El Salvador - We Didn't Get Shot

We had no expectations for El Salvador. In fact, our plan was to drive through it only because we had to so we could get to points further south, otherwise we would have skipped it altogether. R has too many clients who have told her things about the gang situation in El Salvador that if we had any expectations at all, it was that we would be held up at gunpoint. R also has a Salvadoran client in Virginia who insisted that we stay at his “rancho” when we got to El Salvador. After we learned that staying at a rancho did not mean we would be playing city slickers, but instead meant we would be lounging in hammocks by the beach for free, the safety issues that loomed so large seemed trivial after all, so we made plans to contact him as we got closer.

When we got to the Guatemala-El Salvador border on Monday afternoon after making better than expected time driving from Antigua along the coastal highway to the border town of Ciudad Pedro de Alvarado, there didn’t seem to be any line formed of cars and people waiting to get into El Salvador, so we figured we would just keep going. We left Guatemala where we had been since last year (we entered on December 19) without any fanfare, and frankly, with only a short look back over our collective shoulder.

Even though the bureacracy was very efficient, and the border people very helpful, by the time we were stamped out of Guatemala and stamped into El Salvador the sun was sinking in the west so we pulled into an auto hotel recommended on our iOverlander app. An auto hotel offers its guests complete anonymity - the building is hidden inside a walled compound and each room is like a small apartment with an attached garage to park your car. When I asked the owner of the auto hotel where we stayed on Friday night, our last night in El Salvador before we crossed the border to Honduras, whether it would get busy that night because it was a weekend, he said, “No. It’s not that kind of business. Most couples come in during the afternoon for just an hour or two.”

We stay in auto hotels because they are generally clean, low cost, come with a plentiful supply of tissues, and we like to watch ourselves sleep in the big mirror that is on the wall opposite the bed. The kids also like the slide drawer to the outside where the wait staff puts our food and takes our dirty dishes and where we can pay our bill without making eye contact with anyone.

R wasn’t able to get in touch with her client in enough time for his caretaker to immediately get the rancho ready for us, so we spent Tuesday night in El Tunco. El Tunco is a popular surfer hangout along El Salvador’s Pacific Coast which boasts some of the best waves in Central America, so there are a lot of young people walking around barefoot. It is also as hot as Christie Brinkley in “National Lampoon’s Vacation,” so J and I alligatored ourselves over the softball size boulders that washed around our ankles with each breaking wave for a high tide swim but decided to get out after we found ourselves about 40 meters from our entry point after only a few minutes in the water.

During low tide on Wednesday, R and I were able to easily walk over the rocks that were submerged during high tide and then cross about fifteen meters of hot black sand to the water, where we frolicked happily for an hour in the warm, rolling surf while Coconut and J absorbed as much hotel Wifi as they could with hopes they could emit a signal as their own personal hotspots at the rancho.

Wifi access aside, we had high hopes for the rancho. On the one hand, the owner works in the U.S. as an apartment manager, decidedly lower middle class on the pay scale, but on the other hand, things are cheaper in El Salvador so it wasn't out of the realm of possibility that he could have built the Taj Mahal.

Well, he didn’t. Coconut and J took one look at the house and went, “Eh.” J sat on one of the beds and said it felt like it was made out of hay. They both slept in Wesley while R and I braved the rustic accommodations which did not include running water - we flushed the toilet by dumping a bucket of water into it.

But the whole point was that this was a house built by a beach, and with a pool that had a table built into it so we could sit in the pool, instead of around the pool, and play cards, which we couldn’t do in the ocean because the waves were pretty relentless. We loved it.

The one weird thing was that the caretaker and his family lived on the property as well and they must have been under orders to not let us out of their sight because they followed us to the beach and watched us swim, took us to the store when we needed milk, and even served our meals at the restaurant one day when we went for lunch. We felt like celebrities in town with a Secret Service escort.

After spending a couple days at the rancho, we made a beeline for the border with Honduras, so we could buzz across that country and into Nicaragua to meet friends on Monday who are flying down from Los Angeles. We would have liked to spend more time in El Salvador because it surprised us with its order and civility - the intersections were all well signed and even the cows ate from troughs, not from trash piles as we’ve seen in other places. The two beaches we visited - El Tunco and Majahual - were great, and are not even the best beaches in the country, and the other small piece of the country we saw while driving through was beautiful and mostly clean. And the people were all very friendly. Not one of them pulled a gun on us.

A Hundred Dollars in Water Bottles

On the second to last day before we left our rented house on the shores of Lake Atitlan, R and her friend went for a massage and Alan took two of his girls horseback riding. That left me home with Coconut, J, and their friend. I suggested that we take the kayaks to the nearby town of Jaibilito to replenish our milk, potatoes, and to get a treat for ourselves in the form of a 12-ounce carbonated drink. Before anyone agreed to this voyage, though, they all wanted to know how far it was and since I didn't know, I told them it was ten minutes. When we got there we pulled our kayaks onto the shore and there was a gaggle of young kids running round in their underwear which they use as swim trunks and a woman washing clothes and I was a little concerned that someone would take the kayaks, but only a little because I generally have faith that people are honest and really, what the heck are they going to do with a kayak since they can’t use it to till a field? We walked across a grassy patch with a dirt trail worn through it, past some chickens, and up a few narrow streets to what amounted to the town - three stores selling junk food, soda, and powdered milk, a woman selling shaved ice, and an art gallery that was closed. We didn't want powdered milk and we couldn't find any store selling potatoes, but there was one guy set up under an awning selling fried chicken and french fries and he had just pulled the fries out of the oil so they were nice and fresh and we got two orders to share for only 10 Q, which is about $1.30 USD.

I sat the kids down in the shade to eat the fries and went back to check one last store and it turned out they had real milk and potatoes so we got what we had come for, but when we got back to the kayaks, Coconut let me know that our two expensive Thermos water bottles were missing. Now, it hadn’t occurred to me to bring the water bottles with us into town, or to hide them, even though it should have because the water bottles are shiny and when the Spaniards came to this land they were able to trade shiny beads and jangles for large swaths of land, and allegiances, and gold, and shiny water bottles have a use, which is to hold water, so they are actually something that can be purposefully used, unlike a kayak or a shiny bead or jangle.

After I sternly talked to the group of boys running around about the missing water bottles in a voice that Coconut described as yelling at them and her friend described as talking loudly, the bottles did not appear. I next spoke with the woman who was washing clothes; she looked amused, but shrugged her shoulders. She said something to the boys in a language that was not Spanish but was probably one of the Mayan languages that is still spoken by many of the folks around here. Chances are I wouldn’t have understood her even if she spoke in Spanish, and the boys started rooting around in all the trash that was scattered here and there and found my water bottle. They thought this was very funny. I got the impression they were playing a game of hide and seek, and when I asked for the other bottle, they thought that was even funnier. At that point, some of them left to go swimming, but a few others said something that J translated as “An older boy took it.”

Two of the boys walked me to the house of the older boy - I forget his name. I knocked on the gate and asked someone who I think was his mother if so-and-so lived there and she pointed at a boy cutting wood with a machete in the front yard, then she got up and started speaking sharply to the two boys who had brought me there in that Mayan dialect. I asked Machete Boy if he had taken our water bottle and he said no. I told him that the two boys in the street had told me that he did, and he said he didn’t. I asked him if he was telling the truth and he said he was, so I apologized for bothering him and J and I walked back to the kayaks where Coconut and her friend were guarding the other water bottle, and our milk, and potatoes.

There was still a bunch of hustle and bustle around the shore from the boys, and now some girls had wandered over too, and to add insult to injury, some guy who was digging a hole nearby dumped a shovel of dirt and gravel into one of our kayaks.

I wish that I could speak Spanish better, because the only words I could think of to describe my frustration were to say that the town was full of thieves, but I didn’t think that was going to be helpful so I just kept my mouth shut and we all got back into the kayaks and paddled off. By this time, the afternoon winds across the lake had kicked in and it took us quite a bit longer to paddle back to our house than ten minutes and when we got back we were all hot and tired so we went for a swim from the dock.

We’ve now spent over a hundred dollars on water bottles on this trip. We left Alexandria with six water bottles, including three for R.

The first water bottle we lost was a new, insulated Thermos that R got as a gift at our going away party and that we left at Busch Gardens two days after we left Alexandria. We estimate it cost about $25.

The second water bottle we lost was J’s Sigg and we left it on my cousin’s kitchen table in Tulsa after he and his wife had gone to work and we couldn’t get back inside. That one cost $20.

We bought J a new water bottle before we crossed the border into Mexico for $5. A cheap thing that he doesn't like because the water tastes funny if left inside for longer than a few minutes.

The third water bottle we lost was a purple Sigg that R had for years and we left it in the back of a collectivo that was taking us to market in Puerto Escondido. It cost $20 at Whole Foods.

