Incidents of Travel in Latin America

by Lars Holger Holm

  A ‘ring of fire’? Yes, indeed. The lake, situated at 1500 metres above sea level, is ringed by mountains which in theriomorphic formations dive into the lake’s unfathomable blue water (there is no actual reliable measurements of the lake’s maximum profundity, but so far depths of up to 600 metres have been estimated.) Although I would never contemplate taking a swim in its water (primarily because of the agricultural fertilisers that are washed out there with the rains) local children certainly don’t hesitate to do so. And just as Isidore said, the water, regardless of is depths, is neither too cold nor too hot because it is heated from underneath by magma.

  Over the shorelines waterfowl hover all day long. Grebes and seagulls you may see around Bornholm too. However, add to these the archaic looking pelicans, descendants of the flying dinosaurs. Finally the clouds, as always in hypnagogic formations, are also coloured by the lake and the eternally verdant mountains. At dawn, as experienced from Hotelito el Almanecer (Sunrise Hotel) the fishermen can be seen hoisting nets into their kayaks — it’s rather like watching the Mayan culture itself hail ‘the place from which the rainbow takes its colour’, allegedly the exact linguistic meaning of the single word Atitlán!

  The atmospheric light is infinitely seductive, refracting in the finest nuances and shades in the course of a single day. Some sunsets offer a firework display of flashpoints that wander over the mountainsides following the sunlight as it peers through clouds and canyons, and descend on mountain passes. And it is during these ‘Zauberberg’ hours that the Isle of Death and the Beach of Oblivion suddenly rise out of the mist, engulfed in a supernatural, timeless light that slowly and mysteriously fades, like a vision, a visitation, a waking dream…

  Venit nox: The Zodiac lights up in its zenith. Orion and his hunting dog solemnly proceed; the Pleiades wave and flash like the seven days of the week, of which Monday is the smallest and sometimes invisible. Heavenly diamonds, observed with a glass of cold white wine or a whisky at hand, in a deck chair on the hotel’s wide Earthen terrace. Above the skies shine in their infinity.

  I arrived at the village of San Pedro, located on a promontory on the lake’s western shore, four days ago, and have since not felt a desire to seek another residence on Earth. It feels like I’ve come home. Maybe I’m already dead? But in that case, an unusually living death! I am excited and inspired. Like a fish in water, a bird in the air, an artist in his fifth element. I send no photos, partly because I do not have a working camera, but quite especially since all the photos I’ve ever seen of the lake and its surroundings make the mountains look both flatter and lower than they actually are. Similarly, the camera can’t reproduce the subtle light shifts that give the incredible depth of perspective to the mountains.

  Contemplating all this artistic subtlety, I begin to find it a bit surprising that contemporary Maya painting so often insists on interpreting Guatemala’s magic landscapes in bright monochromes squarely dressed against each other. As far as I can see, the use of that colour-scale can only be justified in the last trembling minutes of twilight, when the mountains turn into blue-grey giants, the sky into a purple streak while the laundresses are seen gathering their clothes beyond a foreground of yellowish-white water lilies. In other words, it seems to me as though Atitlán is still waiting for its artistic interpreter. Dear Brother, it’s time to start packing the travel easel!

  With that laconic exhortation, I embrace you and wish you a great, rich, abundant, fertile and lush new year.

  Always yours

  Lazarus

  The Bus

  Traveling in so-called developing countries certainly has both its rewards and its fair share of hardships. One of the latter is the inevitable, and at times even hazardous, bus journey. One sometimes hears about terrible bus accidents occurring in the mountainous regions of the Earth. The only thing that surprises me in relation to these is that they don’t happen more often. And I’m not here talking about the absolutely deadly passages over for example the Hindu Kush, where encounters with another vehicle can result in a literally abysmal catastrophe, or where landslides may make the road disappear altogether, necessitating, in the best case scenario, days of excavation and restoration before circulation can be resumed. No, I’m just talking about the regular bus trips over good to decent to almost satisfactory roads that take place, every minute of the day and night, in every nook and cranny of Latin America. Here, in the overall absence of railways, buses are by far the most common and economic means of transportation.

