El Salvador. ‘Hey, it’s really great. It’s a must. You’ll love it. They’ve got this great museum with photographs and stuff. You know, like the war that went on?’
Do I want to visit the sites of massacres?
Do I want to admire photographs of the victims?
Am I gripped by smashed US helicopters as sculptural art?
Is massacre tourism my thing?
Not really.
I’ve seen too much death up close. I’ve ridden on horseback through countries where every village has been bombed, where seventy percent of the population has fled over the borders to vile camps. I’ve lain behind a rock beneath a pile of Afghans while a Russian gunship pops at us.
I’ve driven through countries suffering total drought: where survival of the breeding stock of the nomadic tribe is the one essential: where old folk and infants are abandoned.
Worse, I have used my imagination to describe a horrendous massacre in Aftermath, only to read in the Peace Commission’s report of a similar massacre perpetrated by the Guatemalan army.
So, no, I think I’ll give Perquín a miss.
Paz sounds a better destination – then on to the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa. I enjoy typing ‘Tegucigalpa’. It has a ring to it. I am dyslexic. Correctly spelling such a difficult name is satisfying.
Four police in a jeep wave me down as I pass a stand selling watermelons. They ask which road I took and wasn’t I aware of bandits? I admit that I have read warning notices. However, all Hondurans I have met on the road have been kind. The sergeant says that I have been lucky, gives me a slice of melon and warns that I must be careful in Tegucigalpa. ‘There are many thieves in Tegucigalpa.’
Tegucigalpa faces a decision: will it fall down today or wait a little? The city is not sited on a geological fault, nor has it been bombed. It merely looks that way. And some of the people I pass on the outskirts are reminders of refugees from a war zone or an earthquake. A woman, barefoot, her dress raggedy, carries a baby in her arms. An older infant lolls in a grubby cloth tied across her back. A third child follows, hair tangled, barefoot. They have nothing. Nothing.
What will they eat tonight?
Where will they sleep tonight?
Will they survive the night?
I ride into the city centre and find the best hotel room of my journey so far at Hotel Boston. The room is five metres by five, high ceiling with old-fashioned ceiling fan, tiled floor, large bathroom with hot water, window and doors onto a balcony. No matter that the street is noisy in the early morning. I rise and enjoy watching the city wake.
There is an excellent Chinese restaurant on my left. Upstairs is good for people-watching. I order a chop suey for five dollars. The waiter doesn’t warn me that dishes on the main menu are for four people. I am served a chop-suey mountain.
I meet with three medium-level government administrators in from the provinces for a conference. The conversation soon turns to the main news of the week. The Honduran president has met with President Chavez of Venezuela to discuss Honduran oil requirements. The Honduran president is presumed to have been trying to make an advantageous deal – odd behaviour for a president. The US ambassador to Honduras has reacted by cancelling all Honduran applications for US visas. This is a serious threat to the country’s economy – Hondurans abroad remit in excess of one billion dollars a year.
The three administrators are enraged. ‘As if we are children to be punished,’ one protests.
Another points out that the US imports oil from Venezuela.
Let me paraphrase the rest of the conversation:
For years the US used Honduras as a base for the wars it sponsored in the region: to unseat the Sandinista government in Nicaragua and fight the left-wing guerrillas in El Salvador and Guatemala. Successive US administrations have treated Honduras as a colony, influenced the choice of government, been accustomed to obedience. Now the US has no further use for Honduras. Honduras can sink in the muck largely created by the US.
One of the administrators insists that the US is responsible for the epidemic of violence in Honduras. The US gave so many arms to the Nicaraguan Contras. The Contras sold them once the war was over. An AK47 or Ml6 sells for thirty dollars. And the US Immigration Department has expelled so many young men, Honduran by parentage but kids who have never been in Honduras, kids infected with the American gang culture.
These three Hondurans are conservative rather than rabble rousers of an anti-American left. I merely relay their arguments and anger. Their judgement is that of the loyal servant or mistress discarded by an ungrateful and thoughtless master.
Onward to Danlí, Thursday 22 June
A minivan driver kindly leads me from the centre of Tegucigalpa to the Danlí road. The road seems the same as the road in from the west. Pine forest is pine forest, mountains are mountains, a tar road sown with mantraps is much the same as any other tar road sown with mantraps. Honduran mantraps are potholes fit to swallow a Mack truck. In sunshine, the potholes show as dark pools of shadow. Today is a grey day and the potholes appear at the last moment.