The fourth water bottle we lost was Coconut’s Sigg and it got smushed when we were bouncing over a tope in Mexico and the slider door of the van opened, the water bottle fell out, and I ran over it. Cost $20.

When my in-laws visited in October, they brought us two more Thermoses, one for R and one for Coconut, that we ordered from Amazon for $45.

The fifth water bottle we lost was my Sigg. I filled it at the beach in San Augustinillo and left it in the freezer overnight and it split its sides. It cost $20 at Whole Foods.

When our friends visited us in Guatemala in January, they brought me a Thermos insulated water bottle that we ordered from Amazon for $25.

The sixth water bottle we lost was R’s insulated tea carafe from Teavana that she got as a gift. We estimate the cost to be $25. It was the last of the original bottles we brought with us and we called it the last of the Mohicans. It vanished without a trace.

The seventh water bottle we lost was the $20 bottle that Coconut got in October. It was stolen by some boys in Jaibilito, Guatemala.

The Battle for Guatemala

My wife, two kids, and I spent the last week squinting into the sun glistening off the waters of Lago de Atitlan, a caldera lake set in the central highlands of Guatemala. Before that we were a week around Lago de Izabel, a vast lake connected by river to the Caribbean Sea and encompassing wetlands, rainforest, and beach, and the week prior to that we spent at Lago Peten de Itza, near Tikal, that mystical jungle nirvana of crumbling stone temples and mosquitoes. No one is more qualified than we are to rate, in two thousand or more words, Guatemala’s major bodies of water as a family vacation destination so that you can know best how to spend your hard earned Quetzales. Based on our own customer satisfaction surveys, we have assessed each of the three lakes for whether they are swimmable, campable, drinkable, and on intangibles.

Swimmable is just what it seems - you see a large body of water on a sweltering hot day in the jungle and you want to know, “Am I going to be eaten by crocodiles, or worse, if I jump in?”

Campable relates to the point that we are travelling in a VW camper van and we want to be able to sleep in our van, or in tents around it, so we don't have to lug all of our important stuff, like scissors, loose change, and soda crackers, to a hotel room. Despite the rules being somewhat more relaxed in Guatemala, it still seems awkward walking through the hotel dining room with your fishing tackle. Then again, how many hotels do you know where the back porch to your room overlooks a swamp?

Drinkable. Lake swimming involves horseplay, which involves laughter, which involves open mouths and swallowed lake water. How sick can you expect to get?

Intangibles includes random thoughts about life on the lakes from a slightly twisted but mostly rational mind.

LAGO DE PETEN ITZA

Lago de Peten Itza is in the northern lowlands of Guatemala, surrounded by mostly dense, tropical rainforest. We spent ten days bouncing between El Remate, a hamlet on the eastern shore of the lake, Flores, a small island in the lake which is a popular gringo base camp for visiting Tikal and which is connected to the mainland by a causeway, and Tikal, the vast Mayan ruins which are not actually on the lake but are close enough that we consider it to be a part. Everyone from Hernan Cortes to Charles Lindbergh has visited this lake, you can read their reviews on TripAdvisor, so it is not a secret destination, but that just means you have more options of hotels, restaurants, and places to buy chachkeys.

We found a lot of things to do for families in this area - you can take boat rides around the lake, visit a zoo and wildlife rehab center, or hike through protected wildlife reserves and through minor Mayan ruins. And then of course, there is the grand daddy of all Mayan sites in Guatemala - Tikal.

Swim. Yes! There are lots of nice spots in El Remate where you can see the lake bottom and the water temperature is warm enough so that even R took a dip. The lake water around Flores is less clean, but people swim there and we could easily have joined them on one of the hot afternoons if we had been wearing our bathing suits. One afternoon we took a lancha to the middle of the lake and jumped in and swam around.

Camp. If you turn off the main road in El Remate onto the other road, keeping the lake on your left, there are several options for camping, including in the Biotopo Cerro Cahui, a wildlife conservation area where I didn’t actually see any wildlife, but I did take in some nice lake views from the mountaintop miradors. The owners of the hotel and restaurant Mon Ami - which was the focal point for most of what we did when in El Remate (eat, swim, and WiFi) - let us camp in their parking lot one night for free and use their toilets.

Flores is a concrete jungle and has no formal campgrounds. However, there are plenty of hotels and every night we rented a room either R or I slept in Wesley in the street. If it was just R and I and we didn’t have to pop the top for the four of us to sleep in the van we probably could have slept for free every night. As far as food, there are plenty of restaurants that have good grub for cheaper than you would pay in the States so you don’t have to get the camp stove out and cook in the streets as well, even if you decide to sleep there. Plus, each night comedores set up along the waterfront sell cheap, cold tacos, and crunchy tostados with a variety of toppings to choose from, including beet salad.

You can camp in the large, grass parking lot at Tikal, or stay in one of the two overpriced hotels on site. You can not bribe the guard to sleep at the top of Temples I through IX.

Drink. I peed in the lake a few times, but I would still have a glass. We did see a cow jaw bone at waters’ edge near San Andres, but chances are you won't visit this town on the northern edge of the lake so won’t have to wrestle with this uncomfortable fact of life.

Intangibles. We heard this area is one of the more expensive places in Guatemala, but we have been hemorraghing money every place we’ve been so we didn’t really notice much difference. Nobody drowned when we rented paddle boards on Christmas Day so it was memorable in a good way.

LAGO DE IZABEL

This lake is enormous, requiring more than 3 hours and a hundred dollars to hire a boat to take you from the wetland habitat of the Reserva Bocas del Polochic at the western edge, through the river gorge around the town of Rio Dulce in the east, and to the town of Livingston, which lies at the mouth of the waterway, where the river meets the Caribbean coast.

Because we were not impressed with Rio Dulce, we visited the town of El Estor, at the western edge, and hired a boat to take us to see manatees, monkeys, and the Russian nickel mining operation which is dumping toxic chemicals into the lake and pumping colorful smoke into the sky. This was a highlight of our visit.

We also stayed at a jungle lodge at the mouth of the river gorge which had a rope swing, a ping pong table, and bed bugs. It was also a jumping off point to visit Livingston, which is supposedly a cultural experience unique in all Guatemala because the residents are more similar in appearance and custom to their Caribbean island neighbors, but it didn’t feel all that different than walking around by the city courthouse near 7th and Pennsylvania, N.W., in Washington D.C.

Swim. No one likes gas trails in their lake water but rope swings are cool even if you come out of the water feeling like an oil slick. We did not swim at the Livingston beaches and although the word was that swimming at the opposite end of the lake near the wildlife reserve was good, the water there was dirty as well because villages along the rivers that feed into the lake use the rivers for things like trash disposal.

Camp. The only place we found to camp in our van was a muddy, noisy marina parking lot in Rio Dulce. We skipped it. There are lots of neat sounding jungle lodges tucked here and there around the lake but most are only accessible by boat. For us, this meant finding secure parking and the hassle of packing all the stuff we might need into overnight bags. The other annoyance about this arrangement is that you are subject to the monopoly of the hotel over food, drink, and what not.

Drink. You would have to pay me a lot of money to drink eight ounces of this stuff.

Intangibles. If I ever die, I want to come back as a boat operator on this lake, as it gives meaning to the phrase - nothing in life is free. Even the jungle lodge hotel where we stayed charged us a boatload of money to shuttle us to and from Rio Dulce. I was afraid to mention to the management that I got attacked by bed bugs for fear they might charge me per bite. El Estor was one of the dirtiest towns I’ve seen in Guatemala, with trash lining either side of the street, dogs with open wounds roaming the fields, and lots of plastic bottles and diapers washed up on the shore. The waterfall at Finca El Paraiso, near El Estor, had natural hot springs feeding into the falls and we got to jump off the waterfall, which was fun, but the beauty of the place was underwhelming.

LAGO DE ATITLAN

This lake may or may not have been formed 85,000 years ago due to volcanic activity and tectonic plate shifting. What is known though, is that the lake is filled with water, and that population growth, the proclivity of the people to enjoy unhealthy snack foods like barbecued, pig-flavored, Tortrix, the introduction of non-native species into the caldera to promote sport fishing, and wastewater runoff from agricultural and tourist endeavors, have caused the lake waters to become susceptible to increased production of algae spores which require the formation of NGO’s to raise awareness among the many rich Americans that visit the area.

Based on my experience, I’ve been here a week, the villages around the lake are inhabited by traditional Mayan peoples who continue to practice the trades of deforestation and subsistence farming, while the fancy houses that dot the hills are owned by rich people who rent them on AirBnB for hundreds of dollars a night. We stayed in one of those places.

