Notes from 2021: This is basically a Central American travel diary, scribbled in real time, subsequently typed up into a basic word-processing programme in Berlin sometime in the early 1990s. I never attempted publication, as far as I can recall, though I probably thought about it. I note I created a semi-fictional narrator, ‘Cynthia’, a simplified, somewhat caricatured version of myself, my background, and of my early years in West Berlin – and took a couple of years off my age. In 1989, I would have been 30.
I believe I also indulged in some invention around teaching at the Universidad Centroamericana in Managua. It is true that I was employed there, with a view to teaching English. I did some class preparation, and met other members of the Translation school, but a combination of sickness – hepatitis – and the election crisis there early in 1990 meant that I never actually got around to holding classes.
This was source of shame to me at the time – I felt a cop-out, also bound up with the sense that I was fleeing a country in crisis – so using what information I had, and subsequent EFL teaching experience, I invented, probably convincingly enough – you can be the judge.
All the rest – the vast bulk of what follows – is first hand experience. All photos are my own except where credited.
Total wordcount comes to just under 47,000.
And for anyone who prefers, here is a pdf link:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1N37i4gQOINdk-UROfR-dPLwFzKbvIceV/view?usp=sharing
CAST OF CHARACTERS:
1) Cynthia Henderson; me, that is, 28-ish, born in Midhurst, Sussex, nationality British, of course. I left England not long after leaving university because, quite frankly, there didn’t seem to be much on offer for not-particularly-brilliant or rapacious arts graduates, at that time.
If I was going to end up being a secretary I might as well do it in an interesting location, at the very least abroad. I had always wanted to go abroad, ever since Daddy took my brother Anthony with him on a year’s sabbatical in Kuala Lumpur, and left me with Mummy and the baby at home in Chippingsworth. I didn’t even get to go on a visit.
I emigrated to West Berlin, with about five hundred pounds in traveller’s cheques, and a handful of contact-addresses, feeling a lot less confident than I sounded when I announced that I was leaving stupid old England for good, and if England (not to mention my parents) felt sorry, well it should have thought about that earlier. Now it was too late.
I know West Berlin isn’t Kuala Lumpur. But it was a start.
My initial ups and downs are another story, but one of the ups – yes, definitely an up – was meeting Juergen. We kind of got on with each other, because we seemed to be the only people in the six-person flat (Mummy would say commune) who appeared not to have a wildly whacky social-life consisting of support-group meetings, alternative therapy sessions, meetings with fellow performance artists etc.
We were also the only ones to have boringly regular daytime jobs, Juergen because he had finished studying and had to start paying off student debts somehow, and me – well, I was a foreigner and took with gratitude whatever permanent and respectable job I could get. Otherwise, EEC or not, I wouldn’t have been able to get a residence permit.
The others did nights behind bars in alternative cafes or cinemas, when they weren’t being customers in the same, so frequently Juergen and I were the only people left in front of the TV during the eight o’clock news bulletin followed by the routine suspense film.
Mummy always claimed that television was culturally demeaning and had destroyed the ancient art of conversation. I have always found the reverse to be the case; and that a truly awful TV show can usually spur the most placid of spectators to genuinely expressive motions of disgust.
But perhaps my experience is limited to incurably taciturn characters whose skill in the art of sustained conversation has long been sunk without trace and without hope of redemption.
Come to think of it, Mummy would probably say that about Juergen.
But the fact is, it was the TV that brought us together. I would never have had the nerve to go into his room, where he would be playing with his electronic gadgets, or constructing a new set of shelves, and sit on his bed for a chat, the way Ulli did from time to time.
And he would never have bothered me. He probably thought, like most of the others, that I couldn’t speak proper German; although at least, unlike them, when it came to it, he let me put it to the test. The others were too happy practising their school-English to display any genuine curiousity about my own linguistic abilities. My German was, of course, actually not very good; but – and that was another thing – I owed it to Juergen, and the TV, that it ever got any better.
He wasn’t very happy in Berlin. His work, though lucrative, was uninspiring, and he was missing his old crowd from Duisburg. So far, as far as he was concerned, the internationally celebrated Berliner Szene had failed to live up to expectations, and he was thinking of throwing it all in and going back home.
I eventually said that I thought it would be a great pity if he did that, and it was from that point on I think that he kind of got the idea that I kind of liked him. Anyway without going into details right now we ended up getting pretty close.
2) Juergen Buecher; aged 30-ish, nationality German, birthplace Duisburg, in the Ruhrgebiet, an unromantic location if there ever was one. Juergen is a highly qualified technician or electrician or engineer or something like that, anyhow he was earning an awful lot of money in West Berlin, where we met, before the start of the events described here. That was how he had managed to save so much, not being exactly a spendthrift type.
I suppose Juergen is pretty German, you know, being practical, thorough, and efficient. But he’s still, culturally, a product of the Alternative Szene, which means that as a young(-ish) person you are conscious of seeing things radically differently than your parents did, or would like you to. That means more in Germany than it does in England, for in Germany the parents of people of our age are almost uniformally prosperous and proper; nouveau-riche, certain members of my family would say, putting on a sort of affected irony.
Not that Juergen’s are that prosperous, in fact they are not actually as wealthy as mine. But there’s a kind of national sense of propriety, which we don’t have (English loyalties depending more on snobbery and what newspaper (if any) we read); a pressure to serve and conform to the flawless and eminently successful social scheme and rather materialist conception of the ideal, which people like Juergen and the rest of my flatmates were very conscious, for what it’s worth, of resisting.
This meant less in West Berlin, then, which was full of people like that, making Die Szene huge and amorphous and rather an establishment in itself, (and not necessarily poverty-stricken), than in the smaller West German towns, of which Juergen’s birthplace was one.
3) One BMW motorbike, build 1986, with two very large metal saddle bags, and an outsize fuel tank. This machine had been shipped by Juergen to Managua, Nicaragua, prior to the events described in this book. It had to do with his work there; the local public transport, although cheap, being inadequate and too much of a strain, on top of everything else.
And then he had always planned to tour South America on the bike, sometime, having already done most of Western and Southern Europe.
This was one of the things he had talked about, in front of the TV; it came up because of his only regular evening appointment in those days being his weekly Spanish lesson.
It kind of came out that I wanted to travel in a big way too; although that was long before I finally took the plunge, and we ended up going together.
4) Assorted Europeans (mostly German), the occasional US American, Nicaraguans and other native ladinos in minor roles.
27th July 1989, Managua, Nicaragua
In the plane, on the final stretch (Berlin to Frankfurt, Frankfurt to Miami; Miami to Nicaragua) , I sat next to two Nicaraguan men, returning home laden with Hi-Fi equipment from a few months’ illegal work in Miami. They watched my mounting excitement as the lights of their home town came into view with evident amusement.
Too excited to eat, and anyway fed up with 30-odd hours of plastic food, I donated them my entire Costa Rica airlines supper tray.
The first thing that hit me was the night air; hot, wet and heavy. I could hardly breathe. I got myself through the makeshift customs and immigration in that wide-eyed, hyperactive state induced by a combination of exhilaration and exhaustion. An amazed Juergen, not quite believing I’d made it, met me in the airport carpark with a borrowed pick-up truck.
So here we are, in this little, plain bungalow, with a low, leaky ceiling, red tiles underfoot, and outside, a muddy, tropical garden, reduced to a murky puddle after the midday cloudburst, with lime trees, a banana, two laden, majestic mangoes, and several spikey bushes all crammed together on a patch of ground, surrounded by a high concrete wall.
He found Juergen’s job for him, though as far as I am concerned, me being neither German nor a technician, I don’t fall within his brief. Juergen made some enquiries on my behalf at the university here, and I wrote to them from Berlin. It seems they do need English teachers verybadly. I can probably start there next term, which begins next month.
Juergen was here several months before me, and arranged for us to move temporarily in with Werner, a guy he knew from Berlin a while back, who has now been here for quite a while, and runs some kind of liaison office for volunteer technicians from West Germany. This is his house, although he’s hardly ever here, seeming to work late every evening.
Juergen has already started work in the city hospital workshop. We’ve driven about town on the motorbike, and I’ve tried to adjust to the heat and the squalor, and the open stares of the brown-skinned people grouped at tatty bus-stops, curious, sometimes envious, sometimes hostile. And to to Juergen himself in a non-Berlin context.
At daybreak, the first street-sellers troop past the front door, pushing creaky wheelbarrows laden with fruit and vegetables, or with baskets of tortillas balanced on their heads, or occasionally a rickety old horse-and-cart, and rouse the neighbourhood with cries of “verdurrr-as!”, or as appropriate. The stream remains almost constant until about ten o’clock. If you were efficient, you could shop for most things without ever passing beyond your front gate.
This is a relatively orderly residential area on Managua’s outskirts. In the evenings, cars rarely come by and the streets are full of children, boys playing improvised baseball, girls with hoops and skipping ropes, and in all the front rooms you can see the TV on in front of the women in rocking chairs.
The family opposite, whose father has a taxi, usually parked in the evenings before the house, have strung up their beautifully-embroidered hammock in the garage. Sometimes the children lark about, swinging in it, but more often it’s Dad’s prerogative to relax there behind the grating, idly watching the street-life go by.
I’ve learned how to go shopping, trooping along behind other women with bags on their arms a few hundred yards along dusty, dirt tracks lined with makeshift hovels, to the local covered market, where I feel terribly conspicuous, with my bad Spanish and unconceivable wealth, surrounded by tables laden with exotic produce, which most people can’t afford.
Tiny children wheedle and beg, bored stall holders call to me with siren voices, mi amor, or muneca, which tickles me while increasing my sense of being an alien.
But somebody has to keep us in eggs and milk and bread, and at the moment I have more time than anyone else, and in any case I feel the outings do me good.
I got terribly lost on the way home, in devastating midday heat on one occasion and was eventually brought back by a good-natured local lad who obviously thought I was slightly out of my mind.
They sell fizzy drinks or frescos at the market in little polythene bags, because the bottles that the coke or whatever comes in are a precious commodity not willingly relinquished. You have to chew a hole in the corner of the bag and suck; it feels a bit like being back at the breast. At the more upmarket stands, you might be favoured with a plastic straw.
I’m getting used to the empleada, a local woman who comes with her three small kids, three days a week, to wash the floor and the clothes, although quite apart from the Spanish I find it difficult dealing with her, not being exactly used to servants, although here everyone who can afford it, nica or foreigner, seems to consider it a matter of course.
It’s true that without washing machines of any description, the laundry alone in any household must be a full-time job.
31st July 1989, Managua
Without Juergen to ferry me about on the motorbike, and to explain the bits that he’s already been through, I don’t know how I would cope with the bureaucratic necessities. I have to get my one-month tourist visa transformed into a one-year work-permit. And for that I need a contract from the university; difficult, until term starts, but by then my one-month permit – which doesn’t allow me to work anyway -will be almost up, and I’d have to leave the country and re-enter again to get it renewed.
We’ve no phone at the house but even if we did, lines are frequently out of order and people unobtainable. If I had to wrestle with the ropey, jam-packed buses every time I had to get anywhere, I’d spend all day hanging around waiting for a bus with enough room left to squeeze myself in; and then forcing myself out again through the packed bodies at more or less the right stop, not to mention the fact that carrying anything remotely precious like a passport – which of course you need for all Ministry matters – is tantamount to making a present of it to the highest bidder.
The funniest thing about driving around Managua on the motorbike is the bemused and often exstatic gazes of fellow-drivers, or the street sellers at crossroads, always male, of course, enthusiastically leaning out of the side-windows of their vehicles.
“Cuantos litros?!” , indicating our outsize petrol tank, accompanied by delighted and obscene exclamations of excess, is the standard opening, but time allowing, the interrogation becomes more technical, usually ending up with almost embarrassedly-tentative enquiries as to how much a bike like ours costs.
In spite of myself, I am becoming an expert on the bike’s design features, moreover in Nica-Spanish. As Juergen has explained, bikes of this size and kind are very rarely seen in Nicaragua, and never in the hands of natives; although motorbikes as such are very popular, obviously the first thing a lad buys himself as soon as he gets a little money.
They’re usually the smaller Japanese makes, or the East German MZ, which is what the Sandinista (government) police force has.
The other thing is the children, who gather wherever you stop, not necessarily to cadge money for offering to watch the bike, sometimes just out of a kind of listless curiosity and thirst for attention. The little ones tug at your clothes and play with your fingers, grinning coyly and winsomely up through dirty faces and filthy, matted hair.
5th August 1989 Managua
At the university I was greeted with almost embarrassing effusion by the School of Translation’s administrative principal, Marina Zeledon, a vivid woman of forty with bubbles of shoulder-length jet-black hair and very crimson lipstick.
She seems terribly impressed by my actually very mediocre university qualifications. She ushered me into a departmental meeting which was supposed to be reviewing the attainments and setbacks of the previous term, she explained, and insisted on presenting me to the assembled staff members like a debutante at a ball.
They were a mixture of nicas and foreigners, about half-and-half. One side of the room – the nica side – were complaining that the students’ level of English was not high enough; the course was supposed to qualify them as translators and interpreters, but in fact, most at the end of the 10 semesters were still capable of making the most elementary mistakes in grammar and comprehension.
Many began their fourth or fifth years, when they were supposed to start practising translation and interpretation in earnest, with still only the most basic grasp of grammar and limited reading skills. The teachers in the early years, they argued, should exert a more rigorous pressure, gear their classes to the fastest, most diligent students, and let the others keep pace, or fall by the wayside.
A spokesman from the other side of the room, occupied mostly by fair-skinned English-speaking foreigners, the group obviously responsible for basic tuition, to which I would no doubt belong, said straight away that expecting fully-fledged translators and interpreters to emerge after five years’ classroom teaching was expecting the impossible. In most cases the students were starting from absolute scratch.
Another voice from the directorial side insisted that the department was there to train translators, and not to serve as a general language-improvement institute for mediocre students.
I said to Juergen later, why do they have to call it a School of Translation at all, why not just call it an English department, like they do at home, with an option on training as an interpreter for those students considered competent?
Juergen said it probably had something to do with the socialist realist notion of education for production, rather than for a general notion of culture. But that seems particularly cruel given that, as Marina Zeledon said, English translators are anyway not employable in Nicaragua at anything like the rate of a full set of graduates every year.
Well, it can’t make me more apprehensive than I am already, and I’ve no intention of performing the kinds of miracles in class that are beyond the existing teaching staff, who struck me as eminently sensible and competent. My best is going to have to be good enough.
The admin staff keep impressing on me not to expect too much of the students, that they’re not at the same level as university students in Europe etc.etc. I feel like saying, hey, well, I’m not actually that hot myself, you know.
It’s nice to feel wanted; but they should realise that if I was really some kind of high-powered academic looking to expand on some esoteric bit of literary research, this is absolutely the last place I’d come.
The university buildings are a little bleak. The classrooms are bare and peeling, with nothing on the walls, because anything removable, even a tatty old world-map, would vanish, as everything does which is not actually nailed or chained down, and a lot of things which are.
For instance, all the locks and bolts on the toilets have long since been unscrewed and taken off home, or to sell at the notorious Mercado Oriental. And most of the toilet seats as well.
But what saves the university grounds is the glorious vegetation, which sprouts everywhere in luxuriant abundance as soon as the rainy season gets underway. Huge trees with vast, gnarled trucks from which roots and lianas hang. Lofty palms and bristly mangoes; and climbers with leaves five times the size of the ones we grow in pots as house-plants at home.
And the other thing that brightens the place up is the students, with their Latin taste for flamboyant clothes and vivid make-up, and their extrovert gaiety as they stand about in the corridors, teasing and giggling and showing off like adolescents anywhere. Though I’m told a lot of them have kids and jobs as well.
12th August 1989 Managua
It looks like we’re going to have to find a place of our own sooner than we expected. Werner seems to have taken a peculiar objection to our presence, in particular, for some reason, to me; odd, since we see so little of each other, with him working late every day of the week, and at weekends Juergen and I usually take off somewhere.
But perhaps that’s the problem. Youngish ‘alternative’-type West Germans have this almost sacred notion of living together; it’s not just a question of sharing a house or a flat like in London. You’re supposed to form a real close-knit community, a kind of ersatz-family.
I haven’t anything against this on principle, but it should develop of its own accord, when through happy coincidence people find they have compatible life-styles. Forcing it only leads to bitterness and resentment.
It has partly to do with the fact that West Germans are so spoiled, materially, that they take somewhere secure and comfortable to live for granted. If you move into a shared flat or house, so the theory goes, you’re not doing it, as you are in London, because you’re desperate for a roof over your head and couldn’t possibly afford to live on your own, so whether you’d want to or not doesn’t come into it.
You’re doing it because you want to live communally. In practice it leads to ridiculously high expectations.
That was my attitude to flat-sharing back in Berlin, anyway. Here, I considered it totally irrelevant; surely all of us would be far too busy and preoccupied to worry excessively about the group-dynamics at home, so long as missiles weren’t actually flying.
I seem to have been mistaken and obviously Werner thinks that Juergen and I disappear on our own or live for each other too much, without taking him or Benno into account; for which I am naturally the main culprit, since before I turned up they were three lads together, with no external distractions.
Benno, an electrician from Flensburg, was on holiday in Europe when I first arrived. He’s since returned to the fold. I actually found him, in contrast to Werner, a relaxed, easy-going sort of person, and I’m sure he wouldn’t have made any kind of fuss on his own account. But now he’s not going to say anything to contradict Werner, who he idolises rather.
It’s not as if the other lads don’t have girlfriends, but I suppose the difference is they don’t live in. Benno sees a lot of the nica secretary from his firm, who is actually fairly obviously pregnant, whether from Benno or not, nobody seems to know.
Werner’s girlfriend is a volunteer social-worker from Madrid, but as she is based somewhere the other end of the country, she only puts in an appearance at weekends.
Juergen says, incidentally, that before I arrived he had the feeling that Benno and Werner were much thicker together than either was or wanted to be with him. When he said as much, yesterday, in self-defence, Werner acted as though some hidden truth of monumental significance had been revealed, and said why didn’t we discuss this at the time?
Juergen naturally hadn’t thought it worth raising, being preoccupied enough at work, and anyhow counting the days until my arrival. But Werner is like that, one of those typical Germans who believe all problems can be solved by endless discussion. Basically he is just a shit-stirrer.
You would really think he had more important things on his mind. We certainly do. The last thing I feel like engaging in just now is the merry-go-round of house-hunting, in this unpredictable and badly-organised city where most people don’t have phones.
We have made some interesting excursions on the motorbike; up over the hills which surround Managua to the Pacific, where the beaches are broad and flat, the water shallow, the currents unpredictable. There are some fairly tastefully-designed resorts with picnic tables under palm-thatched huts, to which the children from the local cafe run after you to get you to order lunch.
Their fried fish is good, huge portions served in a tomato-and-onion sauce, or garlic, with spicy cabbage salad, banana chips, and limes. But the natives have an appallingly low level of conscientiousness regarding keeping public space clean, though the insides of their own houses are usually spotless.
Still the beaches are long and sparsely peopled, and it’s not difficult to find a quiet, unspoilt spot. At weekends you can rent ponies from local boys, and ride up and down in the surf; but you have to be careful, as they are totally unscrupulous, and will always insist you’ve gone over the hour and must pay extra. You just have to be ruthless and deny it.
Also anything left unguarded, even if it’s only a dirty old pair of ancient socks, will inevitably disappear. If Juergen and I want to go off together, even for a quick swim, clothes, books, glasses, T-shirts must be padlocked into the bike’s saddle boxes. We have to take a risk with the sandals, which we need to cross the hot sand to the sea. After taking them off, we bury them in the sand, and frequently take ages to find them again afterwards.
The best part of the day is the evening, where you can sit in the coastal village at a cafe and watch the sun go down over the Pacific Ocean.
Down by the coast, in the shadow of volcanoes, the plain and the sea is fertile; once over the hills, there’s nothing but wide fields of corn and sugar-cane reaching almost to the beach.
Up on the plateau, the wind is bitter, the villages scrappy and depressing; nothing but the ubiquitous grill-stands by the roadside, dirty children with meagre plastic bags of fruit or biscuits for sale.
5th September, Managua
The other place for a day trip is Xiloa, the volcanic lagoon, half-an-hour’s drive or a bus-ride out of town, whose cool, sulphuric waters are deliciously soft and soothing. The picnic area along the shore gets crowded at weekends, but it’s always good for a swim as the natives never venture into the deep, perfectly still water, but just splash about, adults as well as children, on the shallow beach, the women and girls all still modestly encased in their clinging wet dresses. Few of either sex, apparently, ever learn to swim.
We’re still not out of Werner’s house, but with any luck it won’t take all that much longer. I’ve settled down a bit at work, have learned to rationalise my preparation so that it doesn’t take more than an hour or two a day – essential, as I’ve also a lot of marking to do. I can do it at home, if I want, as the classes themselves are all over by one, which is better if I need peace and quiet; but I get the feeling if you do that too often it’s considered anti-social. You’re sort of expected to be available, to talk to students, other teachers etc. till about four o’clock.
The classes themselves took a bit of getting used to, and I know that out of uncertainty and nerves I did some things I shouldn’t have done early on. Basically, the students, though they’ll yawn quite openly if they’re bored, and chatter with their friends, eat in class, and do all sorts of things one might think of as being undisciplined and even deliberately provocative, are actually terribly good-natured and amenable. They’ll do anything you say with cheerful and unquestioning good grace; they’d stand on their heads and bicycle in the air if I said that was the exercise for today.
Someone who had been teaching at the German/international school in Managua, which for a fee takes both German and Nicaraguan children, said that the German children were much bolder and cheekier in class than the natives, who tended not to speak until they were spoken to and were impeccably well-behaved, treating all adults as unquestionable symbols of authority.
Superficially this contradicts all the clichés about Latin and Germanic temperaments, although the fact that the West German children in Nicaragua would have ‘alternative’-type parents must play a role. All Nicaraguan parents would have more-or-less authoritarian attitudes to childrearing, and would probably view an inability to impose them as a measure of one’s own poverty and lack of education.
It’s the same as the attitude here to women’s appearance. It doesn’t matter how middle-class, emancipated and feminist she may consider herself, if a Nicaraguan woman doesn’t dress smartly with plenty of make-up, there can only be one reason; she or her family can’t afford it. As a result, the most vocally-radical and educated women are often dressed in the most emphatically feminine of fashions; tight, expensive, satiny dresses, high heels and lots of lipstick; talking all the while in the most uncompromising way about a woman’s right to education, employment, child support and abortion.
For us North Europeans, used to the reverse, it can be disorientating; and I know they are confused and intrigued by the simplicity with which the female volunteers dress.
Certainly my female students are, if nothing else, glamorously and impeccably turned out; usually a different slinky outfit, and makeup to match, every day. It’s more than youthful fashion-consciousness; it’s also a question of personal pride and family honour.
It’s probably true to say, though the standard courses are free, that most of them do not come from the poorest sections of society.
They have something of this unquestioning-respect for authority about them, although superficially they are not at all shy or retiring. But they accept unconditionally that the Teacher Is Always Right; which surprises me anew every time, as my natural instinct is to not actually feel that much older and wiser than they are.
I’m going to try and enforce a ban on food, made harder by the vendors who come by constantly outside the open windows with trays of goodies for sale. I’m going to have to say that no-one is to buy anything either. Somehow this would be easier if I had the feeling the students were being deliberately disruptive, if they weren’t actually so nice.
But on the other hand they probably expect it of me. I know other teachers impose this.
My students are in the second semester of their second year, so they’re not beginners. Some – probably those with relatives in Miami – have obviously had exposure to English elsewhere and speak far too fluently for students with only one-and-a-half years of English study behind them. They’re not necessarily the easiest, because they think they know it all and aren’t particularly attentive if I correct them.
A lot of them don’t give their homework in on time, but I’ve already said I’m not going to bother chasing them up. If I don’t have enough marks to award each one of them an average grade at the end of the term, they won’t be able to graduate into the next year, that’s all.
They have to pass an exam as well. But they could do that in theory without ever doing their homework.
Some of them I know have a lot of other responsibilities, children and parents to support, jobs on the side and so on. There are also, no question about it, a couple of spoiled brats from wealthy families, with regular shopping trips to Miami, an air of know-it-all superiority and probably never a responsibility in their lives.
But I don’t feel it’s my place to nag and bully, because how do I know that the student in question hasn’t had to spend the afternoon taking her sick baby to the doctor. They know the rules. They have to pass both continuous assessment and the end-of-term exam to graduate.
They also receive weekly assessments of their contribution in class, in which attendance and punctuality play a role.
All of this makes for a lot of extra-curricular organisation work for me – I also have sole responsibility for concoction and marking of the end-of-term exam, and there doesn’t even seem to be any established guidelines to work from – but at least I don’t have anyone breathing down my neck from above.
It’s a question of, here’s your class, here are your assessment sheets, get on with it. No further questions. I get the feeling here that the breach between the ideals and the practice is enormous. A lot of teachers, who simply because they are not paid enough, take afternoon jobs as well, are ridiculously overloaded, and the classes huge.
I’m lucky in that my classes are only 20-ish; some people have two classes of 40. Eighty students to continually assess – and theoretically be available too for informal consults. A literal impossibility.
I’m also lucky in that living with Juergen, who has been blessed with a reasonably generous subsidy to his pittance of a local wage from an international support organisation in Geneva, I don’t have to worry about money.
The teachers’ freedom to do their own thing here is a mixed blessing. There is no doubt that for inexperienced teachers, coming from abroad, a little bit more of a back-up system would be tremendously reassuring.
The first question I had when I was told I’d be doing the second year, was, what’s the syllabus? and the second, where are papers from last year’s end of second year exams? Embarrassed looks and evasive answers on both accounts.
Later, in the teachers’ room, an English guy said confidingly, look, forget the syllabus. There isn’t one. All you can do is ask the teacher who had your class last term what they did. That’s if the teacher concerned hasn’t disappeared back to the States or wherever in the meantime.
If so, you’ll have to ask the students.
I had to ask the students. The fact is, if there wasn’t an informal support network of volunteer teachers from abroad, simply at the very least to say to you, look, you’re own your own, so do whatever you feel comfortable with, you would be totally lost at sea without a lifejacket.
The native staff members think that by virtue of your wonderful foreign education alone you are fully equipped to deal with classes without any guidelines whatsoever. It doesn’t matter if you landed in the country yesterday; they assume you’ll know all about the local education system, methods, assumptions, expectations – or they think those things are irrelevant.
They also didn’t bother showing me the library and other facilities, or which classrooms I’d be using, or how to arrange for photocopies if they were absolutely necessary. They were effusive in their welcome, but the support began and ended there.
Some basic sense of responsibility for the new teachers from abroad, on behalf of the permanent staff is missing. Sink or swim, but don’t come to us for guidance, is the attitude.
Luckily my students seemed to have been working fairly systematically through a set book the department library has a series of – one of the few. Actually, as photocopy facilities are few and expensive, the course options are not that great. If you want to take a break from the text book the only thing to do is read something out loud you’ve
dug out from somewhere, or to use a tape-recorder, of which there aren’t enough to go round, but I brought one with me which I’m keeping for my personal use.
But one thing that’s obvious is that the students are quite used to limited options and a rather traditionally dull approach, and they do not find anything incongruous about texts introducing them to the Tower of London, the Empire State Building, or Stonehenge. They are almost pathetically thrilled if you come up with anything original or inventive, and even, sometimes, a little embarrassed.
Judy, a forceful American woman teaching the third years, thinks this is what is wrong with the teaching here as a whole. She thinks that students should be taught English by being encouraged to address themes which concern them and they’d want to talk about anyway. Political issues, given the current polarization of views in the country, are generally recognised as being sensitive, and a lot of teachers and students would instinctively avoid anything remotely controversial in class, even to the extent of not using totally neutral texts or poems, if they happened to be written by known-sympathisers of one position or another.
Judy says that this is chickening out on both sides; another standard complaint about the students is how ill-informed and ill-read they are, regarding international affairs and history, but how can this be improved if all meaningful and possibly offensive issues are avoided?
And what is a university for if not precisely to confront the controversial issues of the day?
She has put together an innovative course in which the idea is to force the students to think critically and creatively about things directly affecting them, and then relate them to a wider, even world-wide perspective. All discussions naturally taking place in English, with regular vocabulary and grammar tests to ensure they are doing their homework.
It may work; I hope so, because she has obviously done a lot of work collecting materials. Her class is a year ahead of mine, so their English might be able to rise to the occasion; and I’m sure most of them will appreciate the novelty and originality of the approach. She may get into trouble though if she gets too controversial. There have been cases of students storming out of classes in protest.
At the moment I am quite content, even relieved, to base the classes on the text-book, dull though it may be. I can understand Judy though. I think if I’d been around for a couple of years, like she has, I’d definitely feel like livening things up a bit too.
