by Randy Denmon
Stranded by a Snowstorm
The next morning we were poised to cross the border into Guatemala but had a small snag. Some paperwork and insurance that I needed to drive in Guatemala had not arrived in my inbox. AIG had agreed to provide this service for a fee. All had been finalized a few days earlier, but now, waiting to cross the border, the paperwork hadn’t materialized.
I got on the phone with the agent in Brownsville. He gave me a story that AIG’s office, somewhere in the northeast, was closed due to a major storm.
Dude, we crossed deserts, mountains, and jungles on third-world roads to get here, scrounging around for power on a makeshift electrical grid, and these guys were going to hold us up over some storm? No wonder the Feds had to bail out AIG. Market forces should probably have been allowed to end this incompetence.
After a few emails and five or six phone calls, I finally got the paperwork, but it was after lunch, too late to depart for the day, especially since we’d only averaged 30 mph the day before. Our next destination was, hopefully, Lake Atitlán, 150 miles into Guatemala, and we had to cross the border.
Moderating our urge to push on, we met a young man at the hotel who spoke excellent English. He told us to only travel in Guatemala during the daylight, and make sure we had an adequate place to stay by late afternoon. We were stranded for the day.
The good news was that Comitán appeared to be a jewel hidden at 5,400 feet in the Chiapas Mountains. The alpine paradise was a popular vacation spot for Mexicans. It had blue skies, warm days, cool nights, and beautiful vistas. Filled with tight, hilly streets (a little like Pacific Heights in San Francisco), colonial buildings, smiling faces, and a lively plaza, money didn’t appear to be God here. We’d seen a few European tourists, but not one American. The kids’ big, curious, brown eyes stared at Dean’s strange green eyes and my auburn hair. We were foreigners in their backyard.
When abroad, I often try to discern America’s effect on the people and landscape. Even here, it was everywhere. Three or four car dealerships sold American brands. There was a Walmart, Domino’s, Burger King, and Autozone. In the centro, the droves of young people bounced around on Nikes, babbling away on their cell phones and tapping on iPads as they ducked in and out of the numerous internet cafes.
In my touring of Latin America, I’ve found that it is best to stay ahead of the loud, rampaging Norte Americanos, ever thrusting out from their borders. Their arrival, en masse, can turn a pleasant beach or mountain retreat into something more akin to a Spanish Bourbon Street. Which means you always have to keep exploring and moving to stay in front. It seems that the advent of the information age has reduced the trailing time of the invaders so much that if you find a little special place in 2014, you’ll likely never see that place again, especially if there’s an international airport within an hour’s drive. Hopefully for us, driving might extend this post-discovery time by a few more years when we found something like Comitán.
• • •
I remember my first experience in Costa Rica years ago on a fishing trip. On our way out of the country, we decided to give San José, the capital, a try. Our guidebook recommended the Blue Marlin Sports Bar and Hotel Del Rey, citing the place as popular with “sportsmen and prostitutes.” This was not a guidebook you’d buy at Walmart or your neighborhood bookstore, but something I’d picked up at a Costa Rican truck stop.
I’m strictly a sportsman, but I may have possibly traveled with some friends who might be interested in the other aspects of the hotel. Anyway, the place turned out to be a real treat. Part hotel, part bar, part casino, and part house of ill repute, it had good rooms for fifty dollars—a nice family-run establishment. We had a terrific dinner at the hotel, and afterward in the bar, discussed fishing as we took in the spectacle of probably seventy-five attractive, polite working girls mingling with maybe a dozen sportsmen. The gaudy, in-your-face nature of the place and ratio of women to sportsmen kind of made the hotel a sightseeing stop.
It was a gringo dream, a place so unique and outlandish, someone could bring their devout Baptist dad in and he’d get a kick out of it. We were treated like true kings for a day. I told one of my fishing pals on the way to the airport, “If the gringo ever discovers the Blue Marlin Sports Bar, they’ll have to add a half-dozen more daily flights from Dallas to San José.”
