by Randy Denmon
“Go, go,” William yelled from the back seat, his tone urgent. “And give me two hundred dollars.”
I turned to look in the backseat. William continued to urge me on. My palms got wet, my heart pounded. Ahead, five or six more shady characters hovered around a shack. The tension mounted. I wanted the hooligans out of the car, now. I finally put the car in park, making sure the guard-stand behind us was still in sight.
William got adamant, pushing his head between the seats and over the center console, bitching loudly with a stern voice and serious face. He mumbled some quick Spanish I didn’t understand, then snarled, “More money.”
I asked to see the papers, my concern growing. William and his buddy didn’t appear to be armed, at least not with guns, but they obviously had plenty of friends with them. The sons of bitches stealing the car seemed a real possibility. I half wanted to get out and give the little punks what they needed, a good Louisiana ass-whupping. Dean would be on board. In fact, for a second, I thought he was about to initiate the process.
William’s crony finally presented the papers.
My patience gone, I snatched the papers. I wasn’t going any further with two crooks in the car.
Dean opened the door and put a foot on the pavement.
To my surprise, William and his junior jumped out of the car, both confronting Dean, their voices growing louder.
Fear and confusion filled my spinning head. Were they about to steal the car? Everything got quick. I raised a hand, flashing our last two hundred dollars, leaned over the passenger seat and threw the money out the door, hoping one of the thugs would take it. “That’s it. That’s all I’ve got.”
William looked at the money as his partner moved around to my side of the car. “How much more you got? Give it all to me.” He said sternly, bending over to pick up the money.
As he did, my instinct took over. I slipped the car into drive and eased forward a few inches.
Dean ducked back in and slammed the door.
My throat thick, on the edge of my seat, I stomped on the accelerator, racing ahead. We shot by the shack and six other hooligans fifty yards in front of us. Fifteen seconds passed, my gaze roving back and forth between the road and my mirrors. We rounded a curve, putting the area out of sight. The Tesla now topped 60 mph. I saw nothing behind us, but as we rounded another sharp curve, a big cow stood in the road, a reminder of the problems with fleeing anything down here. I swerved and missed it, driving on.
Ten tense minutes passed, Dean and I both quiet, our faces red, our minds confused. We saw not a car coming or going. Finally, to my relief, we approached a military checkpoint. The stop was standard, the polite soldiers lessening my tension slightly.
Still unsettled, we drove on through the most desolate landscape yet. As we moved south, the terrain got more sparsely populated with each border. I checked the GPS. It was about thirty miles to Choluteca. We couldn’t get there fast enough.
“Did we get fleeced or robbed?” Dean finally asked. “I’m not sure if that was just your typical scam or something that could have been much worse.”
“I’m not sure either, but what’s the difference?” Still a little frayed, I appreciated that I had not been terrified, and we hadn’t panicked. Somehow, we got out of there. I looked out over the golden, barren hills of the Choluteca Plain.
• • •
I knew a little about this area, at least scientifically. It had been analyzed by hydrologists worldwide after Hurricane Mitch in 1998. Mitch was the biggest Atlantic storm of the century, twenty thousand casualties, the majority in Honduras, most of them here. It was the deadliest storm of the century. There wasn’t even a close second. The massive rainfall had induced landslides and swollen the local rivers to six times their annual flow. The water cascading off the hills, stripped of trees for agriculture centuries before, literally swept away the topsoil and towns, turning the region into a soaking desert. Thirty percent of the population became homeless instantly.
Through the dust-blown hinterland, we crossed several rivers and passed a few grungy small towns, each a collection of untidy shacks and a few dogs that chased us, their lifespans likely measured in weeks, if not days. There was nothing to induce a stop, and we finally approached Choluteca.
We spotted a pretty nice hotel just outside of town. Inside, I explained our situation. The hotel clerk and maintenance man showed us a 240-volt socket on a pole behind the hotel. I checked the power and wiring. It was good, but as I removed the charging adapter from the trunk, the hotel clerk returned.
