by Randy Denmon
For some time, we followed an old Guatemalan bus and got to watch two of the bus’s employees climb back and forth between the bus’s roof and passenger bay through the back door—while the bus drove, bouncing over the terrible road! I backed away for fear that if one of the workers fell, we might run over him.
In Guatemala, like most of Central America, buses are the primary means of transportation for most people, and fill the roads, overcrowded with smiling faces, and constantly stopping and starting. They range from a few modern models similar to Greyhounds to the more frequent versions, called chicken buses, the standard American yellow school bus, some probably sold south of the border by the East Baton Rouge School District twenty years earlier after they were worn out and deemed unfit for transporting kids across the parish.
Here, they’re given a fresh coat of paint, not yellow, but loud colors, psychedelically displayed without order and adorned with weird murals, obviously painted by some artist unable to make a living on canvas. By my inspection, a single rule governs the chicken buses: there’s always room for one more!
• • •
Since Tuxtla Gutiérrez, we had been on the Pan American Highway, built in the 1930s to connect Alaska with the southern tip of South America. The road’s name evokes a major public-works project. Don’t be fooled. Likely, the project was some type of scandal that lined the pockets of contractors or government officials across two continents. Much of it resembles an unmaintained, rural county road in America, except here, it traverses one of the roughest mountain ranges in the hemisphere.
By late morning, our range down to about a hundred miles, I worried that we had made a wrong turn somewhere. For most of the morning the river that paralleled the road had been flowing against our direction of travel, but now the water ran with us and had been doing so for more than thirty minutes. I’m a civil engineer by profession, but it doesn’t take an expert to know that water in any river doesn’t turn around and flow upstream.
Dean needed to relieve himself, so I pulled over and whipped out our only hard-copy map of Central America. Fortunately, the three-foot by three-foot piece of paper was both a road and topographic map. I quickly determined that through the morning we had climbed up the Selegua River valley, but somewhere, the road crossed the continental divide, over the 10,000-foot-high Cordillera de los Cuchumatanes Mountains, and there, the pass formed the headwaters of two rivers, the Selegua, and the Rio Sacuma, which flowed south. I touched a button on the Tesla’s range meter that graphically displays the average energy usage for the last thirty miles. It clearly lets the driver know if he has been ascending or descending. Relief filled my soul as I realized we had been driving downhill for the last fifteen.
By two-thirty, after eight hours on the road, we had traveled all of 150 miles, but then stumbled on a miracle—a patch of new, four-lane road.
Forty minutes later, we approached the turnoff to Panajachel. We had a tip. Panajachel had a hotel owned by a pair of Americans. It was about 3:00 p.m., and we had seventy-one miles left in the batteries. Another decision.
We opted for the conservative path and turned off to Panajachel, immediately commencing a precipitous descent. I pulled over to check the map again, always leery that we might end up at the bottom of a valley and be forced to climb back out of it with little spare power. It was nine miles to Panajachel, 3,000 feet below us.
We slogged on, down the winding road, through the town of Solola and its pedestrian market, the brick road jammed with people, animals, motorcycles, and vehicles of every make, until we got our first glimpse of the impossibly beautiful Lake Atitlán, a wonderful sheet of water stretching for miles to the horizon, glistening, encased by towering green volcanoes, and draped over a mountain caldera.
I glanced at my watch and the odometer. It had taken us more than nine hours to make today’s two hundred-mile trip. Even discounting the time spent crossing the border, we had averaged a measly 28 mph. At this rate, how long would this trip take?
But we would make it and, more importantly, we had made it well into Guatemala, in an electric car! Euphoria filled me. How far could we go? Could we possibly succeed? We still had six countries to cross, all considerably more difficult than Mexico, and we still needed to find a charge today. Thus far, the adventure usually began when we reached our daily destination.
Randy in Chiapas, Mexico
Rigging a plug in Comitan, Mexico
Panamanian electrician wiring us a plug in Penonome, Panama
Recharging in San Luis Potosi, Mexico
Dean posing with the car in Comitan, Mexico
A rural checkpoint in Panama
Dean with Guatemalan police at Rio Pas Bridge
Corrupt Honduran police
Mayan girl suckering Randy in Panajachel, Guatemala
Randy getting directions from Rafael in Guatemala
Cow in the road in Honduras
Goats at the Guatemala border
Lake Atitlán in Guatemala
Volcano in Nicaragua
Randy and Dean at the Panama Canal
All photos from author’s collection
The Car Steals the Show
On the outskirts of Panajachel we saw a sign for the Hotel Atitlán, the hotel we’d heard was owned by two Americans. We pulled in, but to our disappointment, the security guard told us they had no vacancies. Next door sat the Hotel Bahia del Largo. I went in and explained our situation. In no time, I was walking the hotel with the very polite clerk and one of the hotel’s maintenance men, both intrigued by our situation.
