With so many relatives and friends in all the major US cities, and with Puerto Ricans spread all over the world — they are even to be found in Jerusalem — there is very little reason to rock the boat, especially since the island is one of the most densely populated in the world. So even though unemployment is rampant and the US Coast Guard is constantly busy scooping up poor Dominicans dumped on the deserted Isla de Mona, or the even closer Isla Desecheo, by unscrupulous traffickers, a steady flow of subsidies compensates for a feeble industrial output and ensures an average living standard well above the Caribbean median. Another effect of the US pumping money into a system that would otherwise crumble, is a near complete lack of agriculture. Although practically anything could be made to grow on the island it’s really only coffee and, to some extent sugar cane, that is locally produced whereas tomatoes, salads and cucumbers are imported from abroad. The supermarkets sell exactly the same items as in the US but prices are not conspicuously higher than on the mainland. And, true, they do have their own avocados, but these don’t have to be cultivated as they come straight off the trees everywhere on the island. The ones of Rincón are apparently most famous because of their exquisite texture and flavour. I have nothing to object to that evaluation.
As far as Puerto Rico’s cultural traditions go, one element, as predominant as it is bizarre, consists of various Protestant sects, the services of which, on account of the terrible singing that goes on for hours in their chapels, is just as much a torture to the musical ear as the ubiquitous reggaeton. At the opposite end of Puerto Rican piety, which in spite of its primitive forms of worship seems sincere enough, one finds MTV-inspired vanity. Since Puerto Rico is richer than Cuba or the Dominican Republic, people dare to flaunt gold crucifixes on heavy gold chains without running the immediate risk of being decapitated for them by ladrones. Add to this that a surprisingly large number of young men (gay or not) actually shave and wax their legs and arms (and the armpits, that goes without saying), have meticulously tailored beards and even enhance their peeled eyebrows with black makeup. Their preferred clothing is the rapper’s uniform: far too long shorts dangling half way down their butts, sneakers that look like modern Hi-Fi systems, voluminous sports shirts hanging down to their knees and a baseball cap. And yes, Puerto Ricans do play baseball, one of the country’s legendary heroes being the baseball player Roberto Clemente who, while still in the midst of his career, was tragically killed in a plane crash off the Puerto Rican coast.
It thus seems to me that the Spanish heritage, in spite of a tenacious religious bigotry and a language that, at least officially, is some kind of Castilian, is not very prominent. Still, the famous Spanish cellist Pablo Casals had a Puerto Rican mother and he was the driving force behind the creation of the Casals Music Festival, still taking place every year in the island’s capital. In contrast the modern Caribbean lifestyle involves very little folklore and tradition. To most Puerto Ricans it seems quite enough that a super showbiz star like Ricky Martin counts as one of them.
To be fair to both people and the landscape, however: although my lingering impression of the island’s population is that it has ended up in a sort of no-man’s land between two cultures — the old autocratic albeit more charming Hispanic and the more recent and intensely consumerist North American — Puerto Rico also is a very beautiful island. The two smaller islands just off its east coast, Vieques and Culebra, are very attractive too with a staggering display of colourful tropical waters and coastlines. In particular Vieques has for the longest time been spared excessive tourism because half of the island was military terrain. I believe this has now changed, opening up what was earlier almost a wildlife refuge to real estate investors and other merchants. But even during its military tenure (and my only visit to the island so far took place as early as in 1996) it proved virtually impossible to find a decent hotel for less than at least a 100 dollars a night. The one I stayed in was called Hacienda Tamarindo and literally had a big living tamarind tree in its midst.
I said a 100 dollars a night, right? Well that was back then. After a short Internet survey, I found that as of the year 2015 you’d rather have to come up with twice that amount for a single room at the Tamarindo. Solid breakfast is included and apparently there still is a well-stocked ‘honour bar’ to the benefit of hotel guests. Since I had to make up my own mind as to what honourable would be, I decided that whatever I had paid for the room would give me substantial leeway, and acted in accordance with that assumption.
The view from the hotel is most enticing. I particularly remember walking down to the nearby rocky beach with its stunning array of rainbow coloured waters. As I passed over the cattle ground I came across the corpse of a horse. It was in an advanced state of decomposition. Impossible for me not to make the association to Charles Baudelaire’s famous sonnet ‘Une charogne’ (A Carcass), in which the poet compares the future of his beloved muse to the putrefied mass, utterly invaded by maggots and insects, at his feet. It was Baudelaire’s way of confounding (not confronting) ideal beauty with horror and disgust that announced a ground-breaking novelty in contemporary poetry, paving the way for the extravagant poetics of Verlaine and Rimbaud and, even later, the Surrealists. To me Baudelaire is, and has always been, the only French poet I can truly say that I admire and relish. I feel irresistibly attracted to his aesthetics and I believe I know why: although his choice of poetical themes is quite restrained, his formal treatment of even the most appalling subjects is invariably classical, consistent, lucid, elegant and poignant. His musical cadence is impeccable to my ear and his mastery of not only French, but also of English, is rare in French letters of the era. Well known for his congenial translations of Edgar Poe, I’d like to also point out his masterly ‘imitation’, as he himself calls it, of Longfellow’s majestic Song of Hiawatha. Just to give the reader a sample, here the opening of the poem in its original:
‘On the Mountains of the Prairie,
On the great Red Pipe-stone Quarry,
Gitche Manito, the mighty,
He the Master of Life, descending,
On the red crags of the quarry
Stood erect, and called the nations,
Called the tribes of men together.’