In Spanish, he said, “The owner doesn’t want you to charge.”
Dean began to protest.
My shirt drenched in sweat, my body drained, my mind devoid of humor, I took a final drag from my cigarette, dropped it on the ground, and turned to Dean. “Let’s go check out the Rivera, and whatever else is here. If we don’t find anything, we’ll come back and bribe this son of a bitch. Everybody’s got a price. I need to get some more money anyway.”
I turned to the clerk. “Dónde está el Hotel Rivera?”
“Across the bridge,” he said in Spanish, pointing. “Take a left at the town’s only red light. You will see it.”
Off we went, over the destructive Choluteca River, and across the town’s only sight, the eight hundred-foot suspension bridge built by the US Army Corps of Engineers and the famous bridge engineer Conde B. McCullough, in the 1930s. It had survived Mitch. Maybe the Corps should employ the same safety factors to levees around New Orleans.
We haphazardly drove around town, but found no red light and saw little, really not much more than a village with dust-covered streets, many playing out to dirt not far off the main drag. The scenery was simple, single-story wood or stucco buildings under tile roofs. We found ourselves in a residential neighborhood, the yards filled with clothes drying over taut metal wires.
In Central America, there are no phone-data services. It’s not like Orlando, where you can google for hotels or map an address. We just moseyed along on a journey of discovery, like nineteenth-century explorers, but in a fast car and watching the GPS map our location relative to the city’s boundaries and major streets.
We finally returned to the town’s main intersection, where the Pan American Highway had a stop sign. A stop sign must be called a red light locally. Taking a left, we found the Rivera. Not too bad. I went in, spreading around the few American dollars I had left in my clothes bag. Soon, we viewed the rooms. Inside, they had ACs powered by 240-volt juice. After checking in, we powered up. The AC was high up on the wall, and Dean made a sling and tied it to the AC to hold up the heavy extension cord. We ran the cord through the room’s window. It would be a steamy night in Honduras without air conditioning.
I went across the street to a grocery store, a Latin madhouse where I sucked three hundred dollars worth of Honduran lempiras from an ATM and bought some water, chips, and cheap Central American cigarettes. The Super Bowl started in ten minutes. I didn’t have a favorite, but hoped the Broncos might pull it off. Peyton Manning is from Louisiana, and the thug Seahawks had knocked the Saints out of the playoffs a few weeks earlier.
By the time I got back to the room, we had popped the fuse. I found the hotel’s maintenance man, tipped him, and after fifteen or twenty minutes found the 20-amp fuse and reset it. I was learning, begrudgingly, that for some reason, the Central American fuses tripped on much smaller amperages than in the States—just another variable to consider in this comic escapade.
I lowered the charging rate to 13 amps and did a quick calculation. We’d get 117 miles of charge by six-thirty the next morning. With the 100 miles we still had in the tank, we’d hopefully get somewhere.
It had been a long nine hours that day. We’d gone 185 miles. I finally flopped down on the bed to give my attention to the TV. The Spanish-language announcers babbled away. Only into the second quarter, the Seahawks were already up three touchdowns. The Super Bowl was essentially over.
As I powered
up my computer, Dean walked into the room.
“What’s up?” I said.
Dean put his hands on his hips. “Is there something in that electric car’s manual that says it will not charge unless you’ve got your shirt off? After all we’ve been through, why do you insist on torturing me in these cramped quarters, showing off your big white belly.”
I lifted my computer, setting it on my bare but sweaty stomach and checked a few emails. “We may be starting to get noticed. Bill Moore with EV World wants to do a conference call with us. He sent me the number to call him.” I looked at my cell phone. I had service, but it was low. I hit reply and typed out a response.
