Aftermath

by Carl Frode Tiller

  So it was all arranged. Four days after you had abandoned both your thesis and your novel and asked me to go traveling with you, we went down to the Kilroy Travel Agency, the backpacking experts, and bought our tickets, and two weeks later we touched down at Aeropuerto Internacional La Aurora on the outskirts of Guatemala City. I’ll never forget that first day on Central American soil: the staggering, positively sauna-like heat that hit us as we stepped out of the plane, the humid, oppressive air, the reek of cigarette smoke inside the terminal building—a familiar enough smell in itself, of course, but strange and exotic to us, coming from Norway, where smoking had been banned on public transport and in all public buildings since 1988. And then, of course, there was the tremendous air of freedom, the feeling of cutting loose that filled us as we plucked our rucksacks off the black conveyor belt and headed out, all set for adventure, all set to discover a foreign culture and in so doing discover more about ourselves as I—inspired by my social anthropology friends—used to say, and this was to some extent true, of course, it was just that the discoveries we were about to make would bear no resemblance to what we had expected to learn and much of this knowledge would not sink in until we were back in Norway and could get some perspective on the trip. Well, while we were there we were too busy coping with the utter foreignness of the place and taking in all the sights and sounds and smells. I had expected to view everything with an anthropologist’s eyes, but before we had even got as far as the bus station, I think I had realized there was no chance of that. Or at least, not in the way I had imagined. I simply wasn’t capable of digesting all these new sensations, the whole thing was so overwhelming.

  As genuine backpackers it was important for us to be spontaneous and take things as they came, so we hadn’t planned too much in advance. The only thing we knew for sure was that we would start by visiting the Mayan ruins at Tikal, near Flores, and go from there to Antigua, which we would use as our base for the rest of our stay. One of my social anthropology friends had told us not to waste our time on Guatemala City, and the Lonely Planet guide, the backpackers’ bible, said the same. So we took a taxi straight to the bus station in Zona 1 and boarded the bus to Flores. Then, true Norwegians that we were, we immediately started wondering whether the bus wouldn’t be leaving soon. The sign said it was supposed to leave at five o’clock, but it was already ten minutes past and we were still almost the only people on the bus. Were we on the wrong bus? No, no, we were assured by one of the ragged young orange sellers roaming barefoot around the bus station shouting “naranja, naranja” in remarkably stentorian tones, we weren’t. The bus would be leaving in ten minutes, he said. Not that he knew the first thing about it, of course, he merely wanted to give us an answer. What we didn’t know then was that there was absolutely no way of telling for sure when the buses ran. The plush-looking, expensive long-distance buses, with their air-conditioning and bathrooms, ran to a fixed schedule but, as we were to learn, the buses taken by most people simply didn’t leave until the driver decided the bus was full enough. And if our yellow-and-black 1950s American school bus wasn’t full when we boarded it, it most certainly was by the time we drove off an hour later. Three or four adults were squashed into seats designed for two, people were sitting on each others’ laps and crammed shoulder to shoulder down the aisle. And not only people: next to me sat an old lady with a piglet on her lap and on the seat behind us was a farmer in a cowboy hat with a gun at his belt and a cage containing three chickens on his knee. It was a far cry, you said, from the Dragvoll to Lademoen bus. This was a Magical Mystery Tour. It was crazy and it was about to become even more so. No sooner had the bus set off than the driver started playing ranchero music full blast, only then to turn it off again to allow a local fire-and-brimstone preacher in a suit several sizes too small for him to rise from the front seat and take the floor. Neither of us could speak much Spanish at that time, but we didn’t need to, we had no trouble understanding the terrible fate that awaited us if we did not take Jesus into our hearts. The preacher gesticulated wildly while declaiming about el diablo with a conviction and a fervor as alien to the average Norwegian circa 1999 as the fanaticism seen in the hellfire sermons of Ole Hallesby, Norway’s answer to Billy Graham, in the fifties. We were both mesmerized and utterly fascinated, but not as mesmerized and fascinated as we were to become, because shortly afterward the bus stopped and on came a man peddling pills, and we’re not talking aspirin here. According to a Dutch backpacker who translated for us, this guy had pills to cure everything from cancer, AIDS, and alcoholism to alopecia and edema. The more garishly colored the pills, the more miraculous their effects, apparently. The worst of it was that people were actually buying them. Men and women who, as I would later learn, were dirt-poor peasants who could neither read nor write and who therefore knew nothing of all of the things that we in the West take for granted were giving their last few centavos for a sugar pill they hoped might help a sick child, a mother, a spouse, or possibly themselves. We simply sat there openmouthed. Didn’t they realize they were being hoodwinked? Did they not have the slightest suspicion? No, there was no sign that they did and, tragic though it was, we couldn’t help laughing. It was like being in a novel by Knut Hamsun. Indeed, this pill pusher could easily have been August in Hamsun’s August trilogy. Still, though, it was the bus driver who made the biggest impression on us. On the inside of the windshield he had placed a sign saying “God be with us,” and well he might, you said, because neither of us had ever experienced driving like it. The bus seemed to have no brakes to speak of, but that didn’t appear to worry the driver much. The time he lost on the steep climbs, where it was impossible to push the bus beyond walking pace, he tried to make up on the downhill stretches, and while ranchero music blared from the loudspeakers and the chickens squawked, we hurtled down the plunging mountainsides so fast that we instinctively reached for each other’s hands and held them tight. On just about every bend little wooden crosses marked the spots where people had been killed in traffic accidents and roughly halfway along every downward slope a little exit ramp ran up the mountainside at a tangent, obviously meant to act as a last resort if your brakes failed—an eventuality far from uncommon in a country where every vehicle on the road looked ripe for replacement, to put it mildly. It was sheer lunacy, or certainly seemed so to us, coming as we did from a country where kids weren’t even allowed to ride their bikes without a helmet.

