Central America

November 21 - Belize City

A few days ago we were in Escarcega, on the other side of the Yucatan. We realized that the border was only 150 miles away, and we could leave that day if we hurried. I'd gone about 40 miles the day before since my last gas stop, and figured that there should be a gas station, since there had been one everywhere in Mexico up to this point. People looked at me funny when I stopped for 3 liters of gas... and it had been an unnecessary precaution up to this point. We zoomed along highway 186, which runs inland just north of the Guatemalan border, and got about 120 miles in, and realized that there were going to be no gas stations until we reached the other side of the Yucatan. We barely made it to a Pemex station in Xpujil, at about 2pm. Pemex is the gas and oil monopoly in Mexico, and is the only brand of gas station you typically see. Generally they are pretty good - with cleaner restrooms than you'll ever see in the States, though they never had toilet seats - but being a monopoly they do some inexplicable things, like closing the only station on the toll road from Mexico City to Acapulco.

The guys sitting around in the station said that there was no gas - or rather, the electricity had gone out, and they couldn't pump the huge amount of gas that was in the tanks under our feet. They tried to send us to the next gas station, but it was 80 kilometers away, too far for my bike, because I hadn't refueled in Escarcega. How long was the electricity going to be out? "Medio hora", they said, a half hour. Having no better option, we decided to wait. Two other vehicles were stuck there. Another pair of motorcyclists arrived. We were all waiting half an hour. An hour. I was talking to the guys on the bikes, a father and son, who were trying to make Merida that night, a few hundred miles back towards where we'd come from. The father, who was wearing new cowboy boots and jeans, had a 2003 100th anniversary Harley cruiser, a bike as big as a Honda Goldwing. It was a very expensive bike, and extremely hard to get even if you had the money, so they were obviously fairly rich. I tried to speak Spanish and he spoke English, but after a bit he switched to Spanish, I guess convinced that I understood him, and we talked bikes for a while. Two hours had passed. He talked to the attendants, who assured us that the electricity company truck had just passed by. We realized that the gas station was not going to be working any time soon, despite the fact that they said again, half an hour.

An American arrived in a beat up old pickup truck, containing a house of furniture, looking like someone fleeing the dustbowl in the 30's. He was a portly man with glasses in his mid 40's, and somewhat cranky - he bought some oil, complaining in English that the same oil had cost him only 25 pesos since he had entered Mexico, eventually cajoling the Mexicans into taking 25, even though they likely had not understood a single word he said. He mentioned that there were some kids conveniently selling gas by the road back 5 kilometers at the entrance to the town of Xpujil, and offered to lead us back there. I mentioned this in Spanish to the other riders, and the father said that he'd already tried to buy gas in town, but that the guy who sold it didn't want to work on Sunday, and wouldn't get him any. I told him I was going to try anyway, and followed the American guy back into town, where we spotted two kids on the side of the road with a pile of 20 liter drums.

The price was only a little higher than usual, and I had no choice, so I bought a 20 liter container, and Ed, as he introduced himself, offered to buy half of it off of me. He'd been worried that the gas wasn't good, but I'd been buying gas at the roadside throughout Mexico and hadn't had any problems, so he waited until they siphoned half of the container into my bike, saw that it looked and smelled like real gas, and then decided to take the rest. The kids had an ingenious method of starting the siphoning by blowing into the top of the gas container. They had obviously been doing this for a while, which made the electricity situation at the gas station seem very fortuitous. For fun I asked the kids if it was premium. "Si, premium," they said, nodding vigorously.

"Alta octana?" I asked, tongue in cheek. I figured there was no way that this was better than regular.

"Si," they said in unison.

"Con plumbo?" I asked, i.e., was the gas leaded. Leaded gas wasn't sold in Mexico.

"Si, con plumbo, they said.

"Claro, muy bien," I said, smiling credulously. These kids had a bright future.

As we finished up and said goodbye to Ed (he offered us a place to stay in Belize, but it was far away from the paved roads) the two Mexican riders arrived. They said that after we left, one of the attendants had come up to him, and said "I'll be honest with you. It's going to take another 2 days for us to get electricity." I wondered if these kids might be related to the guys back at the Pemex station.

By now it was after 4, and we weren't far from Chetumal and the Belize border, but since it was a Sunday we suspected that there was no way we were going to get across to Belize. We decided to try anyway since the crossing was close to Chetumal. We went to the border, and to our relief the woman took our tourist cards. Suspecting a catch similar to when we had entered Mexico, I asked about cancelling the receipt to our permit to import the motorcycle. Different office, she told me, pointing me across the street. I walked across to the Aduana office, which had closed at 3pm. We'd need to come back the next day. But now we had no tourist cards and were not entitled to be in Mexico. We hustled back to the immigration office, where the lady was shocked, shocked, that the office was closed. We got our cards back and headed into Chetumal.

Chetumal was a modern, touristy, charmless Mexican town, but safe and clean. We got a room, and got moving early the next day to the Belize border. This time we were out of Mexico in a few minutes. In Belize we had to buy insurance for 7 days, the longest I thought we'd stay, at $9 US per day, and after that the border procedures were hassle free.

