It’s really getting interesting now – this new ferry route from Panama to Colombia. The stakes are high; if we can get onto it, and don’t have to send the truck on a normal freight ship, it might save us nearly $3000 and a whole load of headaches like having to board up the bus to protect it from the obligatory thieving that happens in and around freight shipping. But, as of today, no one seems to know when this service is going to start up. In fact, no one seems to know, in fact, where the bloody ferry is – it’s last recorded location was in dry dock in Greece 36-odd days ago. Please, please, please correct me if I’m wrong. The stakes are very high.

As you may or may not know, the Darién Gap is a fifty mile wide section of primeval jungle filled with many dangers. It separates North and Central America from the South and there is no road through. Why is there no road? I’m not sure – to stop drugs flowing north is the commonly given answer (though I imagine a lawless jungle area is good drug-running territory). It’s like just a few miles beyond the Panama Canal, where they have linked the two watery hemispheres together, the Pan American Highway grinds to a halt and you must divert to Panama’s Caribbean port of Colon to catch a boat to Cartagena in Colombia. This 200 km crossing costs more than getting from North America to South Korea, across the Pacific – a fact that should be of some interest to North American based overlanders looking for something truly exotic like East Asia to explore. However, a simple RO-RO (roll on – roll off) ferry such as they have all over the world would greatly reduce travel costs and simplify the procedures since you can travel with the vehicle. So in April, it was announced that there was to be a new ferry service and hundreds of press releases were sent out stating the first voyage was set for 10th May. Well  the wheels had fallen off and that date has come and gone: Some people who had reserved tickets have been told that the ferry won’t start until the end of the summer (I’m not sure when that is in a tropical country). No one is even exactly sure what the documents required for buying a ticket. Some people say they’ve been asked to show proof of an onward flight from Panama. Or maybe that’s Colombia. We’ve been told we can’t take the dog. We’ve also been told we can take the dog. Our plan, at the moment, is to observe what happens on the 31st May – the latest date of departure that is rumored. What a glorious mess! Have a look at Drive The Americas site to check out the evolving situation…

The same kind of thing was happening back in South Korea, looking for a way out – we couldn’t go back to Russia, couldn’t go onto China or Japan. There was always N.Korea. We scoped out the border but it didn’t look good. So that was kind of different to now  - we had no choice but to throw ourselves at the mercy of freight shipping companies. Here we kind have a choice.

It’s more like the time at the junction east of Ulan Ude, Buryatia. The new road that kept us going eastwards in Russia was being built, we knew. But was it actually finished? Travelers coming the other way told us it was nearly finished but it still wasn’t marked on any map and no one could tell us whether it would take us six weeks to get round to Vladivostok or whether it could be just a few days. And meanwhile the 3-month Russian visa was ticking down; could we afford the time to drive south into Mongolia, especially with our trucks just beginning to show suspension problems? There, we thought the stakes were high; I didn’t want to think about what would happen if we overstayed a Russian visa. Just the thought of my dog alone in the dark van down in the customs yard while us humans were locked up somewhere brought tears to my eyes.

Of course, the uncertainty ahead, the route unknown, is very much a part of traveling – even the commute back home from work can present a myriad of geographical options that could result in a missed game of football on TV, say. and, during that journey, you exist in a live state, you are trying to second guess the future, you are at one with time. Not everyone has the luxury of enjoying it though – spare a thought for trans-world migrants whose impoverished families are relying on the limited choices available to someone who could, at any minute, be arrested, deported or worse. Or someone escaping injustice, tyranny…  The biggest mass movements in history were generally disaster zones. Luckily for us this ferry thing is just a ferry.

And if the new Colon to Cartagena service turns out be a complete joke, some kind of hoax that has got legions of over-landers banging on the ticket-office door, begging, frothing at the mouth – one or two of them wondering how difficult it could be to pool resources and start our own bloody ferry company – then, well, no big loss, eh – you have to embrace whatever the future brings. It’s just this Schrödinger’s cat of a situation is such a buzz. And (will it sail?/won’t it sail?) is happening right now!

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Our first conversation in Nicaragua, with an actual Nico, went something like this:

“Hi, where are you from?”, “Portugal – my husband [yeah, me] is from England.”, “You need some help with the border?”, “No, we’re good, thanks, we’ve done many borders…”, “OK, you know, you’re very lucky, you come to Nicaragua and all the Nicos want to help you. But if a Nicaraguan comes to your country, they are treated very badly.”, “That’s not good, have you been to Portugal?”, “I was in America – they treat all the black people like shit. I want to be a terrorist and kill all the white people.”, “Oh….”, “People like you…”

I’d like to do a little post here about Nicaragua – hopefully it might be of some interest to anyone hoping to visit the place on the way through Central America – you know, it might give you a feel for the country – I dunno, it might dispel a few misconceptions and, seen through the prism of a couple of crazy overlanders such as us, might just confirm a few notions that you had about this area. I can’t say that I knew much about the place before we arrived on the border from Honduras, so, at first, we wondered whether the Nicaraguans would really like to kill us – when, in fact, by the time we left for Costa Rica I felt that they had saved my life…

That first conversation had taken place at the border even before anyone had seen our passports. Of course, that was the only “problem” we encountered at the frontier – the officials were all pleasant enough and, other than waiting for the big commercial trucks to move out of the way, we were soon speeding down through the gentle hills towards volcano land. We talked about this wanabe-terrorist; he was just having a laugh with the rich gringos; he must have had some bad experience in America, maybe; he’d been absorbing too much anti-Western news and media – he wasn’t even black – in Dunia’s own country, he would have looked pretty much the same as most of the Portuguese… But it was kind of a strange conversation to have for us – this kind of casual hostility that neither of us had encountered before on our travels. One week later, we had another conversation just like it – hmm, was a pattern developing here? Welcome to Nicaragua.