Swim. Yes, but only because we’ve spent hundreds of dollars a night on a lake front villa and there is nothing else to do. The lake is deep, averaging over 600 feet, and the water temperature ranges from “freezing”, to “quite a bit colder than freezing”, to “I can’t believe I’m swimming in this”, to “Hey, do I still have a face because I can’t feel it anymore?” There is one spot in San Marcos, one of the lake villages that is accessible by a long strenuous hike or by a short expensive boat ride, where you can pay to jump off of a wooden dock into the lake thirty feet below. Of course, we paid to do this, but only J and I jumped.

Camp. Many of the villages are built on the side of the mountain and are only accessible by boat so we had to leave Wesley parked in a field in Panajachel, which is the nearest big town that has a road going to it. There is tent camping at the Reserva Natural Atitlan in Panajachel, but since we were staying at a fancy AirBnB place, we only did the zip lines. You can catch boats to all other parts of the lake from Pana and the villages each have their own identity - drug town, meditationville, old, rich, white people place, etc..

Drink. There are certain areas of the lake where it is not recommended that you allow your body to touch the water, but in other areas, swimming is okay. I take this to mean, drink the water at your own risk.

Intangibles. If I die and I can’t come back as a boat operator on Lago de Izabel, I want to come back as a boat operator on Lago de Atitlan. The lake is beautiful, hemmed in by three volcanoes and countless other less threatening peaks, and hikes around the mountains offer some truly spectacular views that make you think about whether your life has amounted to anything more than a hill of beans. Kayaking is a water activity, but around midday the heat rises from the Pacific Coastal plain and creates a westerly wind that blows white caps across the lake making boating not much fun, and probably dangerous. If you are not into hiking or freezing your ass off in the lake, there isn’t much else to do after noon except laundry and check your bed for scorpions.

And the winner is . . . Lago de Peten Itza! In our view, this lake has it all and is  the best spot to visit if you've only got a week in Guatemala. You can swim in it, drink it, camp around it, and completely ignore it to visit Tikal. And the nice thing is that it will still be there waiting for you to come back from wherever you've wandered off too - just like the scorpions we found in Coconut's bed.

The sick times of our lives

Coconut started coming down with what ails us before New Years’. She was running a high fever, and had muscle aches and a hacking cough. We were camping at the time at a tranquil place on the Rio Chiyo owned by a guy from Philadelphia and his Japanese wife. While we were all having fun swimming in waterfalls, fishing, and jumping off of bridges, poor Coconut was curled up in Wesley’s top bunk.

We were worried that she had chikungunya, a relatively new-to-the-Americas mosquito transmitted virus which may or may not cause those infected to scratch in the dirt looking for insects, or Dengue Fever, which is just as horrible. We met a guy from Canada who had both viruses within a few weeks of each other and he didn’t prefer either – said they both made him feel worse than a turd stapled to a garbage can lid.

We got out of the campground after two nights and headed towards Rio Dulce, a crossroads town on Lago Izabel, so that we could get Coconut to a doctor and checked into a hotel so she could be more comfortable. We never found a doctor, but we did find a pharmacy with a nurse on duty who was able to quickly rule out our worst fears - though, we don’t know how - and prescribe some medications for inflammation and congestion - though, we don’t know why.

We had planned to visit the lake anyway because our research indicated it was centrally located for water activities, to visit the Caribbean coast town of Livingston, which is home to the Garifuna people who are descended from African slaves, and to visit some other unique natural sites around the lake. We also heard Bruno’s Marina would be a great place to camp.

Whoever wrote that research needs a good talking too - Rio Dulce is horribly hot, congested, noisy, and dirty and Bruno’s Marina was a muddy wreck – there was no chance we could camp there, even if Coconut felt up to it. The more interesting places to stay in the area are situated around the lake and are only accessible by lancha, so to do any water activity on the lake requires paying enormous sums of money to people with boats. We had to pay nearly $60 USD to get to one jungle lodge where we stayed for two days so that, with no other eating or drinking options, we could pay to drink their bottled water and eat food prepared in their kitchen. Plus, even though J and some boys from the Czech Republic didn’t seem to mind, you came out of the water feeling like an oil slick.

Livingston turned out to be a ramshackle town providing ample living quarters for pelicans but not much else of obvious cultural significance. The Garifuna culture, at least, has been Westernized enough to give the white oppressors who enslaved its ancestors its comeuppance in the form of overpriced, mediocre soup.

The natural beauty of the Finca El Paraiso, a hot spring waterfall, was underwhelming, and the Reserva Bocas del Polochic, one of the richest wetland habitats in the country, is being threatened by a Russian nickel mining operation that pollutes without sanction by the Guatemalan government.

To top off our week, at one of the hotels where we stayed, bed bugs had me for breakfast, lunch and dinner, J beat me at ping pong, and R started coming down with the same symptoms that Coconut was finally shaking loose.

Needless to say, we were happy to leave the area, and were intent on getting R someplace where she could rest comfortably. Our next attempt at nirvana was to head to an abandoned eco-resort set on a waterfall that a motorcycle overlander we met shortly after we left Oaxaca described as paradise on earth. Unfortunately, to get to Eden, you first have to drive through Puerto Barrios, which is the port town where the major U.S. fruit companies ship pineapples to the rest of the world, but apparently fail to give back to support the city’s infrastructure – the two-lane country road in use by the heavy duty and high volume of truck traffic, when not covered in dirt, is like driving on a trampoline it’s so cracked and uneven.

After getting through Puerto Barrios, the road to Eden becomes an extremely steep and rocky ascent and all I needed to hear from R was let’s find another place to stay, but she was fading fast – she failed to even comment on my exceptional conduction of our vehicle as I bounced it over boulders and through mud pits or on my witty opinions of our motorcycle-driving friend. Plus, since we had already committed more than an hours’ worth of driving in the wrong direction from where we planned to spend the rest of our time in Guatemala in order to get as far as we had - there was no turning back. When we finally arrived nobody liked the place. R immediately went to sleep, Coconut proclaimed the water too cold for swimming, J wouldn’t sit on the toilets, and the camping turned out to be expensive, not free like I expected. We spent one night.

We planned to spend the next few nights at a Japanese guesthouse so that R could rest in clean white-sheeted bliss, Coconut and J could catch up on homework, and I could visit some nearby ruins, but after we found the place on a street so narrow we had to move to the side just to let ourselves pass, we learned the guesthouse was full so we changed our plans to push on to Guatemala City. I was the most disappointed with this turn of events as my sole experience with Japanese guesthouses is gleaned from the novel “Shogun” - the protagonist of the story is visited repeatedly in the night by unsolicited women - and I was curious to know if this protagonist could expect the same treatment. Alas, fate can be cruel.

Fate can also decide that we aren’t going to make it to Guatemala City on a particular day, and along about the time the town of Santa Cruz rolled around, we were all hot, cranky, and tired of being in the van. Santa Cruz wasn’t on any map that we had or in any guidebook, but it turned out to be an okay place because it had a waterpark, and the hotel, though not much from the street, was like a small neighborhood – but like one of those weird, spooky dreams, there was nobody home but us.

We decided to hang around for a few days anyway so that R could get back on her feet, and like an exorcism, the demon bacteria could worm their way into me. Sure enough, by Sunday, after two-days’ worth of chlorine-soaked thrills, I was beginning to feel achy, feverish, and after taking the medications prescribed for Coconut that we didn’t give her, just well enough to drive to Antigua and crash into a hotel bed for the week. And that’s what I did. R and the kids might be able to speak of Antigua, but they didn’t do much different. So, we leave after a week in Antigua without knowing much about it other than it has big, wide cobblestone streets and the workers doing construction next door thoughtfully don’t start work every day until 7 a.m., on the dot.

So far, the month fits into the category of misery loves company and is similar to those first days with a newborn when you tell everyone how wonderful and rewarding it is. You are tired and cranky because the kid keeps waking up at night crying, you’re not having sex with your wife, and you can’t hang out with your friends because of the guilt of leaving your wife on her own with the cute, little monster. In this case, I’m tired and cranky from tossing and turning all night with worry and sickness, I’m not having sex with my wife, and I feel guilty because we’re dropping serious coin on fancy hotels and laying around like sloths. Overall, it’s been a wonderful and rewarding experience. You should try it.

Things to Know about Life on the Road

We left Alexandria, Virginia on August 1, 2015, in our 1985 VW Westphalia and spent nights in North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas before finding ourselves at the U.S.-Mexican border in Laredo, Texas. When we crossed into Mexico on August 26, we expected to spend a month making our way to Belize and to be in Panama by Christmas. Happily, that plan didn’t work out and we spent the next 3 ½ months experiencing Mexico, which is now one of our favorite places. We even settled down in Oaxaca for a month when we rented a house, giving our “life on the road” some semblance of stability.

