La Fortuna, Costa Rica

I’ve had an interesting couple of weeks. First of all it was only on the roads of southern Guatemala that roadside shopkeepers piled rocks and branches. Presumably this was to slow traffic in the hope of selling something to the occupants of swerving cars. Further north the roads were much less crowded and in much better shape. Except, that is, for the road from Sacapulas to Coban. It’s marked as a major road and begins like that – tarmac and even white lines here and there. Further on it turns to gravel, then into a single track past Mayan villages through the jungle. I thought I’d taken a wrong turn somewhere but the guys in what looked like a quarry (but was in fact a bend in the road) assured me I was going the right way. I had the feeling I was the only westerner to have come this way for years. Rounding a bend I saw a large Kawasaki cruiser of some kind parked up, and its rider and passenger taking photos. And a couple of days later the owners of an American RV I met at a campground told me they’d come that way too! The road did however get much worse; further on crews were working and their huge trucks were churning the surface to porridge.
I stayed a couple of nights in a small village called El Remate spent a whole day at Tikal. It is quite stunning. Two days later I crossed the boarder to Honduras at Corinto on the northern Caribbean coast. What a farce that turned out to be. Because it wasn’t possible to get the papers for my bike at the boarder I had to carry one of the boarder officials on my bike, on top of my luggage to the customs office at main town of Puerto Cortes 50km away. We arrived at 2pm. I thought that would be plenty of time to get the paperwork sorted. Wrong. For one thing all the staff were packing up and getting ready to go home. However, one of the guys there, Guillermo, spoke pretty good English and rushed around trying to get a form from this office, stamped somewhere else, paid for at another, copied here, signed there and eventually at 6pm told me I’d have to come back on Monday morning. So I stayed at a small village called Omoa on the coast and which was overrun on Sunday by partying Hondurans arriving in hundreds of buses. I’d have much rather gone much further up the coast to a more remote region but it was ok, although it rained all weekend. After three more hours on Monday morning and $150 later I was all set. So I rode almost all the way to Nicaragua, and left Honduras the following day.
The atmosphere in Nicaragua was immediately very different; the boarder was straightforward for one thing and I felt I was going to like it there. Granada is a beautiful colonial town, like a relaxed Spanish city. There are plenty of tourists, but it hasn’t been spoiled. In fact all those tourists mean there are lots of great hotels restaurants and cafés, and being in Nicaragua they’re all very cheap. After two nights in Granada, I set off for San Juan del Sur on the Pacific coast. My good friend Marty from Tallahassee had put me in touch with a guy he knows called Shaun who lives there. Shaun and a couple of business partners are at the early stages of setting up a solar powered wireless internet system for the town. I mooched about on the beaches for a couple of days then decided to take a short ride and a ferry to the volcanic Island of Ometepe in Lake Nicaragua. Pretty straight forward I thought. Ah, no. After one night at a lovely hostel on a coffee plantation I fancied another watching the sun go down camping on the beach somewhere. At the first town I came I found about a hundred people in the road. They were standing around a barrier across the road made with rocks and branches. It was pretty evident they were not going to let me, or anyone past. If they told me why they’d blocked the road I didn’t understand, but I was on an island and there’s a rough road all the way around, so I thought ‘ok, I’ll ride the other way.’ An hour and a half later on the other side of the island I came to a bend in the road, which was a village. Hundreds of kids and men were standing around a barrier blocking the road. I might as well have just landed from space. The kids gathered around the bike shouting and grinning, and poking and pulling at things. Some of the adults walked over and made it clear I wasn’t going any further. I had the feeling ‘Christ, I’ve seen this kind of thing in the National Geographic,’ but I didn’t want to get off the bike to take photos. It was slightly intimidating, especially when another barrier began to be built behind me. So I headed back for another night in the hostel wondering what I was going to do to get off the island. The protesters had told me they were going to block the road for a whole week! They were protesting price increase of the only car ferry to the island. It had recently been doubled to $25 for a small truck. It’s a week’s wages for an islander.
Back at the hostel I sat up late with some of the others drinking rum and talking about what we were going to do to. One of those staying there, a German girl called Nicole and I thought we might have a better chance of getting through together, and maybe if we left early we’d get through before the protesters even arrived. Some chance. It was still dark when we left the hostel and I was feeling pretty queasy as we bounced down the track and sank into the sand dunes that cover stretches of the coast road. Sure enough, there were plenty of people manning the first roadblock, and a couple of trucks already waiting. Nicole used her Spanish to ask what was going on, as if we didn’t know! And to ask them about their protest with which we genuinely sympathized. $25 is a lot of money in Nicaragua. We stood there talking and taking pictures for over an hour. Nicole even videoed one of the organizers explaining the islander’s grievance. She promised to send the video and some of her pictures to the press. I’m sure she will. Just as Nicole wandered off to a nearby field to photograph a local man riding his bull (!), an older man who appeared to be charge, appeared and told me we could go. Or at least I had a feeling that was what he said. He was calmer than the rest and seemed used to making decisions. I think he was the town mayor. Just at this point one of the kids who were now standing around my bike again pinched my gloves. As he ran off the other kids shouted at him and pointed him out to me. He was made to hand them back to me. Those in charge where very embarrassed and apologetic. The boy looked pretty damn ashamed too. So off we went. And at every roadblock we came too we were waved through. It was pretty cool. I think ours was the only vehicle allowed to travel around the island that day.
We caught the ferry and I left Nicole in Rivas and went back to San Juan de Sur. Unfortunately carrying Nicole’s luggage as well as mine had caused the cast aluminium support for the top-box to crack. I didn’t think there was much I could do about it so instead I and took most of the weight out of the top-box and had my rear tyre changed for the new one I’ve been carrying since Phoenix. The old one was so worn that for the roads on Ometepe had scored it right down to the cord. The guy in the first tyre shop I went to tried to get the old tyre off the wheel by jumping on it and would have buckled it if I hadn’t stopped him. The fourth place I went to back in Rivas actually had the tools for the job.
I was about to leave on Tuesday when I asked the guys who were in Nica Geeks (Shaun’s company in San Juan del Sur) if they knew anyone who had a welder. Turned out that Santiago Mateer (another guy from Florida) was in checking his email and had got one, as well as a couple of pieces of steel. We sat outside his old school bus campervan under a tree on the property he’s just bought and fixed up a damn fine bodge.
I’m pretty proud of myself for fending off the touts at the boarder with Costa Rica and getting all my paperwork sorted on my own. I’m camping in the garden of la Posada Inn in La Fortuna and this evening I’m going to visit the hopefully lava spewing Volcan Arenal tonight. Mileage 13208