3rd October 1989 Managua
Here we are at last in a little house of our own! At the end we weren’t really on speaking terms with either Benno or Werner. Too bad, but I had been feeling a little alienated anyway by the West German Managua scene. I had the feeling that not being German, people concluded I was some brainless little thing who had attached herself to Juergen for her own materialist ambitions, the fact that I’d done it back in Berlin making me only slightly better than the Nica women who are allegedly constantly on the make with the foreign men here.
Germans can be incredibly superior sometimes, especially when they get together; I think they are just too conscious of their technical excellence. I cannot imagine the English and American volunteer staff at the university, for example, behaving that way. Though it’s quite true that all the Germans we’ve met have been technicians rather than mere language-teachers.
We found our house through a very proper agency, run by an elderly aristocrat, from her well-furnished bungalow with huge pictures of the Pope on the walls. As long as you have a regular supply of dollars, house-hunting in Managua is not really difficult. Owners like foreigners because they not only make regular payments in hard currency, but are also considered to be of generally better breeding than the average native tenant.
In the course of house-hunting we came into contact with what we hope is a dying breed of Nicaraguan, one for whom all native products including the population itself are by definition inferior and inept, and for whom the country’s, and indeed Latin America’s, only hope for the future lies in importing as many goods and people from the north as possible, with a view, one day, to being humbly accepted as another United State.
It is no coincidence that our landlords speak like this, because these, usually, are the people with houses to rent. These ones didn’t appear to have grasped that Northerners coming to work in Nicaragua today do not have quite the same attitude as the ones who used to come, or their own friends in Miami, or that all white people are not basically the same. They seem to take it for granted that all of the world’s natural (fair-skinned) aristocrats would want to live in the style to which they themselves had laid claim all their lives, and were finding, these days, increasingly difficult to sustain.
In the old days Nicaragua like other Latin American countries, had a tiny but fantastically wealthy aristocracy which lived with servants and mansions and an exclusive social scene in an imitation of some long-gone European elite – but that nobody lives like that in Europe any more seems to have escaped the notice of relics of this society that has survived here.
Anyhow these people seemed to assume we would be installing servants and expensive antique furniture and whole carcases of beef and pork in the freezer, and that we would be full of sympathy for their own pathetic worries about income and their children’s foreign school-fees.
Actually it was quite interesting listening to them grumble, as we went to view the house in their chauffeur-driven Mercedes. I had no idea that there were people like this left in Nicaragua, although I know that many of the leading Sandinistas came from wealthy backgrounds. But I’d assumed that the rest had either adapted, or fled the country, which many of course have.
The house itself is actually fairly modest, though a pretty setting, set back from the road, with a lovely garden all round. It has two bedrooms, a sitting room, a kitchen, and two showers. The kitchen opens out onto the garden in the back which has the usual exotic selection of mangoes, limes and bananas. At the weekends we sit there in rocking chairs in the shade, breakfasting in the late morning.
It’s just round the corner from Managua’s Intercontinental Hotel (rooms an astronomical $90 a night), from which a constant stream of smart foreign journalists seem to come and go, but, typically of the kind of mixture characteristic of Managua’s barrios, our side-street is full of potholes and heaps of rubble, between open squares of unkempt grass, and the next street along is nothing but grubby shacks and loose hens and pigs and infants running about.
Every morning at about seven o’clock a local cowboy on a wiry pony drives his herd of bony cattle up the hill past our front door, in search of a new patch of overgrown urban wasteland. Now and again, Juergen, feeling rather self-conscious, nips out in his wake to collect fertilizer for the garden.
It was here that the 1972 earthquake had its epicentre, in whose vicinity the Interconti was just about the only structure left standing, which may explain why the area has now thrown up an incongruous mixture of luxury and squalor.
Our house, for which we pay $200 a month, lies somewhere in the middle.
I have acquired a rickety old bicycle which gets me to the university in ten minutes – a fairly nerve-racking ten minutes, with trucks thundering by on the badly-surfaced roads, frequently and unpredictably strewn with rubbish, but it saves me being dependent on Juergen for every little trip.
None of Managua`s the streets have proper names, or if they do nobody knows them. Postal address run something like this: From the Antojitos Restaurant, walk two blocks into the setting sun, then half-a-block to the south, and it’s the one with the green front door opposite where the filling station used to be.
That is what people actually write, using accepted abbreviations, on envelopes, and postmen are dependent on the help of neighbours and passers-by. Imagine, a capital city with no proper street names or house numbers, and you have some idea of the kind of overgrown village that is Managua.
Our landlord came round very drunk one evening, two weeks after we’d moved in, obviously having been boozing somewhere, and now feeling like a self-confessional chat. He got very sentimental and self-pitying, telling us how he had never had the chance to learn a profession and could now only make money by engaging in some kind of shifty business he did not expand on, but he tried to scare me, the little woman, with allusions to his ruthless and unscrupulous connections.
He was only trying to impress, in the manner of a drunken macho, but it may have been partly true. He had given the impression of having married into an aristocratic family rather than having come from that kind of background himself, being much darker-skinned than his wife and sister-in-law, to whom the house actually belongs.
He was definitely in awe of Juergen, another pronounced example of the national inferiority complex. How different it is, the experience of being a foreigner here, from being a foreigner in Germany. Our inescapably superior status continually embarrasses me, still half-expectant of the hostile contempt that anyone with a foreign accent arouses, in non-alternative circles, in Germany.
We got rid of our depressed landlord eventually. I wonder if he is going to be paying us regular visits of this kind.
10th October 1989 Managua
Bluefields is a scruffy, cynical, colourful little town of small-time enterprisers; a real racial melting-pot, the people of native Indian, African, European and even Chinese descent in varying proportions and all combinations. Market vendors, hotel managers, small motorboat or lancha owners shamelessly rip off tourists with promises to trips to idyllic deserted Caribbean beaches, neglecting to mention that it rains most of the time.
We visited the town for a few days during my half-term, driving the bike with some difficulty through the mud as far as Rama, in the heart of Nicaragua’s interior, from where a boat goes daily up the Rio Escondido to Bluefields on the Atlantic Coast.
Part of the road had been swept away by last year’s hurricane, and we had to creep along a muddy goat-track on the side of the gorge. We spent an absolutely sweltering night in the creaky old Rama hotel on the banks of the river, plagued by mosquitoes and gasping in the thick humid air.
The rain buckets down like nothing imaginable in these parts. Afterwards, the sun burns through the humid air till you pray for rain again. The temperature swoops and soars about five times a day, in accordance with the alternating rain and sunshine, and in the marketplace the stall-holders stand permanently on the alert with sheets of tarpaulin and huge umbrellas which double-up as sunshades as well.
At night, in our hotel, the rain thunders like machine-gun fire on the corrugated iron roof making conversation impossible.
Running tap water is scarce, which seems crazy in the town with just about the highest annual rainfall in the world, as are flush toilets. In our relatively superior hotel you could flush the toilet and sit in a plastic basin under a running tap in the mornings, but not in the evenings. The resourceful manager deposited extra basins out in the street, which inevitably filled to overflowing within the course of one cloudburst, so there was always some available.
I spotted the Lambeth Council garbage-collection lorry (during the 1980s Lambeth Council was twinned with Bluefields). It looks in good shape. Incidentally it is still carrying its British number plate.
The majority English-speaking Caribbean population has a free-and-easy casualness about them; everybody wears shorts, and the men usually bare-chested, as they work on the numerous building sites and in their own backyards. Our tight-lipped, fortyish, business-like hotel manageress zips about town in tight jeans on a Honda, which in Managua would arouse a lot of macho stares, not to mention jeers, but is here a matter of course for anyone lucky enough to have one.
It’s a cheery, friendly, lively sort of place so long as you watch your purse and don’t act the innocent bimbo. It doesn’t appear to have been much touched or impressed by the Sandinista revolution.
Outside the town, the damp hills have been stripped bare and desolate, the combined effects, I suppose, of the hurricane and the unchecked wood-gathering on the part of the local population. A series of rock-pools, in a shallow gorge half-an-hour’s walk from Bluefields, where the local children come to splash about, must have been idyllic in the days when the surrounding hills were dense with jungle.
We got up in the middle of the night and stole down to the harbour in the damp darkness before dawn, to catch the four o’clock boat, which snakes its way back along the sleepy brown river to arrive at Rama at midday.
The banks are lined with hour upon hour of deserted marshy shrubland, fronted by rows of tall coconut palms often bent to the ground by the force of storms. Obviously, a twice-daily or more battering of heavy rain, for nine months of the year, does not trouble them; they are as abundant as dandelions on a British lawn, but it probably explains why the pendulous trunks never seem to straighten but loop this way and that over the river, as though contemplating their top-notch of spikey locks in the sluggish water.
Only the occasional flimsy settlement nestles on the bank in a tiny coconut or banana grove, where a makeshift pier to which a few canoes are attached extends into the thick mud.
San Juan del Sur, where we have spent a couple of weekends, is a pretty, unspoilt seaside town in a cove on the Pacific coast near the Costa Rica border. The makeshift bars along the seafront do fantastic plates of shrimp and lobster for next to nothing; and if you know where to go you can drive along obscure tracks through the bush behind the sand-dunes to totally untouched and undiscovered virgin beaches. If Nicaragua ever gets rich enough to invest in a tourist industry, this’ll be the first place to suffer.
24th October, 1989 Managua
Juergen is the kind of perfectionist who has difficulty coming to terms with the huge gap between the ideal and the practice that seems to confront just about anybody coming here to work as a volunteer. In his workshop, they need an extra work-table. They need replacements for a string of simple things like plugs that he knows are available in the central Health Ministry warehouse. But though he’s applied and applied, reminding the workshop administrator again and again, nothing happens.
He believes the administrator is a crook, because things disappear inexplicably from the workshop warehouse and he’s the only person who would have unsupervised access. Essential parts disappear all the time from the hospital machinery, clearly at the hands of the mechanics with whom he works, but everybody puts it down, with a cheery laugh, to the espiritu santu – obviously a running joke.
Juergen has a teaching function in the workshop, and he dutifully runs once-a-week practical seminars; but although his pupils obediently attend and claim to have grasped everything, it’s quite obvious that they haven’t. Also, they don’t really want to, as what they earn in the hospital is hardly worth taking home and what really interests them is the business they do on the side – with the aid of parts from the hospital – mending the neighbours’ TVs and radios back in their home barrios.
Juergen has found that the best way to interest them is construct examples that can also be applied to home-consumer technology; but this naturally leaves a lot of the hospital technology out in the cold.
The worst thing, though, is the feeling that the workshop boss – the administrator – is working against him. As long as the man in charge is only interested in sabotage, all efforts at structural improvement are futile.
This has long since been grasped by the other volunteer in the workshop, an Austrian called Wolfgang, who is content to plod along doing things as they’ve always been done. He exasperates Juergen too, agreeing with him on principal but refusing to back him up practice.
There was some operating room piece of machinery that constantly reappeared in the workshop requiring some basic replacement, until finally Juergen took it back to the surgery and explained to the doctors in person that if they would only refrain from doing such-and-such, it wouldn’t keep going bust. He and Wolfgang agreed to go on strike if it appeared in the workshop within the next two weeks; but when of course it did, Wolfgang repaired it without a murmur in the same old way, as soon as Juergen took an afternoon off.
Wolfgang has already been there two years and only has a few months left. It’s obvious that he’s long past any kind of outraged or principled gesture. It strikes me this is a necessary survival mechanism.
Juergen expends so much senseless energy in blustering about in indignation.
Juergen owes his job probably to one Miguel Santos, who is the hospital’s neuro-surgeon. Dr Santos is actually of German background and education, the name being an old cover from the days when he worked with the FSLN guerillas before the Sandinista triumph that got stuck. In his previous existence as a leading West Berlin neurosurgeon he was probably known as something like Horst Strammbaum.
(He was in fact Ernst Fuchs, his nom de guerre Carlos Vanzetti, and something of a German/Sandinista legend. He died in Nicaragua, in 2003, aged 70, of a brain tumour.)
He has lived for at least ten years in Nicaragua, and within the hospital at least, would have a lot of say, should he care to interest himself, in who was to be employed where. For strictly speaking technicians of Juergen’s calibre do not belong in the individual hospital workshops, but should work directly for the Ministry of Health, to be sent by them to any of their institutions in need, in Managua or the whole country, leaving the day-to-day repairs to the local mechanics.
But, as Dr Santos would know, being on the receiving end of breakdowns in the maintenance system, getting any kind of service from the central Ministry of Health is a wearisome and bureaucratic business. He must have decided that what he needed was on-the-spot back-up, preferably of West German background, enabling him to bypass the Ministry altogether.
Juergen found the doctor unfathomable at first, the way he paid him constant visits in the workshop and seemed inexplicably concerned about his welfare, although in the normal run of things he would have very little to do directly with the doctors. But then as Juergen became aware of the chain-of-command and -service, and of his own anomalous position in it, this likely explanation dawned on him.
This would also explain the administrative boss’s unrelenting hostility. He must have felt he’d had one put over on him, when a new, highly-qualified foreigner suddenly appeared in his workshop.
But Juergen has grown fond of the five workshop mechanics, with whom he has the most to do on a day-to-day basis. Rather like my students, they are good-natured and affectionate lads, though lacking any kind of formal education, which makes his teaching sessions difficult.
I don’t know if this is the reason but it’s a kind of standard complaint from foreigners involved in teaching here that the nicas as a rule don’t seem to understand what understanding is all about. They always nod enthusiastically, and then go on doing things the same old deficient way, being quite incapable or just not interested in differentiating, for example, between the bits they’ve grasped, and the bits that aren’t quite clear yet. So as a teacher you are constantly in the dark about whether anything is getting through at all.
As an EFL teacher, you can in theory check up on students’ progress without depending on them to inform you, but a general lack of sophistication still, obviously, makes the process more laborious. Juergen’s problem is that short of insisting that they go home and build him a circuit themselves, he’s no real way of checking up on them at all.
They also have a tremendous desire to please, which can also cause confusion, because they’ll say what they think you want to hear. Just for example asking directions on the street; a nica will nearly always make something up rather than have to disappoint you by saying they don’t know. At the same time their genuine delight when they really can help would make your heart glow.
I’d classify every one of my students as being motivated and enthusiastic. Unlike Juergen’s muchachos, they don’t have to be there; all of them, for whatever dubious reasons, in some cases, genuinely want to learn English. But you wouldn’t think so, judging from the inconsistency with which they hand in their homework, or, more strikingly, the flippancy with which it is sometimes accomplished.
I might have said the exercise is to compose ten sentences using a particular grammatical construction. You can bet at least 50 percent of the class will hand back ten sentences, which are identical except for the fact that they have used a different proper name each time, and almost exactly the same as the example I wrote on the board in class.
And if I complain, they say, but there were no mistakes, were there?
They are not being provocative. They simply have to get it done quickly as they have other things to do and have not really grasped the object of the whole exercise; they are just doing it because Teacher said, like little school-children.
But they really do want to learn English. That’s what makes this kind of sloppiness so hard to grasp.
They think learning English – or electronics – is like putting money in a slot-machine. You do everything the instructions say and the desired result pops out automatically. I think it’s this kind of mindless passivity more than anything else that Judy is trying to break through with her new course. I wish her all the luck in the world but I doubt she can make an assault on a national characteristic alone.
Juergen keeps grumbling that on a technical level the nicas want easy answers and instant results for everything, without being prepared to take responsibility for any of the groundwork.
The wife of one of Juergen’s muchachos, as he calls them, although at least two of them are considerably older than he is, washes our clothes for us. Juergen takes a bundle over on Tuesdays on the motorbike during the lunch-hour, and picks it up the next day. We’ve also noticed that, unsolicited, she sews on any buttons that are missing, and neatly patches up any holes. For no reason, I mean I don’t think she expects any kind of generous donation. It’s just that people here just like being nice.
8th November 1989 Managua
The fruit is ripening in our back garden. Already every morning the ground is littered with yellowy-green limes. The neighbouring family, who up until now have observed us discretely with a mixture of distrust and curiosity, asked for some quite openly, and after that, I gave them regular bundles. Juergen takes them to work, as we can’t possibly use them all.
We cook simple things like rice and fried bananas, or occasionally get steaks or a frozen chicken from the supermarket. The best place to get meat is the renowned German butcher, who is not really German, but has technicolour posters of Bratwurst and other teutonic delicacies pasted up in his shop, and allegedly did an apprenticeship there.
Anyway he has the most hygienic looking meat counter in town, and there’s always a queue outside, mostly comprised of foreigners.
The place to get bread is the wholefood bakery, another place to meet all your chums. Along with real brown bread – the natives go for dense white stuff with a lot of sugar in it – you can get honey, untreated peanut butter, and various sweet cakes there. I often nip down on the bike in the afternoon, as it’s not that far away.
And then of course there’s the diplo-tienda, Managua’s attempt at a US-style supermarket, hard currency only. We use it more often than I’d like to confess, to get things like mayonnaise and mustard and tea-bags and tampons, hard to find outside. Because of the US trade-embargo, most of the goods are Canadian; or they come from the States via Mexico or Panama.
The selection is not that spectacular, and except for the tampons, you could certainly live without it; but amongst the natives diplo-tienda goods have tremendous snob-value. You can see the well-endowed ones coming there with their Landrovers on massive shopping trips, amassing goods, most of which you can get at any corner shop or market outside, probably cheaper. Obviously well-connected Managuans still have no problem getting their hands on dollars.
Monika, an Austrian nurse who works in Juergen’s hospital, says the nica women don’t use tampons because most would die of shame rather than fumble around between their legs for bits of string. Instead they use an old-fashioned kind of padding.
And there’s the diplo-hardware store across the road, for electronic goods, bicycles, furniture, and everything else essential to stylish living. We bought ourselves a liquidizer, and an electric fan there. These can be bought outside, but for things like this it is cheaper to pay in dollars.
If you meet any of your chums in the diplo-tienda, you’re likely to exchange rather sheepish grins. At least half the custom there is Nicaraguan.
We make endless quantities of freco with our liquidizer, chopping and squeezing mounds of bananas, pineapple, papaya, oranges and limes into the beaker and whipping it all up till it foams. Cooled in the fridge, it tastes fantastic.
25th November 1989 Managua
Term is nearly over. Teaching has stopped; I’ve set my exams and all I’m going to have to do is mark them. I’ve worked out the continuous assessment averages and have already had a couple of altercations with students who think I haven’t been fair. I was expecting this; and there’ll certainly be more when the exam papers are marked.
I’m sure I have the reputation in class of being a kind of soft touch; someone who never punishes or gets cross. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this as such; it’s quite true that one reason I don’t raise my voice is because I’m conscious of not being physically capable of it in any very awe-inspiring way. So perhaps making virtue of necessity I’ve always taken the line that there’s no point in trying to bully students into learning if they really don’t want to. And that making them want to doesn’t have anything to do with shouting at them.
But that doesn’t mean I’m easily intimidated, or that I am not capable of being absolutely adamant once I have reached a decision. A number of the boys have opted to mistake my gentle approach for a general uncertainty, and, now that the moment of truth, when I have inescapable power over them, has come, and finding they are not going to get as good grades as they would have liked, they are trying it on, in the hope that a known softie like me will be easy to wheedle and manipulate.
I actually do not find these lads at all difficult to deal with and their slimy-macho approach just makes me all the firmer in my opposition. It is much harder failing the overworked women – and it is somehow always the girls – who I know have about a hundred family responsibilities on the side. There have been some definite border-line cases, and, where I have considered the student to be of a generally diligent nature, I have erred on the generous side, the directorial staff would probably say.
But I’ve tried to make it clear to those students that it was only touch and go and that unless they somehow manage to develop more consistency, they probably won’t pass again next term. I hope that’s not just passing the buck.
The exam paper isn’t all that hard and most of them will get through. I’d like to offer those that don’t the option of another test at the beginning of next term, giving them the chance to swot in the vacation, if they feel inspired to. But that doesn’t seem to be a routine procedure and I’m scared of landing myself with too much work later on.
Judy says her course went well although she had to spend a lot more time on basic grammar than she’d reckoned with, and so didn’t get through all that much of it. She said everyone was enthusiastic and there were some lively discussions, and that a lot of suggestions for new themes came out of the class. I said that was terrific, and she should let me have some of her used materials.
24th December 1989 Managua
Not having to go to work anymore, I spend a lot of time about the house, washing the white-tiled floor, on which films of dust settle in a few hours, washing clothes by hand in the concrete sink outside the back door, hosing down the garden, and gathering the limes and mangoes. The rains are over now, but the winds blow cool and gusty, tearing down the unripe mangoes which lie like little embryos all over the drying ground.
This is the coolest time of the year, for we are still north of the Equator, and we have shivered in temperatures of 22 degrees C on a couple of evenings. On the radio they said historic lows of 12 degrees have been measured in the hills inland. There are heavy snows apparently in Texas.
I usually have the radio on, thinking it’s good for my Spanish. It doesn’t take long to get all the schmalzy-latino-hits by heart. There is remarkably little overflow from the English/USA pop-music scene here; they have their own teen-stars and heartthrobs, all from the Spanish-speaking world, and the hits all have Spanish texts, though occasionally I have recognised the tune from an earlier popular English version.
Sometimes, it’s even the same singer, singing a very free translation. An exception to the language/pop-culture divide is Madonna, who is obviously a big star in the original everywhere.
Tastes are conservative, romance and sentimentality being the order of the day for young and old. Only the university radio station run by the university School of Journalism plays a significant proportion of vaguely new-wave sounds, mostly English language.
The standard TV entertainment is the notorious telenovela, up to fifty or a hundred episodes of romantic melodrama, running most nights of the week, to which the entire nation is allegedly addicted and which comprises the crucial topic of conversation at most workplaces the next day. Most of them are imported and dubbed from Brazil.
Towards the end of the week, there is sometimes a remarkable selection of films, some old, some very recent big-budget releases, of which I can only presume the state TV station has pinched a black-market video, because they would only have just reached the cinemas in Europe. They are usually shown with Spanish sub-titles which especially on most peoples’ fuzzy old tellys must put them beyond the reach of many of the still-only semi-literate natives.
The big news all over the media now is the US invasion of Panama. National outrage all over the Sandinista-controlled and sympathetic press. The opposition rag Prensa has however condoned the invasion, which, so popular wisdom goes, will cost them votes in February’s election here.
The election campaign is already energetically underway, at least on the part of the Sandinistas and a number of smaller parties, though the main opposition-grouping, UNO, has hardly made a visual impact at all. They are allegedly waiting for their donations from Washington to come through. A pathetic excuse, since most of their politicians could finance the campaign single-handed.
We can get US newspapers, a day late, and Time and Newsweek from the Intercontinental Hotel foyer. The invasion of Panama seems unanimously deemed unfortunately timed, as far as US designs on the Nicaraguan election are concerned, but still nobody in the States seems seriously to have considered the possibility that the Sandinistas will win.
All reputable prognoses put them already significantly in the lead, and frankly, what the UNO has produced in the way of campaign material so far, is so pathetic, it’s hard to see how they can make any headway. Contra activity has reactivated, despite promises of truce, which must also work against them, because they are not very discriminating in their targets.
A handful of would-be voters were killed on the voter-registration days in October, and an attack on an isolated mission in the western part of the country killed two nuns, one of them actually a US American, and sent a priest into intensive care and the rest of his life in a wheelchair.
The murder of the six priests and their housekeepers in El Salvador back in November was given special poignancy because one of them had previously been rector of the university here. At the time of the massacre the current rector, also a priest as they all are in this Jesuit institution, made an extremely moving public speech in the main hall, which was attended by all the leading Sandinistas.
Of course the opposition rag puts all the atrocities down, as fact, to the Sandinista Army/Salvadorean guerillas, to them one and the same thing, without a shred of evidence, of course, but they’re hard put now to explain the burning of a provincial Frente Sandinista campaign office, and subsequent death of a volunteer, in the context of what was obviously some kind of demonstration clash.
From what I had heard of La Prensa before coming here, I thought it must a conservative, but respectable and generally trustworthy newspaper. It isn’t; I’ve never seen such shamelessly slanted reporting in my life, or such sophisticatedly malicious techniques of invention.
Of course (pro-Sandinista) Barricada, El Nuevo Diario, and the Noticiero Sandinista on TV are slanted too. They leave things out or diminish the importance of events which don’t suit them. But they don’t lie quite so directly, quite so unashamedly, or with quite such authority as Violeta de Chamorro’s newspaper. Someone there still has a spark of conscience, of idealism, of a notion of what truth is.
La Prensa has been so duped by powerful maniacs from the north that they probably genuinely believe that a monopoly on truth is held by those with might and money.
3rd January 1990 Managua
We got a letter from a friend in Berlin with a few crumbs of Wall stuck onto the paper with a piece of sellotape. On New Year’s Eve, we tuned in to the Deutsche Welle and the World Service at five o’clock, which was midnight in Berlin, and imagined we could hear our mates popping the Sekt bottles and dancing on the remains of the Wall amongst the crowds around Brandenburg Gate.
All the events in Germany and those before them in Eastern Europe have been faithfully reported by the Sandinista media here; the person under most pressure being the East German Ambassador who is pulled into the TV studio on occasions to offer apologetic explanations of the historic events in progress. It was unfortunate that the Human Right he selected as an example of those respected by the East German state over the West German one was the right to abortion, something not likely to go down terribly well in this very Catholic country, apart from in exceptional feminist circles.
He is quite a well-known media personality because Nicaragua, down the years, owes the GDR a lot. Among other things they have financed and run the Karl Marx Krankenhaus, the most modern and reputable public hospital in the country.
New Year’s here is sober in comparison, but there are a certain amount of partying and fireworks. Having rather dropped out of the internacionalista scene, we spent it alone. Most of my work colleagues are using the three-month university vacation to visit their own families.
15th January 1989 Managua
When Juergen was attending a month’s preparation course for work abroad, run by his European funding agency in West Germany, he met a young electrician also heading for Nicaragua, who he remembered because amongst the 40-odd assembled students, they were the only two. Unfortunately he couldn’t remember his name, but knew he was stationed in San Carlos, right down at the tip of the Nicaragua Lake near the Costa Rica border.
So he took a couple of days off and, inspired by the prospect of seeing a bit more countryside, we drove down there for a long weekend.
He wasn’t difficult to find, as everyone in San Carlos knew the new German electrician, and we were directed enthusiastically to his house like long-lost cousins.
Living and working in a small town out in the wilderness must be quite a different experience from being in Managua. Even if you have a personal vehicle, it takes a whole day to reach the capital, on rough, unsurfaced roads. There’s a real sense of the jungle creeping in on all sides; lizards of all colours, not uncommon in Managua, are everywhere, on the floors, the windows, furniture; and snakes and scorpions an everyday hazard.
Uwe shared his house, which was one of those East Coast wooden ones on stilts characteristic of damp, marshy areas, with a Bavarian, also an electrician, on loan from his firm for six months on some kind of union-exchange scheme. The two, who hadn’t met before arriving in San Carlos, were obviously caught in a kind of love-hate, mutual-dependence-leading-to-mutual-irritation kind of relationship, which you can understand developing between two isolated Europeans in a place as remote as that.
Both of them seemed popular locally as well, of course, especially with the native female population. Uwe was quite young still, and this latter attention, probably a revelation to him after the characteristic coolness, according to Juergen, of girls in German student circles, had transformed him into a shining-eyed, pink-faced Casanova. I felt quite amused in a motherly sort of way, watching him flirt with the trainee-nurses at the new village hospital where he worked, but wondered, in the spirit of my own solicitous mother, if he’d thought about taking precautions.
Werner, an old pro, or so he always gave out, used to say the problem with getting involved with the Nica women was that they were dead keen to get married, considering any North/Westerner to have better prospects than their compatriots, and were not above using pregnancy as a means to an end.
San Carlos’ only hotel, situated on the murky square on the lakeside, is as creaky, crumbly and decrepit as you can imagine. The toilets have quite obviously not been cleaned for years.
Heading for home, the stream we’d crossed without noticing on the way down, had been swollen by off-season overnight rains to a swirling torrent, bursting its banks and submerging the little road bridge under about two feet of water.
The only solution was to lug the bike, with the help of enthusiastic and helpful bystanders, into a tiny wooden rowing boat belonging to local campesinos, and get ourselves rowed across the surging water, for a modest fee, clinging for dear life on to the bike, whose front wheel and handlebars reared out precariously over one side.
We also ran out of petrol exactly on the stretch of road notorious for Contra-activity, because we’d been unable to fill up in San Carlos, the sole petrol station being shut. Luckily, the Contras kept a low profile, and we found someone in the nearby village who sold us a couple of litres, just enough to get back to Managua with.
It’s a vague ambition of ours to drive sometime on the only road that crosses the country from east to west, to Puerto Cabezas, on the northern bit of Nicaragua’s Atlantic coast. But quite apart from the fact the road isn’t surfaced and hence not advisable in the rainy season, if we couldn’t count on getting petrol once in Puerto Cabezas, we’d never get back.
Puerto Cabezas sounds like a lost-and-forgotten village in the jungle, and just about the last place in the world you could count on getting anything. It has been the focus of the Contra-war zone for several years, though restrictions on entry have been lifted recently. Still the war must have left its mark.