Nevertheless, our goal was to overland to South America in a year, and however dim that prospect looks at the moment – as I type this on January 11, 2016, we are more than five months into our twelve month trip but have only been in Mexico and Guatemala (we planned to have been through those two countries, as well as El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica by now, and waiting in Panama to ship our van to Colombia) - we plan to push southward until we have to come back north.

Since we left Oaxaca on November 29, we have been living out of the van more or less on a day-to-day basis. This has reminded us that overlanding is not the party that it may seem to be. As a fellow overlander said to me as we bellied up to the tiny bathroom sink to wash our dinner dishes, “People think we’re on vacation, but this is hard work.”

It’s not the 9 to 5 type of job, and we don’t get paid, but for all the fun it is to discover new places, it does involve some hard thought. With that in mind, we thought it would be fun to share how we go about our “daily work” – which consists of finding a place to go, finding a place to sleep, and figuring out what to eat.

"What are we doing today?"

Coconut and J ask us this all the time. Their second most frequent question is, “How long are we staying here?” Sometimes we have an answer, and sometimes not.

When planning a route into and through a country, we come up with an overall country plan. How do we get from our entry point, visit the places in the country that are must do, that we have always dreamed of seeing, or that we never heard of before but that have been recommended to us by other overlanders, and get to our exit point using an efficient route on paved roads? Our country plan for Mexico got blown to pieces, as we ended up in places we had no intention of going and stayed much longer than we planned, but that turned out for the better. We’ve stuck to the plan so far for Guatemala.

In making our overall country plan, I am low tech. We have a few guide books – Lonely Planet and the Rough Guide – and I read them. There are a lot cooler 21st century ways to do this, but I like to curl up with a good book at night and what could be better than the Rough Guide to Central America on a Budget?

When I come up with a place or an area that sounds fun for all, or that has something educational to do that I think the kids won’t complain too much about, I look at our paper map to see if we can get there in a reasonable way considering all the other things in the country that are on the list of things to do. One thing we learned in Mexico is that not all roads are flat and that Wesley, our van, is capable of climbing mountains, but that it takes time. We double the time that our guidebooks or Google Maps estimate that it will take to get anyplace.

Once I’ve mapped out an overall country plan, I discuss it with R, our resident techie, and she uses the few apps that we have and poses queries to the overlanding forums she is part of to see if things have changed in the few years since our books were written or for places to camp, since the books are written with backpackers, not overlanders, in mind.

When we are in country, we plan our day-to-day activities like we would plan our weekends at home – we see what comes up. As I mentioned, we go to an area of the country because there are cool things to do there, but we don’t really have a plan to do them. We roll with the mood that strikes us, or the weather, or the circumstances. For example, we anticipated that Flores, Guatemala, had a full week of activities - a lake for swimming, boats to cruise the lake, a zoo, hiking, a wild animal rehabilitation center, and Tikal. Also, R had studied Spanish in nearby San Andres and we wanted to visit her places of interest. We ended up underestimating the time needed and spending ten days there, and still didn’t do some of the things I thought we might do. Other places, like Rio Dulce on Lago Izabel, are hot, bustling, dusty junctions, and we get out of dodge sooner than we think we might.

Other times we don’t get to a planned location and have to come up with a new plan on the fly. Semuc Champey, the most beautiful waterfalls in Guatemala, was recommended to us by several other travelers, but it will have to exist without us because we couldn’t drive there from where we were. Instead, we drove to some other waterfalls that were maybe not as beautiful, but we learned how to use a machete to cut a coconut and jumped off a bridge with some local boys into the Rio Chiyo.

Earlier this week we planned to stay at a Japanese guest house in Quirigua, a small town near some off-the-beaten track Mayan ruins, so that R could rest from her recent infirmities, the kids could catch up on homework, and I could visit the ruins. However, after finding the guest house – which was no easy task – we learned there were no rooms available. So it was back in the car for another 200 kilometers to Guatemala City. After a few hours of driving, we were all hot and cranky and R was fading, so we ended up at a hotel with a pool and water slide in Santa Rosa where we stayed for two nights.

"Where are we going to sleep?"

When Coconut was three, we flew to the Bahamas to meet some friends who were cruising in their 44-foot sailboat, Belisana, for the year. We told Coconut beforehand that we would be staying on the boat with our friends, so when they came to pick us up in the dinghy from wherever it was the puddle jumper dropped us off, Coconut was a little confused. She whispered to R, “Where are we all going to sleep?”

Having Wesley solves that problem – we can all sleep comfortably inside the van. My preference is to camp because it’s cheaper, and also, like a younger sibling, Wesley has become part of the family and it’s a little sad when we roll the slider door shut and walk away for the night. One couple we met in Oaxaca told us that when they have guests to their home, they offer the guests their own bedroom and sleep in their van in the garage. We understand that sentiment. There have been a few times when we’ve rented a hotel room and R or I have slept in the van on the street. It’s nice and cozy.

Sometimes it is too hot to sleep in the van, or sometimes we have slept in the van a few days in a row and we need a shower, or the kids will request a room with WiFi. For example, Coconut asked if we could get a room for Christmas because she didn’t want to drive on that day. That was a reasonable request – how else would Santa have found us – so we got a room.  If we get a hotel room, it is usually a place suggested by our guidebook or that R has found online. If we plan to be around a while, we will look for an AirBnB place.

In most cities there are no convenient places to camp and we end up in a room because we would have to camp too far out of the city to visit the places in the city that we want to visit. Once camp is set up, it’s an involved process to break it down to drive around town, so we don’t usually do that. Guanajuato and San Cristobal de las Casas, both in Mexico, were two exceptions where campgrounds were within walking distance of the city center – though, in Guanajuato, we called the campground a “yonke” (junkyard) because there were several rusted out autos on the grounds.

"What’s for dinner?"

Wesley comes equipped with a two-burner propane stove, and we brought along our camp stove, so we can cook our meals at home. If we aren’t camping, we look for rooms that have a private kitchen or access to a communal kitchen. R has become expert at baking a pizza on the bottom of a cast iron frying pan.

Of course, part of the fun of traveling is that you get to eat all the tasty foods native to the place that you are visiting. One of our favorite things to do in Oaxaca was to visit the Friday street vendor food market in Llano park to get the pork rib tacos for 5 pesos each. Overall, we prefer the food in Mexico. It was cheaper than in Guatemala, and tastier – we eat these things in Guatemala that they call tortillas but the Chicago Black Sox may have used them in 1919 for baseball gloves.

We also loved the abundance of fresh fruits and vegetables in Mexico. And the fresh squeezed juices. Consistently, the vegetables on offer in Guatemala are yellowed broccoli, wrinkled string beans, and sad-looking cauliflower. The fruits are just as pathetic - waxy apples and believe it or not, it’s hard to find a decent banana. Guatemala does have seedless watermelons, which is the only kind the kids will eat, and the pineapples are outstanding. We drove through Puerto Barrios the other day, which is a city on the Caribbean coast where Dole, Del Monte, and Chiquita have shipping facilities, and stopped at a few roadside stands for some of the sweetest pineapples ever. They cut it in quarters, with the hard center intact, so it’s like you are eating pineapple on a stick.

The only other food that stands out in Guatemala is the fried chicken from Pollo Campero – but this is basically fast food and you can now get it in the states, including in Alexandria. So, we’ve done a lot of eating at “home” – eggs and rice, roasted potatoes, salads, pasta.

So, that's it. That's how we've taken the two greatest obligations a parent has to his or her children and turned them into our only responsibilities. It's a pretty low-stress lifestyle - no worrying about schedules or who needs to be where at what time - and for all the benefit that Coconut and J will get out of it, the more immediate benefit seems to have accrued to R and I. In fact, while reading "Life of Pi" yesterday, I came across this thought penned by Yann Martel, the author. He writes, "I have nothing to say of my working life, only that a tie is a noose, and inverted though it is, it will hang a man nonetheless if he's not careful.

It's a New Year in Guatemala

We spent a low key New Years Eve - four Gallo beers and a rum with coconut water - relaxing in the quiet beauty of the Oasis Chiyo in Las Conchas, Guatemala. We brought the noise: J finally got to shoot off the last of the fireworks we purchased in Mexico and those that he received from Santa, in a soccer field that doubles as a cow pasture. Even though we aimed the rockets away from them to avoid a stampede, the cows were not pleased with the noise and smoke and we could see their eyes reflected red in the flashlight beam move deeper into the corner of the goal where they took their repose. We have been in country for two weeks now and I think I’ve seen enough of Guatemala to suggest some New Years resolutions:

Put up road signs.  Not the kind that tell me the road is going to curve to the left, but the kind that tell me where the hell I am and where the right fork of the road goes. All too often the road splits and there is nothing to indicate which way leads to heaven and which way leads to hell.