Sure enough, some years later, maybe five, maybe ten (I’m getting so old it all runs together now) I was back in Costa Rica fishing. On our way out of the country, I told the guys, “I’ve got to take you by this place in San Jose the night before we depart. You’ve never seen anything like this.”
The night before we departed I motored up to the Blue Marlin and walked inside to get a couple of rooms. I was quickly told the joint was not only full, but they were full for the next thirty days. The board behind the counter indicated that the price for rooms, if available, was north of $100 a night. To make matters worse, it looked like everything in the area was getting remodeled. I looked over my shoulder to the bar that had been somewhat tranquil a few years earlier. The free market reigned, and the hotel and casino looked like some type of Latin, X-rated Disneyland. More than a hundred Americans, flashing their money, had wedged themselves into the bar that an American fire marshal would have rated for no more than forty.
• • •
Anyway, we’d found a little treasure in southern Mexico, and we’d enjoy it before the strip malls went up—or worse, oil was discovered nearby.
I spent the free day wandering around Comitán’s rolling streets and zocalo, and took care of a few pressing items back home.
Late that evening, I put the Tesla back on charge. We planned to be on the road early, six-ish. How far would we make it into Guatemala after we crossed the border? At the pace we made the day before, it would likely take eight hours to get to our first possible place to overnight, but the road might be worse. For certain, it promised to be hilly and winding.
Dean again found the Louisiana Tech basketball game on his Chinese website. It didn’t get my mind off the daunting task at hand—six more countries to cross. In the next twenty-four hours we’d find out a lot about ourselves, and the viability of our long-term goals.
Land of the Maya
Early the next morning, the eastern sky shifting from indigo to crimson, we finally rolled out of Comitán. It was about fifty-five miles to the Guatemalan border. Not far out of town, civilization vanished as we darted up and down, round and round, here and there, over the topes, and slicing through the green hills. Most of the topes were designed for their intended purpose, to slow traffic instead of rip off the car’s suspension, but in one little hamlet the regional road engineer must have had a sadistic side.
The endless jade hills of Chiapas are one of the most impoverished and lightly populated areas in Mexico. Here, the people are more indigenous than Mexican, and as likely to speak a local dialect as Spanish. Due to its rugged mountains, and lack of mineral riches or rich farmland, Chiapas has been a remote backwater for five hundred years.
• • •
This is the home of the left-wing, anti-Mexican Zapatista Army of National Liberation. Though it has been almost twenty years since the rebels’ last major uprising, the movement still flexes its muscle occasionally, and frequently feuds with the federal government. In the last two decades, Mexico City has given the region more attention and resources, but any peace is fragile. To date, the rebels have yet to sign a peace treaty with Mexico City, and in recent years, most of the regional unrest has moved to Oaxaca, one state to the north.
• • •
Western services outside of the major towns are rare here, and while living in the adjacent state of Campeche, I felt concern as I traveled these roads, even with native Mexicans, a decade earlier. Today, like then, my worries weren’t the revolutionaries but just the sheer isolation of the place, a huge no-man’s-land in the harsh mountains between the towns. Early in the day, we passed only a few cars.
I couldn’t help b
ut fret about a mishap here, a mechanical problem or a slide off the road. I didn’t relish the thought of overnighting in this bush.
It’s not that I fear Mexicans, or sleeping on the side of the road. I have bunked under the stars in plenty of strange places in Louisiana, and I have no doubt Mexicans are no more nefarious than Louisianans.
Actually, I’m quite certain average Mexicans are much less threatening than average Louisianans. But in Louisiana, any potential perpetrator has to worry that the intended victim is packing a high-caliber firearm and would love to get some practice on a live target. In Mexico, only bad guys have guns so they are less inclined to be cautious with strangers.
