September 2nd - 8th, 2004

September 2nd, 2004
From Paradise to Cockroach Family Ambiance

We pack up early and head down to the dock after breakfast; we swim and wait for the boat. We sigh as the boat skims us away from paradise with a boatload of tourists who carry enormous backpacks. The second-class bus takes us up the hairpin turns overlooking the lake, we change busses twice before arriving in San Andres and are charged twice too much once by a swindler. After lunch we do a high-speed bike loading operation at Maya Pedal and say goodbye. Armed with a couple wet rags from the workshop we head off to face the pollution.

Shortly after leaving Chimaltenango the road begins to climb. We have a shoulder to ride on most of the time but big trucks and busses climbing past us clog the air with thick black smoke. The rag filters but forces us to work harder to breath. After a few hours the climb has become steeper, storm clouds form and we drag ourselves into a roadside restaurant for a break as the rain begins. Our calculations say we need to keep going if we want to get to Guatemala City but we need to breath. We drink juice and eat a wonderful green salad, it seems like ages since this has happened. The owner of the restaurant is a really nice lady who used to work for the Red Cross. She tells us that there’s a long downhill into the city. The rain has stopped when we leave and we’re soon zooming downwards at 40km/h. In the failing light we see the city stretched out below us like a big off-white dirty stain.

We continue to breath through our rags as we enter the increasingly dense pollution zone. Almost every Guatemalan we have talked to about this city has said two things, one: not at night, and two: not in the downtown zone one. We proceed to violate our promises and navigate the cities network of dangerous highways at night. After asking directions from fifteen people and puzzling over our map under streetlights we end up in a neighborhood that has a few low priced hotels to choose from. We shop around and choose the “family ambiance” hotel. We soon realize that our choice of lodging is nothing like a family spot. We have landed in Guatemala city’s infamous zone 1. The hotel’s family is made up of drug addicts, pan handlers, and prostitutes who are complimented by a few million cockroaches. We eat in a nearby comedor and return to our room’s doubtfully clean sheets exhausted. As soon as we turn off the light the pitter patter of little feet fills the room, but we’re too tired to care. In one day we have gone from a beautiful green paradise to a cockroach infested hole. We find the time to laugh before conking out.

Friday September 3rd

We explore zone one a bit, have breakfast, and change hotels. The new hotel room has big red double doors, a sculpted ceiling, clean sheets, its own bathroom, a TV, fewer cockroaches, and doesn’t cost much more. We meet with the Mama Maquin women’s group twice in a couple of days and gather information for our next article. The hotel receptionist guy tries to raise the price of our room on us unsuccessfully on Saturday morning when I go to pay. On Sunday we spend a good fifteen minutes arguing with the hotel employees that they can’t raise the price until Johanne’s excellent bargaining tactics offer them a way out and they back down. Yes our Spanish has improved...

Monday September 6th, 2004
That’s it, we split!

We leave the city in the morning. Guatemala’s national soccer team is playing Costa Rica right here in the city today so there is a crazy amount of flag waving. We ask a guy for directions and he bikes with us for an hour or so, leading us out of the city with his incredibly muscle-bound legs. Just on the outskirts of the urban sprawl Johanne and I separate, we’ve decided to experience biking alone for a couple days. She stays and writes postcards for a bit as I screech down a never-ending slope that winds down and down towards El Salvador. A woman selling oranges on the roadside gives me three, I tell her to wave at Johanne and continue to burn it. I stop in the late afternoon and eat an enormous meal, the waiter says it won’t be hard to find a place to camp.

I continue down the road, getting tired and can’t seem to find anything good for the night. Several different people direct me to the town of El Molino, telling me I’ll be safe there but nowhere else. I arrive in down after dark and talk to the police who give me their permission to camp beside the basketball courts next to the station. The court closes at nine so I set up the tent under the close supervision of twenty kids. Once done I sit on a bench and try to read. I give up before I start because the same twenty kids are crowded around me so close that I can’t breath. They invite me to play basketball and I do. It’s fun! They’re all so little and energetic. I get some of them to dunk by lifting them over my head. I soon need to stop as the 80kms of biking have me somewhat tired. I sleep okay but some drunkard swooning nearby keeps muttering in a sloppy deep voice about a wet chicken. I wonder if he’s referring to me in the rain.