Northern Belize had a strong Mexican influence, including lots of speed bumps. We camped at Crooked Tree Reserve - a place that Cathy had picked out because of the hundreds of bird species. We had a $5 US camp site, next to the lagoon, in front of some empty tourist cabanas. At night, the Belizean family that ran the place left, and we were alone on the lake. We went out on their pier to a palapa platform on the water, where we cooked some food and relaxed in their hammocks. Except for some fire ants, it was paradise. The next day we went for a walk to boardwalk out in the woods, which we never found and was at least 5 miles away, but we did see a lot of wildlife, and we were happy when we packed up for the city.

Belize City was 20 miles away, a shanty town of 70,000 people - tiny by Mexican standards. Belize City was fairly underwhelming, with everything closing up around dark, leaving nowhere to go and the streets too dangerous to walk outside of a small hotel sector. During the day the streets were swarmed with cruise ship people, who all seemed less than thrilled with the place. We took a water taxi out of town to one of the Cayes, an island out on the ocean near the barrier reef.

Belize has the largest living barrier reef in the world, the reason that the cruise ships can't actually come in and dock here, and the reason that Belize is one of the leading dive and snorkeling meccas. The islands near the reef are called Cayes, and they are by far the best part of Belize. We took a 40 minute water taxi, a speed boat with seats for 20 people, out to Caye Caulker. The town had no vehicles, and was only a few sandy lanes with small hotels, dive shops, and restaurants, mellow and really nice, a huge contrast to the city. We found a dive shop to take us out to the reef to go snorkeling.

Our guide's name was Marlin, and he took just the two of us out on a boat to the reef, where he dropped anchor and we all went snorkeling. Marlin showed us all of the highlights of the reef, tropical fish in a hundred colors and many kinds of coral, then took us to another area where we swam with rays and nurse sharks. Another dive company's boat was there, and the operator of that boat picked up one of the rays and let everyone touch it. They were completely tame, and would swim right alongside the tourists, looking for the food that the boat operators always threw out. Marlin finished up by feeding a bag of fish to the sharks and rays, and then we headed back for our water taxi into town - since we'd made the mistake of paying for another night in Belize City.

Today we head out for the Guatemalan border. The roads are supposed to be mostly paved now, much better than I expected, so hopefully we will make it to Tikal tomorrow.

November 24 - Flores, Guatemala

We arrived in San Ignacio in Belize the day before yesterday, and finally we saw a good sized town in Belize that we liked. Cathy and I decided to camp, and located a nice place on the outskirts of town. It was grassy, with lots of flowers and towering trees and no fire ants. We set up our tent, and headed through town to the small Mayan ruins on the hill. This is a fairly minor Mayan site, but was in contact with other cities like nearby Xunantunich. The nicest part was that there was virtually no one else there. There are two ball courts, one of them largely overgrown. I asked the guard about the ball game - he had a lot of other information, but not too much on the actual play of the ball game. This information is hard to come by, and little is known for certain. Apparently the Maya played the game as a religious rite, with the teams representing opposing forces in the spiritual realm, and there are conflicting stories as to whether it was the winning or losing captain that got sacrificed, but blood was definitely involved.

We headed into town where I did a few hours of internet to put my Alaska journal online. I always forget how lengthy a process writing is. Luckily I was doing it inside of a whole foods store, and Cathy was able to do some shopping after she checked her own email.

We crossed over from Belize yesterday. This involved a $12.40 U.S. bill for sanitizing the bike (with a nice computer printed receipt - as if that makes it all official) which I at first mistook for all of the custom procedures, and then getting our passports stamped for free. They seemed ready to let us go through. It all seemed too easy, and I remembered our Mexico problems, so I asked around and sure enough the Aduana (Customs) was separate. This involved me filling out some forms, walking out and down the block to the bank to pay, and then returning for my sticker, but only cost $7, which leads me to believe that the sanitization thing was the graft opportunity for these bastards, but then since I had to buy insurance for both Belize and Mexico, this border is pretty cheap, so I´m not complaining (it was in fact cheaper than the Belize exit fees.) We got rid of the rest of our Belize dollars for quetzals and headed out.

The road to the border was paved, but the road on the Guatemala side was dirt. I actually was aware of this long before I got to the border - I was looking at this line on my Central America map as far back as Los Angeles, and dreading it. I asked another motorcyclist I know who is ahead of me in Central America how the roads were in Guatemala in October, and he said the Peten was "oatmeal", and this road was in the Peten region. But I talked to Alan Colton´s son Michael in Belize City, and he had just come from Guatemala City a few days before, where he lives. He said that my map, bought in Seattle, was wildly inaccurate and that the road from Flores to Guatemala City was now completely paved - my map showed half of it as gravel. Even better, he said that the dirt section was not the full 60 miles from the border to Flores anymore, only about 20 miles of it.

The 20 miles of dirt could still be a nightmare for an overloaded bike with two people on it, so I´d budgeted a lot of time for us to get to Flores. We got a later start from San Ignacio than I would have liked, and it was around 2:30 pm as we headed over the dirt from the border. Dark fell at 6 pm. This road was known to have bandits, so we had to be off the road before then. The dirt was not as hard packed in some places as I would have liked, and in other places was bone rattling with rocks and washboard. In some places there was a single central lane with broken dirt and mud on the sides. Storm clouds were overhead, and if a tropical downpour opened up, we´d be in trouble. I climbed a steep hill, climbing back and forth across a rain gulley in the middle of my lane. The rain held back until just as we hit pavement, a very lucky thing. It never rained hard, and soon cleared, as we entered Flores.