For the first time, the euphoria of the trip had started to subside. Both Dean and I were now mostly engaged in the business of getting there. We were somewhat like Lewis and Clark, traversing the unknown, trying not to get lost, fleeced, or stranded. Where Lewis and Clark daily searched for water and shelter, trying to avoid hostile Indians, we looked for 240-volt outlets with easy access to the road, internet service, possibly some nightlife, and cozy, comfortable beds.
As we approached the Guatemalan border town of La Mesilla, I scanned the scenery for archeological ruins. I remembered my frequent traipsing of the rural roads on the Yucatan Peninsula, where I would pass old ruins or smaller pyramids grown up in the brush and seemingly unexcavated beside the road. To my disappointment, here in Chiapas I saw nothing.
Nerves in my spine tingled as we passed through La Mesilla and then through the two-mile neutral zone between Mexico and Guatemala. The first Guatemalan border guard we encountered asked for our papers, studied them briefly, and then told us we had to turn around and go back to Mexico to get processed out of the country before we could go on to Guatemala.
This perplexed me as I didn’t know you ever had to be “let out” of a country. When we left the States, the US border guards stopped us only to make sure we knew we were headed to Mexico.
We turned around and drove back the two miles. There, Mexican immigration and customs stamped us out of the country. There was a third stop, to sign some papers so I would get my four hundred dollars back that I’d paid to drive into Mexico.
Assured that we could now proceed, we drove back to the Guatemalan border and were welcomed into the country by a speed bump so huge I wasn’t sure we could even scrape across it.
The other side of the border was a maze of chaos. Tens if not hundreds of hasty shacks had been erected adjacent to the narrow road, selling anything and everything, and hundreds of people filled the street. It looked like we were about to drive through a county fair in Ohio.
We began the confusing, problematic, bureaucratic process that would forever haunt us while moving south through six Central American countries, getting ourselves, and more importantly, the car through customs and immigration, and obtaining drivers’ permits.
Immigration was pretty straightforward: a ten-minute wait in line and a stamp. Then the car was fumigated. After it was sprayed, I was given a receipt in exchange for one American dollar, and the border guard pointed to a little building with a sign over the door: Aduana.
Through the building’s open window I presented my passport to the customs agent on duty. “Buenos días señor. Tengo un coche, pero mi español es muy malo.”
The tall, slender man squinted, producing an unpleasant face. “Su problema.”
Translation: “It’s your problem you don’t speak Spanish.”
I pushed forward all my paperwork, my Mexican car permit, proof of insurance, driver’s license, car registration, title, bill of sale, and some other documents Mexican customs had given me upon our exit. This initiated a thirty-minute process in which I filled out several more pieces of paper. Documents were looked over and copied, and some simple verbal exchanges were attempted. The crux of the process required that I get a Guatemalan driver’s permit and the car be cleared through customs.
The mystifying, lengthy procedure went on for almost an hour until the customs agent grabbed a stack of papers and walked outside to inspect the car.
While I’d been inside worrying and explaining, Dean had been conversing with the immigration and customs agents, and a dozen or so natives all now stood around the car, its trunk and hood open. They all seemed amazed that the car didn’t have a motor.
Dean had pulled out the charging adapter and was demonstrating how we charged the car.
Several of the officials were sitting in the car, and a few more were having their pictures taken in front of it.
The scene lightened the custom agent’s mood, and he only briefly looked over our belongings before signing our paperwork and sending us on with well wishes. I looked at my watch. It was now 10:00 a.m.. The border crossing had taken about an hour and a half. Two border crossings down. The process had been so cumbersome and time-consuming that we decided we didn’t have the time to get Dean a driver’s permit, which was fine with me.
As we pulled away from the customs house, we were assaulted by money changers and peddlers. I exchanged a Ben Franklin for Guatemalan quetzals, but we were going nowhere. A quarter mile up the road, an 18-wheeler had tried to turn around on the tight street, producing a twenty-car line. People screamed and bitched. Horns blared. The local police stormed into the mess in hopes of sorting everything out. The truck was wedged sideways, the cab facing a vertical hill. It would be a while before the cops could get the truck back on the road and out of the way. Over the road, a huge sign read: Bienvenido a Guatemala.
