Sweating It

Today was the second and final day in Nicaragua.
Marie and I headed out of Granada without ever having seen the place in daylight and rode south for the boarder with Costa Rica. I feel quite bad about this since it seems like a nice country with a few really good things to spend some time on. The only reason I'm doing it is so that I have the option to go to Columbia and because I have a definite intent to spend more time here on the way back (enough justification).
On the way South to the boarder (only about an hour ride) we got pulled over three times by the police and each time they want us to get out all our papers and ask us all the usual questions. No problems here but it takes about 20 minutes each time and at this rate it was starting to eat up serious time.

So, then we arrived at the boarder and had to get ourselves and the bikes out of Nicaragua and then into Costa Rica. Sounds simple but this was unlike the other four boarders that I have crossed. All the other crossings I chose were at quite small crossing points and there was not a lot of traffic. However down here where the countries get very small, the options become limited and where there were three or four roads to choose from in the past there is now just "the road". So after we had negotiated the continual police interest on the way, we had to face huge line ups at customs and immigration. The officials were in fact quite helpful and always pointed us in the right direction for what to do next, but the line-ups were just insane. It didn´t help that we did it one at a time either (the other person watched the bikes while the first person did the run-around) and the process to get out of Nicaragua took about four hours. Fortunately the Costa Rican side of things was much quicker and it only took another hour to get into the next country.

By then, we were running out of time to get to a sizable town to sleep (only about an hour away) so we promptly headed off South again and didn't bother with the fact that neither of us had eaten more than a handful of junk food for the whole day.

Costa Rican country side is absolutely beautiful and the country is clearly far wealthier than its neighbours to the North, but the local police are just as annoying!
Yes, we got pulled over twice more in that hour of riding - again for no particular reason other than to "have a chat". We made it to our destination right on dark, but it was a really full and quite stressful day when we had actually expected to have a fairly easy day of it. - silly us!

Tomorrow we run South again to get near the Panama boarder - more guilt about travelling so fast.

Parrot on a Stick

Rode into (and half way through as well) Nicaragua today. There was relatively little trauma or cost at the boarder so that was good.
Initial impressions are that there are significantly fewer people here and that the country seems drier (even more like Mexico than Honduras was). It does however seem a little more friendly than Honduras was.

We rode South after the boarder, aiming to get to the central tourist destination in the country, a colonial city on a lake shore called Granada. On the way there we rode along a very nice highway and there were the usual occasional groupings of roadside vendors. However on one particular section of the highway there were at least a dozen people with assorted tropical parrots for sale. They were tied onto sticks that the people were waving about with abandon - much to the parrots dismay!
There were small green and yellow ones (probably lorrokeets of some sort) but I figured they probably weren't ripe yet. One guy had a nice ripe one though, it was a huge red Macaw. I didn´t stop to take pictures because I was caught up thinking about the moral implications - am I encouraging them by taking pictures? but I think I wont make a difference to any of it, so next time I see this sort of thing I will stop and have a closer look.

So I rode on toward Granada. When I was almost there though, I managed to attract the attention of the local police and got pulled over for some sort of local infraction. The officer in question seemed quite sincere and did not try to get me to bribe him, but there was no infraction I could justify with the ticket I got (tax collection from foreigners?) He gave me a ticket and kept my licence but I was smart enough to give him an old copy so I don´t really need it back. Not sure what I will decide to do about the ticket since I am probably only in the country for one more day. Oh well, I rode on again into the city as the day started to close and commenced the usual hunt for a "cheap but not too cheap" hotel.

Some good, some bad, An average day.

Contiki Touring

I seem to have briefly converted from adventure touring to Contiki touring.

Another rider friend (Teryk) who is a bit further down the track emailed a couple of days ago and advised me that he had located a good safe cheap way to get from Panama to Columbia. There just are no roads through that section of central America and it is known as the "Darrien Gap". After brief thought, I decided that I was very interested in this idea and said I would head South to catch up with him for the boat ride over to Columbia on the 10th of January. This meant I had about 18 days to get through Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama. It felt like a bit of a rush but the distances are really quite small and I would be able to see what I wanted so it seemed OK.
Then, yesterday there was another email saying the date had changed and the boat now left on the 3rd of January! That means there are three countrys between me and the boat and only 10 days - Contiki Touring!
Its way too fast to see what there is in those countries but I think I am still into going to Columbia - good people to go with (Teryk and Marie) and exciting destination with safe and relatively cheap transport!
 I don't seem to be thinking about things too much at present and am just "going with the flow" so to speak, so hopefully the gods will be kind!

20,000Km and Counting - Honduras

The trip meter on the bike rolled over for the second time yesterday. I am now 20,000km into this trip and four national boarders away from where I started.