Flores is a great town, a small village located on an island in a lake, with cobblestone streets, decent food, and cheap places to stay. It is completely overrun by gringos - mostly Europeans - and seems to be populated almost entirely by hotels and internet cafes, so an authentic Guatemalan town experience it is not, but it is very close to Tikal, where we´re headed today. We´re staying at a hotel/restaurant called El Toucan, where our double room costs a little more than $7 a night - the catch being that there is no private bath and our room opens on the entry area of the restaurant, which means we´re not sleeping before they close at 10 pm. Other than that, this place is ideal, and to Cathy´s delight it even has an actual toucan. Cathy loves birds, and all animals seem to love her. If we´re on a crowded street and there is a stray, it will come straight for her, whereupon she says "I didn´t do anything! They just come to me!". If there are birds around, they definitely will get part of our breakfast - a few crumbs - but its true, they do gravitate towards her. I´m hoping we´re not adopting the toucan. Might be a little hard to get through customs in El Salvador.

November 27 - Guatemala City

We went to Tikal on the bike 3 days ago, and by the end of the day both of us were winded. We´ve been worried about the altitude since Chiapas, and we´re trying to do everything we can to prepare for Guatemala City and Antigua. Even there, which wasn´t more than 2000 feet, we were having problems. We´re beginning to think it´s related to chloroquine, our anti-malarial drug, which can depress breathing. I´ve ridden a bicycle with 50 lbs of gear over a 6700 foot pass east of Seattle a few years ago, so to not be able to breathe at less than the altitude of your typical eastern ski slope means that something is very wrong. Cathy is having the same problems.

We take our meds on Sunday every week, and this week we thought about switching over to a different anti-malarial called Lariam which we have a supply of, because I´m heading to countries where the malaria is chloroquine resistant. The only problem is that Lariam has a slight, tiny chance of making you psychotic - either filled with violent rage, or suicidally depressed. A quick search of the web will bring up dozens of Lariam horror stories. (The military fed this stuff to Marines. Good move.) We were still going to take it, but then Cathy did a quick poll of other gringos in town, and her informal survey turned up a Dutch couple in our hotel - the guy had taken it s few years ago, and had burst into tears randomly the next day and nearly driven his car off the road. Of course, it is only supposed to drive you insane if you already had a propensity for psychosis - but that really sounds like drug company legalese for "not our problem."

So we stayed with the chloroquine, and started taking another pharmaceutical wonder called Diamox. I tried out a quarter of a dose first to be sure that there wouldn´t be any interaction or allergy for me to sulfur drugs - the Physician´s Desk Reference is vague about these things, and neither of us is a doctor - and then started taking it twice a day. All of these pills, by the way, are available over the counter both here and in Mexico, no questions asked, at any farmacia/drogueria. (Belize, where the pharmacists are "licensed to dispense drugs and poisons" uses a prescription system.) Want Cipro? No problem, and it´s cheap. This situation could give you enough freedom to hang yourself if you´re not careful, but then again down here I take these drugs with far greater caution than I do in the U.S., because back home I´m assuming that the doctor has considered all of these details. But apparently something like 70,000 people a year die from bad prescription drug interactions - so this is another situation where the libertarian approach is probably the best. After all, a U.S. doctor prescribed Lariam from me, and I later heard about the problems with it from a newspaper. So I bring up all of these boring drug details here in case someone else out there starts having altitude problems and is taking chloroquine.

Back to Tikal. Tikal is by far the most impressive Maya site we have seen, with four enormous, steep pyramids (one of which made it into Star Wars - the rebel base at the end), surrounded by myriad building complexes, all rising out of the jungle. I´ve been reading up on the life and times of the Maya - I hate history that presents a series of historical events in a vacuum, and want to know more about the society - the result of being raised by an anthropologist, I suppose. There is little concretely known about Mayan society, since something like 4 codices (Mayan books) survived the Conquistadores, who burned everything they could find. The parallels between the Conquistadores and the Nazis abound... the main difference being that the Conquistadores were successful and got to write the history books.

I did find one site which had some interesting facts and theories. One is, since Mayan society - at least that around Tikal - existed in a jungle, it was highly dispersed. Rain forest soil is incredibly infertile, and the slash and burn agriculture used to fertilize it requires a farming family to move every few years. He estimates that 70 acres would be needed to support a family of 5 on a long term basis. However it only requires the farmer to work a little more than half the year, which means that the great majority of Mayans didn´t really live in these cities, but returned to them to build structures and celebrate rituals. It also says that it "would not be inaccurate to think of Mayan life as a series of rituals." Most of them involved some sacrifice of blood - the upper castes would regularly have to give blood for rituals, in various painful ways life piercing the tongue with a stingray barb. The highest forms of sacrifice involved the removal of a victims still beating heart at the tops of one of these temples - whereupon the body would be kicked down the steep stairs and would roll to the bottom.

A lot of people wonder why the Maya disappeared - but of course, they never disappeared, I´m sitting near some of their descendants right now. They did start to abandon their cities after around 900 AD - but my own theory is that if the cities functioned primarily as religious centers, then a change in religion would make them unnecessary. Maybe the Mayans gave up ripping people´s hearts out...

