Though it’s perfectly true that a typical Latin American border station leaves it almost entirely up to you to find or not find the appropriate counter in order to obtain your stamp, and that you might in principle cross back and forth between two countries without ever being noticed by the authorities, I was nonetheless detained awaiting further investigation. Not in a prison cell, for sure, but seated opposite a Guatemalan senior customs officer who amiably went over the details of my recent confession. But not for long, since the Father himself was only all too eager to get inside the confessional! He soon had me introduced to his wife, appearing from nowhere, and then shared pictures with me of the rest of his family members. As a final gesture of confidence he extended an invitation for me to visit with him and his family in their home. After an hour of absolutely delightful small talk over coffee and cookies, I was released and not even obliged to pay fiscal fees to the Republic of Guatemala, since these only apply when you leave the country by air.
On the other side of the border control, however, the customs officers were more than eager to have me paying. Entrance and exit to and from Belize territory is a frontier business, the authors of which don’t find it below their dignity to even charge for the issuance of a surprisingly expensive ‘One Day Transit Permit’. The whole thing is carried out pirate style, with a touch of unsentimental Anglo-Saxon expediency. After this legally enforced robbery, the taxi driver waiting on the other side seemed friendly and cooperative in so far that I mentioned what I thought the trip from the border to the town of San Ignacio should cost, and he consented.
But where was I? Oh, yes, on my way from Guatemala City to Managua. Although the border controls between Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua did take some time, the bus passed through them during the hours of daylight, which is considerably more comfortable to handle than being forced outside in the middle of the night. Of course we had in many instances to carry our own luggage across the frontier and then make sure it was reloaded again. But sometimes this walk was mostly symbolic and only involved carrying the bag from one corner of the room to another. The hassle was really nothing compared to the ordeal described above. It also considerably helped to blunt the edge of hardships that the bus made a full stop in San Salvador at a hotel offering decently priced accommodation. I managed to sleep well and horizontally for a couple of hours before regaining my bus seat at seven in the morning.
The most picturesque of the border stations mentioned is no doubt the one between Guatemala and El Salvador, the Aduana Terrestre las Chinamas. The borderline between the two countries here coincides with the course of the river Paz, which I think is a pretty good suggestion to both sides — let’s not forget that in 1969 the Lilliputian state El Salvador actually went to war with neighbouring Honduras, a brief bellicose event triggered by the outcome of a soccer game between the same two nations. El Salvador also had a civil war on its hands during the 1980s in which an estimated 75,000 people lost their lives before a peace treaty between the government and the guerrillas could finally be concluded in 1992. Guatemala too, during the same period, had its own share of military and civilian atrocities.
It may have been in my imagination only, but the lively clear waters of the river, where the women stand up to their waists doing laundry while their colourful dresses float like lotus flowers all around them, and where naked children frolic in the natural cascades, evoke the image of an untouched Indian Eden; yet, at only 100 metres distance above them on both sides of the bridge, the representatives of two armies are present. There is a steady stream of trucks, buses and cars in both directions waiting to receive clearance but, naturally, leaving Guatemala was of course easier than entering El Salvador. Before we could continue towards the capital of the latter the bus was searched repeatedly and everybody asked to identify his luggage, both the one travelling in the compartment below deck and the ones brought inside the cabin. However, after about an hour in total we were on our way, enjoying the spectacular sight of the, for the time being, peacefully smoking volcanoes dotting the plains.
Less interesting than the nature scenery is the metropolitan area constituting the country’s capital San Salvador. But it does have one of the most beautifully located modern airports in the world; close to a long sandy beach framed by vegetation. The adoption of the US dollar as the national currency in 2001 predictably has been a thorn in the side of the political Left, since it effectively means that the country can’t carry out any monetary policies of its own and instead has completely placed its faith in the hands of the Federal Reserve. Low interest rates, allowing people to take cheap loans to buy private property, have on the other hand triggered inflation with surging prices on everyday commodities as a consequence.
In spite of the temptation, there is actually to my knowledge only two Latin American countries (apart from Puerto Rico which really is almost a part of the United States) that has adopted the US dollar as their official currency, and that is El Salvador and Ecuador. In Guatemala the national currency is the quetzal, which is a very apt name since it designates a swiftly flying bird. In Honduras they have the lempira, and in Nicaragua it’s the córdoba. Notwithstanding, a greenback is pretty much welcome everywhere in Latin America, whatever local governments and political parties try to say to the contrary.
The bus arrived in San Salvador in the evening and I managed, as mentioned above, to get a room for the night in the hotel from which the bus would depart again in the morning. That was all fine. But why had I even embarked on this long trip all the way down to Granada? The principal reason might sound odd enough. The truth was that I was going to see ‘my’ dentist, Dr. Leo Grant. I guess it might seem a bit exotic to travel 24 hours in order to visit a dentist in Nicaragua of all places, but I knew Dr. Grant from before and had reason to be satisfied with his work. I’m not the only one in this position. There are for example quite a lot of elderly Americans who travel to Nicaragua to have their dentures taken care of at a fraction of what such interventions would cost in the US. In addition, other expat gringos combine their trips abroad to renew their Costa Rican visas with a visit to a dentist in Granada. It really is a bargain. If you’re in the region and need to have some dental work done, this is the place. I know only Leo Grant by personal experience, but there are several other highly professional dentists and I suppose both their prices and services are comparable to those of Dr. Grant’s.