Thanks Bill. We’re in rural Honduras now. Tomorrow, I will likely have some better phone service. Tomorrow around 6 will be good. I’ll email to confirm an hour earlier. If you don’t hear from me, we got caught up on the road somewhere, but I will touch base with you the next time I have email service. Best, Randy
Impatient for morning, I scratched out a few notes from the day and answered an email or two, my body dying to fall asleep. I had days earlier given up writing, too busy just taking care of the essentials. We were out on a limb, for sure, but hopefully at the bottom of the cauldron. The trip was somewhat like a pendulum. With the exception of northern Mexico, the countries got worse, at least from a wealth and safety perspective. But from here, they should progressively get better and more modern.
• • •
The trip had started with fanciful romance, a fantastic excursion, a break from the real world. It had now devolved into something more like work, the days and nights filled only with the cumbersome job of getting there, with little else to occupy our minds. In our quest to daily keep moving south, the scenery and exotic locales had almost unnoticeably turned bland. But we might actually make it to Panama if we could get through Honduras.
I picked up the map, having little clue what lay ahead. The ominous, now everyday question besieged me. Where were we going, and what lay ahead?
• • •
With daylight, we said goodbye to Choluteca. Late in the night, we’d apparently blown the fuse again, but we did have 188 miles of battery. As Dean complained about the local beer, we slipped out of town, stopping at a military checkpoint only to be waved along by the friendly sergeant after producing our papers. The Nicaraguan border was only forty miles away. I wanted to get there early. We hoped to make Granada, the ancient Spanish city on the banks of Lake Nicaragua.
Though we’d had little correspondence with the Honduran natives, with the exception of the border villains, most were smiling and eager to help. The night before, an English-speaking Honduran gentlemen staying at the hotel had knocked on our door, wanting to look at the car he’d heard about. We showed the fifty-ish man the car, all its bells and whistles, and he took a few pictures. I bartered for some directions, and he told us the best way to Managua, Nicaragua’s capital, was to get off of the Pan American Highway onto CA-3, via Somotillo, closer to the coast.
We conversed with the man, a professional, for a good hour, and told him our story of the latest border crossing. He lamented and explained the dire state of his beloved country, large portions of it now overrun with narco cutthroats in bed with the government.
The man (I won’t mention his name, profession, or city) told us the sad story of his own plight. Recently extorted for money he couldn’t pay, he was currently applying for a work visa in Canada. The criminals had, out of the blue, paid him a visit, saying they knew everything about him, where he lived, where his kids went to school, what type of car his wife drove, etc. The local police had told him they couldn’t help.
• • •
Stories like this remind me how fortunate we are in America, or how simple corruption can corrode every facet of society. Later in the night, I watched two large Honduran families lounging and playing around the hotel’s pool. The cute kids splashed in and out of the refreshing water as the parents laughed and sipped drinks at a table.
I’ve always thought Central American families are much closer than American families, probably because of the lack of a social net. The family is all they have. And we have little concept of the stress these families live with every day—their son might accidentally end up in the wrong place at the wrong time, their beautiful young daughter might catch the eye of a powerful gangster, or a family member could just disappear.
In the States, it doesn’t matter if you’re the local whiz kid who went on to found a software company or you went to work at the local mill at eighteen and ended up a foreman twenty years later. If you’ve been an honest, productive citizen, you’ve built up some capital with the community. You get the benefit of the doubt, and you typically have to do something wrong to get sideways with the government or underworld.
The opposite holds true in much of the third world. The more successful you are, at least until you become the very rare super-rich, the more you become vulnerable, a target. Here, I’m constantly reminded that it’s not America’s affluence that makes it rich, but the rule of law. Without it, nothing else matters, and nothing will bear more fruit than for humankind to live with the rules of the game established and adhered to. No amount of government aid, handouts, or pork can match this, so sought after in much of the world but taken for granted daily at home.
Honduras appeared totally broken. Though statistics vary, it’s probably the poorest, most lawless country in Central America. The security situation has devolved so much in recent years that in 2012, the Peace Corps, present in the country since its inception in 1961, pulled out citing security concerns.