We drove one weekend for a couple of hours along the Puerto Cabezas road from Matagalpa, and watched the landscape get gradually rougher and remoter. High, jagged blue ridges of rock behind forests of ancient, evergreen trees laden with silver-blue capes of Spanish moss, the stony track, used mostly by horses, a pale-yellow streak dipping up and down through passes and valleys.
It’s tragically amusing sometimes, stopping at roadside cafes for a basic lunch of chicken in salsa, watching the standard groups of male campesinos, sitting or slumping around the tables in advanced states of stupor and inebriation, with usually about 20 empty beer-bottles arrayed before them. The women – it’s invariably women – energetically running the bar, leave the bottles on the table so they know how many to charge for at the end. The whole scene is like a standard lesson in Nicaraguan sexual stereotypes and expectations.
28th January 1990 Managua
The election campaign is getting intense. Marina Zeledon, the admin principal at the School of Translation, where I drop by most days to look up textbooks and short stories for next term’s courses, has regaled me with Frente Sandinista T-shirts and ball-point pens. The Sandinista campaign office is directly opposite the university entrance and seems to emit a steady stream of Frente regalia in all directions from its gleaming, boldly-painted facade; pens, T-shirts, baseball caps, car-stickers, belts, even brief-cases and school backpacks.
Frente handouts dominate the aspect of streets; their plump little arrow logo is everywhere. Their TV spots, which grab the attention with bursts of fireworks and catchy snatches of song, are smart and slick like a lesson in TV commerciality.
Besides which the UNO campaign has not got off the ground. Their TV-spots are tired and uninventive. Their posters and slogans are dull, and they’ve no recognisable signature tune at all. The music they use on the TV is the old chestnut “We Shall Overcome”.
Looking about, it’s hard not to believe that the Sandinistas will win resoundingly; certainly everybody at the school takes this for granted. But at night sometimes, I’m gripped with sudden panic, wondering what we’ll do if they don’t.
On the way home from a visit last weekend to the volcano at Masaya, we and the other weekend travellers were regaled at a crossroads by a band of angry, bad-tempered UNO supporters, who, having slowed all traffic down to a crawl, hammered on our tank and saddle-bags and shoved leaflets under our noises, spitting out “Muerte a la Frente!” as we crept passed.
We remained impassive, looking neither right or left, and I was glad of our helmets and the fact that I’d made a mental decision not to wear the Frente T-shirt till the election was over. As a foreigner it’s not really my business.
But I was sobered by their evident hatred, something I’ve not encountered before; quite different from the mournful self-pity of our landlord, who is also without doubt a UNO supporter. These people were poor and ragged, and harboured violent resentment and sense of betrayal.
(Note from 1991?) Juergen took 10 days off work to go to Costa Rica, ostensibly to look for electronic parts not available in Nicaragua, but really for a bit of extended holiday. I went too, it still being vacation-time, and resolved to keep a more systematic diary than usual.
3 February 1990, Bagaces, Costa Rica
Straight down from Managua on Sunday morning, we made it to Penas Blancas before noon, no time to sneak a quick dip in San Juan del Sur en route. Luckily we packed yesterday; both saddle-bags jammed full, a large metal box with a hefty padlock (Juergen is very security-conscious) on the rack behind me and a loosely packed sausage bag on top of that.
Seems an awful lot for a couple of weeks, I mean we are not exactly planning to mix with high society requiring a different haute couture outfit every evening. I think a lot of it is tools, Juergen likes to be prepared for any emergency; and he’ll have included things like an aluminium kettle and primus stove, so that if we’re stranded in the outback somewhere we can at least make ourselves a cup of coffee. I leave things like packing to him, instinctively, in the certain knowledge that anything I concoct will be hurled asunder by his nibs in pursuit of the only conceivable perfect solution.
We are quite used to the road south by now, even the potholes are familiar, and the big tree by the roadside before Rivas where we always stop for a pee and to prod our bottoms back into shape.
The border itself though is new, luckily fairly deserted, although even the responsible officials are hard to locate. The huts look like they are made of cardboard. Nobody is much interested in our papers, or our luggage, although the ritual band of admirers has already assembled around the big, laden motorbike.
It’s very dusty and hot, of course, and once we’ve left the tatty little band of grilled-snack and gaseosa (the nica word for fizzy drink) sellers behind before the customs building, there’s nothing to drink except our own very lukewarm water until we arrive at the Costa Rica Reception Center; a more appropriate designation than customs office.
There, the Costa Rican official meticulously disinfects the motorbike (and all attendant baggage), insists that we take out a local insurance policy, and warns us that, unlike in these hopelessly irresponsible countries (he flaps his hand in the direction of the border we have just crossed), in Costa Rica all motor cyclists are bound by law to wear helmets.
He points significantly at ours which are bound to the bike, for the duration of customs procedures. On the road, we have always worn them anyway, at Juergen’s insistence; as he hastily explains, it’s also the law in Germany. The official nods sagely. Some countries, he seems to confide wordlessly, are civilised, and some just aren’t. Well we needn’t worry. We’re in Costa Rica now.
The Costa Ricans, well-schooled in tourism, have a tourist desk on hand in the customs office. We are welcomed, solemnly, to a free country, by someone who very much wants to speak English to us, but whom we disappoint by claiming knowledge only of German and Spanish.
Our Spanish is actually quite good enough for tourist purposes, so they’ve no excuse. It’s not that I mind speaking English. It’s just I can’t stand being taken for an American – I mean U.S. American. Juergen feels the same way I do.
After we had claimed our free tourist map, we headed for the customs canteen. Our first culture shock. There they all were, the rows of cooled brand-name canned sodas from iced tea to spiced grape half of which I hadn’t seen since my trip to the States two years ago, and Juergen has never seen.
Not that they really interest us, and to be fair (or deprecating, whichever way you look at it), Nicaragua has its fair share of gaseosas too. Only they only come in bottles.
I’d sooner drink a ‘freco’, any day, pulped fresh fruit drinks available in most places, although it seems in Costa Rica they like you to say it properly; ‘refresco natural’.
To be fair, they were good in the customs canteen, complete with the little tubed ice-cubes that you also get in the States. (In Nicaragua, ice comes in shattered chips after someone has taken a hammer to a massive block. You can only hope that it wasn’t sitting on a filthy pavement at the time.)
On the road again, and although we thought we’d got used to Nicaraguan dips and bumps, we couldn’t help appreciating the speed and smoothness of a real well-kept road. The countryside, though, is no different, flat and arid. February is the heart of the dry season, and the Pacific Coast is really dry.
The next day we took a detour through a national park billed as one of the few remaining bits of dry-tropical-jungle in existence. It was pretty dry, huge, fat, sluggish lizards flopped across the baked stone-and-chalk track, a pair of brilliant macaws squawked their way overhead, and two monkeys loped into the bush as we rounded a corner.
It was pretty exciting. Nicaragua hasn’t yet got around to setting aside bits of its jungle for exotic-tropics-hungry visitors from the north. And in Nicaragua no self-respecting internacionalista would confess to a kitsch yearning for travel-brochure tropical paradises.
Quite a few volunteer-workers in Nicaragua take their holidays in Costa Rica.
I think it was because we were so busy wildlife spotting that we struck a stone and kipped over as the track took a sudden dive, landing on our backsides in the prickly scrub, the bike skidding on a few yards before coming to rest, wheels spinning, in a chalk-pit.
The only thing broken was the right-hand mirror, which, though still in place, is picturesquely shattered.
It is not the first time it has happened. Juergen, who claims never to have had an accident in 14 years of motorcycling on European roads, is sometimes nonplussed by the unpredictable surfaces of local dirt tracks, luckily though, speeds are always minimal.
The only difference between Costa Rica and Nicaragua in this respect seems to be that the handful of main roads are in better shape. As a general rule, most villages off the main routes are served only by a bumpy track that you wouldn’t even get a motorbike down in the rainy season.
One reason why Juergen wants to head directly to San Jose is to get some kind of heavy duty tyre that will propel the bike along the stickiest of surfaces. We should be there tomorrow night.
5th February 1990, San Jose, Costa Rica
We drove to San Jose via the Pacific Coast, where there was a bit of genuine preserved rainforest, with a tasteful nature trail and rambling detours you could make through the jungle if you wanted. It’s the closest to a Tarzan set we’ve been so far, the problem with the rainforest in Nicaragua being that it is totally inaccessible for normal mortals. We didn’t spot any jaguars or anacondas, but the vegetation was the real thing; dense, grotesque, and very green; the air hot and humid just like in the tropical greenhouse in West Berlin’s Botanical Gardens, and we sweat buckets.
The moisture obviously came from underground as there was no cloud in the sky and probably had not been for several months, but the thick leaves overhead kept it in, with the powerful sun beyond cooking the whole thing up like a steam bath.
After that we began the climb to San Jose, leaving the tropics behind. San Jose lies at an altitude of 1,500 metres and as befits the capital city of an impeccably civilized country, does not suffer from the punishing heat of a city like Managua, but is cool and breezy.
But the first thing that we noticed, on the road from the coast, was the people. Some kind of national fiesta seemed to be in progress; cars and trucks bulging with passengers, dressed in uniform T-shirts, and waving and flapping banners and ribbons.
It didn’t take us long to identify two sets of colours; the green-and-whites, and the blue-and-reds. As we overtook a blue-and-red truck, a youth hanging over the railing pointed at his red-and-blue banner, and caught my eye with a questioning look. I suppose we were conspicuous in our neutrality. I responded with my best smile and a gesture of total confusion.
As there seemed to be names attached to the colours, we came pretty shrewdly to the conclusion that it must be some kind of general election. And it turned out that by coincidence we had chosen the evening of Costa Rica’s presidential election-day to arrive in San Jose.
I remembered then vaguely having read something about it in Barricada (the Sandinista daily). Our next thought was that finding a hotel might prove problematic, but in fact cheap and seedy ones turned out to be in plentiful supply. Our cell being on the fourth floor actually has quite a nice view over the city, but everything else about it is better left unmentioned. As I said to Juergen as we climbed the gloomy, creaking staircase, I wouldn’t stay here if I was on my own.
Accommodation for the motorbike, in San Jose, costs about the same as accommodation for us. The city centre overnight carparks up the prices probably knowing that any passer-through has to pay.
We spent that evening strolling amongst the celebrating masses, the celebrations being unpartisan as as yet no-one knew the election result. Every street was packed, nose-to-tail, with honking, screeching vehicles, family members from toddlers to grannies hanging out the windows and clogging the pavements with their flags and balloons and painted slogans.
All the cafes and bars were wide open and draped with their own favoured colours, although some, in the interests of unbiased custom, more discretely; but when we tried to buy a beer we were told that no alcohol was on sale in the entire country tonight, by government order. Soft drinks only.
The election result was broadcast, punctually, at ten, but I got the impression that it didn’t really matter who won. The election campaign had been very short, by agreement (why waste funds needlessly?) Most people, according to a local newspaper the next day, voted according to family tradition (the red-and-blues won by a narrow margin).
The election itself was a family tradition, the respectable Costa Rica family, who with revolution and invasion exploding on all frontiers maintains a dignified absence from the headlines of the world’s newspapers, and goes about its daily business in an orderly and unspectacular fashion, with a modesty befitting a small country which will never be anything more than a pleasant and insignificant banana republic, and on election day, even celebrates that fact.
On election day, the few foreign journalists in attendance are treated to a fiesta Costa Rican style. A celebration of its democratic, frivolous, insignificant self.
I sound rather bitter. But I can’t help comparing the situation with that in Nicaragua, which will also hold elections this month. That campaign has been running officially since last October, and unofficially, for the last ten years. They are going to be the most internationally scrutinized elections ever, so people say. It’s going to be very different; and the main difference is going to be that they matter.
Anyhow I found that the crowds and the trumpeting and hooting got to be a bit of a strain after a while, so I went to bed early with a mild headache.
We spent the next day traipsing through the streets of San Jose in search of a motorbike tyre and various electronic bits and pieces commissioned by Juergen’s colleagues in Managua. It was interesting that the street money-changers – technically breaking the law here as everywhere – lured us off not to some discreet and shadowy street corner, but into a high-tech, windowless office complete with surveillance cameras and very smartly-dressed service – obviously the back room in some highly-respectable high-street firm.
The rest was pretty boring, especially the backstreet workshop where we went to put the tyre on the motorbike and all the lads in attendance acted like they had never seen a female in their lives before. I retreated to a corner with Isabel Allende’s latest, which I am wrestling through in Spanish.
7th February 1990, Puerto Limon, Costa Rica
After we left San Jose, we had a real taste of northern European farmland, it was like being back home in Sussex; damp, misty green fields on a hillside, grazed by cattle or shaggy ponies, they were even the same kind of patchy black-and-white cows that we have at home, not those in even shades of beige and brown, which are the only ones you see in Nicaragua. The fog was periodically so dense that I couldn’t see anything at all, and in my thin cotton clothes, shaking with cold.
We took a detour from San Jose up to a local volcano summit, over 3,500 metres high. You could drive the whole way, winding back and forth on the steep slope, in and out of patches of fog and drizzle and brilliant sunshine. The summit peeked out through the clouds, and the sun shone brightly up there, so we could warm up as we strolled over vast expanses of grey ash, undulating in dune-like formations. We walked for a bit round the edge of the crater, above which hovered a sulphuric cloud, but we had to climb up onto a ridge to do this, which so exhausted us in the thin air that we didn’t make it much further.
The weather got worse on the descent and by the time we were back on the road to the coast I was so cold all I could do was grip Juergen’s trouser pockets with a manic determination to survive the worst the world chose to subject me to. We stopped at a cafe and drank a coffee; and after a while felt human enough to eat a plate of food. Then we dressed ourselves up in everything we had, which unfortunately, especially for poor Juergen with his hands on the handlebars, didn’t include gloves.
But an hour or two later and it was time to strip everything off again. We had dropped down into the coastal plain, and when the sun shone, which at least it didn’t do uniformly, it was hot like in Managua, with that burning sultriness that comes from humidity. The motorbike protects you from the worst of the heat while in motion, as you are in effect in a constant stream of wind; but it hits you as soon as you stop for a drink or a pee, or at a crossroads.
This is banana-country. Vast plantations stretching into the horizon; there are banana plantations in Nicaragua but nothing remotely on this scale. Railway lines running alongside, massive containers lined up ready for transportation to the coast and to Europe or the US, the “Dole – Made in Costa Rica” stickers probably stuck onto the fruit while it’s still dangling from the tree. Anyhow the bunches of fruit had been encased in blue plastic bags while still drooping in thick bunches from the stems, which looked very funny, but no doubt has an agricultural purpose.
“Dole”, in big letters, and the jolly sunshine logo that we Western Europeans know so well arched triumphantly over the plantation’s main entrance; the same thing stamped large and imperious on the side of every container. So many bananas, mile after mile we drove on past.
Puerto Limon, Costa Rica’s main Atlantic port, is an attractive, cosmopolitan, Caribbean town, especially after the seedy-affluent-quasi-North American mixture that is San Jose. The people of Puerto Limon are largely Afro-Caribbean and they quite genuinely speak a creole-English so I have no objection to being talked to in it. Like Bluefields but less cynical, perhaps because it is more prosperous. People seem genuinely good-natured and friendly.
Everybody rides bicycles, men and women and children. You very rarely see women, except internacionalistas like me, on bicycles in Managua.
There’s a fantastic jungle-park in the centre of town, with an array of staggeringly huge, drooping, ancient trees, with roots sticking out from the trunk at right angles like shoulder-blades. Juergen says it’s impossible to cut down a tree like that, the roots are too dense. You’d have to start from about 30 feet up.
9th February, 1990, a beach near Puerto Viejo, Costa Rica
This is it. Genuine tropical/Caribbean paradise, straight from the travel agency dream factory. Brilliantly clear, sparkling, shallow water; pale yellow sand littered with exotic spikey shells and pale grey and pink pieces of corral, and fallen coconut palms whose roots have slowly been undercut by the tide. Accessible only via bumpy, sandy track, and no-one in sight, only a modest palm-thatched hut in the distance which is probably a restaurant.
Here we sit, swaying in our hammocks slung between the palms, sucking on mangoes and watermelons, or stroll along the sand as far as we can go, until the beach peters out and the sea meets the land-bank with a crash and a fountain of surf. Or paddle and splash in the rippling water, which is only just cool enough.
We drove south along the coast from Puerto Limon, and realised from the restaurant prices where we stopped for lunch that we had arrived, probably, at what is Costa Rica’s main tourist region. Still I can’t say that it has been spoilt, we didn’t see any grotesque hotels or sordid resort complexes. The road south through a coastal coconut grove is quiet and modest; the palm-lined road and the sea beyond goes on and on, undisturbed, like the banana plantation.
The weather yesterday was overcast, though it didn’t actually rain. We stopped at a coastal national park containing what our guide-book said was a famous beach; and it was pretty, a sandy curve bordered by a squelching palm-and-mangrove jungle, which I said I bet housed alligators. The park official who took our modest entry fee said we could camp there. There was no-one else about, and it would have been nice, but we don’t have a tent with us. We were worried that we might not find an acceptably cheap hotel in the area.
But we found one a little further on, a creaky old Nicaragua-East Coast-style wooden termite-infected, two-storey shack on stilts, with a modest shop on the ground floor and a handful of very plain rooms upstairs. It’s heartening that prosperous Costa Rica still has places like this. The anti-mosquito window netting is always full of holes but we are prepared, having brought our own net.
And today, just driving idly down the coast in perfect weather, to see how far we could get (before the track peters out compelling anyone who wants to go further, back onto the main highway and through official customs), we found this dream-beach, not far from the Panama border, and resolved to dawdle away the rest of the day on it.
11th Feb, 1990, Turrialba, Costa Rica.
The reaction of casual bystanders – outside the hotel or cafe, at the filling station, or wherever – to our Nicaraguan number-plate is fairly uniform. They are immediately intrigued because we are obviously not Cubans and we don’t seem like Russians, and anyhow they know perfectly well that BMW motorbikes are not available under Communism – they are rare enough in Costa Rica.
They are compelled by natural openness and irresistible curiosity to enquire tentatively into our business in Nicaragua, at the same time not wanting to cause any unpleasantness. Their personal experience of neighbouring Nicaragua is nil, even though financially most could easily afford a trip, but why should they want to …They know there is no Freedom…well you know, opposition is suppressed, for instance demonstrations. (They aren’t.) .. But that will change soon, after the elections … won’t it?
Our opinion is worth something because we come from respectable western countries, and obviously have professional jobs. We say lamely that most Nicaraguans’ worries are not to do with Freedom but with their family’s next meal, and that we think the Sandinistas will win the election. We shocked a couple of very tentative enquirers into stunned silence by referring to the United States’ lies; but almost certainly we drove off leaving them struggling to the conclusion that we must be Communists after all.
The Costa Rican newspapers that we found were aimed at a very low common denominator; full-colour photos (though without nudity), all articles short and sensationalist, and political commentary more-or-less crassly US partisan. We found no local alternative, even at international stands in San Jose, which surprised us in this country which is supposed to have a high average level of education and literacy.
But this is an unbearably complacent country, conscious of its privileged and superior position within Central America. The consensus is conservative and unquestioning. The Catholic Church is almost certainly more traditionalist than large sections of it in Nicaragua, and conventional moral standards more rigorously policed.
Tut-tutting over unmarried mothers and family breakdown as such in Nicaragua would be an absurd luxury, simply not realistic given the circumstances in which most women live, which isn’t to deny that many of them probably would aspire to traditional ideals given the chance. In some of those spotlessly clean and orderly hillside small towns in Costa Rica, on the other hand, those ideals and the moral humiliation of those who offend them are almost certainly reality. The spotless whiteness of the plain town church on the central square, the young girls, equally clean and spotless and modestly flirtatious in their frilly white dresses, reminded me of a Bavarian Alpine village.
It’s interesting that a popular Latino hit of the time, probably originating from Mexico as the majority of the hits do, that we hear constantly on all radio stations in Managua, has been banned nationwide in Costa Rica because of the text’s unforgiveable allusion to the human excretory organ.
13th February, 1990 Puntarenas, Costa Rica
We crossed from coast to coast, bypassing San Jose, and taking in a stroll in forested national park. An American couple asked us the way, and were then obviously intrigued by a) my flawless British accent b) Juergen’s almost non-existent English c) our professed residence in Managua and d) the BMW motorbike; but they were too discreet to ask too many questions, though they obviously wanted to, and I expect we provided them with an interesting topic of speculation over their next restaurant meal.
Actually they are the first Americans we have met, to talk to, although civilised Costa Rica is billed as an attractive holiday option for them in the region, but we have probably been staying in the wrong class of hotels.
And why should US citizens want to come down this far when they can visit the tropics in Mexico? (Unless they’re military on leave from Panama, which is maybe what this couple was.) Costa Rica isn’t even all that cheap.
Puntarenas has a lot of expensive-looking hotels along the sea-front, though no beautiful beaches, but the hotels probably cater for people waiting for the ferry across the Golfo de Nicoya onto the peninsular which juts out into the Pacific on the other side. We’ll take this ferry tomorrow morning.
The sea-front broadwalk is peopled with teenage couples and has the widest selection of refrescos naturales on offer that we’ve ever encountered. We concocted ourselves a couple of disgusting papaya/banana/mango mixtures. The night air is still and hot. Luckily our characteristically modest hotel room is equipped with an electric fan.
15th Feb, 1990, Liberia, Costa Rica
After driving off the ferry onto the Nicoya Peninsular we were unlucky to get trapped behind a convoy of lorries, also from the ferry, and like us obviously taking the coastal road south which was the only option. We couldn’t leave them behind because the road being just a rough and stony track meant we weren’t any better equipped to speed along it than they were. So we spent the next couple of hours choking and cursing in the dust, because every time we eased our way to the front of the convoy, they all overtook us again as soon as we stopped for a pee or to admire the view.
Finally near the southern tip of the peninsular we stopped at length and took a walk along the very wild coastline, bordered by dense dry shrub and the occasional farmhouse. The glittering blue sea, crashing onto the stony beaches, was too violent for us to risk a swim, despite the blistering heat, even as we paddled the undertow sucked with sinister determination, hurling pebbles at our ankles; but we found a pair of perfect, large, spiral shells lying just out of reach of the surf on the stones. All the others lying about had been smashed to pieces by the waves.
Back on the coastal path we nearly trod on a long, slender snake, which whipped out of our way and into the bush with lightning speed, and then lay watching us contemplatively from the bush. It was six foot long but no thicker than a pencil, striped lengthwise black and yellow with a brilliant pale-green head. We thought it looked pretty sinister, particularly given the speed it had just demonstrated, so we didn’t stare into its eyes for too long, though we later found out that it was not actually poisonous.
We thought we would head north-west up the coast to where there would be some more sheltered beaches but we must have taken a wrong turning, because the track got worse and worse as we got further and further inland. Farmers passing us on horseback told us merrily not to worry, a motorbike would get through; but I was beginning to take a sceptical view of local farmworkers’ ability to assess a laden motorbike’s capabilities.
We had already pushed the machine up half-a-dozen hills before the next pair of passing horsemen told us cheerfully that the next village was only about the same distance again.
It was getting late-ish in the afternoon and we were getting close to despair, especially as the next thing that happened was that we were stuck in a stream and it was only with both of us knee-deep in mud and naturally soaked from head to foot that eventually we got out of it.
As we were busy shoving in the mire, three children on a rangy pony came splattering through at a gay canter, disdainfully demonstrating the superiority of beast over machine. I was exhausted, as having pushed the bike up all the hills and then followed behind as Juergen drove painstakingly down them the other side, I had actually walked most of the last five miles, mostly at steep gradient and in soft ground. But there was no point in going back. There were no sizeable towns in that part of the peninsular anyway.
The countryside, when I took a moment to look at it, was pretty; green hills and woods in the afternoon sun, for some reason it made me think of Dartmoor. When we finally arrived at Rio Frio, the promised village, the sun was beginning to set and I think that this, and the fact that we were only there for a fleeting moment, as we paused to ask the way on to town, was what gave it a magical golden quality and that has it imprinted like an ageing photograph on my mind forever.
There was only one track in and one track out of the village at the end of a small rise. Wooden shack-like buildings stood around a muddy sloping square, along one side of which a row of saddled horses, browns and chestnuts, stood dozing and waiting, their long shadows filtering the mild sunlight.
Nothing moved except the flicking of the horses’ tails, until a man in a cowboy hat, lounging on a terrace, came languidly forward to answer our enquiry with a sweeping gesture, while coolly assessing our filthy motorbike.
And then we were gone, out into the rolling hills and trees golden in the evening sun.
I wished I’d taken a photograph, but a photograph probably wouldn’t have done it justice; and anyway, how much of the romance of that vision is a product of my imagination, conditioned by wild-west movies? There must be a thousand villages like Rio Frio, so remote that everybody goes about their business in a time-warp, nothing ever changes, and nobody comes through except tourists who’ve lost their way.
It had been pitch dark for a couple of hours by the time we arrived in a town big enough to have a modest hotel, but by then we were pretty well resigned to having to drive all night if need be. At least the altitude on the peninsula is not high enough to make it uncomfortably cool at night.
25th February 1990, Managua, Nicaragua
Election Day
When we got back from Costa Rica, election fever was acute, and the atmosphere tense. The opposition UNO grouping, convinced that electoral fraud was in preparation, was emitting veiled incitements to sabotage, and a number of internacionalistas with families saw fit to transfer to Costa Rica, just as we were coming back, to witness the proceedings from a safe distance.
Every day new poll-results were published. You couldn’t go anywhere without bumping into foreign journalists or delegations. All three daily newspapers have deteriorated into screaming campaign rags; so much propaganda flying about, it’s impossible to know what to believe. Managua seemed to have become the epicentre of a world-wide hurricane.
I tuned into the World Service but they weren’t featuring Nicaragua in their headlines at that moment. I found this fact amazing, and not for the first time considered how easy it is, living here, to forget that the rest of the world exists at all, except in its role as commentator and political supporter of one or other local faction.
But the last few days were quiet. It’s Sunday. We got up late and went for a walk around town. The handful of polling stations we walked by were almost deserted; only the gleaming United Nations and Organisation of American States cars and minibuses parked outside, the officials within idle and relaxed. The queues had all formed early in the morning and already by eleven o’clock most people had registered their vote.
Last week, the central Plaza de la Revolucion was the site for end-of-campaign demonstrations for both the Sandinistas and the opposition. As we live only half-a-mile away, Juergen and I sneaked down to take a look at the opposition one last weekend, and came back subdued and melancholy, impressed by the size and sour-faced bitterness of the crowd.
It was large, despite the state TV station’s cheeky scheduling of “Batman” for the same afternoon.
Judy, the next day at the school, was scornful.
“They spend all their donated dollars on trucks to haul all their supporters in from all ends of the country”, she said. She expressed mild disapproval that I’d put in an appearance there at all.
I said I don’t know what I’m going to do if the Frente doesn’t win; I may not be here for next term.
“Oh of course they’ll win”, she said, dismissive. “Nobody really doubts it”.
She is married to a Nicaraguan, an active Sandinista, so I suppose she should know.
“Well, you’ll be there on Wednesday, I hope”, she said, referring to the Frente’s end-of-campaign do. Of course we would be. We really couldn’t avoid it, even if we wanted to.
Juergen says Miguel Santos (Carlos Vanzetti) has been going through alternating crises of confidence, saying you can never tell with the nicas, they’ll probably all go and vote UNO despite what they tell the journalists and opinion pollsters.
Juergen says that if the Frente don’t win, he doesn’t want to stay in the country. As his first year is almost up, he’s already made an application for an extension, but he says he’d cancel it.
Miguel Santos can’t return to West Germany, even if the German medical industry would accept him as a surgeon after so many years in the wilderness. He’s still on some wanted list, for his involvement with a terrorist-guerilla organisation, which is what the Sandinistas were when he left his homeland to join them, and probably still are from an official West German viewpoint.
The opposition leaders have been bickering since the campaign began that they have been discriminated against financially and tactically, making numerous complaints to the international observers, of which Jimmy Carter is one of many notables, about the way they are mistreated by Sandinista bands, refused access to the media, refused access to their donations, are the victims of political alliances between the Sandinistas and the non-UNO opposition parties.
Most of the complaints have not been upheld. They have accused the election committee, which has been in action since last October when voter-registration began, and has received excellent commendations from all neutral quarters, of manipulation and bias.
They have refused to the last to sign documents committing them to accepting the election result. They claim that any result which does not go in their favour can only be due to fraud, a claim which sounds increasingly ridiculous in view of the substantial lead given the Sandinistas in every independent opinion poll so far.
It’s hard to see how the international observers can’t fail to be impressed, by the cool-headedness of the election committee, the energetic amicability of the Sandinista campaign, and taken note of the sour, veiled threats of aggression emanating from certain UNO politicians.