We wanted to get to Raxruja after we drove off the ferry in Sayache. The road going up took two directions - one paved and one not - but had no sign indicting what lay in either direction. The GPS apps we are using are wrong often enough where we can't blindly trust them and - see paragraph two below - the fact that a road is not paved doesn't mean it is the road less traveled.  Remember, we got to the Mexican-Guatemalan border by driving through a muddy cornfield.

When there is a sign indicating what city lies on either fork, the city named is often hundreds of kilometers away and not the next city en route. This happened in Mexico as well and requires us to memorize the map of the country for city locations way beyond our hoped for destination. It's like coming into New Jersey from New York across the George Washington Bridge and following signs for Las Vegas to get to Paterson.

Finish paving your roads. We can be cruising steady at 45 m.p.h. on this beautifully smooth and flat road and I will have to hit the brakes hard because the pavement ends and is replaced by a muddy, bumpy mess of a path. And you can never be sure that the muddy trail called a road is the wrong way. The infrastructure of the place puts it firmly in the category of developing countries - while waiting 30 minutes for the ferry to take us fifty meters across the Rio La Pasion in Sayache, J asked, “Why don't they build a bridge?” Good question.

We had a plan to drive to Semuc Champey, a blue waterfall described to us as one of the most beautiful places in the world, but there is no really good way for us to get there. Option one was to drive a paved road about 200 kilometers west to Coban so that we could then drive 150 kilometers east on a mostly paved road to Lanquin to park Wesley and take a 4WD to the waterfall. Option two was to drive a shorter but unpaved, rough rocky road that may or may not be in the process of being improved straight south for 50 kilometers to Lanquin  Option three was to drive north, then east to Rio Dulce and catch a 4WD that drives 5 hours on another rough, unpaved road through Cahabon to Lanquin.

We went to bed planning on option two but in the morning we read some things that dissuaded us from that notion, so planned to skip Semuc Champey all together and go to another waterfall in Las Conchas. Then the hotel owner went off about how beautiful Semuc is compared to Las Conchas so we were back to option two even though the owner suggested option one, saying it would take the same amount of time. We picked up a campesino hitchhiker and he was of the same opinion, but against all available local information, I thought we should try option two because you never know how bad it really is until you see for yourself. “This is the shortest route to a top five tourist destination in the country.” I thought, “Why wouldn't they have paved the road by now?”

Option two was like trying to ride a unicycle over an avalanche. Picture what a group of ten year old boys would do with some hammers and a pile of boulders. This is the road. After twenty minutes, ten of which I spent out of the car figuring out how I was going to get Wesley turned around (solution: get Coconut and J out of the van and safely to the side; put R behind the wheel, and push) we decided to skip Semuc for the time being and go to Las Conchas and then Rio Dulce where we may try option three. I was initially relieved by that decision and all the tense driving and abuse of Wesley that would be avoided, but felt like a real loser when I saw a low-riding pick-up truck with five or six campesinos standing in the bed rolling steadily up towards where we had just turned around. Sigh. Maybe I’ll be a man tomorrow.

Teach your people to smile, and to say no once in a while. We had read the people in Guatemala were more reserved and it is true. We are often met with silence when greeting people. Wesley is no longer met with smiles due to his/her headlight eyelashes. When walking along the road, I miss being greeted by all eight people in the taxi as it drives by. On the other hand, people are very helpful and accommodating when we do strike up conversations. When we were jumping off of waterfalls the other day, I asked whether it was safe to jump in a particular spot. “Si,” the boy said. “You jump here? It's deep enough?” I asked. “Si.” “Right here?” I asked, pointing at the spot just to be sure. “Si.” So I got ready to jump only to be stopped and told that it was safer to jump in a different spot. We don’t know if they are saying yes to be polite or because it is true.

Kill all the mosquitoes. We all know mosquitoes are useless except as food for bats, so why are there so many of them? When we were sitting at restaurants in Flores, we could tell who had been to Tikal by the condition of their legs. Red and scabby meant they had been to the jungle. Now we are those people. I have a bite on my neck that is so big you could hang a picture on it. And they itch like crazy; I have bites from last year that still itch this year. Plus, they carry diseases with cool names like Dengue Fever and Chikungunya, but that you don't want to come down with.

Coconut has been under the weather lately with a fever as high as 40 Celsius (about 103 F) and we worried it was one of those mosquito-borne diseases with a cool name like Dengue Fever or Chikungunya, but which we certainly don't want her to come down with. We took her to a doctor who quickly looked her over and decided Coconut has a throat infection from the weather changes and general climate. He prescribed a number of medications which seem to have helped so we are hopeful that he was right in his diagnosis. Otherwise, I will have something else about Guatemala to complain about.

San Andres - 20 years later

In the summer of 1995 I took what I consider my first real solo adventure and came to Guatemala to go to Spanish school in a little village called San Andres, on the Lago Peten Itza. We've spent over a week on this lake and hadn't yet been to San Andres. The area has changed a bit - 20 years ago the only real way to get to San Andres was via little public lanchas, large motorboats that shuttled between the two sides of the lake. I fully expected to be able to hop on a lancha and visit my former host family and see the school where I first studied Spanish.

On one of our first days in Flores, we were shocked at the quoted price of 200Q ($24) for the ride across the lake. Apparently in the past 20 years there have been road improvements, making it possible for buses to get to San Andres, making the public lanchas obsolete. So it took us a week to finally agree to pay $24 for a 30-minute boat ride to see where I had spent 3 weeks.

The village itself has changed as well with improvements to the waterside: a nice public square and promenade area. After some confusion I managed to find the street where I had lived with Nidia Fion and her 3 children, Siomara, Romero, and Teresa. There was a group of women sitting on the corner and I asked them if they knew where we could find the family. They exchanged strange glances with each other that said something was off. I asked if she'd died and they said yes, 9 months ago, in a terrible incident. The group we had asked was Nidia's family. I didn't quite catch what Nidia's sister was telling me about what happened but maybe her husband killed her. This wasn't quite the reunion I was envisioning. The sister graciously let us walk around the outside of the house and I took pictures of the rooftops of where I had lived. The house had been improved since I was there, though I could still see the roofs of the little outhouse and my stand-alone room where I had slept. We didn't go inside the compound so I couldn't check out the interior.

We then walked to where I remembered the school being and found a burned out shell. I'd heard that it was burned but I just assumed it had been rebuilt. Not so - it was just walls, no roofs, and the beautiful airy classroom with the fantastic view over the lake was an empty space overgrown with weeds.

It was kind of a sad visit, not at all what I imagined, where I would sit down with Nidia and chat with her fluently, then head over to the school and make them proud that I was now speaking fluently, thanks to their teaching 20 years ago.

To top it all off, we're quite certain that the pig who lived in the house next door to Nidia's has also been eaten.

Not Dead Yet

We are always the last to leave the party, sometimes even tucking the hosts into bed before turning off the lights and locking the door behind us, and our planned four to five day stay in Flores, Guatemala, proved no different.  We stayed ten nights.

Technically, the ten nights we spent in Flores included a night in Tikal and four in Remate, but all these places are in the same few square kilometer area of the country so its semantics. Maybe it is more accurate to say we spent ten nights around Lago Peten Itza because Flores and Remate are on opposite sides of the lake, but however we frame it, they were happy days.

When planning our visit to this area of Guatemala I thought we could stay a week because there seemed to be enough fun things to do, I factor in days were we don’t do anything, and of course, anytime you stay someplace for a few days you learn about other things to do there, so if we actually wanted to do everything possible in the area, we should probably just move here.

R also studied Spanish in San Andres, which is a small village on another side of Lago Peten Itza, for three weeks back in the summer of ‘95, so we all wanted to go visit her old haunts - the one room shack were she slept and the one room school were she studied - which have been so impactful on her life, and thus, on ours.

In 1995, before the wheel was invented, lanchas (small motor boats) were the way to get from place to place on the lake. Nowadays you can drive to San Andres, but to make it feel like old times for R, we hired a boat to take us.

It was a bittersweet return; we learned the matriarch of R’s host family recently passed away, the language school burned down, and the pig she used as a landmark was made into carnitas. Talk about hitting the trifecta. R has written about our visit in a post entitled - "San Andres - 20 years later" - which will be posted shortly.

The streets were as steep and the temperatures as hot as R remembered, though, and since the kids weren’t going for swimming from the boat pier - there was a piece of a cow jawbone at waters edge - we had the lancha stop in the middle of the lake so we could splash and play around.

That was the thing to do in Remate as well - it was the first time we ever rented paddleboards on Christmas day. We met a family from New Zealand in Remate and Coconut and J had fun swimming with Hugo and Tooey each afternoon from the dock in front of the hotel\restaurant Mon Ami. We camped in the parking lot of the restaurant one night for the cost of a meal. We also got to eat the food that came with the meal, so it was like camping for free.