The country has avoided the modern outright civil wars that have infected its neighbors in the last hundred years, but minor conflicts between leftists and the government never seem to end. Largely democratic for more than twenty years, things have not worked out so well for Honduras and its eight million residents, almost all of mixed European and indigenous descent.
The American influence has been similar to everywhere else in the region, the country dominated by United Fruit, only to be followed by CIA-trained military dictatorships and death squads to beat off the Communists. In the 1980s, America funded a proxy army here known as the Contras to fight off Central American leftists. Of course, like the Communists they battled, the Contras cut off a few innocent heads and raped a few women along the way despite the fact they were backed by one of the world’s most civil nations. Even in 2009, the Honduran Congress had removed the president in an act condemned by most of the world.
A few months later, to show who was still in charge, the narcos had the country’s hardline antidrug czar, General Julian Aristides Gonzalez, gunned down after he dropped his daughter off at school.
The Southern writer O. Henry coined the term Banana Republic after a stay in Honduras a hundred years ago. Today, I was ready to put the place behind us. I’d been to Honduras on several occasions in the last decade, and even driven across a large section of it, although under the care of an Interpol agent. But traveling to the Bay Islands or the touristy Mayan ruins of Copán is not the Honduras most of the natives experience every day.
• • •
Awash with natural beauty, smiling eyes, cultural riches, and colonial plazas all begging to be discovered, the country has the potential to be a travelers’ paradise. But the possibilities of the country are far from the realities of today, and forsaken southwestern Honduras is no place to hang out and sightsee in a shiny new car that you can’t fill up at the local gas station.
Just before the Nicaraguan border, we passed through the little town of Guasaule. With just a few hundred people, it had only five or six dirt side streets, sided by run-down, tin-roofed buildings. These little impoverished villages all look docile. Two months after we passed through Guasaule I read a story that the local authorities had found a young Honduran man, his head lopped off, lying in the muddy streets.
As we said goodbye to Hondurans, I hoped, maybe with our sincere help one day, the c
ountry would get this all sorted out so their kids could grow up to be safe and successful, possibly even so bored with their easy lives, they’d want to ride off into the unknown somewhere just to get a break from their humdrum schedule.
Poets, Volcanoes, and Hugo Chavez
Getting out of Honduras was a hell of lot easier than getting in. The border crossing had a few hawkers and handlers, but we brushed off the hooligans and stamped out of the country a little after 8:00 a.m.. We made it. Across the Rio Guasaule we went, greeted politely by the first Nicaraguan border guard.
“Welcome to Nicaragua,” he said in English.
I presented my papers and after a few questions was motioned forward.
I turned to Dean, surprised at the simplicity. “Maybe this won’t be so bad.”
“Don’t count your chickens yet.”
“I’ve been here before,” I said. “Much better than Honduras. It’s the land of volcanoes and poets.” I raised our guidebook. “Lonely Planet concurs. Poetry is the national pastime. Even the Communists and right-wing generals consider themselves poets.”
We found the immigration building, bothered only by three young kids. In fact, the Nicaraguans, or Nicas as they call themselves, had a novel plan to promote tourism—a policeman pacing the area to run off anyone pestering us. He asked us about the kids, but I said, “No problemo.” Maybe I’d been overcritical of big government.
We processed all the paperwork in less than an hour. The three little kids, not even ten years old, led us around, pointing and mumbling, “Over there.”
Dean bought the little businessmen a Coke, and I exchanged some of my Honduran lempiras for Nicaraguan cordobas as I wondered why the future villains weren’t in school learning to read and add. The other good news was the crossing was still too complicated for Dean to get a driver’s permit.
In less than an hour, we were on the open road, a stretch of pavement slicing through the coastal plain. My initial impression was alarm at the number of horses, buggies, and vaqueros (cowboys) traversing the road, far more than we’d seen anywhere else.