And as cross reference, Baudelaire’s Imitation called Le calumet de la paix (The Peace Pipe):
‘Or Gitche Manito, le Maître de la Vie,
Le Puissant, descendit dans la verte prairie,
Dans l’immense prairie aux coteaux montueux;
Et là, sur les rochers de la Rouge Carrière,
Dominant tout l’espace et baigné de lumière,
Il se tenait debout, vaste et majestueux.’
It was only seven years ago that I spent ten months in Puerto Rico, but my memories of them, like the carcass above, have begun to decompose. In retrospect I certainly don’t regret having pitched camp there for a while. I did indeed have a very personal motif to choose this location, but since I have decided not to bring the more dolorous aspects of my past into this account, I can’t give to the reader the more precise circumstances pertaining to my choice of location at that point in time. I thus remain true to the admonition given to us high school students by our British, gentlemanly teacher Owen Lee — who passed on to the happy hunting ground many years ago — that our essay to be composed and presented a few days later in class, might well be ‘personal, but please not too personal.’
A sailing trip in the Gulf of Honduras
Since we’re still in the Caribbean I’d like to seize the opportunity to tell the story of how I ended up meeting a German professor of mathematics on his way to a conference in Oaxaca on the topic of ‘how to prove that something is impossible’, as well as an American-Canadian yacht skipper who had been dumped by some Australian hayseed and — now in need of both a new crew and a therapist — invited me to join him for a sailing trip from the island Útila off the Honduran coast to Ri
o Dulce in Guatemala.
Beyond the craggy northern coast of Honduras there are a number of so-called bay islands, most of which are tiny, but three of them substantially larger than the rest. These three are really the peaks of a long coral reef laid out on a northeast axis along the coast. The smallest, most southwesterly of these, as well as the one closest to the mainland, roughly 16 nautical miles distant from the town of La Ceiba, is Útila. To get there by public transportation one has to board a marine construction that looks like some hermetically sealed amphibian landing vessel used at D-Day and offers about the same level of comfort to its passengers. Luckily the ride over the channel only takes about 45 minutes. But this was enough time for me to realise that my co-passenger (there were not many of us on board that floating trough) with big curly hair and beard, sturdy sandals, and something of a sullen regard, must by all criteria known to me to be a German.
After having impassively observed one another we struck up a conversation as the vessel was about to dock. My assumption that he was German turned out to be 100 % correct. Since we were both looking for a hotel, it came naturally to walk down the main street of Útila town together. Close to one of the many diving shops we found accommodation in neighbouring rooms on the second floor of a guesthouse. For several reasons it’s often preferable in tropical countries to opt for second floor rooms if available. For one, the mosquitoes are usually less of a nuisance, second, they usually offer more privacy, and third, the view is usually better.
The view from behind the second floor balustrade over the bay and the open sea beyond it was indeed very inviting and conducive to further conversation. Fritz von Zweienhalb, as his full name spelled (and I here omit the title ‘Herr Professor’ because Fritz didn’t like to be called that way, no doubt considering it too formal in the relaxed setting we happened to find ourselves.) Nevertheless, academia was never far from Fritz’ mind and after some initial research I managed to find out that his areas of special interest and competence within the vast field of mathematics were algebraic complexity theory, parallel computation, finite fields, computer algebra, and cryptography… As for myself and my technical knowledge of math I can’t even remember how one proceeds in order to carry out a division operation of multiple numbers on paper. But though I have some general understanding of the principles of mathematics, I can only hold my ground in argumentation with other generalists. With a specialist such as Fritz I couldn’t even get out of my starting blocks before he would disqualify me with a drawn out and tired: ‘Nein, Nein, Nein!’
Very soon I found myself cornered and had to throw my last trump card on the table. The second last is √ -1, which is unsolvable (the answer is called ‘the imaginary unit’ by mathematical convention, read: embarrassment), and in my view just another proof of the absurdity of negative numbers. As a matter of fact my last trump is in the same suit as the √ -1 and consists in questioning how a multiplication of negative numbers can possibly yield a positive result, for example -2 x -2 = (+) 4. To which Fritz of course replied that it really is terribly simple to demonstrate — I think you can imagine the rest. I believe he lost me already at the very first transition: ‘this relationship can also be expressed as’…. whereby mathematics, that to my simple mind should only consist of numbers, starts to look like an alphabet haphazardly put together without sentence structure, grammar or meaning.