I rode across into Honduras a couple of days ago and Marie and I are in a small town on the North coast of Honduras for Christmas. Initial impressions of Honduras are that it is much more like Mexico than Guatemala. The climate is till very tropical and the people seem much the same. The difference is that it seems significantly poorer here. The vehicles are mostly older and more battered which means they are being kept running longer out of need. The roads are still pretty good but not as nice as in Guatemala. The towns seem to have more litter and there are many more side roads that are not paved and so the dust is back again. The people again seem nice enough but there are even more guards with guns around the place. In a city that we passed through, there was even and armed guard in a donut shop! - Although I must admit, they did look like very nice donuts!
It is now Christmas Eve and it looks like I will spend this Christmas in the Australian style rather than the North American style I have become used to over the past twelve years in Vancouver. Rather than the snow and cold of the North, this year I will be in the heat. The morning will be spent at the local beach with sun and sand and surf before the heat of the day builds up. Then there will be an overly filling mid-day meal and the afternoon will be spent in the shade with beers while avoiding the fierce blaze of the sun. Yes, even though most North Americans will think I'm nuts, there is something very familiar and pleasant about it for me.

Feliz Navidad to us all.

Temples and Tortilla Sex

I spent a couple of days in the North of Guatemala at a place called Flores. It is a small but touristy village on a little island in the middle of a very pretty little lake. It was good to relax there after our ride North, but the reason I had ridden there was to visit the Maya site of Tikal.
Tikal is quite a large Ruin although not as large as Palenque. The special thing about Tikal though is that they decided to go for height in their structures rather than pure massive volume. The buildings are again very impressive and situated on a plane in the middle of the jungle they are very "atmospheric".
As a result of the visit to this ruin I can now positively confirm the existence of monkeys and that ridiculous creation of a bird, the toucan. I have however not got close enough to the toucans to determine weather the large bill of the creature is in fact naturally coloured or has perhaps been "hand painted"... (By local artisans no doubt!...)

So Ive been staying in many assorted hotel rooms in my travels here and in general I have been waking up quite early. I then usually lay around for a while and listen to the sounds of the town coming to life around me.
Since I have been in Mexico and further south there is a new sound in the mornings. It is a very rhythmical sound of light slapping. I only ever heard it very distantly and when I first heard it I assumed it was a couple nearby in the hotel room enjoying some morning "intimacy" and thought no more of it. However this sound has been haunting me in numerous towns as I traveled South and this posed an interesting idea that perhaps there is a particular style of "intimate interaction" that is practiced here in the South and not in the US? This seemed unlikely but again it wasn't a significant enough concern for me to think on more.
However I have now absolutely identified the source of the sound...
It turns out that it is indeed the local people engaging in light slapping in the mornings, but the subject of the slapping is not an intimate partner but rather the morning meal.
All across Latin America the women of the household start their days by making tortillas for the family to eat. They all seem to have the same technique of a seven-stroke slap, and repeat.
Unfortunately my overly active brain has now combined the idea of tortillas and sex and well... it gets kinda kinky in my head some times...

Oversharing, I know :))

Bloody Qutzals!

The Quetzal is the national symbol for Guatemala. It is even included in the center of the national flag. It is a sizable dark green bird with a head crest and two long elegant green tail feathers and a bright red breast. It is also quite rare.


I have finally found a solution to the constant problem of Quetzals both getting tangled in my hair and plucking it out for use in their nests. I had been using a hat to try to deal with the problem but it just wasn’t effective. I eventually had to cut off all my hair!
So now I look like the bad guy in a B-grade action movie. This is no real problem since it seems that almost all of the riders I have met look about the same (Teryk, Marie, Jean-Luc etc.) It seems that someone had already told them about this Quetzal problem... but I was completely unaware. I did buy a big can of “Quetzal-be-gone” but I used it all up in the first few days in Guatemala. They really are quite an insidious pest here and you have to sleep under netting or use screens on the windows and leave the ceiling fan on all night (or you get eaten alive by the blighters).
When riding the bike, they are quite the hazard as well. I’ve had several get stuck under my windshield and all the squawking and flapping about can be quite a dangerous distraction. Even the dead ones on the road are a definite hazard when you run over them as you instantly lose traction and the bike can suddenly be on its side.
Marie has been having plenty of her own problems with the pesky creatures as well and has had several fly into her ears and then annoy her while riding. Her bike started overheating recently too and we didn’t know what was causing the problem, but on closer inspection it turned out to be that the radiator had become completely clogged up with quetzals. We had to spend quite a while getting all the feathers out. I do hope that we make it out of Guatemala soon and into Honduras... Note: the national symbol for Honduras is the jaguar!…)


p.s . This blog entry is a figment of the writers distorted imagination. Please note that no Quetzals were injured in the making of this blog entry and that in fact the writer has yet to lay eyes on even one of these elusive birds.