  In every town and city there are one or several bus terminals accommodating a steady stream of arriving and departing coaches. These terminals are by their very nature bustling places. A bewildering array of bus companies have their ticket booths inside them; outside exhaust fumes of diesel engines blend with the coarse voices of ticket collectors attracting potential passengers by loudly announcing destinations, while passengers are eager to get on or off before everybody else. There are food stands, porters, pickpockets, security personnel and taxi drivers. The ambulating vendors are not content with offering their merchandise through an open window but must enter the bus — sometimes there are four or five of them yelling inside one at the same time. Add to this the sound system of the bus itself pumping out, at max volume, everything from vallenato and cumbia to techno and reggaeton. Sometimes the existence of air conditioning is a blessing, sometimes not. Often it too is set to maximum, with the consequence that it gets so cool inside that you may consider yourself lucky to get away from your travel adventure with only a cold and torticollis.

  With the possibility of opening a window, on the other hand, one stands a chance of being able to maintain an agreeable temperature in the cabin. It also provides a partial escape from the sound of rattling machine guns and crashing helicopters in the action films presented as part of the on-board entertainment. Needless to add that this sound too is a strong competitor to any attempt at conversation and that sleeping during long night trips becomes difficult, not only because of the constant tossing and turning, accelerating and breaking of the bus on interminable mountain roads, but quite especially, I should say critically, on account of the general sound level. The only merciful purpose the sound system occasionally serves is to partially block out the crying of wet babies — and on average there will be several of them on board. The frequency of screaming babies in the buses generally stands in inverse ratio to the poverty of the region: the poorer the country, the louder the bus. Sometimes the whining and heart wrenching cries of these babies go on for hours while their teenage mothers — too young to already be the mother of three, one would think — play with their cell phones. Because, yes: you might think that if these mothers are that poor, how can they even afford to have expensive cell phones? Well, I don’t know how, but they all have one. It’s possible that they haven’t had the money to replenish the credit, but they’ll still have access to the games software — alright! So here we go:

  The bus is filling up with local passengers, all used to bump into each other in the streets for no apparent reason, and even more so inside the restricted space of a bus. If it’s rare for a passenger, once seated, to get up and allow another one to reach his window seat, to help a senior citizen to place her luggage in the overhead compartments is practically unheard of. Since the use of deodorants and colognes to further personal hygiene is not all that prevalent, an exotic blend of scents, adding to the ones already being part of seat and curtain fabrics, soon permeates the atmosphere. Some passengers also find that the sound system isn’t playing exactly their kind of music and thus open cross fire from their own playing devices. Since the internal sound system is quite loud, they need to compensate for this by turning up the volume of their machine as well. Excuse me? Head phones? You gotta be kidding! Our newly arrived, and presently comfortably installed passenger, can’t even imagine that it could be a nuisance to you having to cope with more than one sound source at once. Or to be more precis
e, it neither occurs to him, nor does he care. The only way to make him stop his music is to firmly tell him to do so. But even if he grudgingly consents to this, he will never have understood why his freedom was curtailed in this irrational and random manner. As a male westerner of some physical stature, or otherwise of authority, you might just get away with telling him to shut up. But don’t take my word for it!

  At last, the bus full and the vendors gone, one hour after scheduled departure, it backs out from its platform — already here one will have ample possibility to admire the incredible manoeuvring skills of the otherwise autistic drivers — and hit the road. Or at least that’s what you hope for. In reality you have chosen to travel on the eve of a major weekend, and to just get to the outskirts of the town takes another hour accompanied by abrupt stops involving the loading and unloading of merchandise, boxes and plastic bags, as well as the delivery of some documents to a policeman on guard at a roadside café. Simultaneously more passengers enter the bus straight from the streets. These remain standing and usually get off within the greater urban area, but the frequent stops take time, especially since the ticket guy will not always have money exchange ready at hand. Normally, you have been told, the trip should take three-and-a-half hours, but since after two-and-a-half hours we’re just about to enter the countryside, you realise that a total of five-and-a-half hours under the circumstances would be a near miracle, six-and-a-half something to wish for, and a full eight hours the most likely.