In order to string all this together I had consequently made sure that my return ticket to Florida would be from Managua and not from Cancún, which had been my point of entry to Central America a month earlier. There was not only foresight and convenience behind this decision. In order to emulate US immigration laws, several countries that ought to be more than grateful that tourists come there to spend their money have implemented laws stipulating that foreigners must be able to show proof of a return or an onward ticket to be admitted to the country. To be honest, upon arrival in a Latin American country by air I have never been asked by any customs official if I have a return ticket and I don’t really think they care if you do. Unfortunately, however, it’s the airline companies that cause the problems. Although I, along with many other passengers, know them to be in the wrong as far as most Latin American countries are concerned, they routinely state you won’t be allowed in to this or that country unless you can show the airline taking you there that you have a return ticket. Apart from not being true, this is highly inconvenient for any traveller who is planning to go from point A to point B, C, and D without returning to point A, but instead flying out of this part of the world from point E at some so far unspecified date, and this simply for the reason that he hasn’t decided as yet for how long he’s going to be travelling and where. The airline companies never seem to have given a second thought to the fact that there are travellers with open schedules, preferring to go about the world in an impromptu way.
In other words, if you can’t or don’t want to return
from your point of entry and alternatively prefer to choose another airport to fly back from, you often have little other choice than to eventually end up buying two separate tickets for more or less the same return trip. Perhaps this weird regulation, upheld only by the airline companies and not by the custom authorities of Latin American countries, is part of the plan, since it forces you to spend more money than would otherwise be necessary on your flights. To this end changes in budget round trip tickets are either impossible or very expensive to make.
Most recently, in connection with a trip back to Europe from Colombia, the patent absurdity of airline corporate policies came to unabashed light. Having prolonged my stay in that country, I had had my return ticket from Medellín changed twice through the travel agency responsible for its initial issuance. These procedures of course cost me substantial sums of money. Still, it was cheaper to make these changes than to pay for a new ticket. As the day of travelling approached I nonetheless happened to be back in Miami, several weeks ahead of the rescheduled departure from Medellín. But it was from Miami that my second flight out of a total of three eventually was going to leave. Being familiar with the intricacies of airline policies, I thought it advisable to at least inform American Airlines, (head operator of the flights) that I wouldn’t use the first leg of my trip. In other words: they were free to use and sell my seat from Medellín to Miami a second time (well actually, with all the previous changes taken into account it would have been more like a fourth time!) To this end I went to the Miami Airport, seeking out their reticketing office hidden in the remotest location of the terminal area. As I began to explain what I thought would be a very straightforward matter of just taking me off the passenger list from Medellín to Miami, I could see on the face of the female representative that this was not going to be a merry waltz in the rose garden.
Sure enough, though it was still possible to cut out one part of the itinerary it would incur a 330-dollar fee. I tried to talk some sense into her but there was simply no way round this obstacle as monumental as it was arbitrary. In AA’s perspective, my joining the flight sequence in Miami — and although the flight from there was not with AA but with Iberia a full seven hours after the scheduled arrival of the AA machine — my change of departure city would qualify my shortened itinerary as a ‘different journey’ altogether, hence subject to the rates applicable at this point. She assured me that in view of this, the 330 dollar rebooking fee ‘was not bad at all’ for the proposed change. I on the other hand was appalled, especially after learning that any luggage taken from Medellín to Miami would all the same have to be brought through customs clearance and then be rechecked in at the appropriate Iberia counter. I left the airport without having made any new reservation with the 330 dollars still at my disposal.
Calling up AA’s Customer Service a couple days later I had to spend nearly an hour waiting on the line for the agent to find me pertinent information. Some of the delay was attributable to the hopeless task of trying to convince an automatic voice responder/decoder to accept my correct (Hispanic) pronunciation of ‘Medellín’ as the city of departure: ‘I’m sorry but I don’t understand what you’re saying’, the robotic voice repeatedly stated before finally transferring me to a human representative. The only gain in finally talking to a supposedly living person was that after 45 minutes of my holding the line, she returned with information that I could indeed check in my luggage at the Miami instead of at the Medellín Airport free of cost. Now this may sound like a very marginal concession on AA’s part, but it was essential to the plan fomenting in my brain ever since I had been confronted with the prospect of the 330 dollar rebooking fee.
To make not only a long flight but also an otherwise long story short: the music event at which I participated in Miami was held on a Sunday evening. The following Monday morning, I returned my rental car to Fort Lauderdale to hop onto the Spirit Airlines flight to Medellín, allowing me to once again briefly meet with my beloved travel companion for a single special evening in connection with her impending birthday. I wouldn’t say that the whole thing came out any cheaper than the 330 dollars mentioned above, but it sure was a great satisfaction to know that the money was spent on traveling, champagne and a festive dinner instead of ending up in the pockets of corporate bosses, just sitting there on their fat asses doing absolutely nothing!