We stayed in Flores for an extra day to rest and so that Cathy could start taking Diamox, and then we headed south. The road out of Flores went through the Peten wound through near wilderness, and we saw a yellow diamond shaped sign, the kind that in the U.S. warn of deer, with a jaguar on it. I started watching the road for jaguars. Then a kilometer later, we got another yellow sign that showed something that seemed to be a tapir. A kilometer later, a coati. Then a rusty one with what could have been... a koala bear? Maybe it was rust patches. They continued, ending with a toucan. Why are they warning me of toucans crossing? I wondered. Then the whole series started over again; I´d guess they put them up more as advertisements of roadside creatures we could hope to see, more than as an actual warning.

We made it to Rio Dulce, where the Peten ended, and onto the main road for Guatemala City which shot straight up a river valley right to the mountains around the city. By 5pm, the sun was in my eyes, and I didn´t want to try to navigate Guatemala City for the first time after dark - I wasn´t sure I wanted to drive it at all - so we stopped in Rio Hondo, about 70 miles away.

Micahel Colton warned me in Belize that the Guatemalans were bad drivers, but this didn´t seem to be the case when we were driving the roads from Flores through the Peten to Rio Dulce, and in the valley from Rio Dulce to Rio Hondo. The drivers were a little aggressive, but not out of hand. The ride down was a little depressing - roadside poverty about the same as in Guerrero in Mexico, possibly worse - but safe. We were just about out of cash because none of the bank machines in Flores would take our cards, so we were forced to stay at an up market water park, which was marketed to the 4% of the country that owned everything.

We set out for the last 70 miles to the city, and I was immediately thankful that I had not attempted it around sunset. It wasn´t a very dangerous mountain road, compared with some of the roads in Baja, but the drivers went insane as we approached the city and the traffic got heavier. People started passing in curves, passing even when they saw oncoming traffic assuming the car facing them would slow down or move over, and riding a few feet apart as we wound through curves and inclines. I had a car come up behind me on a long straightaway with no oncoming cars, perfect for passing, and sit not more than 3 feet from my back rack, trying to make me speed up, until she finally decided to pass me - in the curve. At one point I´d passed some trucks, and all of the cars passed me, so I was alone on my side, and I came around a turn to face two semi trucks - one in each lane. I don´t know how I missed the one in my lane, because he made no effort to get over, and had nowhere to go if he had tried. If I´d been driving a car, someone would have died, probably me. I ran into this situation again with a pickup truck next to a semi coming around a curve and barely had the time to get over, which meant aiming right for the edge of a cliff.

I was happy to get into the chaotic multilane traffic of the city, because at least I didn´t have to worry about oncoming vehicles. We made a wrong turn and got on a highway going out the other side of the city, and then had to circle around, but we did eventually make it to Zona 4, where BMW was. They encouraged me to leave the bike for service - my chain was in desperate shape and I also needed to get the 18,000 mile service done - and they had someone drive us to our hotel, a totally pleasant surprise. We´re trying to take it easy now to adjust to the altitude - over 4000 feet - and looking for a place to spend Thanksgiving tomorrow.

December 5 - Antigua, Guatemala

Antigua is a nice town, populated largely by the rich ladino Guatemalans and gringos. The buildings are beautiful, though very low to the ground because the city has been levelled periodically by earthquakes. The streets are cobblestoned, the houses painted a variety of bright colors, and there are no overhanging signs which makes the streets very pretty but also makes it very difficult to find anything. The streets are laid out in a very easy grid system, numbered east and west and north and south from a park in the center. Despite this, you often get lost trying to go anywhere because none of the streets have signs - the only way to be sure is to start from the park and count, because there are no tall landmarks to orient by. Luckily, it´s a nice place to be lost. Antigua often seems to be just a collection of hotels, restaurants, bars and language schools with some internet cafes in between. As my guidebook says, you can forget that you´re in Guatemala - except for the massive volcano that looms ominously over the city.

It´s also really cold here. (Ok, to be honest, it´s getting down into the 60´s - but a week ago I was in the Yucatan, so it feels cold...) Once again, as in Alaska, altitude is what matters. Despite the fact that the city gets cold every year around this time, none of the buildings here have any heat. I actually wake up cold in the mornings, and then I head into the bathroom for a shower. The showers here have large electric devices mounted on the shower head pipe to heat water, possibly the most ill-advised use of electricity I´ve ever seen. There´s only one knob on the faucet, so for hot water you flip on a breaker switch on the wall conveniently located within reach from the shower. You can adjust the heat by playing with the faucet, but once the device is on there is a low level electic current running through the faucet - not enough to hurt, but enough that you notice, which makes it very exciting when the water suddenly gets to hot and you quickly reach out for the faucet...

This week I´ve been on an intensive crash course in Spanish - I have 4 hours in the morning, 2 more in the afternoon, and I´ve seen Spanish language movies every night. I´m actually starting to understand entire conversations, but my head is about ready to explode. My one break from this is when I go back to the family I´m staying with. In theory, a home stay with a local family helps you to stay immersed and learn faster. The family I´m staying with, however, has a very large house in the north section of town, and there are 10 other students staying there. 9 of them are from Holland, so I´m just as likely to learn Dutch as Spanish there, but more likely still to be speaking English. They sometimes they switch between Dutch and English mid-sentence in a way that is maddening. Everyone seems to be doing a volunteer project here, a nice idea... but they´re doing it in a town that is probably the richest place in the country. I guess the Peten doesn´t have internet cafes.