This change-of-attitude is anyway quite marked in the US newspapers we’ve bought copies of lately; the Miami Herald, New York Times, Herald Tribune. All of them have been reluctantly impressed by the Frente campaign, and expressed despair at the opposition’s querulous ineptitude. The UNO, in the US media, has as good as been written off.
The Sandinistas’ end-of-campaign rally was much better natured and about five times larger than the UNO one.
27th February 1990, Managua
I couldn’t sleep that night. On the TV in the evening they brought a preliminary result from four rural polling stations, which in view of the small numbers of people involved in those areas, had completed their counts first.
Those four gave the Frente a comfortable, though not spectacular, lead. The elderly man in charge of the election committee told the viewers he would have a 5% count at midnight.
At midnight, nothing happened. The TV station didn’t interrupt its scheduled series of B-movies. Juergen went to bed, but I couldn’t sleep. The fact that nothing, nothing came on the TV, made me nervous.
Eventually I lay down on my sleeping bag on the sitting room floor, in the dark, with the radio on.
At two o’clock, the radio brought a 30% result. The UNO were very markedly in the lead.
I woke up Juergen and we switched on the TV. With the 60% count, it was all over, the UNO unassailable. At six o’clock, the President appeared in the Congress Hall, from where the election committee was operating, and made a speech to the assembled journalists, TV cameras, and observers.
He spoke in his usual measured tones, of his ten years as President, his comrades’ achievements and the odds against them, and their revolutionary and democratic duty to respect the people’s vote against them now. It was an unequivocal farewell speech, and it sounded like the requiem to Nicaragua’s revolution. I had to gulp down my tears.
We didn’t know what to do.
Our first coherent impulse was an urgent desire to meet with fellow-internacionalistas. At ten o’clock we got on the motorbike and drove through the stunned, deserted city to Werner’s office, which we thought would be a likely gathering point.
But there was no-one there, so we drove to his house, where we used to live. We found only Benno, affecting a general disinterest and leaving us feeling we were overreacting.
So we drove back home.
We were vaguely surprised that the streets still looked the same. We somehow thought that the city’s population, in celebration of a people’s victory and euphoric expression of a state of mind hitherto well concealed, would have torn the ostentatious Sandinista flags and banners from the lamp-posts and trees, from where they’d hung, multiplying every day and confidently predicting victory, for the last few weeks. But they were and remained untouched. There was still hardly anyone about.
We stayed indoors all afternoon, expecting bands of UNO and ex-Guardia thugs (from the pre-Sandinista dictator period) to be roaming the streets in drunken victory parades, for whom internacionalistas, well-known as Frente supporters, might be considered legitimate targets. But the streets remained deserted.
As night fell, we heard shouts and chants, and thought, here they come, but as they got nearer, we recognised the old Frente tunes and slogans.
Sure enough, it was Frente supporters all right, the same young bands of men and women clapping and singing as they had been doing in the streets for weeks. Except now their slogans had a special poignancy, of which they were keenly aware.
More and more filed past, in trucks, on foot, in full Frente regalia, and not an UNO supporter in sight. Some of the young people looked at us cheles (an approximation of ‘yellow’, the local term for white foreigners) uncertainly, and then released broad enthusiastic grins as we greeted them with the Frente salute. It was hard to believe.
There was a spontaneous gathering in the Plaza de la Revolucion, though by the time we got down there it was breaking up. Daniel Ortega had appeared and told several thousand supporters that from now on the Sandinistas would govern the land from below, which we saw later that evening in the television and printed word for word the next day in the Sandinista papers.
After dark, groups of young Sandinistas dragged garbage and loose wood onto the streets and lit bonfires, an old revolutionary gesture from the guerrilla days, and held ritual laments before the world’s journalists, who’d nipped out again from the nearby Interconti to see what was going on.
They trooped along behind the bands looking bored and contemptuous, waiting for fights and trouble that did not come.
Still we’d not spotted a single UNO celebratory fiesta, but I could imagine the stories of Nicaragua’s Glorious Liberation appearing in the world’s press the next day.
The Deutsche Welle (West German international radio), probably wanting to compensate for their reluctant concessions to the Sandinista campaign in recent weeks, turned suddenly nasty, choosing to take the President’s words of consolation to his supporters as a veiled incitement to rebel.
I got really angry, not for the first time. The man had lost, when everyone, even his enemies’ and including himself, had expected him to win, and he had offered his resignation without hesitation, in a generosity of spirit, of which the UNO candidate, had the results been reversed, would have been absolutely incapable. Could not western world opinion even let him do that in peace?
I was, not for the first time either, grateful at least for the BBC World Service, which reported the events, including the President’s spontaneous rally-speech to his supporters, with characteristic and admirable neutrality.
29th February 1990, Managua
At the School of Translation, no-one could think about anything else. Marina Zeledon came in, late in the morning, with an expression of apologetic despair on her face. She was wearing her Sandinista campaign T-shirt, the first time I’d seen her in it. I had to tell her that it was possible I’d not be here for next term.
Anamaria, who teaches Spanish, was in a state of shock and disbelief.
“They were bribed”, she kept saying, “Campesinos admitted to collecting $50 after they’d promised to vote UNO. That’s what they did with all those millions of dollars from the States.”
They certainly hadn’t bought T-shirts. Their supporters had nothing to wear even now they had something to celebrate. By contrast, a certain kind of Frente solidarity has multiplied. For the first time we stuck a Frente banner in our front-room window, which you can see from the road. Our neighbours, who’d also maintained a conspicuously strict neutrality, from regarding us hitherto with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion, suddenly became beaming and friendly.
Juergen says his muchachos were running about insisting that they hadn’t voted for the UNO, although he knows perfectly well that none of them are Frente supporters. They could have voted for one of the smaller parties.
Miguel Santos said enigmatically that the defeat would do the Sandinistas good, disappearing in his usual overstressed style before Juergen could question him further.
A Soviet woman who teaches translation in the university, said, when I said I was thinking of leaving, why? Nothing much will change in the School, and some things will get better. She was the only person in the department not obviously overcome. To her I think it is all part of ‘Perestroika’, as simple as that.
It isn’t the first time it’s occurred to me that for the official solidarity representatives sent from Eastern bloc countries, West European individual idealism must be impossible to understand. For them, a posting in Nicaragua is a privilege, only open to the elite, with access to dollars and luxuries not accessible at home.
But Juergen and I are here as individuals to support an ideal, for which we put up with interminable hassles and what is for us, minimal pay. The average West German here leads a tattier, less well-endowed lifestyle than the average East German. Unofficially, native Sandinistas are heard to comment in rather perplexed tones on how strangely unpolitical the East German representatives always are.
We never thought Sandinista Nicaragua was perfect, Christ, we were reminded every day of its rampant failings. But why put up with them in self-sacrificing service of yet another US-backed, aristocratic-land-owning-Latin-American elite?
If the UNO’s Nicaragua wants engineers and teachers, they’d better get the US to pay for them. And pay properly.
Actually this applies far more to Juergen, who really is capable of earning vast sums in his native land, than to me, who is not; and he was also more genuinely frustrated at work here that I was, being not really used in accordance with his technical ability.
And of course it was never a simple question of self-sacrificing idealism; there was also a hefty dose of the adventure-tourist’s curiosity acting as motivation as well, probably especially in my case. But both are now more-or-less gone.
Still, if Juergen’s year weren’t already up, I would have stayed to finish mine. It’s hard telling Marina. And it’s going to be hard leaving this house, which, in a few months, has really become like home. I feel very, very sorry.
We went for a listless walk this afternoon, down past the busy crossroads, past the Plaza de la Revolucion and on to the filthy banks of the vast expanse of poisonous grey water, Lake Managua, at the bottom of the hill.
This is the scene of last-week’s mass demonstrations. Only rubbish lying about now, and a couple of idle youths, who, I suppose assuming that we come from the Interconti, make a UNO-thumbs up sign to us as they yell across in attempted American.
From here, the city looks unbearably ugly; the broad, unkempt streets, the grey water and grey sky, even the palm-trees look leaden and dirty against the still, urban air.
26th March 1990, Managua
The last few weeks have gone like a dream. The heat is blistering this time of the year, the garden cracked and dry, the mud turned to dust, the violence of the sun inevitably inducing a kind of mid-day stupor.
We’ve sleepwalked our way through our packing, our arrangements, winding up our contract on the house, saying goodbye to our colleagues. Everyone expresses regret, including our landlords, but I’m quite sure we’ll be replaced and forgotten quickly. To our surprise volunteers keep arriving; a group of English young people turned up at the university at the last minute as term began to take over classes, and Juergen’s workshop already has a replacement technician on the way from Europe.
The bureaucratic structures are already in place here to support an army of foreign volunteers and perhaps for that reason alone, they’ll keep coming. The word gets about that the university in Managua is always looking for educated English-speakers, so anyone who feels like a year or two in the sun drops by.
There’s a lot of talk in Sandinista circles about the need to protect the achievements of the Revolution, to which the victorious-opposition responds, what achievements? and points to the 30,000 or more Nicaraguans dead in the past ten years, as though the Sandinistas went to war for their own amusement.
The UNO of course never mentioned the war – only the deeply unpopular national conscription efforts – in their pre-election campaign, not wanting to draw attention to their own rampant US/contra connections.
To be fair, what achievements, apart from ousting Somoza, does sometimes seem like quite a good question, here in Managua at any rate. But for what it’s worth, which is probably nothing at all, the Revolution did mean well. The Sandinistas weren’t just another bunch of self-seeking elitists.
This is probably more than could be said for the UNO, who would subscribe to the conservative’s wishful-thinking, dream-come-true strain of thought which holds self-interest and the public interest conveniently to be one and the same thing. We’re all better off if we all behave like absolute rapacious swines. Which happens to be our true nature anyway. How fortunate for us all.
But there’s a surprising strain of tentative optimism here, even in Frente circles. Money will come from the US. The Sandinistas will form an impressively steadfast and responsible opposition. In six years’ time there will be another election which they will win, having proven themselves in the meantime, released from US pressure, to be the country’s most capable and principled politicians.
The UNO leadership has embarked on a course of tentative reconciliation. Reconciliation is the catchword of the moment, everyone, following the Ortega’s example, attempting to outdo each other in displays of good faith.
That won’t last long, of course, and I think the country is still breathing long sighs of dazed relief that the elections have passed without violence. The Sandinistas did win 40% of the vote, something you wouldn’t believe from foreign reports, out for revenge for having been ‘duped’ by the reputable opinion polls, referring dismissively to their overwhelming defeat. They will have to have some say in what happens next.
At the end of it all, I’m glad that we’re leaving. It isn’t that I don’t care anymore, or that I don’t think the nicas want us, or need our help, or that I even blame them for voting UNO, and with luck Nicaragua’s government now won’t be any worse than most other Latin American democracies, and maybe even better than some.
It’s just that the Sandinistas’ election defeat put the concluding stop on something, some important and almost-triumphant ideal. It would have been so tremendous if the US had received one hell of a slap in the face.
It didn’t happen, and it’s not the end of the world. But the chance won’t come again.
I wouldn’t mind coming back to Nicaragua, providing things don’t take a turn very much for the worse.
But despite everything, despite the UNO’s conciliatory tone, despite the Frente’s diplomatic stoicism, despite a subdued climate of optimism on all sides, despite feeling sorry about leaving the university and the leaky house and the garden and the half-wild adopted cat, despite exchanging the exotic-tropics and their friendly peoples for cold-grey northern Europe, I’m glad we’re leaving now.
Juergen always had it in mind to do an extended Central America tour, when we finally left Nicaragua. He’d kept substantial savings on hand for it, though he hadn’t reckoned on using them so soon. He’d put them in the national Banco de Desarollo, and was worried that the Sandinistas had used them all up for their extravagant campaign, but his fears were unfounded and we got them out without much trouble.
He’s already put Nicaragua behind him, and is looking forward to the trip.
I haven’t really registered that we’re doing it yet, still absorbed with this country and its issues. But I expect I’ll get into the swing of it, once we’re underway.
I wrote this sort-of poem, as a kind of substitute for all the photographs I never got around to taking.
Goodbye Nicaraguita
Goodbye calls of the street-sellers at dawn; “ver-du-u-rras!” “acuacaa-te!”, “Barricadanuevodiariolapre-e-nsa!”, and the dull pitter-pat of unshod horsehooves on the tarmac.
Goodbye insistent hordes of dusty children, crowding round to sell or offer something, lingering in dazed wonder, thirst for attention, and listlessness.
Goodbye crumbling, unkempt streets, gaping potholes, cobblestones carelessly strewn amidst the rubbish before high iron garden gates.
Goodbye oppressive heat of mid-day, the air charged with impending cloudburst in the rainy season, and thick with dust the rest of the year.
Goodbye fertile plains in the shadow of perfectly-symmetrical volcanoes, sporting thickets of ten-foot-high sugar-cane.
Goodbye aimless, leaderless cattle, coats gleaming in mellow shades of mahogany, chestnut, or beige.
Goodbye cool, volcanic lagoons of soft, soothing water, lined with palms and rustic picnic tables.
Goodbye primitive meals amid the bustle of the market, sturdy women competing for attention to serve chewy beafsteak, fried banana, rice and piquant cabbage salad.
Goodbye long, cool, iced fruit pulp, on a hot afternoon after a bumpy bike-ride.
Goodbye spikey mangoes and lofty palms, and children playing beneath them in the streets after nightfall, while on the front porches and in the open front rooms their aunts watch the telenovela.
Goodbye thin nimble ponies, ridden by ageing cowboys through country and city streets alike.
Goodbye miles of broad, unpopulated beach, waves rolling in at unpredictable angles, strange currents and undulating sea-bed where they break.
Goodbye banana groves, the young leaves smooth and majestic, the older ones frazzled and torn by the wind and the summer drought.
Goodbye softly-swaying hammock at dusk, teasing mosquitoes and bright young stars in a velvet sky.
Goodbye vivid, tatty, battle-scarred and majestic country, simple and evasive, spectacular and unadorned, humble, proud, sly, pragmatic, and brave.
3rd April, 1990 Honduras
Yesterday we drove over what must be the highest surfaced road in Nicaragua into Honduras, on the way out for the last time. Who knows when or if we’ll be back.
A lot of paperwork and baggage checks (this was a war frontier until a few months ago). The border guards – regular Honduran Army – did not like our Editorial Vanguardia books at all and wanted to keep the one edited by Sandinista vice-president Sergio Ramirez, a collection of Nicaraguan short stories.
I looked as innocently indignant as I could and pointed out that we’d been given only four days (by Honduran immigration) to get out of Honduras anyway; how much damage could we do in that time? The soldier was youngish and couldn’t be bothered with an argument, and as none of his superiors were present, he gave it back.
Honduras is dry and mountainous so far. The simple restaurant on a hillside where we spent the night in one of their outhouses, had no electricity.
We left our Nicaraguan newspaper, which we’d bought just before the border and the Honduran Army had obviously overlooked, in the room after we left, and looking back saw the family falling over it greedily like children in a chocolate factory.
We drove through Tegucigalpa; it looked horrid, acres upon acres of crumbly shacks teetering on baked hillsides; but is no doubt replete with fast food bars and flashy hotels in the better parts of town.
We drove through endless dusty pine-forests, the road serpentine-ing along the contours, more reminiscent of the Mediterranean, although without the sea, than any Tropics I’ve seen so far.
We have four days to get across the country and we have to keep to it because every half hour we get stopped by roadside police; but at least all they do is check the paperwork, not turn our baggage inside-out every time, which is what happens to some travellers en route from Nicaragua, so we’d heard.
If we’d been allotted more time, we’d have taken a trip to the Caribbean seaside to the north, but as we are obviously not all that welcome here we’re heading straight for Guatemala via Copan, which is a famous Maya ruin.
Our last night in Nicaragua was spent in Ocotal; a biggish village or small town in relatively good condition. The main road through to the border is well-paved, the others, though unsurfaced, clean and even; there were no piles of rubbish, even the houses themselves all had proper tiled roofs and plastered walls.
Perhaps this is why, in this region, the Frente won the kind of support in the election that they were supposed to do nationwide. It’s pretty here, hilly, greener and cooler than Managua.
We met a young Frente militant in the hotel who described how he and his comrades had wept in disbelief the night of the election results. He had fought with the Sandinista guerillas before the Revolution and lost his brother and son to the Contras in the years since. He had a polaroid snapshot of himself with Daniel Ortega which he showed us by way of introduction.
He was on holiday from his native Jalapa, a tiny border mountain village to the east, where he said his mother had been elected a town councillor for the Frente. He was already rather drunk, which no doubt increased his sentimentality, and there was something very pathetic in his insistent repetition of all the Frente apologies for their defeat which had appeared in their papers in the weeks since the election, and their brave rallying cries for the future.
To people like that, who have not seen or read all that much and believe El Nuevo Diario (the most populist and crassest of the Sandinista-loyal newspapers) uncritically and without question, the Revolution was infallible and meant everything.
They contrast with the more-or-less intellectual Sandinista leaders, who’ll have the personal resources to cope with a dramatic shift in their circumstances, not only in Nicaragua but world-wide. Even if they have to go into exile.
Somebody owes something to guys like this, so that they can keep their good faith in some form acceptable to their level of sophistication. It was important to him to hear that Sandinista Nicaragua was ‘better’, somehow, than wealthy, capitalist West Germany. It may be, but I was unsure of our ability to be convincing.
5th April, 1990, Copan, Honduras
Well, here we are in this touristified little village, not far from Guatemala, with its sloping streets neatly cobbled and the roofs neatly tiled and the house-fronts painted, in honour of the international visitors who come to see the archaeological ruins on which the entire village seems to thrive.
Every second building is a hotel. The children shout the few words of English they know at us as we stroll past – but that, to be honest, has happened everywhere so far. Juergen, irritated at being taken for a gringo, always refuses to understand, but I am relatively hardened.
In the past two days we have driven some 250 kilometres on bumpy, unpaved road through some striking scenery – dense, fragrant pine forests at high altitudes giving way now and again to sloping banana and coffee fields. We stayed last night in a compact, tidy little village, on the track which was our main highway, in which not a single electric lamp beamed after dark.
As night fell the family who rented us a room, undressed and headed for bed with candles and a gas lamp. Luckily we had a pair of candles in our pack, and as we sat on the bed wondering what to do, a large blond American Peace Corps worker, who had heard of our arrival through the village grapevine, came in for a chat.
He told us that electricity had been installed over two years ago but broke down almost immediately, and no-one had ever bothered to repair it. The government agencies with which he worked were totally corrupt.
It would have been nice to stay a few days and hear some of his stories, but we are under pressure to be out of the country, and the unexpected roughness of the road has slowed us down.
In the morning the small boys of the village gathered in admiring hordes around the motorbike, and it occurred to me that they had probably not even seen anything like it on television.
6th April 1990, Jocotan, Guatemala
We left Honduras on schedule through a scruffy series of boy-scout-type offices, peopled by generally good-natured officials in T-shirts, tapping out routine forms on ancient typewriters; take away the tourist-board posters and replace them with posters of another kind, and it could have been a student campaign group office.
In the morning before we visited the Maya Copan ruins, which are an active archaeological site still, crawling with diggers and documenters, and heaps of sculptured fragments of stone lying about with numbers stuck on them waiting to be pieced together by an expert into a totem pole.
The ‘finished’ section has some beautiful tall sculptures but the lawn and the layout of the plaza is so neat and tidy that the romance of the newly-discovered-lost-city-in-the-undergrowth is lost. There are some more sites we did not see and the fact is you need more than half-a-day for this.
Shortly after arriving in this Guatemaltecan village, we witnessed a gale and downpour of a violence I don’t think we experienced even in Nicaragua’s rainy season. The roads were streaming afterwards and several market stalls had been flattened by the gusts.
We’d taken refuge in a gloomy bar and when we got back to our hotel the woman assured us she’d seen nothing like it and that usually the weather here is calm. All the mangoes on her splendid tree in the inner courtyard had come down and lay green and helpless on the stone patio.
8th April 1990, Puerto Barrios, Guatemala
We drove along the road to Guatemala’s only little piece of Caribbean coastline and Atlantic port, passing a lot of heavy-duty lorries in both directions, the road mostly in poor condition. Somewhere along the way we noticed that we had left the map in the cafe where we’d had breakfast, back in the village; and also somehow, amid the dust and vehicular disarray, missed the Maya site we’d wanted to take in en route.
And just before Puerto Barrios, major roadworks, which seemed to consist of filling up all the potholes with sticky red mud, held up the traffic for miles in both directions. Being a nimble motorbike meant we were able to skip the queue in several places but it still took about an hour to cover the last five kilometres.
Another Caribbean port with shades of Bluefields and Puerto Limon; the same moist, sticky heat and luxuriant vegetation, people of all colours and races bicycling in shorts, crumbling two-storey hotels with balconies over the street and intermittent water-supply. But it seems less Caribbean, in that there are less black people; most are the usual Spanish-speaking mestizos, judging from appearance, and far fewer pure Indian-types than in the hill village Jocatan.
We’ll take a boat this afternoon to Livingston which is a seaside village with nice beaches, which you can’t get to by road. The motorbike will wait for us at the hotel in Puerto Barrios, and we’ll collect it on Wednesday. Today is Sunday. The coming week is Santa Semana, Holy Week, which there’s probably no escaping anywhere.
10th April 1990, Livingston, Guatemala
We have had mixed fortunes here, in this small Caribbean village undergoing a fairly rapid tourist-industry upswing. Still its charm is not lost, no cars for one thing (no roads out of town, the sea the only way in), and the people friendly rather than cynical/obsequious to the visitors, who are mostly young-ish Europeans on extended tours on limited budgets, like ourselves, rather than two-week honeymoon-suite jetsetters from the States.
But the ‘lancha’ owners are not above making a fast buck. A couple yesterday took us for a half-hour ride on rough seas to a fresh water river where we could bathe, very attractive it was, only we could have walked there in an hour. They had promised to land us on a remote beach but decided on the way that the seas were too rough for bathing. Landing the boat on all occasions was obviously problematic and we got drenched every time, not to mention the copious quantities of sea spray en route.
I didn’t mind too much because I thought the river-pool beautiful, but Juergen felt cross and ripped off, because there was nowhere to string his hammock, the river banks being too steep, and he was also cross with me for disappearing into the woods for an hour without warning him, so that he expended time and energy wondering and looking.
I do have this tendency to ramble off on impulse, thinking, I’ll just look round the next bend/over the next hill, and before I know it I’m miles away. At some point I become selfish enough not to care anymore if people are waiting for me somewhere.
It has something to do with a perennial childish search for fairyland, to get away somewhere remote and exotic where supernatural things happen like they do to children in books, and anything you want hard enough comes true; and all my old magical fantasies are stimulated again by this wild, mythically grotesque vegetation.
Something like this must be what all Northerners are looking for in the tropics, and what the shrewd natives observe with more-or-less cynical amusement.
So Juergen was in bad mood yesterday evening although he didn’t know the worst, which is that both of us appear to have caught colds from the periodic drenchings and hopping about in dripping clothing, despite the fact that the sea is literally like lukewarm bathwater. I have a burning throat and a mild fever and Juergen doesn’t feel too good either. Being Semana Santa (Holy Week) this and all other hotels in the village are booked out for the week so we have to get out.
Away from the coast things should be less stressful but I hope we are not so ill that we don’t even feel like dragging ourselves and the motorbike a few kilometres inland.
Today Juergen was determined to remain on the nearby beach in the hammock, so I, not feeling ill yet, left him there and walked all the way along the narrow, palm-lined, pale-brown beach away from the village till eventually I arrived at the river where we’d been the day before.
The beach got wilder and wilder and more and more romantic, the jungle behind denser, as the outlying palm-thatched huts were left behind. I spotted a sign advertising an insect-and-snake museum and later in the afternoon dragged Juergen from his hammock along to look.
An eccentric Frenchman lovingly displayed his collection of – mostly dead – spiders and scorpions and butterflies, and handful of – live – pet snakes. His prize specimen was a small brightly-coloured red-and- yellow creature that he swore would kill you in an hour, paralyzing your nerves.
Nevertheless he opened the cage and prodded it so that we could see it in action. We were duly impressed.
We had a sandwich and a beer in a beach-side cafe run by a couple of expatriate hippies, a man and a woman in a leopard-skin swimsuit and a lot of dramatic make-up under a broad sunhat, who seemed disappointed that we didn’t want pina colada and crab.
After we’d eaten she brought out the Special Comments book in which previous customers had expressed themselves at length in all languages with soul-searching candour over their rum-and-coke and whatever else.
Well, neither of us much felt like doing that, so I just wrote politely that the sandwiches were good, and that it must be triff to live in a place like this. I could imagine our ex-flatmate Ulli though writing pages of indecipherable gush, as she used to do on occasions in lipstick on the bathroom mirror.
They were her kind of people. Perhaps in every exotic and temperate corner, in every relatively stable country in Latin America or elsewhere, stray northerners can be found quietly doing their own thing in their humble way, for the rest of their lives.
Perhaps our hotel owner is another; an elderly German woman with a soft Pfaelzisch (Palatinate, South-West Germany) accent, who is almost certainly an ex-Nazi. She likes chatting to the guests, especially the Germans, but is vague about the circumstances of her own arrival here, though it was obviously a good few years ago.
Some young Germans we met in the village, who have been travelling around Guatemala for some time, said she was notorious everywhere, and that they had been warned to stay somewhere else. But this was the only hotel room we could find that was affordable.
It is run with Germanic cleanliness and efficiency, and each bedroom door bears the coat of arms of a different German town – ours says Bad Bruecknau, wherever that is. Neither the woman nor the clientele have been in anyway unpleasant, so far.
12th April 1990, Livingston, Guatemala
I am the sort of guilt-ridden person who only has to receive an accusing look and I’ll confess compulsively to strings of crimes I may have fantasised about committing once in my extreme youth.
Or to approach the subject another way, the Germanness of the establishment has taken an avenging course.
Apparently some guests complained about the state of the toilets (something no native would do). So Frau Blitzkrieg is going from room to room making accusations, starting with me and proceeding to where Juergen is sitting outside with a book; and though she took the trouble to knock on my door, I haven’t noticed that she’s got any further.
She reminded me that toilet paper is not to be thrown on the floor (a habit the natives have if no bucket is provided to receive it, as they are obviously brought up not to throw anything into the toilet bowl), that nothing but paper is to be thrown into it – no cigarette butts.
I apologised at once for having once thrown a tampon down it, but as for the rest I didn’t smoke, but would of course remind Juergen (who does). Had the tampon caused a blockage? No answer; she knows though that someone has been washing clothes in the bathroom sink, although that is not allowed. I said I didn’t know about that, and if she’d seen ours out on the line that was because we’d fallen into the sea in them.
Perhaps my guilt-induced honesty convinced her of my relative innocence; or perhaps I’m being paranoid in sensing that she’d picked on me as the guilty party before even starting on her rounds. It comes from my experience of people who want to make contact and are easily charmed, and then turn against you with a vengeance when they find out you’re not so consistently amenable and constantly available as you were, naturally on your best behaviour, on first meeting.
In their eagerness they think you made a promise which you never did, and if they have any power over you they then make you pay for the imagined slight.
Juergen, who can also be perfectly charming and sweet and respectful on a temporary basis, to elderly people especially, suffers from this too, being actually by nature pretty bull-headed.
Yesterday I was getting dressed – Juergen was in the shower – when she knocked on the door wanting to speak to me. It was rather late, as we’d had among other things a feverish night, and somehow I responded to the German voice and manner like a child caught out in trouble and opened the door with guilt written all over my face.
She only wanted to know if we were staying on or leaving – she likes payment in advance – but some people have a knack of turning your weaknesses, in this case my honesty (I said I hadn’t been feeling well to explain the late morning, as if it was any of her business) and my perennial unfocussed guilt complex, against you, deciding to use you, as you so considerately offer yourself, as their next scapegoat.
It makes me long to be away from here, this hotel and village, and spend the rest of my life alone with Juergen somewhere remote and isolated. But we told Frau Blitzkrieg that we’d stay on until Easter Monday, because we were still feeling weak. I’m sure she regretted then giving us the option.
14th April 1990, evening, Livingston, Guatemala
Well, we have taken some long walks into the jungle, up the river inland in one direction, and parallel to the beach and then inland via a tributary in the other. It’s easy to explore because there are these tiny goat-tracks everywhere, used by the indians I suppose who live in secluded handmade huts along the river banks and by lagoons. Finding cool streams to bathe in is no problem, the paths usually run alongside.
We took one boat trip up the Rio Dulce and duly inspected the lakeside caves, and the hot-water source steaming up in a smelly fashion into the main river, and the little nature-museum and jungle trail set up on the banks for tourists, but frankly our own freelance ramblings have been more exciting. We spent another day in hammocks on the beach, this time further away from town, in a more remote and beautiful spot.
It was Good Friday, though, so a number of people did troop past on their way to the river pools where we bathed on our first day. I think we have exhausted the natural charms of Livingston and environs – the jungle is very damp and green, the sea can be very blue, although it is usually rather murky, the same colour as the sand, which is mid-brown, and there are lots of coconut palms.