Jungle Roads

Day four was again spent heading North but we had run out of asphalt.
The trail was apparently a good dirt road but when we started along it it had lots of pot-holes and was far slower than we had hoped. It did not however deteriorate further, and we figured we had about 50km to get to a better road. That fifty Km turned out to take about three hours but was heaps of fun :)

We puttered along through the rough road and regularly had to ride into the gutter or lean the bikes up against the side of the mountain to let trucks fully loaded with villagers past. It was Saturday and everyone was going to the local markets. We Rode through a dozen or more tiny little villages and a couple of them had amazing little local markets that we had to ride right through the middle off (these places have only one road and it gets used for everything.) The country was also amazingly “jungle”.
After an hour or two we came to another obstacle – road works. It seems that Guatemala is doing a major infrastructure upgrade and the whole country is getting bigger and better roads. In this case it means they are converting a jungle track to a two lane asphalt road, but we had turned up well before it was ready. So we had to leave our bikes and walk in to get permission to pass from the engineer and then negotiate our way past the big digging and drilling machines and balance the bikes through the rough loose slimy clay covered tracks – very sporting and good fun!

Then the road got better but was still dirt and very dusty. We made it through that and back onto hard top but there was still a river crossing by ferry and a couple of minor wrong turns (Maries GPS was some help but the Garmin world map SUX!) We made it to the planned destination of Flores in enough time and had a well deserved meal and a couple of beers… A good day :)

On the Road Again

So, now I’ve been on the road for a few days and riding with Marie is turning out to be quite good fun.

We first left lake Attitlan and headed for big bad Guatemala city... The newspapers here seem to be three quarters full of accidents and shootings in this city – There were over 380 murders in the last year! (the other quarter of the paper is of course focused on sports). When we got there we were trying to find the local motorbike shops so that Marie could get a new helmet and I could look for a new rear tire. We had just got into the thick of the traffic and were trying to spot some key navigation points when another guy on a big (well, big by local standards) KLR bike rode up along side and said hi. We said brief hellos in amongst the traffic and went on our way but about 10 minutes later he showed up again with another rider and this time we stopped and had a real discussion. He was a very generous guy and turned out to be “collecting” wayward foreign riders and helping them out. We were not too proud to accept his help and he ended up showing us around to about four different places where we looked at helmets and tires. Marie didn’t find a helmet that she liked but I found a road tire that would do for highway riding. So I lashed the new tire on the back of my bike and our guide pointed us in the direction we wanted to go and we were off again – fighting with the hectic “no-holes-barred” traffic.

After the city we headed North into a highland jungle area. The first night we had not managed to reach our intended destination (due to running around in the city) so we stopped in a largish town that we selected at random and got rooms at one of the local hotels. It turned out that there was a celebration that day for the Virgin of Guadalupe (Shes really popular here in central America!), so there were even more fireworks than usual and all the people were out in the town square early in the evening with all the little children and a good time was being had by all. We ate the local food and strolled around and enjoyed the atmosphere before retiring for the evening.

The next day we rode North again and at the far end of the asphalt road we reached our destination in the jungle – Lanquin.

Day three was spent on a day trip to Semuc Champey which is a natural bridge formation deep in the limestone mountains that has a raging river running under it and is covered with blue green pools of water on the top. It is of course situated in the midst of lush tropical jungle with all the usual vines and epiphytes and steep mountain sides that are quintessentially “Central America” – very nice!

Have Clutch; Will Travel

Well, the long awaited new clutch plates arrived and were rapidly installed yesterday morning. I am a dab hand at this now since I have had that section of my engine apart three times trying to get a temporary fix working (with no success).
The new plates went in and the clutch motion was adjusted and then I went for a test ride... No problems, no evidence of any slipping or binding etc.

So now I am good to go, but I have to admit I feel a little inertia. San Pedro is a great little town on the shores of a very picturesque lake in the Guatemalan mountains. The climate is very comfortable with not too much heat and not too much humidity and the nights are pleasantly cool. There are all sorts of lovely flowering tropical plants with Bougainvilleas everywhere and Poinsettias the size of houses. And of course tropical fruit trees growing in most back yards as well as fresh local coffee (also grown in back yards). At this time of year the days all start out with virtually calm with blue skies and as the day progresses some clouds form and the wind comes up to a moderate level. It has only rained once in the two or three weeks (I forget how long I have been around) that I have been here.
The local community is a very interesting mix of the natives, expats and tourists, but the feel of the place is very friendly with apparently little animosity between them all. This seems to be due to the fact that the expats have not bought up all the lake shore and excluded the locals from accessing it. I´ve heard of it being called "Quick-San Pedro" since people seem to get stuck here :)
Likewise, one of the local shops sells a T-Shirt with the slogan "San Pedro, I´ll be leaving tomorrow" which of course seems always to get put off till the next tomorrow :)

Anyway, so San Pedro is a nice place and I feel both some desire to stay put as well as some anxiety about riding off into the rest of central America with all its unknowns. Just as a reference point here, the trucks that deliver beer here always have a guard riding "shotgun" literally with a large shotgun and a bandoleer full of shells - as if the 6 or 7 shells in the gun may well not be enough to get the job done!
But to travel and to see is what I am here for, so that is what I shall do. The plan is that tomorrow morning I will head off toward Tikal (Mayan ruins) in the north of the country. It seems that this leg of the journey will however be with some company as Marie (the rider who I met at the Mex-Guat boarder with Teryk) has decided to come along on her own bike as well and that will make a nice change from my usual riding alone.

Back on the road :)