Tomorrow I have to leave for Panama. I´ve discovered that due to the way the holidays fall this year, customs in Ecuador is likely to close up shop around December 21, and not really get going again until early January. If I get to Ecuador in early January my return home could be pushed into May, and I might find myself snowmobiling around Ushaia in March. This makes it important to get down there in the next few days. So tomorrow I´m leaving at noon and I hope to make it into El Salvador, and up to the Honduran border by midday Saturday. The Honduran border is supposed to be pretty bad - one of the other motorcyclists ahead of me said that he and two others spent 3 days and $130 each in Puerto Barrios in the north of Guatemala to get into Honduras. I don´t expect it to be that bad, but I`m preparing myself for the possibility that it could take more than one day.

If I do get into Honduras quickly, I only need to cross about 50 miles, and then I´ll hit the Nicaraguan border, which is supposed to be pretty reasonable. I´ll then cross in about a day, enter Costa Rica, cross that country in a day, and finally arrive in Panama. If all goes well, 5 countries in 5 days. Up until now, I´ve never had that much sustained luck, but I`m willing to be surprised. To prepare for all of this I´ve accumulated a few hundred dollars for "procedures" and copied down the current exchange rates for the local currencies. Once I reach Ecuador, I won´t really have any barriers on the road to Ushaia, which is pretty exciting. I´ve been on the road for nearly 6 months now, and it´s become my way of life, so the idea that the end point is close enough to really start thinking about seems incredible. I think once I get to Ecuador, I may want to see the Galapagos Islands and Machu Pichu, and try to get to Antarctica somehow, but the temptation to race down there and be done with that part of the trip will be strong. I can´t say now if I´ll still want to ride back up to Venezuela - that´s a decision I´ll save for the morning after my first night in Ushaia...

November 30 - Antigua, Guatemala

Cathy headed home yesterday morning, which neither of us wanted but was the only option that made sense. I´m going to be in Antigua, Guatemala for 2 weeks, studying Spanish intensively for South America, which is not something she´s interested in or needs, and she would not be seeing very much of me. We knew she had to return at least a week before Christmas, and my school is supposed to finish Dec 13. My intention is to move at high speed for Panama and try to ship to Ecuador before the Christmas holiday immobilizes everything. It probably is not going to be much fun - just a quick succession of annoying border procedures.

I miss her already... the local restaurants and dingy motel rooms are not much fun when you are alone. I forgot how much she took care of basic things like making sure we had a supply of purified water. She also interacts with everything differently from me - the birds and animals, and the people.

Yesterday was pretty depressing - I had a hard time getting going out of Guatemala, but I´m here now, and I´m looking for a Spanish school.

December 10 - San Jose, Costa Rica

I left Antigua on Friday (December 6) on a road that ran between 3 massive active volcanos. A rest in a gringo friendly place like Guatemala is much like a rest when you are cycling up a mountain... you think it will help, but a short rest isn´t going to change much, and in the end it only makes it worse when you have to start going again. I had the goal of reaching Panama inside of a week, which would take some hard driving and a lot of luck. I reimmersed myself in Central America, taking in all of the cinderblock walls with razorwire, the trash lined highway, the random road defects. This road was actually quite pretty and ran close to the ocean all the way to El Salvador. This made the random driving by the Guatemalans and getting lost in the towns that the highway ran through less irritating.

The heat picked up again as I descended from Antigua to the sea, and I was at the border by noon. I made it through the Guatemala-El Sal border with minimal problems, in about 3 hours. El Salvador was reputed to be a fairly violent place, with lots of guns left over from the civil war. One person that I talked to, from Mexico City, said that he thought 5 years ago that it was equally as dangerous as Colombia. I headed for the nearest major town, Sonsonate, and was in a gated hotel long before dark. I paid a little more than usual - after $50 for a week including meals in Antigua, $25 was luxury, and this place acted like it. I went out and got Campero - a Guatemalan chicken fast food chain, that features a cartoon character of a joyous and suave yellow chicken in a cowboy hat. I think "campero" means something like a person from the countryside, like campesino. I heard about the chain in a New York Times puff piece - apparently their chicken is now airlifted into New York City on a regular basis. Now THAT is a taste some people won´t live without. After trying it, I wasn´t so sure why they went to all of the effort, but I can understand succumbing to a familiar taste when you´re far from home.

I raced out of El Salvador for the border with Honduras the next morning. I made it to San Miguel, near the border by around 1pm. I hadn´t eaten anything in my hurry to be out before dark, do I stopped at a gas station - one with a convenience store that looks like something out of southern California - plastic, formica, automatic glass doors. They are actually pretty common in all of these countries. Anyway, the kid in uniform at the door, about 18, with repeat action shotgun, looked at me as I walked in wearing sunglasses and my black clothing and decided that he needed to frisk me for weapons. After I had some food he mellowed out and turned on the Christmas tree (for some reason an artificial Christmas tree in a StarMart in El Salvador seemed pretty funny to me, and I wanted a photo.)