The village itself is populated by Caribbean blacks, and indians (who live mostly on the outskirts or in the woods) and tourists – only a few standard Latinos, who are probably tourists too. There are a lot of informal cafes where you get what are here called ‘licuados’, the ‘refrescos naturales’ of Nicaragua and Costa Rica; beer, and usually weak coffee, and where the service is slow and haphazard. We have taken to frequenting a cocktail bar, just off the main street, in the evenings, and going home slightly tipsy.
It’s been quite nice here – though we’ve lived beyond our means, if we plan on holding out another four months – but it’s definitely time to move on. There’s more to Guatemala than this.
17th April 1990 Puerto Barrios, Guatemala
We spent Sunday in Livingston on the beach doing unmentionably naughty things in the shallow sea. In the evening we ate a creamy kind of seafood soup, with fish and crab and shrimps and bananas floating about in a rich sauce. We had a final couple of cocktails and the bar’s owner gave us a painted shell as a souvenir.
He was probably only making publicity but it was a friendly gesture, contrasting with Frau Blitzkrieg’s viciousness the next morning. She has won a place of honour in my collection of sour German women trying to ring a drop of self-satisfaction out of petty-minded sadism – full of ‘Sie’s and ‘sehr geehrte Frau’s, and as self-indulgently vengeful as they come.
After wishing us a pleasant journey, she said, looking at me with glittering eyes, that, as far as she was concerned, people susceptible to every little illness should really stay at home. This because I happened to mention having a fever some days back; which incidentally never developed into a proper cold.
Not that she had ever asked me how I was, or what I had, just used my apologetic confession to hold me implicitly responsible for every toilet paper shortage, every trace of diarrhoea – and there were some – in the loos.
Of course I never had diarrhoea, I had a sore throat for God’s sake, but nobody, as I say, was asking me. I am sure this is why she refused on Thursday to let me do my washing in the outdoor sinks provided for the purpose, but suggested firmly that I deposit them with the native washerwoman who lived a few doors up, for a fee, of course.
So we left Livingston in a lancha with mixed feelings yesterday and rejoined the motorbike here in the hotel where we stayed a week ago. It was Juergen’s birthday so we went out and ate an extravagant ice-cream after supper as we did not think there were any cocktails in Puerto Barrios.
After that we went to bed and in the course of the next few hours had quite a lot of sex. At least I did. I seem to be insatiable these days, literally; with poor Juergen begging for peace and me pleading with him for patience and still somehow not getting what I want. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, I get terribly wound up and then cross and tearful when nothing seems to work out as planned. The worst is that this seems to happen rather a lot.
Yesterday we ate a hamburger at a stand in the central market and got into conversation with a young Nicaraguan who had fled Managua two years ago not wanting to do his military service. He talked a lot about his schooling problems here in Guatemala and did not want to let us go, to the annoyance of his girlfriend/colleague, who was having to take all the orders herself in the meantime.
Perhaps that was why, when we went back the next day for breakfast, as promised, he quite obviously didn’t even want to acknowledge our presence.
But I tend to think it had to do with us being more-or-less on the other side of the Nicaraguan (political) fence from his own family, though that hadn’t seemed to put him off the first time around.
Biotope del Quetzal, on the road to Coban, 18th April 1990, Guatemala
We have pitched the tent at last! And Juergen is cooking our first home-cooked meal on his ancient old petrol cooker, which has an alarming tendency to explode at moments of tension sending pieces of scrap metal flying in all directions, which is why I keep my distance at times like this.
I was worried that if we never got round to using the tent Mummy and Daddy would tick me off for having sneaked off with it last time I was in England. It’s an old Scottish one they must have had since their honeymoon, made out of thick canvas; much too heavy for tropical climates, but it should be good and waterproof.
Basic, crummy hotels are so incredibly cheap here in Guatemala – about a dollar a night – that it hasn’t been worth it so far. But there happened to be a secluded campsite – no one else on it – in this very orderly national park; which is basically a piece of hillside jungle with tidy nature-trails, discretely lined every 50 metres with jungle-green painted rubbish bins.
We left Puerto Barrios late in the morning the day before yesterday, after chatting in the hotel to the German couple we met in Livingston; they had identified us there as the owners of the motorbike in front of theirs in the hotel in Barrios, from my Nicaragua T-shirt; I suppose they had read our Nicaragua address on the metal trunk on the rack. (Our Nica number-plate was removed by the Guatemala customs official, who decided informally that it would be better for us if we travelled with the West German one underneath.)
They are making much the same journey as us, but in the opposite direction, having started out in California; so we poured over their map and let them recommend us some scenic routes and warn us about impassable ones to come. They were pleasant in a very Germanic sort of way.
We bumped into them again an hour or two from Puerto Barrios at Quirigua, where there are some beautiful Maya relics on display on a neat lawn next to a patch of jungle, the whole site in the middle of a huge banana plantation.
We spent last night watching feature films on TV in a roadside motel, though I fell asleep half-way through the second one.
Biotope del Quetzal, 20th April 1990, Guatemala
It started raining that evening, and rained all night and all the following day. A lot of things got sodden, and everything else mildly or considerably damp; but amazingly parts of the tent’s interior stayed dry.
We spent most of that day looking glumly at the rain, but made one very soggy excursion to the neighbouring village to buy food and candles.
We are at an altitude of nearly 2,000 metres, so it is also fairly cool, and during the night we were shivering, Scottish tent or not, but at least it stayed dry. This morning started brightly, but now the clouds have pulled in, though it probably won’t rain until this evening. We’re making the most of the reprieve to pack up; or at least Juergen is, being in one of his fast-and-furious moods in which no-one can do anything right but himself, so it’s better to leave him to it.
The problem with Juergen is that he does everything practical, including cooking and sewing, so much better than me, that he ends up doing it all. I know anything I start he’ll just pull apart and do all over again his own way.
As far as packing goes, he’s right really, because fitting everything including tent and sleeping bags for two people for four months, onto one motorbike, without offending any laws of aerodynamics or affecting passenger convenience, is a masterpiece of spatial planning, with no margin for error.
But he gets cross with me for being helpless, and as a matter of fact, I don’t like it either.
Lanquin, Guatemala, 22nd April 1990
Despite Juergen’s burst of manic packing we only made it to Coban that night, basically because it looked like rain again. The following morning we did things in town, relinquishing some films for developing, and buying ourselves some hefty campesino boots to replace our rotting sneakers.
At about midday we drove 60 kilometres along a picturesque, ups-and-downs stony track to this village. It has only one comedor and no hotel, so we are camped at the mouth of the famous caves, from which an abundant river gushes and then slows to provide deep, extremely cool bathing.
The general climate is a lot warmer here than in the Biotope, although the site is much more grubby – no rubbish bins or proper loos. In the evening the bats stream out of the caves, and the tree-insects embark on an almost-deafening carousal.
Some animal had a good nose around last night and helped itself to our sugar while we were down at the river washing up. I caught a glimpse of what looked like a large black dog, but it keeps itself out of proper sight.
At least the weather is warm and bone-dry so far.
Coban, Guatemala, 24th April 1990, morning
Well the weather changed that afternoon just as Juergen went off with a stick and a piece of string to attempt some amateur fishing; in fact it began to pour down, which was all right for the fish and as long as it looked like being a passing shower, we didn’t mind either, but it didn’t pass, but maintained a low intensity drizzle all evening and all night, confining us to the tent as this time we didn’t have a thatched shelter to eat and muse under.
But the morning was bright and clear again. After breakfast we wandered into the caves with a torch and a candle. A path has been cut into the rock and the caves themselves wired up to a generator, which allegedly the village policeman will switch on on request – but apparently the generator is not working at the moment.
Our own light source was insufficient, and we crept along, clasping each other, at a snail’s pace. I took a number of pictures with Juergen’s flash of stalactites I could barely see. After about half-an-hour of laborious damp scramble we gave up.
We had intended to visit another underground river spring about 10 km away, but unfortunately the overladen motorbike got stuck halfway up the first steep hill and after examining our prospects of making it there and back, had to give up.
It is true we are lugging too much junk around with us and ought to base ourselves somewhere for a few days so we can dump the stuff, and take one- or two-day trips from there without it. Juergen confesses he is not used to touring with two people and one bike, and on his own preferred to have all his stuff with him so that he could make spontaneous decisions about where to head next, and when and where to stop.
But there is going to be no point in touring Guatemala if we are going to get stuck on every unpaved road at a steep gradient. We’d never get off the Pan-American.
26th April 1990, Huehuetenango, Guatemala, evening
The next day we drove from Coban to Nebaj, a longish way on a pebble track, up and down through valleys and passes. It would have been more spectacular if the weather had been less dreary. A thick layer of drizzly raincloud had suspended itself over the mountain tops and did not budge.
Nebaj is a biggish Indian village tucked away behind hills; a network of dirt tracks around the central church. Pure puddles and sludge when we arrived, but the town hotel is nice; cheap, spacious rooms around a red-tiled central court, and scrupulous, if slightly laconic, service.
All the women and girls of the village wear a resplendent uniform of bright red cloth wrapped around the waist under an embroidered belt, reaching to mid-calf, and a brilliantly-embroidered multicolour tunic on top, with similar tasselled shawls around the shoulders, suspending the baby if there is one, and another shawl, similarly brightly striped but with large pompoms instead of tassels, bound around the head and into the thick black plaits.
I could have watched and photographed the women in the market for hours, but unfortunately my camera gave out. The release-button keeps jamming at crucial moments ruining what might have been superbly-timed shots.
While you are wandering about the village being tourists, women and girls discretely sidle up to you, not unlike people do everywhere else in Central America to get you to do a bit of underhand money-changing; but here what they want is to lure you to their houses to ply you with the family collection of ‘tipica’.
This was the first time we had heard this expression and for a moment were puzzled. The little girl immediately tugged on her ageing but still resplendent tunic, and pointed to her headdress. So we went with her to a badly-lit wooden shed, where rustic shelves overflowed with woven and embroidered scarves, shawls, bags, purses and blouses, all in the village designs and colours.
Of course after granny has laboriously pulled every item, one after the other, from the shelves, with one of her grown-up daughters acting as translator – not many older women speak Spanish – you are naturally morally obliged to spend some money.
I did not mind this in itself, the things really are beautiful, and with some bargaining, they let them go for what is next to nothing for anyone with dollars. You also feel good putting the money into the hands of the women who made the things, and not some dealer creaming off any profits.
Our problem is that being on a motorbike and not in a car, every additional piece of clothing threatens systematic breakdown. Juergen looked on poker-faced.
We arrived here in Huehuetenango, the county-town, mid-afternoon. The weather is better than yesterday but sunshine in these parts is obviously not a matter of course. Up in the mountains we saw the Indian women with dogs, rounding up sheep – the first sheep I’ve seen in Central America. They’d certainly need wool for their clothing up here.
High up near the ridge summits we could see neatly cultivated plots of land laid out like a patchwork quilt; this is where they must grow the new potatoes, onions, cabbages, carrots, broccoli and the other northern-type things on sale in the markets. Apples and plums are also common – unknown in Managua, or a rare luxury. Avocados are abundant and ridiculously cheap, and taste fantastic, moist and creamy, inside the coarse black skins. Within its modest borders this small country must provide fertile soil for just about every variety of fruit and vegetable known to Man.
28th April 1990, Huehuetenango, Guatemala, evening
The next day we drove to Todos Santos Cuchumantanes; an even more dramatically steep and precarious stone track, over a high ridge and across a wide, damp, grassy plain, dotted with shaggy ponies and sheep and isolated shacks. Over the other side, into a pleasant valley, widening as the altitude dropped, the huts becoming more frequent, until we finally reached the village a long way down.
It was pretty sleepy; but here the villagers had opened a special co-operative shop to promote their ‘tipica’, though that didn’t stop families from touting freelance as well.
The men here wear red-and-white striped trousers and straw hats; the women have dark-blue skirt lengths and bright red embroidered blouses, and often a straw hat as well.
As we crawled up the valley on the way back, a minibus driver who was coming down, gave us a stern look through his windscreen, shaking his head violently and gesturing ‘no-go’ with his hands. We looked nervously up the valley from where he’d come, and saw that a thick black cloud had settled on the hilltops, and already we couldn’t actually see much further.
Not knowing what else to do, we drove on timidly, and when we met another car coming down, stopped it to enquire. The driver said it was raining hard, and there was a lot of water, up to here (hand two feet from the ground) but you could get through.
We got dressed up in all our waterproofs and went on prepared for the worst. It struck instantaneously; I was blinded from then on by angry hailstones as big as sugar-lumps, and I had to keep my head buried in Juergen’s back, with my face down to avoid being pelted black-and-blue.
I could not look up until we pulled up for shelter half-an-hour later. Hailstones collected in little heaps between my icy hands and Juergen’s lower buttocks, to which I was gripping as if welded. I did not see as we splashed through a swollen stream which wet us to mid-calf. I was frozen but had gone into one of my do-or-die trances, the only way to survive certain physical onslaughts.
Juergen luckily has a better helmet than me, with a proper protective window in front, so can at least halfway see what he is doing. He says it was a good thing we had more-or-less reached the ridge plateau before the storm struck, and he’d not had to negotiate any steep bends in the rain. Our waterproofs had kept us pretty dry, except for our feet, so though we were pretty frozen, it could have been worse.
Actually, once over the worst, we drove on back to the town feeling pretty pleased with ourselves.
And today we set off again, over the mountain range at another angle. This time the plain behind the ridge went on and on, very desolate with nothing but grey boulders in the coarse cropped grass and a few weak-looking pine trees. The valley the other side, when we finally reached it, was awesomely steep, you had to creep zig-zagging down a precipice.
It took us so long to get to the next village that we had to start back almost at once. But I had time to notice the weird costume worn by the women, a long white embroidered veil suspended from a headband, billowing on all sides down to below the knees, with a dark skirt underneath. It made them look like Arab women, or Catholic priests.
We drove back through sparkling sunshine, in spite of which it was still pretty nippy up on top. It must be a hard life up there where the woman gave us very sweet coffee around the open fire in the middle of her hut, surrounded by a band of curious children, all bowed down with several layers of shawls and blankets.
We came down off the plateau bathed in golden evening light against the brown hills, gently culminating in a perfect creamy-pink sunset.
30th April, Guatemala City
The next morning we broke open the flashy car belonging to the hotel owner in Huehuetenango, in order to get the bike out of the courtyard, as it was blocking up the entrance. The youthful hotel-employee watched Juergen’s technique with interest and a certain admiration.
We drove for most of the day, shivering and sweltering in turn, arriving in this shabby city in good time to find a hotel; luckily, for we exhausted ourselves scouring the seedier districts for something inexpensive but not excessively squalid. We’re going to have to spend a few days here after all.
All our visas need renewing. Today was spent fairly depressingly queueing up in Immigration doling out sums of money without getting anything perceptible in return. I decided to phone my parents, mainly to check on my health insurance number which I left with them. The post office not only overcharged me, adding at least two minutes to the length of the call (Juergen timed it simultaneously), but also as soon as we raised a tentative objection, waved in the armed soldiers (who guard every bank and public building in the country) and held us trapped in a corner of the hall virtually at gun-point, until we paid up in a suitably docile manner (50 dollars – an exorbitant sum in this country).
And that for the privilege of being bawled at down the phone from the other side of the Atlantic by my father for not speaking distinctly enough, which almost certainly had more to do with a ropey transatlantic connection than my imperfect diction.
Daddy has traditional views on personal presentation, especially when it comes to his daughters, and considers intimidation an acceptable disciplinary measure on any occasion. The incident recalled countless similar ones from my childhood, all to do with correct feminine deportment, (which I never acquired) and I remained close to tears for the rest of the day.
On top of which, our handful of exposed films which we lovingly and naively relinquished in Coban for development, not wanting to subject them undeveloped to further months of roasting in the furnaces of our baggage, have apparently disappeared without trace. We didn’t realize that the imbecile in Coban was going to send them to Guatemala anyway; but when they hadn’t returned by the time we left Coban for the last time, after being in Lanquin, we said to him, well, if they’re stuck in Guatemala, we’ll pick them up there ourselves.
They are not here, and the firm says they have never seen them.
To cheer ourselves up we washed down an expensive pizza with a litre of wine and several grappas. This is going to be a very expensive week. At least the hotel is cheap and acceptable – the only stroke of moderate luck to come our way so far in this seedy, ugly, money-grabbing, US-sycophantic city. What we wouldn’t give to be back in a mountain village. But our visas, which become defunct any day now, are going to keep us here at least another week.
2nd May 1990, Guatemala City, evening
Yesterday being May 1st and a public holiday, we took a trip out of town in an attempt to forget our worries, to a ruin some 50 kms north of the city, passing through two Indian villages en route, sampling the markets, and stocking up on fruit and mineral water.
Mixco Viejo was hot and dusty, situated on a rise in the middle of a parched valley, and consisting of several temple-like clusters on the brink of a precipice, but with no intricate or classical carvings. These Mayas were expelled at the time of the Spanish Conquest. In the later years of their civilisation, before the Spaniards arrived, they seem to have gone in less for spectacular totem-poles and the like.
Today in town was at least more fruitful than Monday; we found some essential motorbike parts, a woman to do our washing, and got the film-developing imbecile in Coban on the phone. He claims he has found our films and sent them to the city.
Juergen has got his visa already extended for two months and we even had time to visit the renowned Archeology and Anthropology Museum, which was worth the effort despite the fact that an electrical power-cut (we are used to these from Managua) meant we had to peer at the final exhibits in almost-total darkness.
6th May 1990, Guatemala City, evening
The next day was thoroughly frustrating in that I didn’t manage to go riding. We’d spotted a riding establishment of some kind in the park where the museums were, and had asked if it was possible to ride or hire a horse for an hour. They said, yes, we should come back the next day; but by the time we came back the next day it was afternoon, because I’d menstruated profusely into my only pair of suitable riding trousers in the morning and had to wash them out.
I put them on still wet, and Juergen and I drove about for an hour in the sunshine to get dry; but then at the riding school they said all the horses had already been used today and come back tomorrow.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to after that, and anyhow the next day was Saturday and we’d planned to leave the city for the weekend.
On Saturday morning the local BMW workshop said they wouldn’t after all be able to do all the bike repairs in one day, and we’d have to bring it in on Monday and leave it until Wednesday. If they’d said that in the first place, instead of blithely insisting as they had that we could bring it in any morning without appointment and pick it up again in the evening, they could have had it last week, because there’s no way we want to stay in the city until Wednesday.
Juergen stormed off bellowing that he’d be writing to BMW headquarters in Munich about this, and as for the repairs, he’d do them himself.
Are you really going to write to Munich? I asked a bit later. He shrugged. He’ll have forgotten about it in a day, as he well knows. Juergen characterizes himself as someone whose bark is always worse than his bite. His bark, when it erupts, is actually pretty ferocious.
We were half-way to Antigua that Saturday before I timidly reminded him I’d been thinking about having a ride this morning. He’d forgotten. He turned round very dutifully and drove me back to the riding school.
Everybody ignored us when we walked in. I am unable to place this establishment, where they have rows and rows of fine horses, much better than in the average British riding school, but where any stranger could apparently come along and take a ride without appointment.
But getting anyone’s attention or information had been terribly difficult. Somebody at last brought me a saddled horse, and I got on and waited for someone to show me where to go and what to do. Nobody did; just as nobody had asked me if I’d ever been on a horse in my life before.
There was a kind of paddock outside, so eventually I went there and rode around a few times. The horse was about 15 hands, fairly well-schooled and obedient. The guy had mentioned that the horses were all jumpers, and it had a show-jumper’s kind of alert canter. It was not particularly lively and fairly bored with the paddock, but still a class above the usual bomb-proof riding school mount, and it didn’t occur to it not to do what it was told.
Still cantering in circles round the smallish paddock was very hard work; my muscles still ache two days after.
Later I rode over to a kind of indoor school, which had a couple of two-foot-high poles to hop over. I did this a couple of times; but it was impossible to get going as dogs were being trained in one end and in the other the guy who seemed to be in charge was lungeing a mare with a woman on top, whether for the instruction of the woman or the mare was not clear.
Though everyone assured me I was not disturbing anything it was much too cramped for much activity, so I left again after a few minutes.
I took off the horse’s saddle and let it drink and graze. The man, who had come in almost straight after I did, with the woman and the mare, just seemed to be sitting in the stables watching me. I did not know what to do with the horse, and as no-one seemed to want to tell me, eventually dragged its head from the grass and lead it up to the guy, who then had the courtesy to indicate an empty stable.
He also deigned to talk to me a bit, and said if I came again I could ride one of his real jumpers. I said I would if I had time. I still found the establishment difficult to place. I asked if the horses all belonged to him, and he said yes, indicating the ones in that row, but there were a lot of others and I got the impression they weren’t all his. I don’t know whether he was intimidated by a woman who could ride well, or whether he assumed that because I could I must come from some terribly rich and powerful gringo family.
In complete contrast to such horsey scenes in England, all the stable helps there were men. There were some young, white girls, obviously visitors, riding, but not very effectively, as far as I could judge, and strictly supervised.
Quite obviously here serious equestrian work and care is a male domain, and is undertaken with a certain Marlborough-Country machismo. I was ticked off later by one of the stable lads for playing affectionately with a mare and foal in one of the stables, while waiting for Juergen. It’s not considered good for the horses to get any ideas about humans being softies.
That afternoon we drove the 100 kms to Antigua. All the guide books rave about this town, which was Spanish Guatemala’s first capital; and it is indeed charming and unspoilt, but the mere presence of about a million tourists has had a profound effect on its character, this fact having become the focal point of all native industry.
Strings of clean, civilized hotels, quaint cafes and gift-shops, a permanent ‘tipica’ market, dazzling in the variety and quality of its goods, the prices of everything just that much higher than anywhere else in the country, with the possible exception of Livingston.
It’s all so charming, neat and civilized that it’s not quite real. Still, it’s relaxing after the horrid, squalid capital; and would be a good base to do any business in the city from.
We acquired some more presents for folks back home and dutifully inspected a few colonial ruins. As we were hovering in the entrance to a shop, a man suddenly fell in from the street with a blood-curdling yell, knocking over the shop’s display dummy, and lay face down across the steps, shuddering and breathing in loud gasps. There was small puddle of blood and saliva on the floor under his face. He was stiff and jerking and obviously unconscious.
The shopkeeper, Juergen and I stood and stared helplessly. Juergen dashed across to the medical clinic on the other side of the street, but being Sunday, there was no-one there.
The man seemed to calm down and eventually rolled over to stare at us from the floor. I located his glasses, wiped them clean of blood and spit and handed them to him. He sat up and put them on without a word, not responding to our solicitous questions, not seeming to understand.
He eventually managed to say that he was French – by now a considerable group had gathered outside on the road. He had no idea what had happened. He could not remember what he was doing in Antigua, or how long he had been there, or where his hotel was. He did not recognise his bag, but there was a receipt in it with what he knew was his name on it, though he didn’t know what the receipt was for. He wouldn’t believe that he’d had some kind of fit.
He went off saying he would just walk about a bit and maybe his memory would come back. He seemed so perfectly ordinary, a young European tourist, obviously not drunk; and after a few minutes’ blockage, spoke quite reasonable Spanish.
It was eerie; he clearly couldn’t grasp what had happened to him. It could happen to anyone, anytime.
I think it was thinking about that that gave me a splitting headache later on. I am also still aching from my ride yesterday.
8th May 1990, Guatemala City
Another indifferent day in the city yesterday. I got my passport back, stamped, but with a 30-day’s exit visa. That means I have 30 days to leave the country, starting four days ago. As Juergen, and hopefully the bike, has 60, it would have been nice to have at least the possibility of another extension.
Mainly because the bike’s paperwork still isn’t ready. There’s also a chance that Juergen will not be allowed into Belize (a British protectorate) without a visa – and there’s no possibility of getting one in Guatemala where Belize has no representation. (The countries are antagonistic due to Belize’s nominal independence; it used to be ‘British Honduras’ on which Guatemala had territorial claims.)
It’s just possible that when Juergen and I arrive at the Belize border (the obvious route out of the country enabling us to take in the very-famous-Maya-site Tikal), I, as a British citizen, will be pushed out with a ‘good-riddance’, and (for the same reason) welcomed in Belize with open arms. Whilst Juergen plus bike are trapped in Guatemala, which doesn’t mind keeping them as West German foreign policy has been very understanding, but in Belize the only acceptable visa-less foreigner is a Brit.
That will leave me on my own without a vehicle, and without permission to re-enter Guatemala. It’s a risk we’ll just have to take.
At least we have our films back, developed and apparently in good shape. One of several additional drawbacks is the cancellation of all post to Europe, complicating the sending of packages of ‘tipica’ back home which have quite simply become too bulky to carry. The Post Office won’t admit the reason, but it’s obviously to do Guatemala’s unpaid postal bill from Spain which handles all their European mail, Spain having now gone on strike over it, which we read in a newspaper.
So we sent our packages with DHL, at vast expense, but at least we don’t have to worry about their safe arrival.
This morning I went riding again and was a bit annoyed at being allocated the same horse after all that talk about real jumpers etc. Still there was less going on so I was able to construct a few obstacles to my taste in the indoor arena. I jumped them a few times, then schooled outside a bit, then jumped them again one more time before going in.
I was very active as a teenager in the local pony-club scene; I was a real horse-mad girl with horse pictures and rosettes pinned all over my bedroom walls, and shelves of pony-books I knew by heart. I suppose I was luckier than most because I really did have my own pony, and attended all the local shows and gymkhanas and was an enthusiastic jumper.
But eventually I picked up on some unspoken communication from my family to the effect that ponies were fine for kids, but not something to take too seriously as an educated young lady; and I could already see that once you got too old for the pony-club, there wasn’t much else to do in that scene unless you really had unlimited time and money.
For some reason becoming a girl-groom, like the poor girls in the books, was out. I think at that point I wanted more than anything to get out and see the world, even if it meant never riding again in my life.
It’s now ten years since I rode regularly, or jumped at all. Echoes of my old obsession vibrated in my mind, as I mused over the difficulty I had keeping this horse going into the jumps. On several occasions only his own obvious experience took him over, almost from a standstill; any other horse I’ve ever ridden would’ve just stopped.
But any other horse might not have been so difficult to get going; but it’d be wrong to say he was totally unresponsive; perhaps the fault lay in my own weakness of leg-and-body power? Certainly I felt totally exhausted after every little ’round’. It must partly be a question of fitness.
In the old days I never did have much patience with horses you had to kick to get into motion. Actually the ability to get a lazy horse into gear and moving forward is just as much an equestrian skill as the more glamourous ability to control an over-excited one. It was a skill I didn’t bother about acquiring because I had a willing pony, and thought I’d never want a lazy horse.
But I don’t have a horse of my own at all now; and the fact is as a general rule if you want to have fun on riding school mounts, then you have got to be good at making bored and lazy horses go.
So I keep asking myself; what could I have done to have got this horse going better into the awkward combination of jumps that I’d constructed, going away from the stable yard?
While I was riding, Juergen parked the bike in the paddock alongside the fence, and lay on his back underneath it, fiddling with screws and axels. He was still at it when I finished, so I went and bought him snacks and licuados in polythene bags from a nearby stand.
May 10th 1990, Antigua
Well – yesterday we’d thought we’d just have to collect the bike’s extended visa from the Ministry of Finance, take it to Customs, and then leave Guatemala City for ever, at the latest by lunchtime.
When we arrived early in the morning at the relevant office on the relevant floor of the Finance Ministry tower, we were told that everything was OK but now we needed a sealed legal statement to prove Juergen’s ownership.
Under pressure, the woman revealed that on the top floor of the same building we would actually find a lawyer’s office.
We went there, and he saw us, and amazingly gave us what we needed within an hour, charging only minimally.
So back we went to the first office with our photocopied document. And the lady beamed at us, saying our submissions were now complete, and all we had to do was come back next Tuesday. Today is Wednesday.
We practically hit the roof but of course there was nothing we could do. The point is that while Juergen’s visa is valid for 60 days, mine is already down to 24 and by next Tuesday it will be 17 or thereabouts. With no prospect of renewal.
The other problem is that without its visa the motorbike, in motion, is illegal, as the old one expired several days ago. But we had had it up to here with Guatemala City, and sneaked off that very afternoon to Antigua, which though just as expensive, is so much quieter and more pleasant.
Not before trying though to making an arrangement with the local police station for a temporary permit to cover the bike until the proper one is ready, for which we paid one of the freelance native-bureaucracy professional sharks who hang around outside all public buildings, mainly to see if they really had access to strings we can’t reach.
They don’t, or at least this one didn’t. After assuring us that it couldn’t fail, the police told him that we’d have to come back on Friday for a final decision. We thought this might be worth it, to be able to ride the bike out at the weekend; and at least had the foresight only to pay the shark half the agreed fee. He could have the rest on Friday.
Travelling back and forth from Antigua in the meantime is a hairy process, rather like travelling black (without a ticket) on the Berlin underground. Groups of policemen stand about all over the place, although they rarely stop anyone.