After having thus exhausted my by all means very limited mathematical repertoire I wisely turned to asking the question what it was that had brought him to Útila. His answer was that his father had been there many years earlier and been so impressed with it that he had encouraged him to go there as well. That had been almost a promise on the son’s part, and considering that Fritz had since travelled to almost every corner of the Earth, Útila, apart from being a father’s preferred destination, was also a remaining white spot on Fritz’s inner map. It seemed to me that Fritz had applied the superlatively German virtue of Gründlichkeit (thoroughness) to his travels as well, because he had practically been everywhere, while at the same time being an appointed Professor at various highly prestigious institutions around the world. But research is research and Fritz, in his younger days, had taken his wife and their young children on a trip in the iconic Volkswagen van of the epoch from Alaska to Cape Horn, which even involved shipping the car from Panama to Colombia, since the Pan American highway simply ceases to exist north and south of the Darién, which is the name given to the wilderness connecting, or perhaps even more to the point: separating the two states.
I left Fritz with his bottle of red wine, his pipes with fragrant tobacco and his books that, as far as I was concerned, could just as well, and rather, have been written in Chinese. After having had dinner I strolled for a while along the Main Street. In spite of being a small island with very limited motorised circulation on the boardwalk that runs along the bay, it’s far from secure to walk there because of all the motorcyclists who feel they have the right to drive as fast as they can on what is otherwise, by necessity, a narrow pedestrian zone. Fritz had made the interesting remark that it was typically Anglo-Saxon to let house façades line the beachfront instead of letting the promenade pass in front of it, which he assured me was the more Latin way of arranging such things. There could be some truth to this. In spite of being administratively part of Honduras, the racially diverse population of Útila is primarily English speaking and even has its own jurisdiction, meaning for example that their police force is independent from that of the rest of the country — which perhaps contributes to explain why its members are so fond of wreaking havoc among the tourists from the top of their motorbikes. More importantly, though, this potentially sets up the island’s tiny and idyllic-looking airport as a strategic hub for drug trafficking.
It is well known that all three of the Honduran Bay islands, including their surrounding keys, offer convenient storage and transit point for various drugs, notably cocaine originating in Colombia, destined for the Cayman Islands and the US market. According to a recent El Heraldo newspaper report, a staggering 85 % of the population of Guanaja, the easternmost and least developed of the three islands, regularly uses crack, cocaine and/or marijuana. But although Guanaja, because of its lack of tourist infrastructure, is the number one spot for narco-trafficking, frequently involving fishermen and other members of the local community, both Roatán and Útila have their fair share of drug trade as well. These islands are often the first ports of call for drugs passing via the Colombian islands of San Andrés and Providencia off the coast of Nicaragua, before being transported to Belize and Mexico. Now, this is not something the average tourist to for example Roatán (and I recently spent three lovely weeks there myself) would notice or even be aware of, but it’s a fact to keep in mind for anyone wondering how many of the poor in these island enclaves actually get by on a day-to-day basis.
Anyways it wasn’t drugs I was after, but rather the calm of a little seaside bar with decent and, above all, not too loud music. This is how and where I found Barney. He was sitting alone in a comfy chair by the water with a rum drink close at hand. He invited me to join him and this is how our joint venture came about. In telling it I shall skip the whole initial story of his allegedly falling in love with an Australian woman 20 years his junior (their final break-up was preceded by some argument concerning her lap dog), and just take it from the point where I entered the action.
Like Fritz, Barney is unusual among travellers in that he’s actually not only an intelligent man. He also has a lot of imagination — which he’s fond of referring to as his ‘female side’, sometimes making it slightly hard for me to decide whether or not I should believe everything he says or use my common sense to filter the information. I wouldn’t go as far as to imply that he has some of the characteristics of a con man, but he’s definitely, like myself, an opportunist and I think that’s why we immediately came to recognise and appreciate one another.
The dance on roses having r
eached its grand finale on Roatán, Barney had pulled out of its French Harbour and brought his stately 42 feet yacht, Teleportation, to the bay of Útila in the hope of either selling it right there or bring it to the marine trailer parks of Rio Dulce in Guatemala. From this night onwards we began to hang out, and not only during the evenings. We did some snorkelling together, taking the Teleportation’s dingy to some preferred spots. It was on Útila, with its gorgeous coral reefs, that my passion for this kind of aquatic activity was awakened for real. Ever since I love to float on top of the sea and look down on the landscapes, mountains and valleys, teeming with life, below me. The species of fish, the prehistoric looking plants, the colours; it’s just fabulous, and in addition it’s good exercise — just remember to put your T-shirt on before going into the water. The sun is relentless!
Finally, and even though I could indeed foresee what the result was going to be, I introduced Barney to Fritz. As expected it was like trying to unite fire and water, whereby Barney was the frustrated fire trying to light up easy-going jokes, mercilessly extinguished by Fritz’ innate seriousness. As a matter of fact, Fritz every now and then became quite irritated with people around him and then withdrew into a kind of sullen aloofness that I would a priori consider quite inappropriate for a cosmopolitan traveller, supposedly used to deal with a lot of random trouble and annoyances. How he was going to deal with the inevitable problems connected with a planned trip in the near future on motorbike through Central Asia I can only imagine, but I suppose he finally went there and also lived to tell the story.
Incidents of Travel in Latin America Page 26