The mountains end. The road crosses a flat valley with further mountains in the distance. A miracle appears on the right: disciplined acres in the midst of standard Central American chaos. I am travelling at eighty kilometres an hour. I glimpse cropped lawns, neat single-storey buildings arranged with obvious logic, avenues of palm trees. I must stop. Ahead lie storm clouds. This is the rainy season. A storm in the late afternoon is standard. I want to reach Danlí before the rain. But I am a writer. I ride a further two kilometres before making a U-turn and backtracking. I have discovered Zamorano, the US-funded Agricultural University of the Americas.
To be brief, Zamorano was founded in 1942 as the brainchild of a retired director of United Fruit. The project was funded initially by the United Fruit Company. Now it is funded by the US taxpayer and has an independent board of trustees. Students come from all parts of Latin America and the Caribbean.
Endless conversations between confused gate guards and equally confused administrators gain me entrance to the English language department and an interview with a well-meaning young teacher from small-town USA.
What should a writer publish? Everything – or should he edit himself? I talk for an hour with the teacher. He has taught at Zamorano for two years. He is homesick. He misses those small-town family celebrations of Thanksgiving, Halloween and Christmas. Although married to a Honduran, he seems a little lost.
Is he made nervous by my probing? Is he defensive in his replies?
Perhaps.
I enquire as to the feeling of the students towards the United States.
He replies that he hears some criticism from South Americans, but that Central Americans in general hold a positive view of the US.
I mention his opinions to a senior member of staff, a Latin American. He raises his eyebrows in despair. ‘When will they ever learn?’
He has lived in the US. He recalls any attempt at discussion of US foreign policy as seen as criticism and that he always received the same retort: ‘You don’t like it, why don’t you leave?’
He is proud of Zamorano’s achievements. It is of great importance to Latin American agriculture. And yet one moment of stupid bullying, as with the present cancellation of US visas for Hondurans, destroys all the goodwill the university has earned the US.
I pay for my visit to Zamorano with a drenching and arrive in Danlí exhausted and resembling a river rat. The Grand Hotel is at the entrance to town. The hotel’s swimming pool is no longer in use and the hotel food is disastrous. However, the room and bathroom are fine, the water is hot, and I have a fan and cable TV. I am feeling my years and am in desperate need of the bed.
Danli, Friday 23 June
Hondurans have been kind to me. Danlí has a great feel. This is a personal opinion and based on little evidence. Danlí may be the centre for all sorts of viciousness. It is a small, sleepy town with a good church and an excellent market. Outsiders might judge it a dump. It is a dump, but the people are warm and open. The chain on the Honda requires adjustment and the bike needs a check-up. Carlo the Kikuyu is recommended. I expect a Kenyan, or at least a man who looks like an African from Kenya. Carlos the Kikuyu is a standard mestizo. His shop is a tin shed by the market. We chat while he works. He refuses payment, insisting that contributing to my adventure is sufficient reward.
I take my shoes to be mended in the covered market and find a laundry – all my clothes are either wet or dirty. I abandon a hopelessly slow internet connection on the church square and discover a great internet café, Technochat, midway down the street to the Grand Hotel.
I fall into conversation for more than an hour with a woman, the owner of a store selling stationery and natural medicines. An odd combination?
She had wanted an education. Her father owned a tiny store up in the mountains and was too poor. Married at seventeen, she bore her first child the same year and remained married for fifteen years before divorce. Her husband had gone to work in the US.
‘Men return from the US changed,’ she explains. ‘They are rude and all they do is drink and go with women.’
She believes that people in the US, white people, have contempt for Latinos. ‘How can they not?’ she asks. ‘They only meet those of us who have no education. Those are the only Latinos who go north.’
In Danlí parents are unable to support their families. Her son-in-law is a barber. Some days he is without a single customer. Weekends are better. Some weekends he makes as much as twenty dollars. Labourers earn five dollars a day – not enough to feed a family. So the parents leave. Many of the fathers leave for the US with good intentions. At first they send money. Then they find a new woman, have other children. The money ceases. And now there are the gangs – the sons of those who have gone to the US. The sons are sent back by the Americans. The sons are evil. They think nothing of shooting people for a few dollars.
She is equally critical of Spain: Spaniards are even more racist than white people in the US. She has heard this from her friends who have gone to work in Spain. Many women from Danlí go to Spain, the men to the US.
As for herself, she is blessed in belonging to a church that sends medicines from the US for its members. She was ill and would have died but for the church. I refrain from asking whether the church members who send the medicines are white North Americans – or whether the natural medicines in her store are ineffective.
Many customers enter the store during our conversation. Her daughter serves them. She is training her daughter to take over the store. Then she will go to Spain and work until she has saved sufficient money to buy a new pickup and build a second house that she can rent out for her old age.
I report what I hear. I neither edit nor provoke.
Tomorrow I leave for Nicaragua.