Come to think of it, if they did stop you, a modest handful of dollars would almost certainly do the trick, but Juergen is reluctant to take risks.
Early this morning an overloaded bus turned over on the mountain stretch between Guatemala City and Antigua and landed upside-down in the rocky gorge. Forty people died. The first we heard of it was when we passed Antigua’s tiny hospital on the way to breakfast, and there was a bunch of people outside, mostly women bawling.
Life is cheap here; all the buses are run by private companies and cost next to nothing; for which they are jam-packed, with no regard for safety, full of whole families and all their goods on their way to the local markets.
The buses themselves look ready to crumble. It’s happened before and it will certainly happen again. The occasional tragedy is the price these people pay for dirt-cheap travel, which is a basic necessity for them. Things are no better in Nicaragua, although at least the roads there are for the most part less perilously steep and mountainous.
But life is only cheap for natives; it’s understood by all that for white tourists the stakes are higher. Anyway if we are caught on the motorbike without a permit between Guatemala and Antigua, alluding to this recent accident, and our consequent fear of the buses, might make a convincing excuse.
For breakfast, Antiguans eat a warm, milky variant of Scotch porridge, sweetened with copious quantities of cinnamon and banana, which they call Mosh. I like it, it reminds me of skiing holidays in the Cairngorms.
I went riding this morning through the countryside, from a stables in Antigua; it’d be a change I thought from schooling in circles in the paddock, though I didn’t expect much from the horses.
I was pleasantly surprised, and had a wonderfully responsive grey which the man said was Andaluasian, and could stop and turn and canter on or hold back whenever the ground was appropriate, so I wasn’t at all bothered that all the other riders were beginners.
We rode Western-style, but I’d done this a couple of times in Nicaragua, and it’s not a problem. You can actually have a lot more fun here on an occasional basis, than in Europe, as the arts of Equitation and Horsemanship are not taken so seriously. Once you’re on your horse nobody really minds what you do, and if you want to gallop about at will, you’re quite welcome. The emphasis is on customer-fun, even at the expense of your own and the horse’s safety, (though they would get worried if they thought you weren’t going to bring the horse back) because that way you’ll come back for more.
In England you’d almost have to prove that you’d passed pony-club B test before you’d be allowed to go off for a canter on your own, somewhere they didn’t know you. The skills and the horses are much more jealously guarded and it wouldn’t surprise me if this was partly why English riding-school horses are always half-asleep.
13th May 1990, Antigua
Juergen went back to the city on Friday to collect the temporary police permit, but they told him to come back Monday. The professional shark of course had vanished.
Meanwhile I undertook some light sightseeing and was irritated at being picked up by an obviously slimey character posing as a guide, who then had the nerve to try and bargain with me over what I should give him after he’d supposedly shown me around a colonial convent. I was so disgusted I just walked off, regretting I’d given him anything at all.
I was also struck by the additional stress to which a woman alone on the streets is subjected, which is why I’d let the middle-aged self-appointed guide attach himself to me in the first place, even here in civilized Antigua. Something I’ve been sheltered from up to now, being always either with Juergen, or dressed sufficiently androgynously to pass for male; this actually happens as a matter of course so long as I’m in jeans and campesino boots.
But this time I had on a skirt and sandals; and quickly came to the conclusion I’d rather be taken for a man.
The next day we drove the motorbike as far as it would go up the Volcan Agua; which rears up nearly 4,000 metres behind Antigua. The bike didn’t make it all that far as the track was steep and stony, and wet from the rain the night before. So we left it and started walking; and walked, or rather staggered and gasped, for another two-and-a-half hours in dense swirling mists, before reaching the crater.
Juergen, who smokes too much, was ready to give up long before, and was driven only by overweening pride to stumble on after me. But I can’t pretend I found it easy; a general unfitness combined with the thinness of the air made every uphill step an ordeal.
I circled the crater alone – Juergen still some 15 minutes behind me-and looked down in the intermittent sunshine at the dense beds of cloud jutting out from the almost-sheer drop the other side. Not another peak in sight.
Apparently the views are fantastic when it is clear; you can see both oceans at once. But you’d need to wait around for hours waiting for the opportune moment. I suppose that is why it’s a popular overnight excursion; there’s a little hut in the crater for overnight campers. The wind up here is bitter.
Juergen bounded down at at least five times his uphill speed with me still panting along behind him. We were back at the motorbike in an hour; and although we felt terrifically pleased with ourselves, the fact is that most people who climb the volcano – and we met several small groups – have no vehicle to take them halfway up. They walk from the village, which must mean a very early start.
The next morning I dragged Juergen out riding again. This time there were only the two of us, with the guide. It was fun; I had an even speedier chestnut to ride, and the guide, a youthful mestizo, and I raced excitedly like flirtatious teenagers, but I’m not sure how Juergen felt about it.
He hauled himself onto a horse for the first time in his life a few months ago, on a beach in Nicaragua. He had difficulty in making his horse keep up.
The poor chap’s muscles are in bad shape. He fell fast asleep for a few hours when we got back, and I didn’t wake him, though we’d wanted to explore a local village in the afternoon. He has to return to the city tomorrow, to buy the motorbike a new battery. And the following day we have to check on the bike’s visa, which you can be certain will not be ready. It’s sickening.
15th May, Antigua, late afternoon
Juergen came back pretty depressed from Guatemala (City); the temporary motorbike visa from the police had been turned down out of hand, and Honda, who’d sold him a battery, said he’d have to wait until late the following afternoon to pick it up.
We went off for a surreptitious drive through some neighbouring villages and some native weavers prevailed on me to buy a couple more patterned cloths.
The village in question, which is famed for its weaving skills, had the usual public basketball court in the main square in front of the market stands, but, intriguingly, instead of the ubiquitous adolescent boy-players in more-or-less latino clothes, as we strolled past two informal teams of Indian girls were playing each other in a carefree manner, apparently unhindered by their traditional calf-length wrap-around skirts.
The usual handful of idle men lolled in front of the shops watching vaguely, while the girls’ mothers sat on the ground in the alcoves of their stalls, operating their back-strap looms, waiting to assault the next group of visitors.
It occurred to me that in villages famed for their weaving, which is an indisputably female craft, the village women must enjoy exceptional status, especially in those near major tourist centres such as Antigua, as they have probably long since become the family breadwinners and are uniquely responsible for any prosperity and renown the village enjoys. Regular farm work for the men must be as scarce here as everywhere else.
This morning we caught the bus to the city together. I’d say what happened then at the Finance Ministry earned us a place in the History of Tourists’ Rights. The motorbike’s extension visa was supposed to be ready today (two weeks after submission of application, which they won’t even accept until a couple of days before the old one expires).
Of course it wasn’t; ‘pendiente’, they said. Come back Thursday.
We asked to see the boss. The boss is in a meeting, which would not finish until Thursday.
They slammed the door in our face, leaving us with a half-witted security policeman who understood nothing but that we were to be got rid of as soon as possible.
We unearthed a phone book in a local photocopy shop and copied down the West German and British embassy numbers and went in search of a phone booth. We found one outside the national tourism office and while Juergen was waiting in the queue, I went into the tourism office and poured out our troubles to the lady behind the desk.
As it was a state office I’d expected a curt ‘I’m sorry, we can’t interfere in Ministry matters’; but to my amazement she was immensely sympathetic and immediately got on the phone to all manner of people, putting our case much better than we could have done ourselves.
But the crucial number remained elusively occupied and eventually all she could do was give us a note signed by herself, saying that our application must be expedited.
We thought we’d try it. Back at the Ministry, the Minister’s secretary listened unhappily to our woes, trying again to put us off, and eventually went off to see her boss after I’d pulled my passport out from inside my trouser leg and shoved it under her nose, open at the page with the unmistakeable exit visa.
A moment later we were ushered into a splendid penthouse bureau with a magnificent 12th storey view over the city in the midday sunshine, and a formal, slightly uneasy middle-aged man behind an imposing desk (and quite obviously not in a meeting), asking us what seemed to be the problem.
As if he didn’t know. After the briefest of explanations, he asked us how long we wanted, and agreed without comment to our suggestion that the motorbike’s visa should be valid as long as Juergen’s own, as he is the owner. He signed our bits of paper, and that was that.
We hope. We have an official number now to bring to customs, with the bike, tomorrow. We don’t dare be optimistic. I expect one more indignant trip to the Finance Ministry will be necessary tomorrow. But it really seems that they want to be rid of us, and have finally grasped that the best way of doing that is to give us what we want.
It just goes to prove that there are occasions when making a big fuss is the only way to get results.
17th May 1990, Santiago Atitlan, late afternoon
The papers weren’t ready in Customs at 10 the next morning, as promised, of course. We got on the phone at once to the Finance Ministry, who claimed to have had no messengers free, but that they would be there by midday. Promise.
Of course this made us nervous again, so we dropped in at the West German Embassy for a chat. They weren’t pleased to see us. Juergen was allotted two minutes through a microphone with an official on the other side of unbreakable glass, while still in the waiting room surrounded by all the other patient advice-seekers wondering if everyone else’s problems were worse than theirs.
The official was not at all impressed by Juergen’s difficulties, only shrugged and said, hey, this is Guatemala (ie. not Deutschland). He opened his eyes a little wider when Juergen said, what if while waiting for the bike permit, my residence permit expires? which is what is actually threatening to happen to me.
Yes, well, in that case, come back when it happens. And not before.
Even hardened non-patriots like Juergen and myself harbour a hopelessly idealistic image of our country’s noble representation abroad. We had this vague idea that the mere production of our passport would make the people behind the Embassy desk beam at us with fraternal delight, tacitly congratulating us on having made it to this oasis of civilization amidst the coarse and unrelenting landscape of Abroad, cups of tea and biscuits (or Kaffee und Kuchen) all round before you even get to discussing the problem.
It isn’t like that. The first thing this guy did was disappear completely with Juergen’s passport, and Juergen said he had the immediate impression they were checking up on his criminal record. Not exactly a heart-warming welcome for a fellow-countryman.
I still harbour the illusion that the British Embassy would have been friendlier; but there seemed little point in going there as the bike belongs to Juergen.
We distracted ourselves for an hour in the ethnic Ixchel Museum, and then returned to Customs. Guess what, the papers had just arrived!
After that it was a question of trotting back and forth between the customs office, the official cashier, the bank and the motorbike for about half-an-hour. And then it really was all over.
We spent our last night in Antigua, packed up and left for Atitlan. Here we are, in pouring rain, in a remote village on the south-east corner of what according to Aldous Huxley is the most beautiful mountain lake in the world. It is a pity we couldn’t see much of it on the way in because of the fog. Still we have a couple of days here, so hopefully things will brighten up a bit.
21st May, Santiago Atitlan, early morning
Santiago Atitlan is a small, muddy village in the shadow of a vast volcano, sloping down to a pier on the lake, to which a handful of canoes and a motorboat are attached. The village women come here in droves in the early morning to collect water in their jars, which are in the traditional oval design, with symmetrical handles and a flat bottom for balancing on the head, but are actually made out of plastic.
They wear white tunics with a criss-cross pattern and tiny animal or bird symbols embroidered in the squares. Occasionally the older ones wear a kind of broad, concentric headdress made out of a long piece of coloured band wound round and round the head, which appears on one of the Guatemaltecan national coins, but this seems to have gone out of general everyday use for the younger women.
The day after we arrived we drove the motorbike through the villages and along the precipices around the south west shore, to Tzumuna, where the track ends abruptly in front of a massive and impenetrable shoulder of mountain. I swam off a public beach on the western-most inlet, but after that the clouds pulled in again.
On the way back we dressed up in full water-proof gear, expecting the worst, but although the sky was a violent purple-grey colour, we were lucky enough to dodge the downpour and received only a splattering.
Evening entertainment in Atitlan seems to consist exclusively of large, evangelical religious assemblies, conducted by clean-cut white-faced men in suits speaking in Spanish in a rousing manner from a platform with a microphone. The Indian women, with their brown faces and traditional clothing, sit placidly on the rows of chairs watching, babies on their laps, their men standing at the back.
These meetings took place every evening in at least two locations in the village, with which the sole Catholic church, holding only weekend mass, probably couldn’t compete. They keep the people on the streets until late at night, drifting in and out, while the market-stall holders continue business by candlelight until everyone has gone home.
The next morning we got up very early and took the six o’clock ferry to Panajachel, chugging through the early morning mists in the company of families on the way to market. Panajachel is the lake’s most developed tourist resort, and also a well-known hippie hang-out – a mixture of downmarket foreign tourists (some of whom got stuck), upmarket native tourists from the city, and Indians from the local villages come to sell their tipica.
After breakfast there we hitched a lift to San Antonio, a village some 11 rough kms along the shore, and walked about a bit. It is a lovely area for walking with numerous hillside paths running parallel to the terraces cut into the hillside, on which lots of onions as well as corn are grown. The paths, until recently the only way of getting from village to village, offer panoramic views of the lake and the mountains across the water.
On the way back to Panajachel, we sneaked down to a tiny, idyllic lakeside beach which almost certainly belonged to the luxury hotel a hundred feet up on the hillside, and swam there in deep turquoise water. We climbed up the slope on tiptoe through the hotel grounds, past the swimming pool where a fat, middle-aged, obviously US American couple were sunbathing, but as we were obviously white tourists too, nobody said anything.
In Panajachel, we ate and caught the boat back to Santiago Atitlan. A day without the motorbike.
To compensate, yesterday we drove a long way to the market at Chichicastenango, probably the country’s most famous. The brilliant colours of the stalls and the Indian clothing make it fantastically photogenic, but sitting on the steps of the church, where religious rites of a pagan nature, involving a lot of incense and scattered leaves and petals, were also underway, I could detect a certain irritation on the part of the natives at the endless snapping.
A lot of Indians have religious or superstitious objections to being photographed, but their brilliantly eye-catching clothing makes them a target and a major attraction wherever there are tourists. Many who would have traditionally objected have got used to it, and, especially the children, even tout themselves to tourists as models – for a fee.
Juergen found this disgusting, saying it was only one step from undressing for a camera, and reacted angrily when they posed before us demanding “una foto!” But I was sometimes tempted to play their game; at least that way you’re not offending anyone.
The only perfect solution of course is to sneak pictures without anybody noticing, but for that you’d definitely need a zoom lens.
24th May 1990, Finca Ixobel, outside Poptun, Peten, Guatemala; morning
We said goodbye to beautiful Atitlan and wound our way back along its shores, through dusty, bone-dry hills, to a motel on the Puerto Barrios road that we’d stayed in before on the way to Livingston.
The next day we took a left turn to cross over the Rio Dulce at the mouth of Lake Izobal, where we stopped in the sweltering early afternoon to inspect the colonial castle and take a very tepid dip in the lake.
The weather here is hot and torpid, something we’ve become unaccustomed to these last weeks in the mountains.
We drove north through the Peten jungle, where the road became rough and stony. Stopping to drink coffee by the roadside we got into conversation with a native who said he’d lived and worked in Los Angeles, but had not considered the cost of living there worth the extra money he earned, and returned to driving trucks up and down through the Peten from Guatemala City to Flores.
He used some affectionate term to refer to some locals and the child who was with him pointed out smartly that we wouldn’t know who he was talking about. He explained he meant the local guerrillas.
“But they’re from round here, they’re our mates”, he said, watching the half-shocked surprise on our faces.
Guatemala’s violent side is kept hidden from tourists, as far as possible. We had seen the massive military presence in certain Indian villages, seen the people walk timidly past the barracks and groups of soldiers with eyes lowered; I had read articles in European magazines about the terrorization of certain communities, and about villagers being forced to serve in civilian patrols as military look-out men and informers; but I had not heard much about guerrilla activity.
Guatemala seems so fragmented, the villages so remote and isolated from each other, by language, customs and poverty – making distances greater – that it’s difficult to see how any organisation, official or otherwise, could convincingly claim to represent them all.
A Swiss guy we met later told us how he had been on a bus which had been held up by the guerrillas on a remote stretch of countryside. They’d made a speech up at the front about their liberationist aims and gone around collecting donations. Then they’d got off and the bus went on its way.
We kept driving as darkness fell, there being no obvious place to stay in the isolated roadside villages. We drove on in darkness to Poptun, looking for the Finca Ixobel, about which we’d heard some commendable things. Eventually we found it, not easy in the dark; particularly as the Finca has no electricity.
They were having supper by gaslight as we groped our way into the main house. Young Swiss, German, English and Americans seated around a large table in semi-darkness consuming platefuls of what was obviously extremely wholesome food.
We helped ourselves too, before adjourning to a bunk bed in a youth-hostel type dormitory, which didn’t however separate the sexes.
In the morning, over an equally wholesome breakfast, the manageress, who was Swiss but spoke generally in the house-language, English, (Juergen got some funny looks on making the mistake of ordering his breakfast in Spanish) announced that two people had withdrawn from the cave-trip arranged by a group of the guests for that day.
I said impulsively that Juergen and I would go instead; so off we went.
Two hours’ tramp through periodically dense jungle and a final scramble down to a secluded hole beneath vast slabs of rock, in which crystal-clear water lapped and gurgled.
You go in there, said the native guide; you’ve got three hours. And he settled down for a doze.
We were a group of eight; an English couple and a single guy, two Swiss, a Danish guy, and Juergen and me. We stripped off to swimsuits and into the hole we went, immediately waist-deep in water and plunged into darkness.
For the next three hours we waded and swam through cool underground rivers, by torch and candlelight, the cold water blissful at first after the sweaty humidity of the jungle tramp; torches and candles balanced in mouths, on noses, or in hands held precariously aloft while doggy-paddling frantically with the other through water usually too deep to stand in.
The cave led us along passageways with banks so steep and slippery that in trying to walk along them we constantly toppled over into the water; opening out into spacious underground halls lined with stony mud beaches and glistening rock formations, where alarmed bats whirred in swarms overhead.
At one end the river fell about two metres into a very deep lagoon. We all popped over with a series of excited shrieks, and then, inspired, clambered up the rock-face to one side and jumped again, from about five metres, into semi-darkness.
This little antic had me semi-petrified and I stepped only in a fit of recklessness over the edge, and fell for what seemed like much too long, streaking at alarming speed into the water and shooting downwards into the heart of the bottomless lagoon.
It was really the most fascinating and fairy-tale adventure-type trip I’ve ever done. Along the way we’d developed a certain group-feeling, no-one wanting to be left behind or feel in any way incapable, but I think all of us were somewhat overwhelmed.
On the trek back to the Finca my legs were so weak and wobbly I could hardly walk, but somehow, we made it there.
One of the English guys was a yuppie from London who’d been earning vast sums as a City lawyer before selling up and setting off to do Latin America. He was nearly through with his trip and afterwards was planning to head off for Australia, where, he said, he hoped the pace of life in the process of earning an obscene salary would be a little less stressful.
He was 28 at the most, no older than me, and coy about his professional activities at first, I suppose thinking I’d disapprove since we’d come from (Sandinista) Nicaragua. The first thing he’d said when I mentioned Nicaragua, was, were we communists then?
Yeah, that’s right, I answered; I mean, what else can you say to a question like that?
He was quite interesting about the yuppie London lifestyle he claimed to have put behind him; nothing but overtime, talk about mortgages, tax, and estate agents, and extravagant parties. He struck me as pretty ignorant about many things, but I suppose you’d expect that from someone who’d never done anything but work, earn vast sums and socialise in a fairly mindless sort of way. The question about being communists had been absolutely serious.
I went pony-trekking the next day with a different group, while Juergen put up the tent on the Finca campsite so that we could move out of the dormitory. The riding trip, which included a picnic and a swim in a river-pond, was pleasant enough, but tame in comparison to the caves excursion.
Probably the most exciting occurrence of the day was being attacked by the pair of sulky macaws who stalk about the farmhouse during the day, harassing innocent breakfasters or guests trying to relax in the front room with a book.
Juergen and I tried to shoo them out, at our peril, although Juergen (to the great amusement of the kitchen staff, standing in a huddle round the connecting door to watch) succeeded masterfully in smothering one of them in a towel, and thrusting it, blindfolded, out the door, which left it dazed but unfortunately even more bent on revenge.
As darkness falls, the pair exchange glances and disappear, soaring off in unison into the trees for the night.
The other house pet is a little tame toucan, which also hops about on the tables in search of titbits, but is much better mannered.
We spent our final night at the Finca in the tent, and in the morning, totted up the bill, paid and left.
The Finca Ixobel is a little modern-European design-adventure haven amid the usual rough-and-tumble of the region’s dirt-cheap comedores and hospedajes. The dormitories and camping facilities are simple but impeccably clean. Unquestionably pure water flows at all times from a natural source on the farm itself. Nutritious, well-cooked food, vegetarian if required, and wholemeal bread, is served, all at reasonable cost.
The management, two women, an American and a Swiss, have excellent relations with local guides for excursions, which can last for as long as four days if enough guests are interested.
It obviously does good business. But only like-minded foreigners, conscious of what young northern travellers want, could have conceived it, which is why making money out of off-beat tourism is hard for locals, even when the location is ideal.
I suspect the Finca was viewed locally as a hotbed of lax morals and sinful activities, and no doubt rife with AIDS, what else could you expect from an unrestrained houseful of young gringos?, judging by the knowing grins our initial attempts to find it had raised in the village. There was no-one there over forty, and most were under thirty. Richer, lazier tourists would fly direct to Tikal from Guatemala City, rather than wrestle for hours or days with the track through the Peten jungle.
Finca Ixobel is situated almost exactly at the half-way mark.
It was also symptomatic that ours appeared to be the only private vehicle on the farm at the time. Everyone else came up on the bus.
Still, strangely enough, the presence of too many like-minded travellers galls after a while and I found myself nostalgic for the “real” Guatemala again, of tacky comedor meals and overnight hovels, and not another foreigner in sight.
But for that we’d have to return to the remoter reaches of the mountains. Flores, where we are heading for next, is the general base-camp for the country’s most famous tourist attraction of all.
Note from 2021: Just two weeks later, in June 1990, tragedy struck the Finca Ixobel in the form of the proprietor’s still unsolved murder . It was a paradise resting on murky foundations, as were all Central American foreign-tourist facilities at that time.
27th May 1990, Lake Peten-Itza
I hope we make it to Tikal. We arrived at a lakeside campsite recommended by our budget-conscious guidebook, 10 km from Flores; and an attractive location it is, but for the two of us to erect our tent we have had to pay more than for any hotel room so far. And that for nothing in particular – not even hot water.
We would have turned up our noses in disgust and returned to a cheap hotel in Flores, but Juergen is in the meantime feverish and cannot face any more driving. So we paid up and camped.
During the evening Juergen’s temperature climbed to over 39 degrees and we shared an extortionately-priced meal in the site restaurant, again nothing special. During the night Juergen tossed and panted and sweated buckets, drenching the sleeping-bag and two T-shirts, but this morning the fever has dropped and he is snoring peacefully in the hammock in the morning sunshine while we wait for the tent to dry – it rained of course during the night.
In an hour or two we’ll make the short trip to Flores where hopefully we’ll find a cheap place to stay. According to my visa I have eight days left in this country.
29th May 1990, Flores
We found what claims to be the only cheapish hotel on this cramped little town confined on an offshore island on the lake, and put Juergen to bed. I wandered about in search of some fruit in absolutely sweltering heat, and did some laundry in the wash-basins in the tatty yard.
In the late afternoon Juergen pronounced himself almost well and we went out for an early supper.
So the next day we assaulted Tikal. It is 65 km (on excellent road, leading precisely from the airport to the site’s carpark, and probably the best-kept stretch in the country) from Flores and it was already early afternoon by the time we arrived at the famous structures. I conscientiously scrambled up and down all the accessible temples while Juergen strung up his hammock between the available trees and took it easy. Despite the shady jungle, it was hot.
It is difficult to know how to comment on Tikal without sounding like a million guide-books. Here are the facts: a classical Maya city and ceremonial centre, the earliest monumental structures dating from about 200 BC, although it was certainly inhabited by 600 BC if not earlier, and the latest 900 AD, after which it was abandoned, like the other centres, Palenque and Copan, for reasons unknown.
Although first systematically mapped and explored in 1881 by the British explorer Maudsley, the local peasants and possible descendants of its original inhabitants knew of its existence, under the encroaching undergrowth, all through the Spanish colonial period, and probably visited for their own religious purposes. It has been a national park since 1970, and excavation work continues.
It has a real “lost world” aura, thanks to the untouched surrounding jungle and the numerous overgrown and still “undiscovered” structures alongside the carefully excavated and restored ones. As a national park it’s magnificent, with a healthy population of cheeky spider monkeys and brilliant parrots unimpressed by the monumental stone structures in their midst.
The site is large – the National Park covers an area of 576 kilometres – and still remote enough to absorb even weekend visitors without becoming overcrowded. You can lose yourself on the tracks and stumble by chance on seemingly isolated and undiscovered pieces of ancient masonry.
We went back the next day. On the day after, we got up especially early and drove south along a track which was an unknown quantity towards Ceibal, a site some 80 kms away. We made it, after kipping over twice on a narrow, overgrown track that would have been impassable once the rainy season began.
Most people approach by river on a boat from Sayaxche, 18 kms away, where we’d had to lug the bike onto a lancha to get it across the river.
It was worth it. They were the most beautiful Maya stone carvings we have seen, in the most romantic and remote setting of all, all around the huge green palms wafting their giant manes over the ancient carved stones, dappling the patterns with tantalizing and deceptively mobile light, so that within the hour we spent on the site the same carving took on radically differing aspects.
An elderly Indian in a hut on the edge of the site, who served as caretaker, had assembled a number of the loose stones under an awning in an informal exhibition. While we sat and picnicked among them he gave us a number of red-orange fruits which grew in abundance round there, and we’d seen lying rotting on the ground during our ramblings, but didn’t know you could eat it. It had a slightly sickly, syrupy kind of taste.
31st May 1990, Tikal, evening
We left Flores the next day and set up camp here in Tikal, on the park campsite which is very nice except the water supply is rather sparse, but at least there always appears to be some.
On the way, we passed a car apparently abandoned in the middle of the road with a number of bullet holes in the windscreen. As we drove by I looked round and saw a number of men, presumably the previous occupants, crouched in the long grass at the side of the road.
Juergen shot the bike forward as if stung by a bee and we zoomed around the next couple of bends until safely out of sight.
We’ll never find out what happened because such assaults are not reported in the national press, even if we had access to it here, which we don’t. But a shadow of Guatemala’s darker side crossed our path for a moment, a sinister contrast to the well-kept sites and on the whole ample material provision, especially around the major attractions.
This morning we set off promptly for Uaxactun, an archaeological site some 25 km north of Tikal, really an excuse, as most sites probably are for most tourists, for an exploratory trip through the jungle. But we got there quickly as the track turned out to be in better shape than expected.
There was quite a lot of ruins to inspect, again surprisingly well-tended, considering not that many tourists make it this far; carvings not as exquisite as at Ceibal but a more impressive range of buildings.
Ceibal was like a tiny, secret shrine, hidden away in the middle of nowhere. Uaxactun is actually quite a sizeable village in its own right. A woman there gave us some food in her wooden hut although she did not strictly run a comedor.
We took a detour through the jungle on the way back in fanciful search of further ruins, but when we looked on the map back in Tikal, we saw that the nearest ones were about 100 kms away, so it’s not surprising we didn’t get there.
On the last stretch of track Juergen insisted on steering the bike straight through all the deepest puddles, raising a murky spray every time and wobbling precariously a fair bit in the process – all in aid of putting his new super-mud-proof tyre to work. He’d been disappointed by the relatively firm state of all the jungle tracks so far. The rainy season begins later up here in what is really the Yucatan, and has held off so far.
4th June1990 , Benque Viejo, Belize
On our last night in Tikal we watched the sun set from the high temple in the centre of the Mundo Perdido plaza, lying there on its chalky flat top in the mild evening sunshine, parrot and monkey-spotting till it got completely dark.
Tikal was a lovely, soothing place to camp, despite the scarcity of the water, and being pursued once by a lecherous park guard, when I had the audacity to take a solitary evening stroll around the ruins, in shorts.
The contrast between the imposing majesty of the temples, and the distinctly unmajestic aspect of most park-attendants, who, who knows, may even be descendants of the original architects, but whose envy, coupled, sometimes, with resentment, of the pale-skinned visitors from around the world is written all over their faces, is ironic and might even be funny if it weren`t implicitly tragic.
But the cheeky monkeys, who, after dozing most of the day, come out in hordes in the evenings in search of food, genuinely are funny. Once they pelted me with acorns quite intentionally. Another time a band of three came right into the campsite and leapt about from tree to tree in an exhibitionist fashion above the tents.
We crossed relatively uneventfully over into Belize. They ticked Juergen off for not having a visa but obviously weren’t going to consider it a serious offence. The customs officer then tried to get us to sell the bike, duty-free so to speak, before he noted its presence – making sale illegal – in Juergen’s passport.