After fifteen minutes of looking, we found no 240-volt power at the hotel, but at the hotel’s adjacent event center, we found a dryer and GE electric stove. I checked the dryer’s outlet, only 120 volts, but removing a few drawers next to the stove, we checked the connection, a modern NEMA 240-volt, 30-amp socket. My voltmeter said it was good, and we soon pulled the car to the event center and stretched one of our extension cords into its kitchen. We were charging at 26 amps, my best charge of the trip. We’d have a full charge by four in the morning.
By the time we got the car rigged up to charge, most of the hotel staff and the manager had showed up to look at the Tesla, amazed we’d driven it from America. In no time, most everybody was taking pictures of the car and treating us like celebrities.
After checking in, I ambled over to our room and saw four of the hotel staff, to my disapproval, hand-washing the Tesla. The dust-covered car needed a bath, and I appreciated the generosity, but I liked the car dirty. Covered in grime, it didn’t look that expensive or appetizing for bandits. With the custom washing, it now looked like it had some value and would attract attention.
Somewhere along the road, we’d transitioned from loco gringos into sensations, but the car was the real star of the show. With two countries and thousands of potholes and speed bumps in our rear-view mirror, the little, amazing electric car looked no worse for wear. There’s a simplicity, and with it, a reliability in electric transportation, an evolution similar to replacing piston-driven airplane engines with jets—performance not only increases, but so does the dependability due to the lack of moving parts.
• • •
Electric cars have very little that can break down or require maintenance. They have no transmission, carburetor, fuel or water pumps, alternator, radiator, starter, power steering pump, or spark plugs, to name just a few components, and none of the belts, oils, and filters required by these support mechanisms. Electric cars only have batteries that power the simple electric motor and its supports. Like a ceiling fan, they run seemingly forever with nothing to break down.
The lack of moving parts produces pure power, straight from the electric motor to the wheels without being routed through a transfer case and transmission, and without having the burden of running all the other mechanical devices. And it has no exhaust that can contaminate the air, especially in the third world, where the cities are extremely dense, and cars and trucks often belch a continuous st
ream of thick, gray smoke.
Founded by American engineers Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, Tesla Motors was incorporated in 2003. A year later, South African Elon Musk led a major investment into the company and became chairman of its board. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania with degrees in economics and physics, and a co-founder of PayPal, an online financial services company, Musk has since been the face and driving force behind Tesla, taking over as CEO in 2008.
The Palo Alto, California-based company struggled early. From 2006 through 2012, it sold only about 2,500 of its sole model, the Roadster, a two-seat sports car priced at just over 100,000 dollars. But Tesla succeeded where all the world’s major car manufacturers had failed. It put a reliable electric car on the road. The key selling point, lacked by its competitors, was the Roadster’s lithium-ion battery cells that provided a practical range of over two hundred miles under typical driving conditions.
In 2010, the company made its initial public offering, the first American car company to go public since the Ford Motor Company in 1956. Musk’s stated goal was to bring affordable, practical, electric cars to the masses. In the years since, the price of a share has increased tenfold, and in 2012 the four-door Tesla Model S hit the streets. In its first year and half on the market, Tesla sold more than 25,000 units of the Model S.
The current price of a new Model S: somewhere between 70,000 and 105,000 dollars, depending on features and battery capacity. In Louisiana, the car’s biggest plus is that it cost about seven dollars in electricity to go 265 miles. If you live in some Democratic stronghold like California or New York, where electricity is much more expensive, double this.
• • •
Due to their simplicity, with time and scale, the cost of electric cars will shrink significantly below conventional gasoline-powered cars or trucks. I base my opinion of electric cars on the best available information. The facts are clear: electric motorization is a more efficient, cost-effective means of transportation than gas or diesel vehicles. Much more importantly, we can power these cars with American electricity produced from domestic energy.
I worked in the oil industry for years. Today, with much of Asia starting to drive, we’re burning oil at levels unimaginable only thirty years ago, with current consumption quantities outpacing discovery rates.
The wonderful age of oil is ending. In the long run, the price will only climb higher and higher, the reserves located in more and more complicated places. We buy more than 200 billion dollars of foreign oil every year. That’s not to mention the billions we spend every year guarding the overseas supplies. Without oil, there never would have been an Osama Bin Laden, and the loss of all the blood and treasure trying to stymie the next big terrorist.
If you lack the aptitude to decipher the magnitude of these billions and trillions, let’s just say it’s enough money to solve any of America’s pressing problems, with plenty left over. A solution to our reliance on oil will have to come at some point, and when it does, the entities, companies, and countries that have the technology to keep producing goods and services without oil will command the power and wealth. I vote for the same nation that solved most the world’s problems in the last century. Still, electric cars and Tesla are not completely out of the woods. Elon Musk, having invested almost his entire fortune in the car company, nearly lost it all in 2008 when the company’s finances verged on the perilous. Even today, though Tesla’s stock has soared and the company is valued at over 30 billion dollars, it has yet to show a profit.
It will take years of hard work, research, and billions of dollars invested in the basic electrical infrastructure needed to charge electric cars before they’re fully incorporated into the mainstream.
Southern Summer of Love
The car in good hands, Dean and I headed into town. Now late in the afternoon, I noticed for the first time that the days had started to grow longer, probably by an hour. This made me ponder the enormity of the distance we’d traveled, now about 1,500 miles.