There was less to do in Flores besides sweat, but it was our base for wifi, groceries, and to play the Guatemalan version of Monopoly at the Hospedaje Yaxha, where I also had a few beers with the guys that work there, Scott and Ben.

In between visits to Tikal and Remate we kept ending up in Flores. It's a pretty town, on an island small enough to easily walk around, with plenty of restaurants, hostels, and street parking. There are also many young gringo travelers to make R and I nostalgic for the opportunities of youth. Not that we feel we squandered ours in any way - well, I do - but when all that youth is right there in your face you recognize that certain opportunities are now pipe dreams and that you have to take advantage of your middle aged chances. After all, we're not dead yet.

Tikal with kids

(Ed. Note - I wrote this in a rush on Tuesday morning before we left Flores for the last time and did not get a chance to complete many of the thoughts, or even, the article. Please do not judge my writing on this piece, and please check back in a few days when I have a chance to complete. We are heading to Lanquin and underground caves today so do not expect to have Wifi for a few days. Maybe not until the weekend when we are in Rio Dulce.) When we arrived in the Gran Plaza, the 1,300 year old social and administrative center of the vast Mayan archeological site of Tikal, moments before the sun did its turn on the other side of the globe, we were tired and sweaty but still managed to get a smile out of Coconut and J for the family photo album. This is because R, applying knowledge gleaned from our visit to Palenque a week earlier, had brilliantly thought to advance purchase the "no complaints and unlimited photo" package for the low cost of a soda and Iron Man 3, to be screened upon return to the van.

From the entrance to Tikal, where we purchased our entry tickets, to the parking lot for the ruins is a twenty minute drive through thick, turkey-infested jungle. From the field where we camped, along with fifteen million mosquitoes with teeth like Jaws and an appetite to match, to the Gran Plaza is another thirty minute walk. This place is in the middle of nowhere.

If anyone not from Guatemala ever thinks about Guatemala, I am making these numbers up, there is a five percent chance they will think about the scene from Return of the Jedi where the X-Wing fighters buzz the stone temple comb poking through the tree canopy - that's Tikal - and a ninety-five percent chance they will draw a complete blank because, and I am not making this up, who ever thinks about Guatemala anyway?

A ticket purchased after 4 p.m. on Day 1 allows entry to the site on Day 2 and R and I took advantage of this by waking early and walking most of the marked paths to some of the ruins Coconut and J would be less likely to want to see. This worked out perfectly. When we got back to our camp at nine, the kids were awake (and boiling inside the van) and by ten we were back on our way to the Gran Plaza and some of the major sites.

Twenty odd years ago, R visited Tikal and bribed a guard (she won't tell me how) to let her sleep on top of one of the temples. She couldn't remember which one, but with the help of one of the current guides, we decided it was Temple IV.

Welcome to Guatemala

We woke on Christmas eve morning to clear blue skies over Lago Peten Itza in El Remate, Guatemala. We’ve rented a studio apartment for the Christmas holiday. It has fabulously high ceilings and floor to top windows, and with its setting on the hillside and sun glistening off the lake, it reminds me of a Swiss chalet; though with the high humidity and the sun baking us like chickens in an oven, we are all thinking about swimming rather than skiing. Fortunately, the lake is great for swimming.

We crossed the border from Mexico to Guatemala on Saturday, December 19, at the Guatemalan town of El Ceibo. At the start, we were driving on a mud track through a cornfield and if we weren’t being passed by dozens of other cars, we might have turned around. We figured the road must lead somewhere that people wanted to go – why else would they be driving so fast through muddy farmland?

Eventually we ended up on a nice paved road and arrived at the border at 9:30am (it opened at 9.) I don’t have a lot of experience doing land border crossings, but I think this one was fairly smooth other than the 4 hours of waiting caused by your typical bureaucratic hassles. When we entered Mexico, we needed to leave a $200 USD deposit to dissuade us from selling our van Wesley, or otherwise keeping it in the country.

In order to retrieve our deposit, we needed to have our exit paperwork processed within the 180 days we were allowed to legally be in the country and show that we were exiting with the van. Because there was only one guy working this window at the border, and he didn’t give us any confidence that he knew what he was doing, we thought about just walking away. But we can theoretically live for 2 days on $200, so in the end we waited him out – three hours – and got our money back. Though, we are still waiting for it to show up as a credit on our credit card account. While we were waiting for him, we went to a food stand 300 meters inside Mexico, which we had just been stamped out of, and got a grilled chicken to eat.

The Guatemalan side was a little better; we only waited for an hour to be processed. Most of this time was spent standing on the sidewalk where we were supposed to pay our nonreturnable vehicle import fee of 160 Quetzales (8 Q equals about 1 USD) while the computer rebooted. The room where we got a Guatemalan entry stamp in our passport had six floor fans – giving the impression that it gets really, really hot in there - a stove, and enough tables and chairs so that it looked like the place might double as a restaurant when the border was closed. The office where we processed Wesley’s paperwork was a mobile trailer and we had to walk 200 meters into the country we weren’t legally allowed to enter yet, to get a photo copy of the passport page we just had stamped. Welcome to Guatemala.

Right away Guatemala gave us the impression of a much poorer country than Mexico. It has been raining a lot and the mud went right up to the doors of the wood and tin shacks where the people live – there are no such things as front lawns. There are a lot more pigs wandering around, and turkeys. I saw a chicken nibbling bugs by the side of the road get spooked by something and run into the road and under a pick-up truck; the first time I saw any animal get hit on this trip, even though chickens, dogs, cows, donkeys, goats, and now pigs and turkeys, are wandering around like kids after the last school bell. This really has nothing to do with the economics of a country – the chicken getting run over, I mean – but it was the most interesting thing I can remember from our drive to Flores, and now El Remate, where we have been for the last week.

Flores is a small town on an island in Lago Peten Itza. R spent some time many moons ago on the lake when she studied Spanish at a small village – San Andres – on the other side from Flores. San Andres is too small for an ATM so she and her fellow students had to get a lancha (small boat) to Flores to withdraw cash. Most of the lanchas are gone now since they’ve built a road all the way around, but you can still get a boat ride to San Miguel – directly across from Flores – to walk around and see some jungle covered Mayan ruins, which settlement was apparently visited by Hernan Cortes in the 1500’s. I’m not sure how they know this; maybe he signed the register at the hotel.

Most of our time in Flores was spent preparing for Christmas – we learned how to sew stockings, and the kids wanted a tree and presents – and trying to find the cheapest place to eat. We’ve determined in our few days here that things in Guatemala cost twice what they would cost in Mexico – a beer costs about Q 12 (around $1.50 USD) and a box of milk about Q 20 (around $2.50 USD). It’s still a bit cheaper than U.S. prices, but not as affordable as we expected. We also have to relearn the art of haggling over prices in the market; we lost our touch in Mexico because, for the most part, it isn’t part of the culture.

Of course, all of this may be because we are near Tikal, one of the top tourist destinations in the country - we’ve seen a lot more white (i.e., U.S., European, and Australian) travelers than we are accustomed to seeing. Things may be different as we put some distance between us and this place – which we plan to do after our visit to Tikal on Saturday and Sunday.

Palenque with Kids

When I was a kid I had a book called “Wonders of the World” and I would sit and stare at the pictures it had of Mayan temples half covered by jungle or poking out of the trees and wonder about the people who lived there and what they were like. I imagined walking through the brilliant green fields beside the towering temples – obviously not realizing that the temperatures would be sweltering and the rain plentiful - and exploring the labyrinthine passageways inside. I wondered about details of life there that we will probably never know and the questions raised about this ancient civilization still fascinate me. Last Friday, this 45-year old kid got to visit Palenque, one of the major Mayan architectural sites in Mexico, which was at its artistic and militaristic peak from around 600-800 A.D.. The excavation work at the site which began in 1952 and continues today – only a small portion of this vast metropolis has been released from the clutches of a relentlessly encroaching jungle – has revealed a treasure trove of information for archeologists about this particular city and its place in the pecking order of contemporary, rival cities like Tikal and Tonina, and about the Mayan culture overall. Watching the mist rise from the tangle of trees and vines surrounding these magnificent yet crumbling buildings gave me chills and I realized I am still awed by the questions places like these put in my mind. What did the war chiefs talk about when they met on the patio of the war chiefs? How did the great Mayan ruler Pakal feel when he looked over the city from the portico of Temple IV? Where did enemy captives get their heads cut off? Why are my children so lame?