I had reason to expect much worse at the El Salvador-Honduras border - another group of 3 motorcyclists had needed 3 days and $130 to cross, and a woman I talked to from Nicaragua also had some bad stories. I arrived at 2pm, which only gave me a little more than 3 hours to find a hotel before dark. After I started running into problems, and wasn´t getting what the Salvadoran aduana officials wanted, I hired 2 guides - one for each side. I tried to get the prices agreed to in advance, but things got chaotic, because it was getting late and the border was very crowded. I needed to get my Guia (kind of like a vehicle passport and itinerary) updated for Honduras customs, I needed new forms, I had to exit El Salvador, everything needed to be copied... $3 for forms, $8 for customs duty, $5 to "expedite" putting my info into the El Salvador and Honduras customs computers... $1 here, $1 there.

It was 3:30 and I was just leaving the El Salvador side. I had a choice between violating two of my rules - one is no one except the officials touch my documents, the other was that I never ride after dark, especially where there are bandito problems. I ended up handing over my title to the Honduran guy. The "informal" way of doing things cost me about $50 more all told, but I was out of the Honduras side in 15 minutes - but I´d been hit up for small amounts of money many times, and was getting pissed off, another mistake. When I had to pay the Honduran his propina ("tip"), I thought it was for another bribe - and I started saying that´s it, I´m finished with you guys. Then he kept jacking the price. I was standing in a crowd of 5 or 6 Hondurans, near some trucks about 100 meters away from the Aduana office of Honduras on my way out. I stood 5 inches taller than the next biggest guy, but I was also standing in the middle of a crowd. I wanted to get out of there, so I gave him the money - and in my rush forgot to check for my title. About 15 miles away as I rode away with a major headache across a road that was cratered sporadically, I had an inkling that I was missing my title - I knew exactly where all of my other documents were but couldn't remember seeing it. I decided to not to look to see if I had the title then, because I just needed to be in a hotel. Sure enough, when I looked, it was missing.

That night I weighed my options. The words "Christmas in Honduras" were not music to my hears. If I had to get another title, it would mean I´d be there for at least 3 weeks. I didn´t know what the U.S. embassy could do for me, since they handled lost passports, but it was an option. I also thought about going back and finding the guy and having to negotiate for the title. In the end I decided to return, leaving my bike chained to the gate outside of the final Honduran checkpoint. I thought about bringing a knife, but in the end decided that was only going to escalate a bad situation. I expected no help from the police.

I explained the situation to all of the guards, and got permission to go back into El Salvador - suddenly my Spanish was better than I had thought the day before, and all I needed was a meal, some sleep, and some patience. I didn´t have the guy´s name, and could barely remember what he looked like, as I walked through the crowds. Luckily, one of his crowd of friends spotted me in the crowd and asked me why I was there again. He and the others seemed genuinely surprised that I hadn´t gotten my title back... there was some kind of honor among thieves that this seemed to violate. This is probably why I did what I did next...

We couldn´t find the guy on either side, and someone said he was at home - no great wonder that he took the day off, given what he´d made off of me. I hired the friend for 200 Lempira - about $12 - to lead me in his pickup truck to the guy´s house. We stopped at one place near the side of the highway - a cinderblock shack in back of a larger shack, in the middle of a field of goats - where we found Mimo. Turns out Mimo was the "Salvadorean" guy, and the other guide was somewhere else. I negotiated with my guide-to-the-guide and we settled on more money for me to follow him down 15 miles of dirt and gravel well off the highway through some small towns... The shacks got smaller, the livestock on the road more common, and I went through some towns that didn´t often see visitors, through the hills to a tiny hamlet.

It did cross my mind that this is how Americans on expensive motorcycles disappear and turn up in the State Department´s files, but for some reason I thought this was going to work out. And in the end, it did. We had to find the guy´s kid brother, who led us another house where the guy was, whose name it turned out was Steven. He first said that he´d forgotten the title at the border - and after I looked dejected and furious, he said he was just kidding and pulled the title from his pocket. I´d been sure this was a scam for another $50, so I was thrilled, and didn´t even mind tipping the kid brother for leading us to him. In the end we all were happy, a little lesson in economic inequality - they got food for a week, I have a story and spent less money than I´ve spontaneously blown on dinner back home.

On the way back to Choluteca I was hit for a mordida by a cop, for nothing, but he only wanted $1, so I gave it. It was weird - he didn´t even find something wrong, he simply said it was ok to go, but could I help him out with a dollar? The ingratiating begging from a guy in uniform seemed out of character. I packed up my gear and headed out of Choluteca. Later that day I made it to Nicaragua, and stayed in the town of Leon. At the Nicaraguan and Costa Rican borders I didn´t let anyone help me at all, and it all worked out, I just had to be more patient. I decided I´ll never let anyone else touch my docs again. I also made lots of copies... I´d run out of the copies we made before, and found out I didn´t even have a copy of the title left when it went missing.

The Nicaraguan road from the border to Leon was the rotting corpse of a paved highway. It made me long for the stretch of bad road in Honduras from the El Amatillo border to the Panamerican Highway. Craters a foot deep abounded, and were hard to spot as trees cast shadows in the afternoon sun. I was better equiped for this road than the cars and trucks, and passed them on my way into town. The Panamerican Highway, on the other hand, was perfect. Apparently they are all or nothing with the roads in Nicaragua.