  Those first weeks in Guatemala were amazing. Although I admit that now, when I look at the photographs we took while we were there—at Tikal, for instance—I can’t help laughing. The area was crawling with sweaty, sunburned backpackers with cameras slung around their necks, the Lonely Planet guide in one hand and a flask of water in the other, but from the photos it looks as though we have the ruins all to ourselves. We had been very careful not to get anyone else in shot. But crowds or no crowds, the ruined Mayan city lies deep in the jungle and I knew, within five minutes of arriving there, that I would remember this for the rest of my life. We wandered along damp, earthy-smelling paths above which we could see howler monkeys swinging from tree to tree and hear the chatter and screech of gaily colored parrots and other birds whose names we didn’t know. Hairy spiders, big as a man’s hand, sat motionless on the tree trunks that our shoulders brushed against as we passed and every now and again a red, blue, and probably deadly poisonous frog hopped across the path, reminding us of the advice given to us by the plump, cheery lady who ran the hostel where we were staying: stamp your feet as you walk along the jungle paths to scare away the snakes. And the sense of being in an Indiana Jones movie was only reinforced when the path led us out into enormous clearings where thousand-year-old pyramids and temples stood revealed. We were amazed. Awestruck. Indeed, once we had hauled ourselves to the top of a 150-foot pyramid and sat there in the ruddy glow of the low afternoon sun, gazing over the Mayan city and the endless green jungle surrounding it, listening to the chorus of the tree frogs down below and pointing and saying: look
, there’s the spot where the notorious human sacrifices were carried out and there, that’s where some of the astronomical observations that formed the basis for the famous Mayan calendar were made—well, by then we were nigh on ecstatic, or I was at any rate.

  After Tikal we had been planning to go to Antigua, but after hearing a dreadlocked Italian backpacker raving about Belize and Caye Caulker, we decided to go there instead. Oh, the sheer joy of abandoning our original plan and feeling every bit as free as we longed to be, that alone was incentive enough to follow his advice. And after Belize, Cancún and Palenque in Mexico awaited us, then Antigua, Lago de Atitlán, and Quetzaltenango in Guatemala and then Copán and Parque Nacional Cusuco in Honduras. We wanted to take in all the sights worth seeing, but the time went too quickly, of course, and with only three weeks left of our adventure we both began to panic. We didn’t want to go home, not yet, and after checking and double-checking our budget, we agreed that we could postpone our departure and carry on backpacking for another two months—if, that is, we lived even more cheaply. So we got in touch with the airline and booked new flights home, two and a half months later.