Tuesday morning the AA plane on which I had a reservation left for Miami, allowing me to eventually check in to my subsequent Iberia flight from Miami in concordance with corporate requirements of a complete journey. However — and here comes the second reason for my seemingly convoluted manoeuvring — before I left Miami this time, I would pick up another rental car for the hours necessary to collect my luggage left inside Mike’s tranquil lakeside townhouse (where I had been residing for the last ten days) and return the violin I had rented from Manuel at the Allegro Music Store. Finally, although the staff at the Iberia check-in counter was arrogant, they wouldn’t refuse my luggage because it hadn’t been previously checked in at the Medellín Airport. And no matter how annoying explicit rudeness can be, my share of inconvenience was in the end minor. True, it was and is still is absurd to me, that my luggage could join the trip in Miami for free whereas I couldn’t. But one should perhaps, for the sake of mental peace, compare such an annoyance to the simultaneous lot of 150 passengers and crew blown to smithereens in the French Alps as a consequence of a psychopathic German pilot’s decision to distinguish the day of his ‘suicide’ as a truly memorable occasion. The regional Iberia air shuttle from Madrid passed in the vicinity of the crash area only hours after the disaster. But instead of going insane, the pilots of the aircraft safely brought us down on the tarmac in Nice, where the promise of a Provençal spring seemed to just be awaiting my arrival to be fulfilled.
So much for the malpractices of airline companies. Leaving Fort Lauderdale for my impromptu visit to Medellín, I indeed had to produce proof of my return ticket with AA to Miami. Apparently there is nobody to disprove this assumption, although it should be none of their business to control where a passenger goes after having ordered and paid for a one way ticket to any destination. I have on a previous occasion personally spoken to the very helpful local manager for Spirit Airlines in Managua, and he certified in situ that you can indeed fly there without having proof of a return ticket. I later tried to make this point at the Spirit Air US counter in Fort Lauderdale, only to hear them stubbornly maintain that I need proof of a return ticket to even go there. Some years ago there was still a way to get around all this by buying a full price ticket and then have it refunded at the airport upon arrival. Now they have of course made sure this possibility no longer exists.
*
After this digression into the various horrors of flying, let me return to Granada in Nicaragua, where, as the reader may recall, I had arrived by bus more or less straight from Lake Atitlán in the highlands of Guatemala. The reason I didn’t fly from Guatemala City to Managua in the first place was not only because it would have deprived me of the pleasure of seeing the landscape along the route, but also because of the unforgiving prices that Latin American airlines habitually charge for even very short international flights — inversely domestic flights can sometimes be very cheap, so it’s always a good thing to be on the alert for national sales and promotions.
The town of Granada was founded by yet another one of these indefatigable Spanish conquistadors (in this case Hernández de Córdoba) in the early sixteenth century, and named after the famous eponymous city in the southern Spanish region of Andalucía, at this time only recently reconquered from the Islamic Moors. In many ways it’s a pendant to Antígua, Guatemala. But although it lacks some of the cultural romance and noble nostalgia of the former, it’s a more open and spontaneous town located on a plain with only one volcano as a visual backdrop. The climate too is different and sometimes, for example in March and April, so hot that one thinks twice about trotting the streets during siesta
hours. Inversely, evenings can be absolutely delightful, especially on the broad pedestrian Calle La Calzada, stretching all the way from the eastern end of Parque Central down to the ferry terminal on the shores of Lago Colcibolca (although to go all the way down there after dark is not highly recommended.) There are bars and restaurants along this pedestrian street offering in- as well as outdoor service — the latter something one will never come across in Antígua, not even in the loggias surrounding its Plaza Mayor.
As anybody who has visited early Spanish settlements in the New World knows, all its colonial towns are variations on one and the same theme: a central square or rectangular tree-shaded plaza, in some cases adorned by an elevated, roofed, wedding-cake-like music pavilion in its midst, surrounded by the most important official buildings and private mansions as well as the city’s cathedral. If there is no pavilion the probability is very high that there will be a statue of Simón Bolívar or some more local libertador at the geographical midpoint. Judging from the staggering amount of roads, streets, and plazas named after Simón Bolívar throughout South America, one can only conclude, without even being familiar with his career and itinerary, that he must literally have been everywhere. As a professional revolutionary with dictatorial ambition he has since been intensely admired and emulated by self-styled 20th and 21st century Latin American dictatorial leaders, such as Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, Daniel Ortega, and Rafael Correa, to just mention some of the more colourful of them. He might even have inspired William Walker, a physician and professional filibuster from the United States, who in 1856 proclaimed himself President of Nicaragua, only to put the city to the torch as the locals refused to acknowledge his authority. He was executed, not by the Nicaraguan but by the Honduran government in 1860.
Incidents of Travel in Latin America Page 31