September 7th
Three honey day

I wake up early and breakfast on a leftover baguette two oranges and some honey. Off towards the border the road’s quite flat. I stop in the late morning. Some women are preparing food in an open tin roofed shack. I eat pupusas for the first time. They are like thick tortillas stuffed with beans, cheese, sausage, or any combination of the three served with tomato sauce and spicy cabbage salad. I seriously enjoy the meal and head off again around ten thirty. Little do I know that I have just been eating the Salvadorian national dish. The sun is starting to hurt. Around noon I climb a steep hill. Just so you understand what’s about to happen let me say the following. Although our primary languages of communication between Johanne and I are Spanish and French, the locals in any latin American country we’ve been through so far think we’re “gringos” and generally call out some catch phrase like “what’s up”, “bye bye”, “gringo” etc.

At this point where I left off in the middle of the climb I pass two guys who are cutting grass with machetes on the roadside, these two are no exception in the language they choose to address me in but one of them does surprise me with his choice of words. “Hi honey” he cries out…I crack up.

A short while later I arrive in Valle Nuevo at the border. I hang out and wait for Johanne. A couple hours later she shows up escorted by a police vehicle. We’re extremely happy to see each other and spend some time recounting our adventures since we last saw each other a day and half ago. We narrowly avoid being totally cheated by the money changers who calculate the exchange on a calculator whose numbers are erased off the buttons. We cross over into El Salvador

El Salvador

The border guards are really nice and don’t charge us anything. They tell me all sorts of stuff about the country. We inch up a long long slope, tired, into the village of las Chinamas where we stop and get a hotel room.

September 8th, 2004

We spend the morning in the hotel pool after paying admission, we swim, we relax, we read. The money here is the US dollar, weird. They call a quarter a “cora”. In the afternoon we bike the short distance into Ahuachapan looking for a cheaper place to stay. We find a hotel with great big roaches and settle in. Johanne has a remission of her pre Maya Pedal diarrhea condition and feels pretty crappy. In the evening we go out and visit the town. The village is celebrating the birthday of the Virgin Mary and is decorated with 20,000 or so colored lanterns for the occasion. Combined with the presence of a dozen different marching bands the event is quite a treat. The party ends with rain and we head back to the hotel only to realize that our stove has completely stopped working. Johanne goes to the restaurant next door and the hotel owner at the cash tries to overcharge her and then realizing who she is resorts to his macho instinct to insult her, telling her to go ask her husband what he thinks. The evening ends with a meal of cold broccoli and salt, which isn’t so bad actually. The rest of our stay in El Salvador is permeated with macho men that kill our spirits with their sexism. This is entirely something that directly affects Johanne and that she has opened my eyes to, not something that is directed towards me. We meet good people but it is not exactly a fun two weeks.

Back to Ahuachapan, a couple days and a lot of lying around later Johanne is feeling somewhat better. Walking around town we meet Jose Eleazar and the following day he takes us on a hike in the mountains. We see a gigantic crater at the bottom of which grows some coffee and corn, a tiny figure hard to make out in the drizzle walks among the corn stalks. We then visit a lagoon in another volcanic crater. It has a whirlpool on one side that sucks witless swimmers to their death kilometers below and gives up their bloated bodies some hours later. Jose Eleazar has a habit of walking into peoples little clay houses unannounced during the hike and surprisingly enough we are well received. We meet the woman who had been picking corn in the other crater as we looked on from above and she feeds us some delicious roasted samples. I try what is called a tree tomato and am forced to spit out some acrid jelly.

We also visit another house where we are offered tortillas and salt, the handmade tortillas are thick and hot, crusty on the outside and steamy on the inside. A simple meal of the mountain people but extremely tasty nonetheless. The people up here seem to just get by cultivating what they eat and living in makeshift wood and clay houses, they maybe do a little manual labor or sell firewood once and a while. It’s touching how ready they are to give unconditionally. We had made it up most of the way into the mountains in other peoples pick up trucks but now we run down the mountainside along snaky small muddy paths made slick by the rain. The only way to move down this slope is running but it requires thinking fast.

We arrive in Jose’s house and the jovial talking comes to an end. He seems to feel bad about his poor shack home and for some reason his wife refuses to talk to us. We have a drink in front of a fuzzy black and white TV. Jose’s three kids barely seem to notice us, I am painfully aware of the cardboard mattresses on the bunk bed and the holey wood walls. The uneasy feeling continues through the bus ride and the walk back to the hotel, he seems to want to ask us for money but feels bad. Before leaving town a few days later we stop by his house with a thank you note and a little cash. It’s hard to believe that we helped out much but at the same time seeing people living in such poverty makes me sad.