  Later we would both agree that that was a little too long, because after a while signs of fatigue began to appear, in you in particular. I was no longer as eager to see everything “worth seeing” either, I set greater and greater store by simply taking it easy and more and more often I chose to lie in a hammock, reading and writing and drinking beer, rather than spend the day climbing to the top of a volcano, going on an ocean safari to see manatees and dolphins, or visiting markets, museums, and parts of the city renowned for their colonial architecture. But I never really got sick of traveling, as you did. After three months of bumming around you were positively grouchy, you had gone off the whole idea of backpacking and on particularly bad days you were never done telling me how ridiculous it actually was to travel around the way we had been doing. All backpackers loved to see themselves as being footloose and fancy-free, you said. What mattered to them was planning the trip itself, what mattered was to be spontaneous, to take things as they came and be prepared to change course along the way; they scoffed at the herd mentality of package tourists who let travel agencies plan their holidays for them, right down to the smallest detail. In fact they didn’t just scoff: some of the backpackers we met were so anxious to dissociate themselves from people who went on package holidays that they refused to call themselves tourists. “We’re not tourists, we’re travelers,” as two American girls informed us. But was the difference really as great as the backpackers would have it, you wondered. We might not have had a travel agency to arrange every minute of our trip for us, but our noses were constantly stuck in the Lonely Planet guide and if it said that the Thursday market in Chichicastenango was a “must” and that no one should leave Guatemala without visiting Lago de Atitlán, then, like every other backpacker, that is where we went. The way you saw it, we were no less prone to the herd mentality than people who went to Gran Canaria for their holidays. We all traipsed to the same spots and, like holidaymakers on Gran Canaria, we had much more contact with other tourists than we did with the local people. If our Spanish had been better, it might have been different, you said, but to be honest you weren’t even too sure about that. We would have had to get a little farther off the beaten track for that because where we were staying there were as many Germans, Americans, and Scandinavians as Latin Americans, and while the Latin Americans we met there were not exactly westernized, they were certainly so used to people from the West that they weren’t particularly interested in getting to know us. Or at least, not unless they thought they could make money out of it, as you said. Backpackers were always saying that they traveled in order to learn about other cultures, but in your opinion any knowledge we gained was of the most superficial nature. Yes, we visited Mayan ruins and museums where we saw helmets worn by the conquistadores and weapons they had used, and yes, we had seen exhibitions of pictures by famous Latin American artists and roamed the streets remarking to each other on how interesting the architecture was in this or that part of the city. The problem was, however, that nothing we saw meant anything to us. If we had had Latin American blood in our veins or had been especially interested in the history of Latin America, say, or if we had at least done a bit of background reading before setting out, it would have been a very different story. Then a visit to one of the countless cathedrals, for example, would have triggered a whole string of associations and reflections: Ah, so this is where the remains of Bernal Díaz del Castillo are interred, we would have said as we entered the Catedral de Santiago in Antigua and it would have meant something to us. The name of Bernal Díaz del Castillo and the sight of the crypt where he lay might have reminded us of major events in Guatemalan history and we could have taken all the information we read on the small signs displayed around the church and hooked it up, as it were, to the knowledge we had just had refreshed, thus learning something new. But Bernal Díaz del Castilla was a name we had come across in the Lonely Planet guide only five minutes before we walked through the door and by the next day we’d have forgotten all about him and that damn cathedral, you said. No, you went on, you couldn’t take one more majestic cathedral full of weeping Madonnas, candles, and creaking wooden pews. Every time we visited a cathedral, all you could think of was how soon we could leave again and find a spot in the shade to have an ice-cold Gallo. You’d lost count of the number of cathedrals we’d seen and you couldn’t remember the name of a single one of them. They all blurred into one. The same went for almost all the other sights recommended by Lonely Planet or other backpackers. Spectacular buildings, ancient ruins, beautiful beaches, cities, the whole country, in fact, was just a blur. We backpackers mocked package tourists for flocking to synthetic towns and cities—so-called tourist traps—totally devoid of character. “It makes no difference where you go, whether it’s Mallorca, Cyprus, or the Canary Islands, because they all look exactly the same. When you look back on holidays like that, they’re totally indistinguishable from one another,” you had said at the airport back home in Norway when we saw a group boarding a plane to Tenerife. Now, though, you felt that we backpackers were no different. “I mean, take those two Swedes we met in Quetzaltenango or Huehuetenango or wherever it was,” you said. “They described Tikal as a real high point of their trip, but when we got talking about Tikal, it turned out that one of them thought it was the Incas who had lived there, not the Mayans. And when we corrected her and explained that the Incas had reigned in South America, she pretended that it had just been a slip of the tongue, and after some laughter and a few flippant and supposedly rueful comments she assured us that of course she knew it was the Aztecs who had built Tikal. Mayans, Incas, Aztecs—whatever! This was obviously an extreme example, you said, but still: there was far less difference between backpacker and package tourist than we liked to think. In fact sometimes when we bumped into other backpackers, you almost felt like pretending to be a package tourist, you declared. You felt like saying that you’d come to Central America for the sun, the cheap booze, and all those willing girl backpackers and that you weren’t particularly interested in learning more about the local culture. You actually had the urge to disown all the values and norms backpackers are so intent on evincing. This urge was particularly strong on those occasions when we fell into conversation with the most extreme representatives of the backpacker culture. You had, for instance, been irritated beyond measure by the far too worldly-wise guy from Bergen with whom we’d had a few rum and colas in Santiago Atitlán. He acted as though he had personally discovered the whole fucking continent, you fumed. Christ, just the way he described his nine-month-long trip had had you picturing a kind of Bergensian Dr. Livingstone armed with a machete, risking his life to hack his way through a dense, impenetrable jungle to eventually discover an idyllic little village, far off the beaten track and totally untouched by other backpackers. This was the aim of all backpackers, up there alongside checking off everythin
g on the Lonely Planet “must see” list, but as far as you were concerned, this guy from Bergen was a travesty of the adventuring ideal. “The very fact that he called his journey through Amazonia an ‘expedition,’” you sniggered.