I found Panajachel charming, one of several Mayan villages around the lake. We strolled down the Calle Santander, an open-air market. Latinos and indigenous Mayans sold Western comforts and all sort of Mayan collectibles to the hundreds of tourists wedged between the shops, restaurants, and bars. More tourists paced the town than we’d seen cumulatively the entire trip.
There were a few retiree types and backpackers, but mostly the town resembled some type of American college-aged hippie-fest, the youth of the world’s most powerful country stumbling around in sandals, stringy hair, generally showing off their free spirits. I even smelled pot a few times.
I’ve never smoked a joint, mostly because since I reached the age of consent, I’ve been subjected to perpetual drug tests, either by the US Army or my profession, but I can roll with almost anything. I generally subscribe to the live and let live approach.
Part of my love for all things outside of America is the disorder, the lack of rules, the independence. Despite its greatness and economic power, America is becoming a bland place of uniformity. Though I’m certain it was once the most interesting spot on the planet, the media and federal government’s never-ending war to make us all homogeneous is bearing fruit. They’re standardizing us in the name of political correctness.
My dear home, Louisiana, the closest thing left in the United States to something truly unique, has resisted this for decades, but I fear we’re like the last house surrounded by a spreading wildfire. Just last fall, I was informed there was no smoking in the piano bar at Pat O’Brien’s in New Orleans. Appalled, I inquired about this aberration, as I know well New Orleans will be the last place in America to put aside man’s unhealthy pleasures. The waiter replied, “Go to the patio bar if you want to smoke. Most of the tourists don’t like smoke.”
Hell, that defeats the entire purpose of the place. Louisiana has not a single natural wonder, not even a beach, but the tourists flock in to enjoy our culture, our festivals, our madness, and our incredibly diverse and interesting people. Individualism reigns supreme. If someone wants to go out for a night where everyone dresses and behaves the same, and they’re told what to do, they’ll stay in St. Louis. I fear that, in another generation, Louisiana will be more like Iowa than Bohemia, forced to conform, and that we will lose all local flavor.
We Americans have by and large fallen for this hoax. We adore certainty, abhor chance, snub unconventionality. Americans transformed a virgin continent into the world’s most powerful country in less than two centuries primarily due to our rejection of Old World rules and rituals, accomplishing things other countries couldn’t even dare to dream. Now it seems we’re taught to obey and follow, rest on our laurels.
• • •
As Dean and I ambled on, the magenta sunset dripping over the picturesque village and expansive lake, we spent time people-watching. Here, there were no rules, just the endless, emotional chatter of haggling for goods in a ritual that many Americans loathe. I, on the other hand, love to barter. In New York or Atlanta, some government bureaucrat would probably show up wanting to see everybody’s licenses and inquire if all the merchandise had passed muster with some federal agency. Or more to the point, had all these transactions been reported to the IRS?
The closest I come to this art form back home is buying tickets to a college football game from some fan or scalper. But there the capitalists are usually inebriated, their calculating and reasoning skills, if any, diminished.
I finally made the mistake of nodding to one of the young girls of almost pure Mayan blood who carried five or six colorful scarfs. She and another young girl soon assaulted us, walking down the street with us, brandishing dozens of garments. The last thing I’ll ever need, or wear, is a scarf, but the young girls were so persistent, so adamant, so loveable, that I finally paused to look over one of the scarves. “¿Cuánto cuesta para este?”
The girl smiled. “Five American, forty Guatemalan.”
“Five?” I said in English and with a s
mile. “¿Usted esta loca?”
The girl grinned. “Okay, okay. Three American dollars.”
I passed off my best Spanish translation of, “How about five dollars for two, one from each of you?”
The two girls rolled their eyes, apparently not sure if they should take the offer before I changed my mind, or try to sucker me for more money.
Seeing their dismay, I pulled out a wad of Guatemalan quetzals and paid them each their initial asking price. Their smiles made my day.
The transaction only brought on five or six more of the business ladies, now strolling along beside us. I tried to wave them away. “No más dinero.”
One of the older ladies very persistently pursued me, babbling away in Spanish. My translation: “How come you only buy from young, pretty girls? Buy one from an old woman who works hard.”
“Tough luck,” I said. “Welcome to reality. Young girls have been outselling old ladies since Adam and Eve.”
“What?” she mumbled.
I laughed, and she produced a big grin. This was too much for my heart and after spending a few minutes scanning the scarves and joshing her about her sewing skills, I bought another, bright turquoise scarf without even bartering. I then shooed the other women away before I had to find a bank machine just to get a taxi back to the hotel.
I put the three scarves around my neck, wondering what I would do with them. If I had a girlfriend, I could possibly give one to her, telling her that I was thinking of her way down in Guatemala. I decided to just leave the local clothing in the hotel room and possibly some other pushover would be negotiating right here in a few days for the same scarf. All in all, the haggling with the feisty Mayan women and their big friendly eyes was more than worth the fifteen dollars.