Actually Juergen wouldn’t mind selling the bike, if he could get around this import tax business, but not until we get to Mexico. It would save shipping it back to Europe.
6th June, Belize City, evening
Life in Belize is at least twice as expensive as in Guatemala, and they are also slyer about doubling or tripling the prices again for foreigners. Price-lists at museums etc. quite openly advertise two separate rates, for natives and foreigners. I wonder what the omnipresent British soldiers pay.
The tourist industry here really does seem geared to rich Americans in search of sun and sea and jungle and nothing complicated, like foreign languages, on their two weeks’ off a year. The official language here is English, although most people, particularly inland, speak Spanish as well. There seems to be a marked absence of back-packing Finca-Ixobel type travellers, probably because of the prices.
Our few pages of ancient guide-book had recommended a place called the Pine Ridge Reserve near a Maya ruin not far from the border, so not having any better ideas, we sought it out at some inconvenience and found ourselves on a ranch where we asked, meekly, if we might camp.
The mestizo guy said he would have to ask the boss, and pulled out his radio. The boss replied, over the radio, in broad Texan, OK, for a fee.
They had horses there, which had attracted me in the first place, and we asked if we could ride. They said they offered half-day tours for 45 dollars including lunch.
It seemed expensive but after some deliberation we decided to book for tomorrow; to discover the next morning when the horses were saddled and waiting that they meant US dollars, not Belize dollars.
We took the news stoically and made the best of it; the ride was a little tame for my taste, the assumption being made that we were probably both terribly nervous, but the guide was interesting about his previous existence as a chiclero. (Campesinos could at one time make a living scouring the jungle for for chicle trees, and bleeding the resin for chewing gum and rubber production. They left their mark in a pattern of criss-cross cuts on the bark.)
But in the tent that night I was conscious of acute irritation. I do not like being taken for a rich American. The young guy tending the ranch bar had felt duty bound to lure us from our tent to spend some cash, as we were the only guests, it being off-season. He seemed not only a little taken aback that we were not from the States, but also couldn’t quite credit Juergen’s insistence that he had never even been there, and didn’t particularly want to go.
Many of the simple people here assume, when we say that we come from England and Germany, that these are just more individual states, like Texas or Colorado. Europe means nothing to them, the world begins and ends with north, south and central America, and all white people are gringos. They frequently ask, even after we’ve said where we’re from, if we’ve “driven down”.
The usual accommodation on the ranch was in self-contained bungalows, obviously designed for Americans on package “adventure” tours and not at all for stray Europeans traipsing through Latin America for half-a-year or more. The gut-reaction of the naive employees was that we must be awfully rich to have been on holiday since December (that was what we told them, not wanting to get into any stupid discussions about those communist Sandinistas).
The boss, when we met him, was terribly matey in a Texan-socialite sort of way, to which we gamely responded, even Juergen in his laboured English, secretly longing all the time to be left in peace. And at some level the Texan sensed it, though none of us let the cheery mask slip.
On the way to the Pine Ridge Reserve, we’d crossed over a river on a self-propelled raft, while a single tourist, a woman in shorts, baseball sneakers and sunglasses, watched us coming over from the other side, presumably waiting to take the raft back.
As we landed she asked, grinning, in broad American, if we spoke English. Yeah, I grunted.
“Well you know what you guys look like”, she said, “Exactly like something out of the Mad Max films.”
And she clenched her fists, gripping the air in front of her in a motorbike-riding stance, sticking out her jaw-bone as if to indicate aggression. We zoomed off. She’s obviously seen too many, I thought.
Anyhow at the end of the day we just felt like leaving Belize as soon as possible, to return to what we think of as Latin America, despite the laid-back warmth of the people in roadside shops and cafes who are quite obviously only charging the normal prices, and there was a nice guy in an impromptu roadside workshop who welded our luggage rack back into one piece, it having split along one side for about the fifth time so far, under the combined strain of our packs and the terrible road conditions.
We met his small son with his mates by chance on the road outside Belmopan, just as it started to pour with rain, and we were looking disconsolately for a workshop. The boy said his Dad would do it for us, and trotted along in front of us to his parents’ shack.
We have to come to Belize City to organise our Mexican visas; but there’s certainly no other reason for spending time here. A rangy young man with a lot of half-grown dreadlocks, who’d accosted us in the street and taken us to a moderately cheap hotel, then turned nasty, threatening aggression, when our tip didn’t correspond with his expectations.
Juergen only managed to deflect him with the help of the hotel receptionist’s brother – it was a family-run affair – who was then sternly remonstrative with us for having let ourselves get picked up by such unscrupulous scum.
I do not know if this incident is symptomatic of Belize City but I wouldn’t be surprised. Local stray youths have made constant attempts to attach themselves to us, in cafes, on the street. In keeping with their physical stature and athlete’s appearance, their technique is much harder-sell than that of comparatively diminutive latino street-hustlers, and I suspect they rely on a certain intimidation effect.
I am getting depressed and snappy from not having stayed anywhere really nice and peaceful since Tikal.
11th June 1990, by Cenote Azul, outside Chetumal, Mexico. Mid-morning.
Our last days in Belize were spent in an un-touristy and surprisingly pleasant sea-side town just before the Mexican border. We had piles of dirty clothing, so we washed everything in the available hotel sinks, and hung it up hopefully to dry, but as the sun was non-existent and the day punctuated by intermittent cloudbursts, it was obvious we’d have to stay a day longer than planned simply to get it dry.
We did, doing nothing much but lie and watch the automatic fan blow humid air in the vague direction of our improvised washing lines. However in the course of a short stroll along the sea-front we bumped into a young Dutch worker, doing a year’s practical study in Belize as part of his agricultural degree course.
He said Belize was a funny country. The best farmers were the Mennonites, a deeply religious community of German descent, who used only horses and hand-tools, having no time for modern machinery. Farmers had problems because it didn’t rain as predictably every June the way it used to, now you never knew when or if the rain was coming at all, the locals claimed.
I recalled what the Texan ranch-owner had said; that Belize’s main hope for an independent economy lay in tourist development, which coincided with what his mestizo ex-chiclero guide, who’d been working on the same ranch for several previous owners, told us; that the ranch had been used unsuccessfully for sheep and cattle farming before finally turning full-time to the adventure-holiday business.
But there’s something excruciatingly obsequious about a country whose principal industry is selling itself to rich foreigners; and in the end this must be self-destructive, because how many tourists will indefinitely want to come just to watch other tourists being waited on by natives, there being nothing else left in the country to see?
It just about functions in a place like Antigua Guatemala, which is historically interesting, and well-preserved. But Belize has very little history of that kind to offer.
Any kind of tourism is destructive; the way the Indians in Guatemala for instance do more weaving now to sell to foreigners, than for their own consumption, and you can bet they cater to foreign tastes as far as possible, leaving their own traditional patterns and colours by the wayside.
And as far as Belize is concerned, I’m overlooking what is, what’s more, tourism of the least destructive kind; the vast masses of people who are only looking for spot on the beach under a palm tree, and a snorkel in the Caribbean, and for whom anything else is irrelevant.
The next day it was no distance to the border, and the quickest, cheapest crossing so far; accompanied by a cheery band of British squaddies in jeans, off to spend their free Saturday in Chetumal, the Mexican border town.
Inspired by a glimpse of my British passport, they treated us to their potted version of the reasons for their presence in Belize, just in case we didn’t know.
Every village in Mexico, I thought, seems to be called “Topes”; until I twigged that these signs referred to the humped elevations in the road, built in to slow down drivers some hundred yards before every settlement; and not to the village itself, which usually remained nameless. They had these in Nicaragua, but not so consistently, and they called them something else, I can’t remember what now.
On the advice of our excellent Mexican guide-book we headed out of the sleepy town to look for a campsite by a tranquil lagoon. The one recommended was closed but we found another, an even better location, right on the banks of the beautiful Laguna Bacalar, whose waters are so pure and transparent that we use it for making tea, and the absence of any other water source here is irrelevant.
“Clarita, no?” said the middle-aged man presiding over the campsite, who, when he isn’t taking a dip himself, spends most of the day in his hammock. The water really is so pristine that you almost hesitate to wash your dirty feet in it. Certainly using soap would be a crime.
Little fish play around the weird, flat-topped volcanic-type rock formations, which, just at surface level or a few centimetres under, serve as slippery jump-off points into the pale turquoise ripples, the water round the rocks about 5 or 6 feet deep. The bed, which you can see distinctly, is of fine white gravel, or mud, littered with small pebbles.
Yesterday we took in four sets of ruins on an extensive day-trip into the Yucatan interior, and while driving along the deserted highway spotted a medium-sized turtle crawling painstakingly across the tarmac.
It put me straight away in mind of a terrific passage near the beginning of “The Grapes of Wrath”, which I happened to read a few months ago in Managua. In response to my insistent taps, Juergen wheeled and braked to a halt, and I leapt off to fling the turtle into the bush, taking care to throw it in the direction it was already moving, rescuing it from near-certain death under the wheels of the next vehicle to come along.
Actually we were only just in time; as I scuttled over the road a car was already bearing down on us at breakneck speed, which no Mexican can resist faced with a bit of open road, hooting furiously.
We were lucky the rain held off; nevertheless on the way back to the campsite Juergen developed a splitting headache and another soaring temperature, so we are taking it easy today on the banks of the lagoon. Unfortunately we broke one of the hammocks by both trying to sit in it together, so now we have to take in turns.
13th June 1990, X-Cacel, Quintana Roo, Mexico evening
Juergen recovered somewhat the following day in the hammock, which I generously let him have to himself, and in the afternoon we undertook some light shopping in Chetumal. And today, packed up and drove north up the Caribbean coast, past Tulum, to a beach our guidebook described as wild and remote, but with a campsite.
Well, it has sprouted a restaurant since, tastefully modest in design if not in prices, but is still beautiful and unspoilt, with just the campers nestling in the dunes between the coconut palms. The sand is white and powdery, the sea a deep turquoise, bordered by heaps of chipped coral pieces.
The waves are relatively powerful here, the water surging and uneven, which is probably why it has not sprouted the family-tourist facilities in evidence elsewhere along this coast, though our guide-book claims the whole stretch, apart from a few key resorts, is still relatively undeveloped.
It really is the most beautiful coastline I have ever seen, the only other seaside paradise which came near being our day on the dream-beach in Costa Rica, so many months ago.
16th June 1990, X-Cacel, Quintana Roo, Mexico, morning
We spent our first day on the beach since Livingston just vaguely pottering about, swimming and dozing. Early in the morning you can see the two-foot wide tracks of giant turtles, coming up out of the sea and heading a few metres up the beach, to a messy pit they’ve dug to lay their eggs in; and there’s an identical, slightly less purposeful track back to the sea.
If we had the energy we could sit up all night with a torch, to spot one. But as there are at most four sets of tracks along the entire stretch of beach, you’d have to be lucky. And if they spotted someone from the sea parading up and down with a torch, they probably wouldn’t come.
They are a protected species here, apparently heavy fines and so on for anyone caught stealing the eggs.
This spot has an additional asset, a clear, fresh water pool, hidden away in the mangrove-jungle about a hundred metres inland. Beautifully cool and so clear you can see straight down 30 feet to the rocks and little fishes on the bed. We surprised a group of local boys here, splashing about and snorkelling in the nude; but they relaxed again when Juergen stripped naked and plunged in as well, and I sat about and swam in my swimsuit looking monumentally unperturbed.
The next day we undertook another expedition into the interior, to the ruins at Coba, which are relatively undeveloped and not that popular with tourists. It involved a lot of walking through very dry jungle, and as we neither managed to get there early in the morning, nor remembered to carry water with us, got rather hot and thirsty along long dusty tracks with minimal shade, the undergrowth not being as high or as dense as at jungle sites further south.
My fingers went plump and tender like little sausages; a symptom, apparently, of dehydration. Taking in Tulum on the way back, the late-afternoon light was contrastingly cool and illuminating, although the site was crawling with tourists and in any case covers a much smaller surface area than Coba. Unfortunately we arrived too late to swim at the site-beach and were shooed off home within half-an-hour.
Though the coastline here is ravishing, the countryside itself is so monotonous you look desperately and in vain for any distinguishing landmark. Mile upon mile of bushy shrub, the climate too dry for most of the year to produce the leafy jungle you get further south, in the Peten. We drove south from Tulum along a long, narrow, off-shore peninsular, and found some more ravishing deserted beach; but large numbers of palms seem to have been afflicted by a disease causing them to lose their heads, leaving groves of decapitated grey trunks rather depressingly sticking up by the roadside.
At the tip of the peninsular, we came to a halt as the track petered out and spent about half-an-hour coconut-shying, without much success. You’re better off looking for the ones already lying about on the ground, because they sit pretty firmly on the trees.
Then you have to slice them open which, if you don’t have a machete handy, means pounding them against any available slab of concrete. Unfortunately Juergen succeeded in pounding one into my stomach, which had no effect on the coconut, but left me totally winded, and feeling rather cross.
19th June 1990, Piste, by Chichen Itza, midday
We’re sitting sipping cocktails at a poolside table in a carefully landscaped hotel garden (lofty palms, artistically pruned bananas, rock garden, poolside bar, tennis courts etc.) to which we have access though we are only camped in the trailer park! It being off-season, perhaps, it is all totally deserted, and we have exclusive use of all of the above.
We made an assault on the very-famous ruins of Chichen Itza yesterday which, off-season or not, were crawling with tourists; nevertheless impressive, the range and detail – and good state of repair – of the carved panels unrivalled by anything else we have seen so far. Juergen and I had a minor tiff, worn out by the midday sun and general tramping about, and our paths diverged for a couple of hours; happily to reunite soberly in the car-park in the late afternoon.
We drove from the Caribbean coast the day before, chopping off the north-east corner of the (Yucatan) peninsular which is by all accounts the most developed and expensive part, and can’t be more physically attractive than X-Cacel (pronounced Shkaa-sell, according to our guidebooks.)
This morning we visited a cave which had previously been a Maya shrine and has now been put on display, complete with the ancient sacred offerings, to tourists. We and a pair of Americans were led down from a botanical garden, along expertly landscaped and electrically-illuminated paths deep into the cave to the accompaniment of avant-garde electronic music which sounded like the soundtrack from some trashy science-fiction film.
The sacrificial objects – ceramic pots and models, masks, miniature stone corn-grinders – still lie where they were left, 2000 years ago, on a mud beach, subtly lit for effect against the gleaming cave rock-formations.
A little too sanitized for my taste, and the soundtrack, especially the phoney Maya-English murmured dialogue, impossibly silly, but the lighting did make the best of the caves and the objects on display, and there’s nothing wrong in principle with the idea of putting things on show in the very place where they were left by their users; museums can be very sterile after all.
But the lengths they sometimes go to, to turn their national heritage into an adventure playground is sometimes frankly funny. The next thing they’d have is a screen-Maya-family saga starring Warren Beatty and Beatrice Dalle, with a sun-tan.
Palenque, Chiapas, Mexico, late June 1990, morning
Somehow it has been impossible to attend to this diary for almost a week; never any light in the evenings, nowhere to sit down and write anyway. We spent a second day at Chichen Itza, sneaking in through a barbed-wire fence round the back to avoid having to pay the entrance fee again, which is quite considerable.
They have a system whereby all ruins, small or large, world-famous or unknown, cost a single flat fee; which is waived completely on Sundays, perhaps under the rationale that that is when the natives are likely to come and take a peek.
Or perhaps because quite simply none of the officials can be persuaded to work on Sundays.
It’s actually not that difficult to avoid paying even in midweek, as the staff responsible for collecting the fee are often not that committed to it themselves. It’s obviously a fairly new regulation and at the smaller sites some guards have already confidentially confided to us that they consider the rates exorbitant. A certain amount of private business is done, buying up or collecting for nothing the used tickets sold in the morning, for re-sale at a bargain price to afternoon visitors a few yards in front of the official entrance.
We strolled a few kms away from the main site to an offbeat and neglected area known as Chichen Viejo. Lovely after the hordes around the main structures. Some pretty carvings and buildings and no-one else in sight.
On the way to Merida we stopped off and swam in a deep and spacious underground cave-pool. It was full of Mexican families, childish shrieks echoing from wall to wall. The one noticeable thing about being in Mexico is that the gulf between tourist and native is not as crass as it is in Guatemala, where they’ll look at you in the Indian villages quite obviously as if you come from another, incomprehensible universe, which to them you do.
Many Mexicans are tourists themselves, if only within the borders of their own vast country, but you see them in family groups, on the sites and beaches, next to the foreigners; and the foreigners are not necessarily richer. Certain assumptions and values will be held in common, and communication, even in restaurants and hotels or camp-sites, is less fraught with distrust or awe, and much more companionable.
In the car-park children still crowd round competing for a tip for having watched your vehicle, the way they do in Managua. But they are better-dressed and better-natured here, and they don’t act as if it’s a matter of life or death.
We spent three nights on a trailer park outside Merida, surrounded by factories pumping out dubious-looking fumes. Having acquired three new hammocks in town, we made packages to mail to Europe, but they aren’t likely to arrive before we do, since we sent them by ship, general postage rates being considerably more expensive here, like everything else, than in Guatemala.
We took a day trip to Uxmal and back, another famous ruin, which we surveyed under some spectacular weather conditions throwing the temples into dramatic profile; but I wasn’t feeling too good, having developed some ear-infection, probably to do with too many dips.
On the way south from Merida we camped one night outside Campeche on the Gulf Coast and the next day drove all the way to Palenque, locating – as usual – a trailer park as night fell. ‘Trailer park’ is what the Mexicans say for campsite. Though they’re geared towards families with caravans, usually supplying running water and electricity connections to each car, you can pitch a tent as well.
The drive took us along stretches of the Gulf Coast (Bay of Campeche) , miles and miles of untouched sandy beach, lined with palms, broken only by the occasional hut and a local family on a weekend day-trip. We paddled in tepid, milky-green sea so full of large, curly sea-shells that they gather in heaps round your ankles and on the beach.
For the first time a basic sea-food lunch at rock-bottom “comedor” prices. Mexico’s tourist industry being so much more extensive and sophisticated than Guatemala’s, or anywhere else in Central America with the possible exception of Costa Rica, makes it much more difficult to get off the beaten track – and out of the tourist price-range. This is why we have avoided hotels so far – gone are the basic termite-infested hovels costing next to nothing. Here in Mexico we are committed campers.
So now we are situated by what is Mexico’s most famous Maya ruin, in a trailer park with a swimming pool, of which we are sharing a corner with a good-natured horse. The smell of cut grass drying in the sun, mixed with whiffs of horse dung is exactly that of late-summer gymkhanas in Sussex, so many years ago.
The main drawback to the site is the ants. They have already grasped that leather campesino boots, positioned nice and sheltered under the tent’s flysheet, make excellent nesting holes. I was smart enough to spot the invasion before putting the boots on, but Juergen was halfway to the bathing pool before it dawned on him that his feet were abnormally itchy this morning.
I do not feel much like tackling the ruins at once. Too many ruins can get wearing. I’d rather take it easy and visit some local beauty spot or watering hole and leave the main attraction for tomorrow.
San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico June 28 1990, morning
Mexico’s most famous classical Maya ruin was actually on a fairly modest scale, compared with Chichen Itza, or Tikal. Only a few elegant complexes arranged on the brink of luscious green rainforested hills, looking over into the wide fertile Gulf Coast plain below.
A very village-y, provincial feel, after the smart commerciality of Chichen and the entire Yucatan; dowmarket, genuinely cheap restaurants lining the carpark, a few modest craft stands, no luxury hotels or boutiques. Symptomatic that the standard entry fee was waived because the official claimed to have run out of tickets.
Not as though there were hordes of visitors going through, or that we arrived late either, and if he’d felt like it he could have just charged everybody going in, whether he had bits of paper to hand out or not.
Below the ruins the river which runs through the site plunges down over some boulders to form a small, crystal-clear pool into which the water falls in a energetic shower. We splashed and swam – deliciously cool – in our underwear. Really clear water is sometimes hard to find inland; the rivers being used among other things for intensive laundering, so that flecks of foam glide downstream on the surface, frequently banking up in yellowish, wobbly mounds against the rocks.
We left Palenque for San Cristobal de las Casas via a very spectacular series of waterfalls, with numerous exotic bathing spots, but we didn’t swim as my earache has got worse, due to not having been able to resist periodic submersions in the campsite pool. We took a final stroll through the jungle along the river banks, before climbing up, up into the distinctly cool temperatures of the mountain range.
It was like being back in Guatemala’s mountains, and indeed we are only 170 km from the border, beyond which lies Huehuetenango. Having forgotten, these last weeks in the tropics, we had underestimated the chill of over 2000 metres and fairly quickly abandoned our intentions to camp.
We luckily found a cheap hotel in a good central location with a quiet and attractive courtyard. We seem to be the only guests – definitely off-season; but then this kind of down-market place would be favoured by the natives, who are more likely to be on the road at weekends. It is warmer now, but the temperatures last night were so nippy that it could have been a chilly autumn in northern Europe. In fact – coming straight from tropical temperatures in the afternoon – I woke up thinking it was.
San Cristobal is a Mexican version of Antigua Guatemala, maybe a little larger, a little more genuinely industrial (less of a tourist toy-town), but the same quaint colonial streets and buildings, and corner craft shops. We already found one which sells Indian tunics from Chichicastenango.
Oaxaca City, 5th July 1990, evening
It is impossible while camping to find time during daylight hours to write this diary; significantly I’m now writing in the evening in our wonderful, relatively-cheap-and-luxurious private flat in Oaxaca.
In San Cristobal we strolled about extensively and spent a long afternoon and evening at the Casa Na Bolom, a kind of museum-turned-study-centre, in honour and under the auspices of Gertrude Blom, a very elderly formidable-lady type with a long history of activity as freelance anthropologist/explorer/photographer/environmentalist campaigner, who now lets a daily stream of visitors – and there were a lot of us – tour her atmospheric, souvenir-laden house and hear extensively about her and her dead husband’s life and work.
Reverent students of varying nationalities – long-term residents; ‘volunteers’, they were termed – operated the small gift-shop and made use, deeply engrossed in intellectual pursuits, of the study rooms not included in the tour, but clearly visible from the awesomely well-stocked and decorated library.
I had mixed feelings about the evening’s entertainment, finding something a little too close to personal-cult creation in process, ardent young people clustered around an elderly symbol of virtue and enlightenment; and, in the course of describing her work on behalf of the Lacadonian Indians, a too-simplistic idealization of the notion of ‘tribal culture’, I guess typical of anthropologists – but I may have been being unfair.
No doubt the presence of Casa Na Bolom is of great benefit to people needing moral or material support, while engaged in sundry worthy activities of all kinds.
On our second day in San Cristobal, the girl who ran the hotel said her boss wanted to buy our motorbike for her son’s birthday present, and had instructed her to make enquiries. How much would it cost?
$2,000, said Juergen, off the top of his head, and she went off to report back to the Senora.
What are we going to do, I said, if she says OK, here’s the money?
Then I’ll have to explain about the import tax, said Juergen, and the unfortunate notification on my visa; but it never came to that. The girl didn’t mention it again, so I suppose the price was too high.
We had fixed a horse ride to local villages for the next day, but although we were ready and waiting on time it turned out the guide had had urgent business elsewhere – or maybe he just hadn’t felt like it.
So we set off on the bike instead, and inspected the said villages which were intriguing in their simultaneous desire to financially exploit the steady stream of day-trippers from San Cristobal, combined with their stubborn determination to protect their own religious customs, including their exclusivity. While they welcome you at their markets and ‘tipica’ stands, they object strongly to cameras and are severe with anyone who produces one, especially in the area around the church.
They are not convinced that strangers should be allowed in the churches at all, although one village had solved the dilemma by selling tickets to any outsiders hanging around the church courtyard -whether you expressed a wish to enter or not – which entitled you to a brief and restricted entry.
One of these villages has actually been excommunicated from the Catholic Church for refusing to accept the priest; but this does not appear to bother them at all. They have decorated the outside of their church in garish colours and with flashing neon lights, and carry on worshipping in it in their own style.
Afterwards we drove to a grassy, pine-forested park where there were some caves to explore, and as several boys were standing around outside the caves with groups of ponies, offering them for rent, we took two for an hour and rode through the woods.
It was idyllic riding country, lots of soft grassy tracks in all directions, at gentle gradients. I cantered gaily through the trees on a very small but relatively willing bay pony, but Juergen, who would have liked to follow, was unable to get his rather nappy roan out of a jog-trot. I rode it for a while and exhausted myself kicking and thwacking it into some kind of systematic response.
The next day, we dropped some 7000 feet back down into the tropics, down on the Pacific coast. Some spectacular coastal scenery along the way and the same old thrill of excitement, when you spot the distant blue of the sea beyond the hills for the first time, that I always got on our occasional family trips over the South Downs to the seaside in my childhood.
Puerto Angel, where we stopped for lunch, looked like a nice, small, downmarket sort of seaside resort; we would have stopped there, but there was nowhere to camp. So we drove on another 80 kms to Puerto Escondido, larger, more bustling, more facilities, though currently out of season.
We found a campsite in town near the town beach and put up our tent in what looked like a quiet spot near the hedge, only to find out later that night that the town’s only disco happened to be situated just the other side. Actually I was more bothered by the mosquitoes which seemed to multiply in our tent during the night; music, unless it is very loud and raucous, rarely keeps me awake and I actually find the schmaltzy latino kind of pop positively soporific; but Juergen was furious and full of schemes the next morning for sabotaging their sound system.
We spent a relaxing day on a lovely golden beach a little out of town, being the only people there except the local boys on surf boards, bobbing around in the water at the outer edge of the cove where the larger waves came in. It was fun watching them; they were mostly very young, but pretty skilled.
Later, we watched their elder brothers surfing on the apparently-famous Zicatela beach on the other side of town; this being a long, flat stretch of sand, before which the deceptively calm-looking sea suddenly rears up into 3-and-a-half or four-metre waves, plunging one after the other onto the beach. A handful of other spectators sat there, as they must do every evening, watching the raggedly line of surfers as they bob about waiting for their moment.
In the warm, damp evenings entire local families assemble on the rocks in front of the town with nets and rods and small rowing boats, creaming off the fish which seem to populate the shallow seas at that time in abundance. Overhead swarms of pelicans circle and swoop, intent on reaping their share.
The next day, we dropped some 7000 feet back down into the tropics, down on the Pacific coast. Some spectacular coastal scenery along the way and the same old thrill of excitement, when you spot the distant blue of the sea beyond the hills for the first time, that I always got on our occasional family trips over the South Downs to the seaside in my childhood.
Puerto Angel, where we stopped for lunch, looked like a nice, small, downmarket sort of seaside resort; we would have stopped there, but there was nowhere to camp. So we drove on another 80 kms to Puerto Escondido, larger, more bustling, more facilities, though currently out of season.
We found a campsite in town near the town beach and put up our tent in what looked like a quiet spot near the hedge, only to find out later that night that the town’s only disco happened to be situated just the other side. Actually I was more bothered by the mosquitoes which seemed to multiply in our tent during the night; music, unless it is very loud and raucous, rarely keeps me awake and I actually find the schmaltzy latino kind of pop positively soporific; but Juergen was furious and full of schemes the next morning for sabotaging their sound system.
We spent a relaxing day on a lovely golden beach a little out of town, being the only people there except the local boys on surf boards, bobbing around in the water at the outer edge of the cove where the larger waves came in. It was fun watching them; they were mostly very young, but pretty skilled.
Later, we watched their elder brothers surfing on the apparently-famous Zicatela beach on the other side of town; this being a long, flat stretch of sand, before which the deceptively calm-looking sea suddenly rears up into 3-and-a-half or four-metre waves, plunging one after the other onto the beach. A handful of other spectators sat there, as they must do every evening, watching the raggedly line of surfers as they bob about waiting for their moment.
In the warm, damp evenings entire local families assemble on the rocks in front of the town with nets and rods and small rowing boats, creaming off the fish which seem to populate the shallow seas at that time in abundance. Overhead swarms of pelicans circle and swoop, intent on reaping their share.
The next day we went canoeing and birdwatching on a nearby lagoon, and ended up having a mild tiff over paddling techniques. Then, as it began to pour down while we ate our fish in a modest restaurant on the banks, we got out the marble chess board that Juergen bought in Quintana Roo, and played a game almost until nightfall, under the amused gaze of the waiter, who generously plied us with free coffee the entire afternoon.
I suppose we are well-matched as players because neither of us is very good, but I’m pleased with myself for having managed to learn at all, which I only did a few months ago thanks to Juergen. In my family chess was something for the lads, and my brother, coached by Daddy, was very proud of becoming captain of the school chess team.
But my sister and my mother and I managed to remain totally clueless. I fantasize now about going home one day and beating Anthony, but it probably won’t ever happen. When it came to it I wouldn’t even have the nerve to try.
We went to bed that night slightly tipsy after a generous portion of brandy in a town cafe, and a bottle of beer in the tent, the rain making sitting in the hammock impossible.