  You had completely gone off the whole backpacking scene, you couldn’t take it anymore. You wanted to get out of Guatemala as soon as possible. We had heard that Nicaragua was relatively free of backpackers and you were wondering whether that was what we should do, go to Nicaragua and spend the rest of our stay there. You could, of course, see the paradox in the fact that one minute you were railing against backpackers who dreamed of visiting places where no other backpackers had been, only the next minute to ask if I would like to come with you to just such a place, but so be it. You wanted to get away from the hordes of young middle-class Westerners, you said, you wanted to find a little town in Nicaragua boasting nothing spectacular enough to attract the tourists, some dull, sleepy spot where you could concentrate on your writing and I could concentrate on my reading.

  So off we went to Nicaragua, the poorest, most primitive, most devastated country in the region, on the mainland at any rate. We received our first hint of what lay in store as soon as we crossed the border from Honduras. Suddenly there were hardly any cars on the road, in fact I’m tempted to say that there were hardly any roads. It was the middle of the rainy season and we could be driving along as normal one moment, only the next to discover that the road was gone. In one place it had been swept away by a landslide the week before, in another it had been flooded when a river had burst its banks, and in yet another a bridge had collapsed for the third or fourth time in a year—and no one seemed to be making the slightest effort to fix any of it. We took detour after detour, each one longer than the one before, we had to wait for a tree to be moved off the road and for the bus driver to change some belt on the ancient engine that had snapped, and every so often the male passengers would be ordered to get off and push the bus out of an eight-inch layer of mud. The Nicas on the bus were obviously used to this and took it with amazing stoicism, but we were so tired, hungry, grumpy, and strung out that we could barely speak to each other, because if we did we knew we would only end up arguing. And then, to make matters worse, we learned that the surrounding countryside was swarming with bandits, so it was very important that we reached the nearest town before nightfall. “Oh, if only I’d had the sense to bring a bottle of whisky,” I remember you saying, “because this is an absolute nightmare.”