We were only about 30 minutes into our visit to the museum outside the ruins, which is air-conditioned, and contains intricately carved artifacts from a thousand years ago with funny faces and serpents coming out of their heads, all described in English, including an enormous sarcophagus where bones of the ruler Pakal were found, when Coconut declared she was bored. The extent of her curiosity about the site over the next couple of hours was to ask why the steps of the temples were so big when the people are so small in stature. J climbed 25 steps to the top of a building where a Count from Europe lived for a few years in the early 1800’s, and that was it. He and Coconut seated themselves on a rock at the edge of the Central Plaza and got drizzled on while R and I climbed temples and explored passageways and took in the views with amazement and wonder.

We were pissed – R was going on about how our kids were missing such a great opportunity and I agreed, comparing their lameness to the greatness of another pair of kids who were on a guided tour with their family and appeared to actually be paying attention and asking questions. If I had found the sacrificial table, heads may have rolled. But then the greatest thing happened - the sky unloaded buckets and buckets of rain at a rate of about 15 inches per hour. This, finally, caused Coconut and J to climb the 40 or so steps to the top of the Palace to seek a dry corner and eat the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches I had made for lunch.

The mood lightened even as the sky grew more overcast and dim. They still wanted to leave, but they let me go on a little bit about what I felt as a kid when I looked at pictures of the place in my book and how it made me feel to actually be standing there, and even agreed to walk the few kilometers back to our Maya Bell camp rather than taking a collectivo bus.

We hate camping in the rain, and even though Wesley is cozy and warm, R suggested that we pack up and head for the border town of Tenosique to spend the night. It was a good idea. Coconut and J showered, put on dry clothes, and played cards after ordering lunch at the restaurant while R and I packed our soaking gear as dryly as possible while the clouds continued to empty themselves so much that the pool overflowed. Finally, as we pulled out of camp, the skies cleared and the sun shone through – a good omen for our drive. If all goes well, we’ll be spending Saturday night in Guatemala.

The Long and Winding Road

We heard several things about the road from San Cristobal to Palenque – none of them that it was an easy drive. That the road was long and winding was no surprise -  it was many moons ago that I anointed Mexico the most mountainous country I’ve driven. We also heard that the number of topes was extreme – two tope towns become four and five tope towns with no discernible difference in economic or scholastic opportunities.

Finally, and most concerning, was that we could encounter road blocks along the way that could hold us up for hours if we weren’t willing to pay the “toll” - something like 50 to 200 pesos, depending on how well one can negotiate. Chiapas state has the highest population of indigenous peoples in Mexico and therefore, has the highest population of disenfranchised peoples. As we drive around we point out to Coconut and J all the old men and boys clearing the fields and tending the animals and the women and girls selling fruit, corn, and trinkets on the street, and they know how lucky we are for being born into the circumstances that we were.

The thing is, even though the people are breaking their backs in the fields, they aren’t seeing all of the fruits of their labors because they don’t own the land. It’s the story of how the rich get richer and the poor get more bent over.  So, every once in a while the poor will set up a road block on the main road to Palenque to stop traffic – primarily trucks hauling freight – to protest their condition. I don’t know if anyone in charge who can change their plight notices this and wants to fight for them, but a side benefit is that by stopping traffic, tourists like us who have nothing to do with anything, can pay a toll to move along.

Coconut was actually excited to be stopped like this, but after all the build-up and anticipation – it’s one of the first topics of conversation among overlanders coming from or going to Palenque – we didn’t encounter a road block. I was a bit disappointed as well, because depending on where the road block was set up, I thought we might be able to get an oil change for Wesley while we waited.

A few times during our drive a mom and her dirty and sweaty kids would string up a line as we approached and try to sell us fried plantains or sugar cane for a few pesos. When we didn’t buy any of their stuff, we would hand out a few toys from the bag of junk that we brought with us for this purpose – matchbox cars, erasers in cute shapes, super balls, colored pencils, and the like.

There are a few stopping points along the road to Palenque and the first night we camped at Agua Azul, a series of waterfalls tumbling over rock crevices into pools perfect for a refreshing dip. We’d been in the highlands for the better part of two months so the jungle setting of the falls was a reminder that heat and humidity suck, but at one point after splashing around in the water on a rope swing, J was shivering and we said we would remember that feeling later that day when we were sweating again.

The camping at Agua Azul was pretty basic – no showers and toilets without seats that were closed after dark when all the restaurants and vendors hawking artsy-fartsy stuff went home. A bunch of people drinking beer pulled in right next to us and R was pretty annoyed so went to bed around 7 p.m. but Coconut and J decided that  with the sound of the falls, we could hardly hear their noise. After a few hours the police came and chased the party away – the most effective bit of police work that I’ve seen in Mexico.

The next day – Wednesday – we stopped at Misol Ha, another waterfall with some caves behind it that we paid ten pesos each to enter to see the bat cave and underground waterfall. It was pretty cool. Then R and J and I swam in the pool in front of the main falls for a while before driving on to Palenque and the Maya Bell campground where there are still no toilet seats on the bowls.

There are biting ants, however, and when Coconut and J are not in the pool or scanning the tree tops for howler monkeys, they are holed up in Wesley. J has become super sensitive to bugs and when he and I were leaving the bathroom, he spotted a cockroach so I started singing – la cucaracha, la cucaracha. He asked me who sang the song, but I didn’t know; I said that it was just a folksy song and not a song written by a band that made records. He raised his fist and said, “Yeah, I bet people didn’t sit around at Beatles concerts going, 'yeah, play La Cucaracha, man!'”

A Change in Plans

We left Alexandria, Virginia, on August 1, with plans to be in Belize City on October 2. Coconut and J’s grandparents wanted to meet us somewhere and Belize in October seemed reasonable, though I’m sure we never looked at a map or actually figured out how many miles away it was and how many hours of driving would be required. R and I aren’t that type of overlander - detail oriented. We just kind of go with our gut. On September 16, when we were still stuck in Zihuatanejo, a great Mexican beach town on the Pacific side that we had stumbled into a week earlier without any idea of what we were getting into, we did the math and figured that Belize was still about a million miles away and that we could never get there in two weeks and a few days so we had a change of plans and took R’s parents to San Augustinillo, a different Mexican beach town on the Pacific side.

A change in plans – that’s pretty much been the story of our trip. By Christmas we thought we would be in Panama. Instead, we might leave Mexico and be in Guatemala. We spent our first week in Mexico at La Posada, north of Monterrey, where we only planned to spend a night. We spent four nights in San Miguel de Allende because we were having fun with Sean and Mittie, a whole week at Zihua; seven nights in Puerto Escondido; more than a month in Oaxaca; and now, a week plus in San Cristobal de las Casas which I was pretty much ready to skip except for a hot shower and hotel room pillow.

We crossed the border into Mexico on August 26, and if you add it all up, we’ve been here for more than 15 weeks when we only planned to spend about six. Overindulgence has always been part of my identity – too much of everything is just enough, as the Dead sing in “I Need a Miracle” – but I didn’t expect Mexico to grab me by the huevos like it has.

The natural beauty of the country is unbelievable – like nothing I have ever seen. Driving roads where the horizon lays out mountains on top of mountains is terrifying, okay, especially when you are driving the equivalent of a tricycle, but once you get past that, the feeling that vista gives you is tremendous - you feel wild; unhinged. Like anything can happen but it will all be fine. And the people are so friendly. How often have you said, “Hello. Good morning” to every single person you passed on the street, including those riding by in a taxi and the driver? And had it returned? Americans' perception of Mexico is so skewed by media portrayal that we should sue for libel. Is a bunch of guys standing on the corner drinking Coca Cola and eating grilled corn on the cob threatening to you? How about when they all raise their Styrofoam cups in recognition, genuinely smile, and say “Buenos noches”?

So, our plans have changed a lot and we’ve had a hard time getting out of Mexico. We haven’t needed an explanation because we haven’t asked any questions – we go with our gut. Along the way we’ve run into other folks who are wobbling from there to here, but no matter what song they’re singing, when we tell them how we’ve got stuck, it’s the same refrain: you’re doing the right thing. There’s no place like here and there’s no place like now if you’re enjoying yourself.

And we are. Since we arrived on Sunday at Rancho San Nicolas, with plans to spend a night or two, a family of four from Canada has pulled in next to us. An older couple from Switzerland who has been here before pulled in next to them, and a young couple from Switzerland who has not been to Mexico before but took 14 months to drive up from Uruguay pulled in next to them. This has driven the American who has been here for the last month to the corner of the grounds – not because he’s not social, but because too much English spoken outside his window breaks his concentration while he finishes his novel. On Friday night, we all went out to dinner.

