P-A-N-A-M-A-!
Crossing into Panama illegally certainly didn’t garner the smiles and handshakes I was hoping to get. Instead it was met with detainment by the military, a search of my goods & some questions I couldn’t actually answer about how I managed to get around the official boarder and into the country initially unnoticed.
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Literally pouring rain so hard I was laughing at the ridiculousness of our hike through the woods. Down a slippery slope, across a growing stream then through a small series of trails that based on the tip we received would find us at a natural bridge created where a tree fell and a number of other trees sprung up out of the side of it. When I saw the big sign reading “NO PASE, CRAZY MAN WITH GUN” on a piece of plywood blocking the trail I felt that perhaps we’d made a wrong turn…
Costa Rica, whatever you heard is probably true be it beauty, people, military, wildlife and on and on. They seemed to have taken a completely different approach to tourism and the environment then the rest of Central America and most of the world from what I’ve seen. Certainly after months in the dilapidated setting of most of Central America, Costa Rica will seem like an entirely different planet.
Hell they don’t even have a military. I felt like we traveled down a little rocky trail in rural Nicaragua because we heard this guy held the secret to happiness in his backyard and for a small fee he would show us this secret.
My friend messaged me to ask; “So are you now a converted coffee drinker?”
I said; “Yes, so long as I know the farmer personally, have met the bean pickers, was in the truck when the beans were transported to the mill and watched a professional make the coffee after he roasted the beans.” Actually, it was pretty easy to check off the list of requirements in my present situation & here’s how that happened. He made us pour the 18 year old rum into our hands to prove its quality.
I’m thinking to myself shouldn’t we be pouring this into our mouths to be proving its quality? Afterwards she got up and showed us the place in the backyard that had once been the hole her family would hide in to avoid being captured by the Nicaraguan military.
It’s one thing to read about the brutalities of history, it’s another to hear about them right from the mouth of someone who has lived through the unfathomable while sitting in their yard in what was once a civil war zone. Brace yourselves people… I like countries where things like riding exploding volcanoes with sketchy rocks on a sled and overloading vehicles with people are encouraged and charged a fee to enjoy, rather then say the North American view where the fun would be fenced off and have a team of lawyers waiting at the gates to greet you.
It seems that KLaiR has been getting all the maintenance on this trip and a few other areas have been getting much less attention. KLaiR gets regular lube jobs on the chain each day, regular oil changes (however I did mess that up one day and put in two stroke oil, woops!) and she regularly gets a full body inspection so that less and less parts continue to rattle away, like the highway peg that’s now actually lying on a highway someplace in El Salvador :((
Really for such a small country, roughly 300kms lengthwise, you have about three choices to make it across and well I ended up back tracking across the least traveled a few times before I eventually exited.
In total I spent about six weeks in El Salvador and all of that except about three or four days was spent in the little country town of Juayua, the other days I managed to get lost then retrace my steps a few times. When I was sixteen years old my Dad gave me a cell phone. The phone company gave it to him for free and it was an extra $10/month for the plan that included unlimited evening and weekend phone calls. I was in school during that day so this would be the ideal phone plan for this sixteen year old. Keeping in mind this was pre-internet or texting on a phone, it was just used to make calls.
This would make me the first person in my school to have a cell phone for about six months or so, hell even my teacher looked at my phone one day and said “you’re sixteen and I’m forty-three and I don’t even own a cell phone”. Restaurants in North America likely employ as many immigrants, be them legal or illegal as any other workforce available. I know, I’ve worked in many, many kitchens in various parts of the planet and I was typically the minority. However from this you get to learn all of the best and worst parts about a culture in all it’s fiery glory.
Driving down Mexico’s Baja California is a glimpse into what road tripping across the USA must have been like half a century ago. Adventurous, breathtaking and unspoiled by hoards of weekend warriors and rules about what one must do at every organised KOA along the way.
I ended up about 5kms down a dirt road off the main route in Guatemala one day on the recommendation of someone else. It took me to Las Pozas, a magnificent riverside camp and events area. The handcrafted farm with soccer pitches, zip lines, fishing, camping, rope swings and a little bar, right next to the most amazing set of river falls in the world was the works of Jose Blanco.
Jose had spent the last decade or so, manicuring this site for all to enjoy. I was surprised to find out he had once lived "The American Dream", spending about ten years in the USA and some time in Canada, he still held an I.D. card to come and go as he pleased from the U.S.A.. I like to think that everything I do is somehow inordinately special, that what I’m doing with my time in someway cannot be duplicated by others or that if anyone random is partaking in the same moment in time it is somehow ruined or less special. The exception of course is if the moment in fact requires another person to say revel the moment I would have otherwise not known existed.
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