Panajachel, Guatemala

In Mexico drivers tend to take traffic rules as mere guidelines. Cows, donkeys and people walk in the road. I often saw smoke-belching tractors running the wrong way along the hard shoulder of motorways and in towns the scooters dart all over the place. Approaching Oaxaca city I was surprised to see quite a few cars running the wrong way along the duel carriageway. No one else seemed to be surprised, everyone just moved over from the ‘fast’ lane to let them past, not that we were traveling fast by this stage. The reason was over the crest of a hill – a crowd of cars and people so dense that I couldn’t even see the road. So I turned round and joined a stream of traffic heading back, even the complicated set of traffic lights we met were calmly negotiated in the wrong direction. Obviously this kind of wholesale ignoring of traffic rules could be dangerous but in a society where such behavior is not unexpected I think it’s pretty reasonable. It’s for that kind of freedom, as well as because of stunning scenery, the culture, the amazing archeological sites and the warm and friendly people that I loved being in Mexico.
I’m in Guatemala now, and it’s a whole other extreme. I crossed the boarder at Cuidad Hidalgo. It was thronging with touts waving wads of cash to change and guys ‘offering’ to help foreigners. Three things made it all pretty confusing: The language was one. That many of the customs officials didn’t seem to be wearing a uniform was another (a gun on their hips made them stand out a little). And lastly, many of the officials were in on the racket with the touts. So I had to pay Carlos, my self-appointed helper, to get me through it all. Unfortunately it all took a couple of hours and it was dark by the time I got to the city of Quetzaltennango in the western highlands (Its commonly known as Xela, its Quiche Maya name). But I found a room, and somewhere safe to park the bike easily. Xela is the second largest city in Guatemala, but its still pretty small place. I stayed two nights there – getting my bearings and considering whether or not to take some Spanish lessons. I decided against it. I have about a month to reach Panama and I’d rather see things than go to school. I’ve just arrived in Panajachel, on the Lago de Atitlan. It’s another tourist town but the lake is spectacular. It was formed from an enormous collapsed volcano cone and is surrounded by three more looming volcanoes. The highlands all around are populated by Mayans. I saw hundreds of their small cottages surrounded by maize fields from the road. At every small town dozens of Mayans wearing their brightly coloured clothes were hanging about and selling things. I noticed they’re not as inclined to wave as the Mexicans (in Mexico I waved from the Copper Canyon Train to a man pushing a wheel barrow in his field. He couldn’t help but wave back, almost tipping out his maize), but there were plenty of friendly smiles.
Clearly the condition of the roads is something I’d be interested in. In Mexico they were pot-holed and in the mountains the occasional landslide had caused sections to disappear, but on the whole they were pretty good. And I thought the Mexican drivers were pretty considerate too, more so than some parts of the US. Here however, it’s a different story. Traffic laws may be ignored in Mexico from time to time, but here they appear to be just a roomer. Where there’s road works its not unusual to see cars approaching through the dust on both sides of the road.
I had to leave the Kiwi guys in Mexico City six days ago. (Take a look at their website http://www.locokiwi.com/). Jon’s passport had not come through and I needed to get on. It was really nice to have companions for a while but I don’t mind being on my own. I like to be able to ride where I want to, and stop whenever I feel like it. Tomorrow I’m going to head north towards the jungle and the ancient Mayan city of Tikal. Mileage 11403.

Mexico City

Hotel Monte Carlo, Mexico City, 5th March
On my second day at the Hostel in Zacatecas a couple of guys riding from New Zealand turned up on their motorbikes. Jon and Josh had left San Francisco five weeks earlier and are heading for Rio on their Kawasaki KLRs. Their timetable for reaching Panama is more or less the same as mine so we’ve hooked up and spent the last few days traveling together. After couple of nights in Guanojuato, another beautiful colonial town and built in a narrow valley with a shocking one-way system and a terrible traffic problem, we left for the mountains near Angangueo, Michoacan state, to see the gathering of the wonderful Monarch butterflies. Or we intended to leave; having got our stuff together Josh’s bike wouldn’t start – he’d left the lights on. No problem, a bump aught to do it, but as it fired up petrol started pouring out. We had a look and found some bastard had ripped the fuel line off the carburetor. It took a couple of hours to figure out a repair so we didn’t make it to the butterflies that day. Next day, after a night in one of those motels that rent rooms by the hour, we set off again. This time we had to wait while the local bike mechanic straightened both of Josh’s wheels. He’d been up early tinkering and thought that tightening the spokes would be a good idea. So, it was three days before we saw the butterflies; millions of them, fluttering and gliding in pools of sunshine between the trees, gathering in huge orange swarms on tree trucks and branches and settling to drink from the small streams - looking like a carpet of constantly trembling orange leaves.
However, it turns out that Jon has lost his passport. Last seen when he opened his bag to give our websites to a guy we met in Guanojuato. So we’ll spend a couple of days here while Jon gets started on getting a new one issued. I can’t stay longer – I’m going to meet Nushka in Lima, Peru in about six and a half weeks. I’ll fly the bike from Panama City to Quito, Equador and ride from there to meet her on the 20th of April. Mileage 10438