On Friday morning I took a walk on the path that leads steeply up from the campground, crossed a few barbed wire fences to the top of the hill, and gathered my breath while I watched the mist rise from the fields. I came down along the road and took a path that led to a river where I saw an old man gathering sticks like gold from the bank to put on the fire where he was heating his breakfast. When I arrived back at camp at 8:30, J was in the common room. He had started a fire in the fireplace and was playing pool with his two new friends. Coconut, who will be a teenager on Monday and has been acting like one lately by sleeping to 10 a.m. or later, was not far behind. Before lunch, she was demonstrating to the boys how to draw a bow to shot an arrow, and actually joined the Wiffle Ball game, which the young Swiss guy joined too, after sitting and watching us for about a minute.

Coconut told us later in the day that she wanted to stay here until at least Tuesday. We planned to start our drive to Palenque, a major Mayan ruin, on Sunday, but now - what the hell? We may have lots of questions about what we’ve done, and what we are going to do, but there are no regrets.

Crazy Town

Chiapas state has the most independent-minded indigenous culture in Mexico. Parts of the state were never fully subjugated by the Spaniards, and several tribes continue to deny Catholicism as the national religion and not pose for tourists’ pictures. The state even rejected joining both Mexico and the United Provinces of Central America subsequent to the eviction of the Spaniards in the 1820’s before deciding by referendum to join Mexico. We’ve witnessed some of that edginess during our short stay in San Cristobal de las Casas. We arrived during the week long fiesta for the Virgin of Guadalupe, who is the patron saint of Mexico, and she apparently requires that the band start playing at five a.m. to the accompaniment of exploding sticks of dynamite and someone yanking on the church bell 100 times every fifteen minutes. Despite the constant drizzle of rain, uncharacteristic, we are told, the people’s spirits, and the fireworks’ wicks, have not been dampened.

We didn’t plan to stay in San Cristobal for long, having just come from an extended stay in a colonial city (Oaxaca), but I ran Wesley into a telephone pole so we are grounded for a few days while it gets repaired. As we drove to a body shop recommended by someone that we just met, I described to Coconut and J how the repairman would drill a hole into the middle of the dent, insert a tool that would splay out from the inside, and then pull the metal back into shape. Instead, the body guy comes out into the rain and mud with a heavy mallet and a piece of two by four and starts banging away. In an ironic twist, he thinks he might have the van a few days so he can get the paint to match. A perfectionist.

After watching this spectacle for as long as we could take it, we started walking back to town. At a busy intersection, we saw a kid - a teenager - with a plastic liter bottle filled with gasoline. He took a swig from the bottle, spewed flames from his mouth, and then daintily dabbed his lips and chin with a greasy rag. It looked really cool, but was a depressing thing to witness. We gave him fifteen pesos. I told Coconut and J that if they ever needed money that badly they should come talk to me no matter how grouchy I am that day.

Later, while we were eating lunch at the fanciest pizza place in town, a parade came marching through the main pedestrian street. We quickly ran to the balcony of the restaurant to watch and saw an older man at the end of the line nonchalantly lighting bottle rockets with his cigarette and launching them from his hand like he was Cape Canaveral. We didn’t feel nearly so badly about this - in fact, we could hardly stop laughing it was so funny.

The fireworks culture in Mexico is quite different than what we are used to. Explosions are mandatory for any celebration, and ubiquitous at all other times. I think the school principal will often set off a rocket in lieu of opening bell. R and I had fun shopping for cojetes before our Thanksgiving celebration and the kids had fun setting them off - under my supervision, of course, for whatever that is worth. When J had a friend come over for a play date, lighting off fireworks was the featured activity.

Anyway, the rebellious strand that permeates life here seems to have trickled over - this morning even R, a notorious pacifist, got into the act. When the first volley of gunpowder was detonated outside our door several clicks before sunrise, she rolled over and said, “I’m going to kill them.”

Indian style in San Cristobal de las Casas

Since Mexico gained independence from Spain in the early 1800’s it has survived several invasions by other countries, including the United States in the Mexican-American War, and internal uprisings due to bad government that has caused it to change heads of state more often than the wind changes direction. Many of these civil wars were instigated by indigenous peoples seeking equal rights, particularly with respect to land holdings. In fact, as recently as the 1990’s, a rebel group called the Zapatistas engaged in an armed insurgency as a means to bring about social reforms for indigenous peoples in Chiapas state, where Wesley is currently parked. In some cases these uprisings bring about social reforms that redistribute land ownership to ejidos - community land holdings - for local groups native to the region. On Saturday night, we arrived at Sima de las Cotorras, an ejido of the Tzamanguimo people - who must be ancestral to Chiapas.

The Sima is an enormous sink hole in the ground, dating from who knows when, and its recent claim to fame is that it is home to several hundred green parrots which spew forth from the ground like feathery lava each morning and seep back at dusk, but only during the months from April to October. In December, the parrots are sunning themselves in warmer climates; but nobody told us this, so we bounced our way over 12 kilometers of rocks and mud to camp in the rain and cold. No matter, because the chances that we were going to be able to wake at dawn and hike the few meters to the sink hole to see the birds as they greet the day was really quite slim. Instead of seeing birds, we justified our visit to the Sima by taking a stroll around the perimeter of the interior of the hole on what we called a “danger walk”.

Being on the ejido, and witnessing what the folks have done with their opportunity to own land - nicely maintained grounds, well-built and kept cabanas, good restaurant, something to keep their children home and to take pride in - led to a Vanamos breakfast conversation comparing Native Americans with Mexican indigenous peoples.

Now, I’m just a guy with too much time on his hands, so none of what follows should be taken as gospel, but just some general reading I’ve done has learned me that before the Spaniards conquered what they came to call Nueva Espana, the native tribes like the Aztec and Maya had settled in great cities and when they warred with neighboring cities, they sacrificed the captured warriors by cutting out their hearts, or chopping off their heads. Native Americans, like the Lenni Lenape and the Apache, did not build cities but generally moved around the plains or forests depending on the season. If they got into a disagreement with a neighboring tribe, they organized a raiding party and, under cover of night, stole some of the other tribes’ horses. Comparatively, this is the equivalent of bullying the other tribe for its lunch money.

When the Spaniards came to Mexico they were viewed as bearded gods and were thrown great feasts and given women as concubines. Then they conquered and enslaved the men and took their land and its riches. When the first settlers came to America, they wore white socks pulled up to their knees and patent leather shoes. They tried to befriend the Indians because they needed their help to understand which crops to grow or else they would die. If the Indians were unfriendly, the settlers lived inside forts that they built out of sticks, just like the second little pig.

When the Mexican Indians got fed up with the Spanish Imperialists, a priest led them in revolt and they kicked them out, but this didn’t work out any better because the Church came into possession of the land. In the 1850’s, the Zapotepec politician Benito Juarez, one of the unsullied heroes of Mexican history, passed reform laws that required the Church to sell the land, but this didn’t work out any better for the natives because most of the land was purchased by rich people - not by historically oppressed peoples - and the rich people continued to exploit the natives and combat further reforms that would improve the natives’ station. This has continued to create unrest, and as recently as 1910-1920, Mexico was still engaged in widespread civil war to redistribute hacienda land to the natives. The natives haven’t owned their ancestral lands since the 1400’s and basically, they are pissed off about it. Occasionally, they get thrown a bone in the form of an ejido and it’s nice to see them take hold of the chance to preserve it in a way that the Tzamanguimo have done with the Sima.

On the other hand, as the American settlers became more comfortable with the land, and imported more guns and people, they pushed the Native Americans further and further west, signing treaties along the way that promised the Indians several shiny necklaces and a lifetime supply of alcohol. Eventually, the New Americans got tired of that game and created reservations in god forsaken places like Oklahoma where they forced the Native Americans to live with no economic options but to sell tax-free cigarettes and build casinos.

Well, it was an interesting conversation that we had, and Coconut even asked some questions about why Indians build casinos that reminded me of a very good book that I read called “Revenge of the Pequots” which details the history of Indian gaming starting from the Seminoles’ bingo parlors and the State of Florida’s unsuccessful efforts to tax the profits. The Pequots are a Native American tribe from Connecticut that was forced to open Foxwoods Casino and book multi-million dollar acts like Keith Urban and Nickelback, which is why you have probably never heard of them, but other tribes have heard of them which is why they all want to open casinos and get rich too.

Anyway, after our danger walk and lunch, we got in Wesley and drove a couple of hundred kilometers south and 1,940 meters up into the clouds, literally, to San Cristobal de las Casas, a colonial city in a valley surrounded by a pine forest. We planned to be here only a day or two before heading north to Palenque, but while we were waiting to pull into the campground Rancho San Nicolas, I got it into my mind that I would back up in case anyone coming out of the gate wanted to pass and I ended up kissing a telephone pole that someone had decided to plant two feet from the curb in the road. It did serious damage to the rear fender and dented the rear hatch so much that it won’t open. I also broke a taillight. What all this means is that we are going to be sitting in San Cristobal for a few days while Wesley gets repaired.