West Germany beat England in the World Cup today, so theoretically I shouldn’t be talking to Juergen, but since neither of us knew that either team had made it to the semi-finals, it seems rather irrelevant. We only found out because several cafes in town advertised the fact on blackboards outside, hoping to draw extra custom in view of their strategically-placed colour TVs.
Such is the Mexican enthusiasm for the game that they are irresistibly drawn to the TV, whoever is playing. For some reason the national team wasn’t in the competition this year. But I wouldn’t have liked to be Juergen, had they had to play Germany at any stage.
Yesterday we made it to Oaxaca, after what must have been the toughest bike-ride so far, though we should have been better prepared. But the variations in temperature in this region, within distances of 100 kms or less, are terribly difficult for us Europeans to grasp. When you are sweltering away down on the coast you simply do not believe that within an hour you will be blue and shaking with cold.
We set off late in the morning – as usual, when we have to pack up the tent and everything, including waiting for it all to dry off after the night’s rain- in bright sunshine; but soon after we turned inland at Puerto Angel, the clouds pulled in and it started to drizzle.
We didn’t mind at first, it wasn’t cold, and we had more-or-less waterproofs; but the road wound on and on upwards, the rain got more and more persistent, and the temperature plunged.
We came to a halt at a cafe somewhere near the highest point – 3,800 metres, the girl said – sodden, and so numbed and frozen it took some doing taking off our dripping boots to wring out our socks. Juergen was typically resourceful, dashing about digging dry T-shirts and socks out of the bike packs, the bike all the while stationed out in the unrelenting rain, and stuffing the boots with newspapers, while I stood shaking and miserable in bare feet on our damp towel placed on the stone floor, disconsolately sipping sweet coffee.
The girl assured us that the other side of the pass was warmer. A window out of the front of the cafe looked straight down the mountainside at what must have been a spectacular view, if the dense mist had let us see more than about 20 feet. She said you could see the sea at Puerto Angel.
Things got better after that and we were able to enjoy some of the views into the valleys on the other side, where the low cloud was limited to a few beds of white cotton-wool between the peaks, serving to enhance their stark, blue-black beauty.
It is warmer in Oaxaca (City), although not tropical by any means, as we are still at 5,000 feet. It rained again pretty heavily and extensively this afternoon, but yesterday after driving for about two or three hours through the long, approaching valley between round, velvety hills, we arrived in darkness, but dry.
We were lucky with this Posada in which for the equivalent of 10 dollars a night we have a lovely apartment, two sets of french windows with balconies onto the street, fridge, small cooker, cupboards, bathroom, burning hot water, sitting room and double-bedroom, all to ourselves, in a central location. Most things seem to be good value in this friendly, welcoming town, famous for its ‘artesanias’, and maybe owing its relative prosperity to its tourists.
We did a lot of food shopping early this morning, determined to make the most of the fridge and cooker, then got thoroughly drenched while inspecting the ruins on Monte Alban and looked at most of it splashing through puddles and trying to ignore the drizzle, although actually the rain had an enhancing effect on some of the carvings, I thought, washing away the dust and making them gleam.
(photo: cdn.getyourguide.com/img/tour/5aaad34b326ec.jpeg/98.jpg)
Afterwards, as the rain had intensified again, we took ourselves to the regional museum which has some Mixteca tomb treasures including what are allegedly the most intricate examples of native American gold-work to have survived the Spanish plunderers, which they did only because they were never found, being buried in the tomb.
It is also an ethnological museum, with every Oaxacan indigenous group minutely documented recording numbers and language and customs, including traditional clothing and fine examples of local ‘huipiles’, or Indian women’s embroidered tunics.
‘Huipils’ as beautiful as those in Guatemala can be bought here in the craft shops and markets, at higher prices – but what attracted me to the native clothes in Guatemala was that they were actually worn by about 90 percent of women in a particular village, for instance.
And often the actual garments for sale had quite obviously been worn by themselves for a number of years. Here, they are more like museum-pieces, specially woven for the exclusive souvenir shops.
Distances being so much greater, we haven’t had time to go into the rarely-visited remoter villages, where perhaps traditions including dress survive untouched, but I wonder if even there it is the same other-world feeling that you get in the Guatemala mountains. The markets, though colourful and lively in their way, are less traditional; and everyone has access in the towns to cheap, colour-fast, synthetic products meaning that few women still bother with the intricate native weavings and embroidery for everyday use.
In Guatemala you genuinely feel that the majority of villagers never cross their parish boundaries in their entire lives, and the only people coming through are the evangelical missionaries, the occasional adventurous tourist, and of course the military.
8th July 1990, morning, Oaxaca City
The main square here is a pedestrian zone and permanently full of strollers and vendors. You can eat well there at one of the outdoor tables, although you might have to spring for cover as the heavens open without warning. We’ve become addicts of ‘mole’, a thick, sticky black sauce with a lot of something like molasses in it, that they dollop copiously over bits of meat or chicken and rice. (I think it is actually chocolate . . .)
There is a museum here displaying numerous pieces of national pre-Colombian art, with the intention of emphasizing its artistic rather than archaeological merit, in the words of the museum’s founder, a well-known Mexican artist (Rufino Tamayo,)They had some perfect bits of Maya stela and, viewed that way, they certainly are amongst the most lovely of the ancient sculptures. All those delicate fingers, stern, sad profiles and waving quetzal plumes.
But if I hadn’t seen them, poised in their native jungle, they’d still probably be lost on me.
We took a day-trip down the valley to Mitla, which has some very famous and elegant ancient palaces; but I actually preferred Yachila (think I meant Zaachila) where we stopped off on the way, whose ruin-complex has a fantastically spectacular location, on the edge of a rocky outcrop overlooking the wide, green Mexican plain. Cactuses of various breeds cluster around the rocks and ancient tomb, from which you look down onto the quadratic palace-foundations and ancient ball-court, and out into the endless valley.
Between Cuauntla and Puebla, evening, 15th July 1990
Oaxaca already seems so long ago. It was nice there, except for something confrontational that happened to the motorbike, parked out in the street, in the middle of Sunday night. There was a tremendous crash at about 4 am, and Juergen shot out of bed, out onto the balcony and down the stairs, before I was even fully conscious, to find the bike on its side in the middle of the road, and the culprit long-vanished.
He hauled it onto its wheels and patted it down, but something had happened to the handlebars which nearly caused a bad accident yesterday. As it was, we toppled over turning into a filling station yard, because the handlebars jammed, and as usual I came away with the worst of the bruises, and a mildly swollen ankle.
It’s fixed now –I mean the handlebars, although my ankle’s doing all right too, thanks -a question of extracting a bent piece of key from an equally bent socket – but it has made Juergen exceptionally grumpy these last few days.
We drove from Oaxaca to Veracruz, with the intention of finding a boat to take the bike back to Europe at the end of the month, before flying back from Mexico City ourselves. We found a beach outside the city to camp on, which would have been ideal if the beach supervisor hadn’t insisted on turning off the water supply as night fell, and also tried to extract 20,000 pesos from us per night – seven US dollars – for the privilege of camping on a square of sand.
The beach was quite attractive but being more or less urban, nothing compared to the Caribbean beach X-Cacel, where we camped (with excellent services) for 8,000. The sand was brown rather than white, the palm trees rather obviously positioned (and few), and a hundred yards down a horrid hotel-and-chalets complex marred the view.
The water was also not remotely clear, although actually quite clean; but no brooding turtle would have dreamed of trooping out of the sea and up the beach, past the rows of coloured deckchairs (for rent) to lay her eggs in the dunes by moonlight.
But we weren’t in Veracruz to enjoy the beach; and at least the rest of the business seems to have resolved itself within three days of traipsing round the city looking for shipping agencies, customs agents, carpenters. We have cornered a customs officer, who, for a hefty fee, which is really nothing more than a bribe, will see to it that the motorbike’s export documents are processed in time.
I did not like his wily manner of attempting to assess how much it was worth to us, drawing me as the little lady into the negotiations, appealing to my supposedly natural feminine desire to get everything taken care of with as little fuss as possible, and attempting to play Juergen and me off each other, because as the man well knows, hubby will never hear the end of it if he doesn’t do what the little wife wants. And as he’s the one writing the cheques naturally the little lady isn’t going to worry her head so much over what it all costs.
Still we really had no option although Juergen refused to go all the way and let him claim a lump sum for customs, carpentry, freight, the lot. He’ll handle the carpenters and the shipping firm himself.
We stopped off at a colonial castle – the city’s main tourist attraction – which was once a notorious prison, in the middle of the major shipping port, surrounded by massive quays and wharfs and warehouses, and were intrigued to be surrounded by Mexican day-trippers, families, and school-groups. As foreigners we were definitely a novelty.
Veracruz – including the beach – is probably that kind of place. More Blackpool or Southsea than Cannes or Capri.
We ate nothing but sea-food the entire three days, mostly at unpretentious dockside cafes where huge, spicy prawn cocktails cost about a dollar. You can also get the most delicious coconut ice-cream.
While you sit slurping at the wobbly tin tables, a group of two or three lads will set up their marimba in the doorway, and bong out a popular tune, usually asking you to select from their repertoire, scribbled down in a pocket-notebook, beforehand. Then the hat comes round, of course, and they’re off to the next joint with a jangle of change and a cheery farewell.
At least two fishermen come round to our tent every morning with baskets of fresh shrimp. We usually take some, although they aren’t that cheap. Every evening, a local football team trains on the firm, flat sand until nightfall. After they’ve gone, we sit at the tin tables on the fenced-in patio around the abandoned swimming-pool-and-changing rooms complex – like the football players, we have to creep through a gap in the fence – which is the only place there’s light, and play chess.
It rained heavily one night with violent gusts of wind; the first really tropical rain-storm we’ve run into this year. The tent stood its ground, thanks to Juergen’s ingenious boulder reinforcements, though it billowed out in the wind like a pneumatic trampoline.
On our last afternoon on the beach, I sat in the hammock leafing through the guidebook noting sites of interest inland, as we now have a few days to spare to take a final round trip. From my information Juergen concocted a five-day itinerary circling Mexico City, covering 250 kms plus one ruin each day.
I thought at the time it sounded a little rushed, and so it turned out, not only because 250 kms sometimes takes a lot longer than planned, especially in mountainous areas, but also because some ruins, like Teotihuacan, require at least a whole morning or afternoon and cannot be slipped into one hour at the end of the afternoon after a day on the road. And that’s assuming one wants to spend every day on the road.
And then of course we toppled over the day before yesterday and Juergen had to spend at least an hour extracting the offending piece of metal with a borrowed drill.
All this didn’t strike me as being a major setback, and leaving out a couple of the ruins somewhat less than a tragedy, but Juergen, who seems to have a less flexible attitude to plans than I do, got so grumpy yesterday that I nearly hit the roof.
He was making ludicrous claims like he never wanted to leave Veracruz anyway – ludicrous because the whole trip was his concoction in the first place. I was prepared to turn right round and head straight back there if that was what he wanted. But I suppose he was only sounding off a bit. But sometimes I feel he should exercise a little self-restraint and not take every tiny frustration out on whoever happens to be in his path, namely me.
We continued on a slightly modified route, got rained on last night up in the mountains outside Cuernavaca, looking for a road towards Malinalco, gave up and returned cold and wet to a crummy hotel on the outskirts of the city. But today was a good day. On the way to Malinalco, through beautiful pine-forested hills, we came across a small national park by a lake, where Mexican families sat Sunday picnicking at wooden tables in front of taco-stands, and watched their children taking pony-rides.
I made straight for a bunch of unoccupied ponies, and Juergen and I went riding again, for probably the last time, through the brilliant-green clearings in the pine-forests. The open expanse by the lakeside was full of horses and ponies, standing or being ridden idly about, families with kids, and stands selling food and handicrafts -it reminded me of Steep Gymkhana.
It felt even more like it, steering my own pony adeptly through the throngs of people, finding a clear corner in which to canter in circles, and from where to observe the scene. I had a good pony, beautiful, responsive, nippy; the one pony that I have ridden in Latin America that I would have really liked to take home. I could imagine him, with a little training in a European snaffle bit, a fine hack and a speedy jumper, the sort of pony I would have watched with envy and admiration in the gymkhana ring in my early teenage years.
We followed the Mexican Sunday-trippers on to the Aztec temple at Malinalco, where, despite the hefty climb up the hillside, it was difficult to get a good view of the main bit of temple itself, for all the families and kids sitting on top of it. Sunday sightseeing, especially in the Mexico City area, has its good and bad points.
We are now overnighting in our most expensive hotel to date – it has a TV as well as a spotless private bathroom, clean towels, and a limitless supply of soap – before heading back to Veracruz tomorrow. The one in Papantla came close, although this is nicer.
Papantla’s ruin, by the way, “El Tajin”, was lovely; elegantly landscaped on several levels like Palenque, a series of little courtyards leading off each other, the main temple a series of indented layers narrowing to form a pyramid, looking almost like a Chinese house or something. Or maybe it just looked so pretty in the flattering evening sunlight, with the raggedy bands of local children playing tag on the squares of rough grass.
The famous pyramids of Teotihuacan, where the Aztec king Moctezuma used to go and pray for advice on how to deal with the Spaniards, are still awesome in their way, although their general commercialism is a little off-putting. All along the famous central highway, vendors had erected souvenir stalls, turning the entire site into one long handicrafts market.
As usual the most appealing bits were the little offsite complexes where some exquisite ancient wall-paintings could be discerned. Another site we visited, also famous for its murals, had been literally encased in a vast, synthetic shed, and the visitors, instead of being free to wander, are steered strictly along a superimposed pathway with informative signs posted at intervals.
All in the worthy aim of preservation, I suppose. But after Guatemala’s wild, untouched and in many cases unreachable sites, it can all become a little soulless.
Since last night Juergen has been much better tempered.
Veracruz, 17th July 1990, evening
Last night was spent in Jalapa, a prosperous university town, and this morning looking round its famous Archaeology and Anthropology museum, which has several massive Olmeca heads on display, before driving the 100 kms to Veracruz.
Here we are, in a relatively-unseedy hotel – we have been more generous with ourselves lately as our time is nearly up, and we have some money to spare – close to the harbour, facing the customs building where we have to oversee our bribes, with the cranes and ships’ masts visible behind. We are on the third floor, looking down on the rather busy plaza in front.
We have driven through some incredibly stunning scenery in the past few days. Vast expanses of flat, gleaming marshland bordered by stark grey mountains, rearing straight up out of the plain to form an awesome barrage. A fantastic, solitary, snow-capped volcano, perfectly symmetrical, rising to its 5,500 metres from the surrounding agricultural plain, which is littered with weird sandstone rock formations dotted with sparse scrub.
But I have never seen so many gruesome accidents in my life, as here on the highways of Mexico. Smashed up cars and bodies lying on the tarmac under blankets in pools of blood. Before I came to Latin America I’d never even seen a corpse. Now we seem to stumble across one about once a week.
It has something to do with the state of the vehicles, and of some of the roads, but mainly to do with the macho way they drive, as though taking care is something for wimps and women. Drivers of heavy vehicles zoom past us on the motorbike, with honks and triumphant grins, determined to go faster than we can, if it kills them.
Veracruz, 20th July 1990, midday
A couple of hectic, anxious days, Juergen flitting frantically between the customs building, the carpenter – who has built him an admirable wooden shipping crate for the bike, at a cost of $175 – and the shipping agent. Not much for me to do but sit about vaguely offering moral support, kind of frustrating with Juergen flipping out all over the place in his usual style.
The shipping agency, the day we returned, expressed doubt as to whether their container, in which the bike is supposed to sail, would be filled up enough to ship at all. The next day, yesterday, they were closed and picketed, dockers on strike, and heavy rainfall overnight meant that this morning the streets near the sea front were transformed into murky, swirling rivers – all traffic brought to a virtual standstill. Meaning more delays, everyone having a perfect excuse not to meet their deadlines.
Today being Friday, anything which doesn’t get done now will sit until Monday and we are supposed to be flying out of the country on Wednesday, from Mexico City. Quite apart from the fact that there is lots there to see and it would be nice to have a little time to spare. Trains and buses to the capital fill up fast and have to be booked in advance.
We spent a long afternoon in our breezy hotel room, sorting out our entire baggage into three piles; a) to be packed into rucksacks to take to Mexico City for immediate use, b) to pack into the bike’s saddle-bags to endure weeks at sea, for collection in another world, in another era, and c) to be discarded immediately.
The latter pile turned out to be impressively large. An awful lot of our still-quite-new T-shirts and cotton trousers have developed gaping holes, the inevitable result of prolonged subjection to coarse scrubbing-brushes on bumpy slabs of stone.
Until Juergen gets back from wherever he is right now, I’ve no idea what’s on the cards.
Mexico City, 21th July 1990, evening
Everything fell into place at the last minute. The dockers resolved their strike, the customs’ officer collected the encased bike from the carpenters’ only a few hours late, and duly installed it in one of the customs warehouses to await shipping. Formally it’s already left the country.
The lads in the carpenter’s shop had scribbled quaint graffiti all over their handiwork – the bike’s shipping case – to the effect of “World Cup Final 1994: Veracruz City (Mexico) 6, Berlin United (Germany) 0” or variations on the theme. I hope it doesn’t serve to put some humourless customs officer in Hamburg in a bad mood.
We spent our last evening on the Veracruz zocalo rather wistfully downing tequilas. Though it’s not a tourist attraction, this steamy, sweltering port city has an undeniable, unpretentious charm. The zocalo of an evening must count as one of the open-air tropical hot-spots of the nation. I have never seen such a continuous stream of vendors and street musicians, marimbas, guitarists, and flautists; all out for a quick buck at your expense, of course, but all good-natured.
The first-class bus trip to Mexico City was punctual and eminently bearable. We were also impressed by the service from the tourist-bureau at the busy bus terminal, where we landed, darkness already fallen. The girl behind the desk found us a hotel in the correct price range, and rang and reserved for us. A casual bystander, who was watching, then took us along with him and his three children – he said they were just back from their annual holiday in Cancun – on Mexico City’s astonishingly cheap-clean-and-efficient underground to the right station.
The hotel, visible from the station entrance, turned out to be a bargain. Clean, cosy, fully-functioning hot and cold bathroom, colour TV, broad window with almost-panoramic views (4th floor), and near-central location.
Well naturally we watched TV till rather late last night, and got going rather late this morning as a result; also both of us felt a bit weird possibly due to the sudden altitude – well over 2,000 metres -from Veracruz which is of course at sea level (especially after heavy rainfall).
Actually my dizziness wore off fairly quickly but Juergen developed an absolutely manic craving for coffee which I disregarded or felt disinclined to take seriously, when all the cafes wherever we seemed to be going seemed to be closed, and I had no desire to spend hours searching. Which led to a bit of a row later on. Here we are back in the hotel after a certain amount of sight-seeing, but Juergen is apparently not talking to me.
This is an interesting city with plenty to see and most of it seems to be free. As we only have a couple of days I put myself under considerable pressure to get through at least some of it, but Juergen being less concerned with sightseeing, gets irritable at the first set-back ie; like finding ourselves walking in the wrong direction, or not running into a cafe when we need one, because partly, I suspect, he regards the whole exercise as a waste of time. I don’t know exactly what he would do with himself if I wasn’t here to drag him to museums, parks etc. It’s something I’ve frequently asked myself.
He always denies it hurt and vehement when I suggest that perhaps he’d rather be somewhere else, but does admit that I am a more enthusiastic sightseer than he is. But he doesn’t like to let me go off on my own. I think part of him is afraid I’ll meet up with some frightfully cultured and cultivated young man in front of the Frida Kahlos, and that’ll be the end of me.
Actually I like sightseeing on my own, and the last thing likely to impress me is some pretentious snobby pseudo-intellectual type, pointing out artistic influences in terribly refined and well-informed tones. Apart from being boring, it makes me feel looked down on, which I don’t actually like.
But Juergen doesn’t understand that. He thinks that every time he has to admit to not feeling up to another museum or ruined temple, I am secretly sneering at his intellectual dullness. I’d like to be able to say, that’s his problem, but of course it’s mine too. His unpretentiousness is precisely what I like about him.
24th July 1990, Mexico City, evening
We spent all the next morning pursuing the elusive Lufthansa office around town; it had not only recently changed its address, something the tourist information service did not know, but also resolutely refused to answer the phone. We located it eventually after two futile taxi rides, in an exclusive suburb, and were tolerated in the shiny new office with attendant in-house security, just long enough to confirm our flight. Obviously we are not as well-dressed or something as their regular clientele.
Juergen booked our seats four months ago from a travel agent in Managua.
We didn’t have much time to sightsee after that, so sat in a cafe as darkness fell and concocted a strict agenda for the next day.
It actually worked and, on our last full day in Latin America, we inspected a lot of murals and buildings and strolled quite a bit through what is termed the city’s ‘historical centre’. The central square, which is bordered by the Cathedral, a major Aztec temple only recently excavated, and various colonial-era government palaces, is a vast, cobblestoned plain without a tree or a spot of green.
At weekends it’s a mass of people and vendors, selling everything from neat piles of fruit and vegetables, kitchen hardware and handicraft souvenirs, to themselves, lounging against the railings in front of the Cathedral with cardboard signs saying something like “electricista” hanging round their necks.
There are political groups and protestors too, collecting signatures and donations, for imprisoned relatives or strike funds, but they don’t approach the foreigners. Sometimes the entire city centre seems like one big market-place; informal stalls or stands or simply blankets spread out on the crowd with a makeshift assortment of cheap goods, everywhere you go, on the pavements, in the parks, in the tube-stations, even down on the platforms.
Our guide-book had told us the story of the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan, where Mexico City now stands, and we had seen the Rivera depiction of it, and found the place where the looting Spaniards stole away from the island city laden with gold. The terrible confrontation which gave birth to Mexico, and to its inhabitants’ self-definition today, is present everywhere, in the murals, some of which deify the Aztec warriors, the monuments, the ancient temples, even the names of the underground stations. Here in this city you can’t escape that thunderous and bloody climax, in which the stories told by every other provincial relic in Mexico and in Guatemala, culminate and meet their tragic end.
Beside which, the city’s revolutionary identity seems pallid and insignificant; still the Rivera murals are there, depicting Mexican history on the public buildings, evidence of a political culture inconceivable in the European countries I know. The city as a whole exhales a national, cultural pride that probably only the capital of a vast, tremendous country conscious of a panoramic history can display.
Over the past weeks, we’ve seen countless groups of Mexican schoolchildren and families paying dutiful or recreational visits to the ancient sites of Chichen and Palenque, Monte Alban, Teotihuacan and Tajin; for its people, from childhood on, being Mexican must, almost in spite of itself, mean something inescapably tragic and splendid. Certainly there’s nothing like it in Guatemala, or Belize, or Honduras, or Costa Rica, or Nicaragua.
Now we are facing our last night, slightly irritated by the hotel staff who do not fully believe that we paid for the following three nights on the morning after we arrived. Foolishly we didn’t ask for a receipt at the time.
I am gripped with periodic panic, assaulted by visions of us landing at Berlin-Tegel with no-one to greet us and nowhere to go, and no chance either in the ensuing weeks of finding anywhere in the whole of the city, or country for that matter. The real, harsh world again after so many months in limbo. And me not even German.
Epilogue
The Berlin Cynthia and Juergen returned to was no longer the eccentric half-city they had left just a year or two before. In their absence, the Wall had gone, the Eastern Bloc collapsed, the Cold War finished. East and West Berlin were easily accessible to each other for the first time in 25 years, and, on the face of it, already a unit.
In reality, its transformation had barely begun, but no-one (least of all these two) had much of an idea at this point what had been set in motion.
Over the months and years ahead they too had to adapt to new circumstances, and were forced to reflect on personal and professional options. They were more fortunately positioned than many, for sure, but that’s a story for another time.
Late 1990 or early 1991, Berlin
The most immediate thing about being back in Berlin was the reactions or rather non-reactions of the other people on the underground. No-one stared openly. Everybody stood or sat, impassive, absorbed in themselves, and we were just two more tatty young people in jeans and T-shirts, lugging rucksacks. I wasn’t aware of how I’d got used to being stared at, in curiosity, on public transport from Managua to Mexico City; me especially, a white but sloppily-dressed woman with what was obviously a completely incomprehensible set of values.
Back in Berlin, everyone under 35 looks like us. We were just one of the crowd again. It was a bit of a let-down.
Some months later – the cold weather had already set in – the boy sitting next to me in the crowded underground train asked suddenly, did my rainbow-coloured scarf come from Guatemala?
Yes, I said, turning to look at him.
I’m from Guatemala, he said, breaking at once into Spanish. I’m a student here.
He wanted to know where I’d been. He was from Puerto Barrios, which was not really like the rest of Guatemala, he said.
I knew, I nodded.
He looked himself more like a Belizean, light-brown skinned, but with black-African hair and features. He did not know if he was going to go back, when his studies were over. It depended on the situation.
Juergen and I had attended a meeting in the technical university at which two Guatemalan refugees had reported on life in the Indian villages around Coban; the arbitrary discipline imposed by the occupying (Western-backed, anti-communist) Army units, the fear that had led many to flee to the camps on the Mexican border.
Some, instead of fleeing the country on the devastation of their villages, had allowed themselves to be herded into “inland” refugee camps, where they were interned as if in prison, and subjected to daily indoctrination until they consented to “volunteer” for the Army which had destroyed their homes.
I read a small newspaper item about how the Army had opened fire on the a group of villagers from Santiago Atitlan, outside a local police station where they had assembled to protest the unfair arrest of their neighbour. They killed up to twenty of them, including children.
To us, it had seemed such a meek, ineffectual, and earnestly religious village.
A Nicaraguan student also came to talk to a meeting organised by a local solidarity group. He described himself as a Sandinista supporter, while never having been a Frente member. He said that the election defeat in February 1990 had been deeply traumatic, and triggered an internal campaign of self-criticism and renewal in local Sandinista groups throughout the land.
The fact is, the FSLN had been a guerrilla army, he claimed, and they had never managed to discard their military roots sufficiently for the purposes of civilian government. This was partly because of the ongoing militarization of the country, imposed from without; but they still had not been receptive enough to the people’s complaints. They had imposed, rather than responded; and there had somehow never been time or space for genuine discussion and exchange.
It was illustrative of as much, that entire committees, made up of longstanding Frente notables, had been voted out and replaced with new delegates, just as soon as the assembled townspeople had been given the benefit of a secret ballot. This process of renewal still had much to do, and morale had been very low, but some promising and dynamic leaders had emerged.
Amongst the questions which followed was one from an ex-GDR (former East German) student, who wondered whether the Sandinistas hadn’t been over-influenced by the East German apparatus with which, for material reasons, they had had so much contact?
The Nicaraguan – all utterances were repeated in the other language, Spanish or German, and the translations were sometimes rather slapdash – responded with a vehement denial that the Sandinistas could in any way compare with the old apparatchiks of Eastern Europe, and that the material help they had received had been accepted without conditions attached.
But it was quite true that many Sandinistas had harboured inordinate respect for the (now defunct) GDR, which made subsequent events additionally traumatic for them.
Nevertheless, they had always gone their own way, propelled by their own national and historic identity.
I felt that some point had been missed, and was afraid that the ex-GDR student would have her negative suspicions confirmed by the vehemence of the response. There were certainly aspects of Nicaraguan administration, affecting foreigners, which had seemed to resemble those of the GDR; for example, the obligatory currency exchange, and the individual cabins at the airport immigration, before which you were supposed to line up to present your papers one after the other in an orderly fashion. They were just like those at Friedrichstrasse (the east/west Berlin pedestrian transit point).
But the way they were operated was not; the Nicaraguan officials were bored and uninterested, and, with national lack of inhibition, showed it. They couldn’t be bothered to argue with protesters if something was missing, or even look through everything they were supposed to. Checks were perfunctory, and the queues moved fast; at least on the days that I was there. All the technology and recommendations in the world would not turn a Nicaraguan into an East German.
But – being so far away, it was easy for the Sandinistas to overlook and discredit the rumours they heard about the Eastern Bloc. If they had all really known what went on there, they might have been more responsive to pre-election warning signs at home.
For instance, Sandinistas who visited the GDR (former East Germany) may genuinely been impressed by certain things, and doubtless believed uncritically the lies fed to them about the People’s Rights and Freedoms. This would have made them less self-critical, faced with their own military-type structures, and less susceptible to signs of discontent, for they could tell themselves, they do it this way in the GDR, and everyone’s happy there!
They thought they were invincible in a free election, because they seriously believed that the GDR leadership had been winning theirs for the last 40 years. Wanting to think well of their benefactors would have made them blind to their own vulnerability.
The GDR would have concealed as jealously from them as they did from everyone else (though with less success) the rotten truth at its heart; namely that its government represented, ultimately and exclusively, like arch-conservatives everywhere, the self-interest and promotion of an elite.
The Sandinistas, naive and deluded as they may have been on occasions, cared about their country and its people. For that reason alone, their ravaged, neglected country needed them, and it still does.
Tales from the 1980s 