Crazy Drivers, Big Mountains
Frommer’s Travel Guide says this about driving in Guatemala:
In general, I don’t recommend renting a car in Guatemala. The roads are often dangerous. Guatemalan drivers, particularly bus and truck drivers, have apparently no concern for human life, their own or anybody else’s. A brutal Darwinian survival of the fittest reigns on Guatemala’s roads. Passing on blind curves seems to be the national sport. Pedestrians, horses, dogs, and other obstacles seem to appear out of nowhere.
It didn’t take long driving up and down the twisting road to determine that Frommer’s had a good handle on driving in Guatemala. Despite this, I couldn’t help but be overwhelmed by the beautiful country, the most mountainous terrain we had yet crossed. Even in the twenty-first century, railroads have not penetrated the steep mountains of Guatemala’s western highlands.
We entered the country into one of the most impressive, majestic valleys I’d ever seen. The steep, teal slopes fell almost vertically thousands of feet from a royal blue sky to a narrow gully barely wide enough for the road to squeeze beside a clear, blue mountain river filled with raging rapids. The tight, winding road, steep drop-offs, and drivers racing and passing caused me to rediscover religion more than a few times.
In the first hour, we were stopped twice by the police. The first was almost by accident when a senseless Guatemalan driver passed us on a sharp curve. Just for good measure, the policía, armed with machine guns, waved us in with the mad driver. The officer questioned me for five or ten minutes.
Translation: “Why don’t you have a Guatemalan driver’s license?”
I produced the permit I’d just spent over an hour laboriously getting. Just when I was starting to get worried, a soldier arrived, dressed in green camouflage. After some lengthy conversation with the policeman, they let us go.
The second stop was the more conventional, American version, the cops rushing up behind us with flashing lights. This one went a little quicker. We told them we were tourists and showed them the electric car and all our charging cords, etc. They laughed a little and let us go.
Guatemala, the most populous and fastest-growing country in Central America, is in transition. With almost 40 percent of its people indigenous and its per-capita income only about a third of Mexico’s, it has only recently begun to recover from its more than thirty-year civil war that ended in 1996. Most of the war, waged between the right-wing government and the rural poor, primarily ethnic Mayan an
d Mestizo peasants, transpired outside our windows in the western highlands.
Twentieth-century Central America is filled with bloodshed and strife—civil wars, revolutions, proxy wars, rich versus poor, urban versus rural, establishment against progressive, East against West—but nowhere was the exploitation and subjugation of the indigenous people more brutal than in this country.
The story of Guatemala’s Maya and their struggle for equality is long and complex. Rigoberta Menchú, an indigenous woman from the western highlands, wrote a bestselling story of her life as she rose from a young peasant worker to become a leading human-rights voice for the region’s indigenous people. Most of her family were killed by government forces along the way.
In 1992, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, one of only three Central American Nobel laureates. There is also an award-winning documentary about Rigoberta’s story, When the Mountains Tremble.
In the last decade, La Violencia, as the Guatemalans call it, has settled down, but scuffles, some resulting in death, still continue between the liberals and the police, and of course, the drug lords utilize the area to move their precious merchandise closer to the market—upscale America.
• • •
As we drove on, stopping several times for traffic to be diverted onto gravel paths around washouts, I fretted, continuously staring at the range meter. It didn’t take long to determine this was coffee country, and it must have been the harvest season as the truck beds were loaded with either workers headed to the fields or bags of the valuable harvest. Along the road, coffee bags were stacked ten feet high.
The road kept climbing, our pace excruciatingly slow over the topes, now call tumulos (most designed much better than the Mexican versions), around three-wheeled taxis darting everywhere, and enterprising capitalists standing on the edge of the road shoving papaya, melons, and nuts into our window. I appreciated their entrepreneurial spirit, but weaving around them took my full attention. At every little village, our pace slowed even more as big trucks wedged onto the road from everywhere.