The people in Nicaragua gave off a much friendlier vibe immediately, from the border crossing on. The Salvadoreans had seemed a little tense, the Hondurans had a mean streak to them, but in Nicaragua I actually felt comfortable. One guy waved me to the side of the road, and I thought he was a cop so I stopped. He said no, he just wanted me to slow down, because there was a school nearby, and then he explained how to spot the cops. In Leon, the oldest city in Nicaragua, every street had fireworks exploding for Christmas. Every house had a door to a front parlor open - I thought at first that they were stores, because some had gates, but then I realized what it was when I kept seeing couches and televisions. All were in plain site to the outside, so that neighbors could drop by, and passersby could see Christmas decorations. Everyone was sitting in their front parlor or on the steps, talking to their neighbors well into the night. It seemed like a nice community - I imagined this was what Antigua had been before its discovery by the Gringo Hordes.

Yesterday I got stopped at a checkpoint by the cops on my way to Managua, and the cops found in my Guia that I was not quite on the exact highway specified, but on a parallel one skirting Managua, and they had me pay 22 cordobas - $1.50. This was more of a nuisance than a problem, though I did have some tense moments when I opened my box for my documents and all of my $20 bills were showing. The Nicaraguan exit procedure was a dance of a thousand steps - at one point I got a receipt for a receipt, at 2 different windows - but Costa Rica made up for it, being as easy as Guatemala.

Last night I tried to make it to San Jose - I left the border at 3pm, after crossing most of Nicaragua and doing 3 hours of customs, and tried to drive 180 miles on so-so roads. I got nailed by a trooper doing 101 km in a 60km zone - which cost me 100,000 colones (about $40) informally. It would have apparently been 260,000 to pay at the bank and they would have done something to my passport and driving permit here. It shocked me that I was hit for a mordida in Costa Rica - I had thought things weren´t corrupt here. After that I slowed down, then got stopped again by another pair of highway cops for a completely bullshit charge of passing in a double yellow line zone. I talked my way out of that one - I think that it helped that I continued speaking in Spanish after they tried to switch to English.

This had cost me time though, and by then it was near dark. I looked at my map and saw mountains on the road to San Jose, and I realized that it would be crazy to continue. I had 70 miles to go, and it was dark already, because the sun had almost set, and the road is shaded by trees. I was having trouble finding a hotel so I could get off the road. Oncoming headlights on the narrow road were starting to blind me. I asked at the roadside and was directed to the Hotel Mirador, which I was told was on a paved road. It was except for the last kilometer... which was gravel and dirt, and incredibly steep, down a ravine then up a big hill. When I got to the top, I found out Mirador was just a restaurant... I´d barely been able to make it up in the dark, and the idea of trying to go down and looking for a hotel seemed insane. So I bargained with them and camped in their parking lot for $5.

They had an open air pavilion for a restaurant, about 40 feet on a side with a kitchen attached, and a separate building with a bar outdoors. It was a very nice hilltop restaurant setup. I had dinner there, set up my tent, then had a few beers at the bar. I actually gave them advice on how to fix their DVD player in Spanish, which was appreciated (I was surprised that I could explain it). I was rewarded with Mexican campesino lovesong videos for about an hour. I decided to head out when a new crowd came in and started with karaoke. My tent was a little damp with all of the jungle humidity, but I was comfortable enough. Strange jungle noises surrounded me even in the grassy field, as I looked out the screen roof of my tent at the stars. When I awoke this morning I walked out to a gorgeous view of mountains and volcanos on one side, and the flat land next to the ocean near Puntas Arenas on the other, a surprise as nice as when Cathy and I picked a campground in the dark in California and woke up under redwoods.

San Jose is a busy but fairly orderly town, compared to Managua and San Salvador. I was surprised that it is less overdeveloped and crowded than Guatemala City. I´m actually able to drive here in the city with some level of comfort, since the Costa Ricans are fairly courteous and careful (I guess those highway cops do something...) I´m going to meet up tonight with Tim Colla, another motorcyclist en route to Argentina - we´re going to try to figure out how to send our bikes to Ecuador from Panama without a carnet.

December 15 - PANAMA CITY

I look around this place, and it's hard to believe that I'm here. By some quirk of fate, the hostel that we were looking for is on a street 2 blocks from the hotel where I was staying 6 years ago. This time I'm in a hostel - Panama City is now expensive enough to need them.

The last time I was here, I was working with another victim of Penn and Schoen, Todd Brown. The night that I arrived to work with him, Todd wanted to go to a strip club, so he drove the wrong way up Avenida Espana (the principal street) for a block, and we were immediately pulled over by lurking Panamanian police. Todd told me to leave it to him - he had street smarts (he, after all, grew up in Duluth.) Since he didn't have his license or passport with him, and we were in fact guilty, I suggested a bribe. So did the police in terms both subtle and not so subtle, ultimately ending with their saying that Panamanian jails were probably beyond our gringo imaginations, and that seeing a judge about this infraction could take some time. I was free to go, and nearly did, but Todd finally gave in, and Mr Jackson helped us "fix" the situation.