  This, however, is of no concern to the indigenous driver or passenger, who both have a completely fatalistic approach to the vicissitudes of traffic, weather and wind. You too soon realise that you can do absolutely nothing to change the situation for the better. The only thing you can positively do is to work on your own attitude and try to be as comfortable as possible, which, for example, involves pushing a firm knee into the back of the seat in front of you so as to prevent the person seated there from reclining into your lap. Since nobody will ever ask you if you think it’s OK to have a ponytail in your mouth, this is the most discreet and efficacious way to ensure your own comfort zone. Often the passenger ahead will conclude there’s something wrong with the reclining mechanism, and you’re more than happy to endorse that belief. If, per chance, he does insist, he will at one point or another be forced to turn around to find out about your role in this quandary, and that will give you a welcome opportunity to more or less politely discuss the matter, explaining that though Procrustes certainly had no scruples in this regard, you are not willing to cut off your own legs in order to comply with even his most ardent wish.

  I mentioned that some of the bus drivers, apart from a stamina enabling them to sometimes drive for eight hours straight, seem almost autistic, or at least awkward as far as social interaction is concerned. By all means, they bother minimally about the comfort of their passengers and for the most part entertain a capricious driving style. I’m not saying that safety is none of their priorities, because to some extent, and insofar as they too would like to reach the destination unharmed, I think it is. But hardly anyone in Latin America, regardless whether they’re cab or bus drivers, ever tries to drive smoothly. A public transport is just as much part of the general race towards the next traffic jam as all the other vehicles in the road. The driver will thus only step on the breaks when he absolutely has to, that is, in the very last instance and only to avoid an imminent crash. The immediate consequence of this is that you’re shaken around as if inside a tumble dryer — and sometimes that is exactly how it feels when both heat and humidity are on. One, two, even three hours that way are still endurable. The real tests to your own character, strength and stamina occur on the long runs, preferably involving one or a couple of national border crossings. These, in combination with bumpy, heavily trafficked or winding roads — or all at the same time — can be absolutely gruelling.

  The worst I have ever experienced in this regard took place quite recently on a bus trip from Playa Máncora in northwestern Peru to the city of Cuenca in Ecuador. Two weeks prior I had been forced to conclude that Immigration from Ecuador to Peru was extremely slow. As I arrived in a taxi one afternoon to the Peruvian side of the border the customs agents there couldn’t process my passport because allegedly they had no access to their own database. The only one who had this access at this time was the Ecuadorian border station. I had to take a cab back to where I had come from and line up in order to even get out of Ecuador. This alone was a 1½ hour procedure with hundreds of people waiting in line for two customs agents to repeat a mysterious bureaucratic ritual before they could stamp each passport. The process was very slow and painstaking. After finally having had my own passport stamped, I had to join another line and wait for the improvised Peruvian customs office on Ecuadorian soil to carry out the same convoluted procedure. As I said, this took about two hours in total and I really thought that was bad enough. However, crossing the same border two weeks later was an even worse experience.

  The bus for Cuenca had departed around midnight, one and a half hours behind schedule from Máncora, arriving at the border station in the small hours. This time there was only one customs officer in each boot, one Peruvian and one Ecuadorian, whereas the people waiting in line were even more numerous than last time. I consequently had ample opportunity to study the immense interior walls of the waiting area covered with proud publicity and photos of happily smiling faces. It announced in both Spanish and English that the facility had been thoroughly modernised and provided with a number of amenities for the benefit of the passengers, such as toilets and shops. It also boasted of its transparent, efficient and state-of-the-art processing services. Yeah, right!