I'm in an internet cafe on that street, and the place as well as the whole city is transformed. When I saw the movie "The Tailor of Panama" last year, I assumed that the shots of the pastel and glass skyscrapers that the American warplanes streaked towards were some computer generated fantasy, but in fact they are real. The streets wind, and the long, thin towers stand on hills of various heights, giving the skyline an organic look. A new autopista (toll highway) has been built on a causeway across the bay to the airport, giving a magnificent view of the new skyline as you approach downtown across the water.

Six years ago, Todd and I drove west on the Panamerican Highway verifying our company's digital map and database, and as I looked at my map I realized that I was looking at a road that ran all the way home to New York City, and I wondered what I would find over the next hills. That was one of the moments that led to my doing this trip, and now I finally know that whole highway. The last time Todd and I were working here, we felt like areas of Panama City and the surrounding countryside were suspect, even a little dangerous outside of the North American bubble of Panama City. Now I regard all of Panama as one of the easiest places, a welcome rest from El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua.

We departed from Costa Rica four days ago - it took a little longer to fix my bike than I'd hoped, and Tim Colla also had problems with his repairs. I was happy to get out of Costa Rica - San Juan was not the tranquil eco-paradise I'd been expecting, and finding anything there was a pain in the ass - the BMW dealer for San Jose is located, according to the BMW Worldwide Dealer Directory, at "200 meters east of the Indoor Club", and this is completely typical. In many respects Costa Rica was like Belize - a wonderful place to visit despite its capital.

The road south from San Jose climbed to 11,000 feet or so (3400 meters) as it wound between two enormous volcanoes. We cruised in and out of clouds as the road ran the top of a ridge, occaisionally catching a brilliant glimpse of the land far below when we could tear our eyes away from the road.
We stopped for lunch, and Tim said "Riding behind you I can see what I look like, with the bike, the boxes, the gear, the clothes... we look pretty badass."
That struck me as funny, because being on the bike every day has become my routine, and most of the gringos I've interacted with in the last two months are also on a trip like this, so it becomes easy after a while to forget that this is something out of the ordinary. Spending some time with Tim was good for me because it helped me remember the spirit of spontaneity and adventure that my trip started with... he's only been on the road for 2 months (he's also 20), and still has all of the enthusiasm. I'm still happy to be going to Argentina, but I'm also glad to have the end in sight.

After 100 miles, the road dropped back down, and we reached the border of Panama early in the afternoon. The border was as easy as we'd been hoping, and we were in David by 4pm. The run from David to Panama City was one of the flattest stretches in Central America until we were just at the edge of the city, and we cruised along at better than 100 kmph for hours, until we suddenly we wound up a few hills, crossed over the Canal, and we were in the City. The first place we intended to look for our hostel was in the Old City - I remembered it as a somewhat dicey area, near a neighborhood that had been shelled by the U.S. in 1989, but I figured it was worth a look. We rode through narrow streets overhung by balconies down to the ocean, and stopped at a park, intending to borrow a yellow pages and find ourselves on our maps. Instead, we were helped - more or less against our will - by some cops on bicycles.

Given that most of our experiences with the law here have been opportunities for corruption, we really just wanted to find the place ourselves, but how do you say no to a cop that really wants to help you? So we followed them through the traffic, down the wrong way on narrow streets, into a market area against traffic, and all the while I tried to stay close because if we lost them another cop would probably ticket us for going the wrong way. We were then handed off to the tourist police, who insisted that we should follow a random car that would show us the way. Around the time that Tim and I were about to make a sudden turn and lose our guides, we arrived in the area of the hostel.

Yesterday we got to the cargo terminal at Tocumen airport and found our shipping company. After I left an expired credit card with a guard, we rode our motorcycles across the tarmac around crates of air freight, next to a plane that was about to depart. This was definitely more fun that the normal passenger terminal. The price had suddenly risen from $350 to $500 in the week since Arne and the other motorcyclists had sent their bikes, but we managed to talk the guy back down, since we were surrounded by dozens of shipping companies. Then we drained the gas out of the bikes, and disconnected the batteries, parked the bikes and got little blue pieces of paper in return. My bike is going to Bogota without me Wednesday... something I'm trying hard not to think too hard about.

But now it's out of our hands. In many ways, it is a tremendous relief. Having the motorcycle provides tremendous freedom to go where you want, whenever you want to, but by the same token it also restricts what you can do, since you always have to make sure that nothing happens to the bike. This was especially annoying in Belize, where the best things to see were all a water taxi away. So for a few days, I have the luxury of not needing to know where the bike is, exactly. We celebrated this milestone - the end of North America, and the start of South America - by going out and buying everything needed for martinis, including the glasses and some really nice gin and vodka, and spent the evening drinking on the 8th floor balcony of the hostel in the tropical heat, watching fireworks for Christmas explode over the city. Then the owner of the hostel rounded up 10 of us and we went out to a very exclusive yet throroughly forgettable club. This morning I tried to recover from the celebration with eggs and chorizo, a beer, and "The Big Sleep". Tomorrow I'll buy a ticket to Quito, and the final leg of the adventure begins. That's where Tim and I part company, as he meets up with his family in Guayaquil to head for the Galapagos Islands, and I with any luck meet up with the gang of motorcycle riders already in Quito.

It seems unbelievable that we are crossing into South America. This is the point of no return... now we can't just turn around and drive home. And inside of two months, I'll have reached Ushaia, and then I'll be getting closer to home again. I can't wait.