  The toilets, for one, were unbearable to visit because there was no water to flush human waste down the drains. Since the only little shop available was closed at this time, there was not even a vending machine where one could get a bottle of water — and mind you: the night was stifling hot! The bus itself was locked up so one couldn’t even return to it before all passengers had been cleared by customs. As usual there was nothing else to do than to quietly acquiesce. This time such acquiescence involved three hours of waiting in double lines until the bus was ready to hit the road. Or so we vainly hoped, because in the middle of nowhere something went wrong with the engine and the bus stopped for another 45 minutes. Luckily no malicious vagrants seemed to be around as the ticket collector managed to get the engine up and running. Then, at 4 AM, to the great joy of all overtired passengers, the sound system came on at full blast with Latin Metallica, one and the same atonal pattern mercilessly repeated until the bus reached full stop in Cuenca four hours later.

  If this border station thus is the modernised and hyper-efficient version of Latin road customs, what would then a regular old fashioned one be like the reader might wonder? Strangely, in my experience, they are to be preferred in all respects compared to the one described above. I once embarked upon a bus journey that took me from Lake Atitlán via Guatemala City (where I had to change buses) to Managua, and eventually all the way to Granada in Nicaragua. This 24 hour trip involved crossing no less than eight border stations (both sides of four border lines). They’re located along the asphalt cattle track pompously baptised Pan-American Highway, and you’ll note that you’re approaching one by looking out of the window. If suddenly there’s more than a usual amount of roadside junk, meaning even more apparent poverty, plastic bottles, dirty cesspools, tin cans, hovering vultures, skinny cats and stray dogs, chances are you’re getting close to a national border, habitually the most neglected area of even otherwise somewhat neglected countries.

  The actual border facilities are in only marginally better shape than its surroundings. But they do have ambulating vendors at all times of day and night, stands selling refreshments and nutritive tidbits, as well as officials apparently less burdened by detailed protocol than their ‘modernised’ colleagues. It’s even easy to slip through borders without even showing a pa
ssport; although it’s not to be recommended. Usually, if one doesn’t have a valid entry stamp allowing access to the country, getting out can become a problem to which money might in the end be the only solution. Nevertheless, this did happen to me once, and before I continue to describe my onward journey to Granada, I’d like to invite the reader to follow me from Flores in northern Guatemala to Belize, where my encounter with the local officials might have taken a turn for the worse.

  It was early afternoon, the rooftops basking in the hot sun while every living being, except mad dogs and Englishmen, tried to stay out of it. For me, however, the time had come to say goodbye to the idyllic Flores Island in the Lago Petén Itzá which had been my home for almost a week. A taxi had been ordered and my strapped bag gone before me into the cockpit as we took off. The driver brought me to the local station for minibuses where a rustic Mayan family, indigenous to the strange borderland sharing territory with modern day Belize, took care of me. They swiftly brought me to the border station where I had no reason to expect a problem, especially since I had deposited my bag with magic herbs from Lago de Atitlán as a gift to the next passenger in my roof terrace hammock (one of my very few principles in life is precisely to never have ‘anything on me’ when crossing a national border). I even looked forward with a rather unmotivated self-confidence to the imminent customs ceremony.

  At first everything seemed to run ever so smoothly. There were smiling female faces, goodbyes and stamps about to be sealed in my passport when, suddenly, the inhuman computer refused to give final clearance. After much puzzled investigation it transpired that I was apparently in Guatemala without having been formally admitted to the country. My passport showed that I had recently left Guatemala for Honduras but it contained no evidence of my re-entry. I explained that this must be due to my recent two-day visit to Copan, located just on the other side of the Guatemalan border. My continued plaidoyer ran as follows: ‘What really happened at that border control I’m not quite sure about. It’s possible that I managed to unknowingly ignore the booth where I was supposed to get a stamp. It is also possible that in the general turmoil and confusion of documents, (not at all as unlikely as it may sound) the officer simply forgot to mark the re-entry in my passport.’