I Was Born to Rock

Until that second conversation, however, we had a smooth and easy time. We headed for the volcanoes, stopping at San Jacinto to see the pools of boiling mud and hang out with some of the children there who wandered around with us in return for being able to inspect the inside of our truck.  A few miles on and we came to Leon, where we found a vet to update Vaga’s vaccinations, watched some football at the Bigfoot Traveller’s Hostel, before heading to the beach close by for a couple of days.

One week in, we hadn’t felt the need to resort to any paid parking – the country seemed safe and secure and the only guns we saw were attached to actual police people… One cop did want a tip for doing his job, keeping an eye on his allotted zone in Leon where we had parked the bus. He seemed embarrassed, in the end, when we questioned why – we gave him less than a dollar. Another cop asked us if we could give him one of our bicycles so that he could do his rounds easier. Well, you can park for free but you might have to help subsidize the police force.  At the beach we found a large open area to park up, paid $2 for Wi-Fi for a day, and stayed to take a breather from the previous couple of weeks moving around. The biggest problem we had was that the shops hardly ever had any change and the trading of cigarettes, beers and stuff became like a web of IOU’s and promises to pay tomorrow.

If you stay on the Pacific side of Nicaragua, you’ll have no problems moving around the country. Further east, in the jungles laced with rivers that is known as Miskitia, you’ll need a 4×4, a canoe, a helicopter or some combination of all three. But we had come to see the volcanoes which are arranged in a spine running the length of the country on the western side. Looking at the exhibitions at the Masaya National Park I learnt that Central America is not so much where North and South drifted together but it Is a volcanic production, Nicaragua especially, come bubbling up from under the sea to join the two continents. The volcano at Masaya should be especially noted because it’s one of the only active volcanoes that you can drive right up to the crater’s rim and peer down into the groaning, hissing, bubbling, fuming hell below.

Bypassing any possible delights to be had in Managua, we drove onto Granada which is Nicaragua’s beautiful, colonial gem of a town on the shores of the 19^th biggest lake in the world. In reality it has none of the genuine charm of Leon. The street kids here are more clued up, speaking very good English but ironically hard to communicate with because you’re never quite sure if the conversation is heading towards a scam of one kind or another. They operate in the shadows of the big, $200 a night, hotel and among the crowds of westerners – many of which actually live here, gentrifying the neighborhood. This is where we were told that Nicaraguans want to kill us for the second time. They guy was much more drunk than the first but now I could kind of understand his anger, if that was what it was.

We were just coming into Granada – amidst the various road-side advertisements offering tourist services to tourists, one particular sign stood out: Japanese Hospital. We’ll have to remember that one if we need it, Dunia said.  She was, of course, alluding to the Japanese funded building going up at Tikal, Guatemala, that we had seen; remembering the sight of some Japanese workers in immaculate hi-tech overalls and hard hats carrying shiny tool boxes and various gadgets slung from their belts. Slightly out of place on a Central American construction site. No doubt if ever you needed a hospital then a Japanese one would certainly do. A day later, I found myself there, in agony, not caring a fuck about the nationality of the doctor.

We had a long conversation afterwards about whether Dunia had ‘caused’ the whole episode by saying what she did, tempting fate. The philosophy of coincidence is a vast one, far beyond the scope of this humble blog offering although a business visit to a Nicaraguan hospital certainly deserves a mention – especially, given the satisfactory outcome and the end of my agony. I am endlessly grateful, to the Nicaraguans working there, to the Japanese who, I suppose, contributed funding and, of course, Dunia who had to negotiate the truck that she barely drives through the old colonial streets of Granada while I lay clutching my sides, thinking I was close to death.

It turned out to be a damaged rib most probably from various exertions undertaken when changing pieces of our old, rusty bus a month previously. Basically I can say that the doctors and nurses alleviated the extreme pain with shots of something like liquid MDMA; they took blood, urine tests and x-rays; they let me sleep overnight under observation and in the morning they served up the diagnosis which must have taken an experienced eye to spot as this injury is most normally seen in the knees of teenage basketball players. Well, that’s the case in the west anyway – maybe, here, where sometimes people have to work very, very hard to survive, it’s more common. All I can say is that the treatment was efficient and free.

After this scare, we had a few days rest at the Laguna de Apoyo, a beautiful old crater filled with mineral water. The parking is easy but we spent a few dollars using the amenities offered by the Cultural Centre of Apoyo so that I could gently come to terms with my sudden medical condition.  This is a beautiful, relaxing place to be with enough activities to keep you going for a while. Highly recommended would be some kind of contribution to their Peace Project in benefit of the local children. 

A few days later we drove south and out towards Costa Rica, parking up, for the last time in Nicaragua, opposite the twin volcanoes of Ometepe, on the shores of Lake Nicaragua. The border was fun – the Nicaraguans making it much more work to get out of their country than to get in, in terms of customs inspections and the various bits of paper. Maybe there is a good reason for that but I doubt it. You can sense an underlying chaos in this country, something that grows with years of civil-war possibly. One minute they might mention they want to kill you – the next they could save your life.

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This article is about how to build a shower in a camper-van or converted truck or bus. I believe my plan is the cheapest, most environmental, simplest option for anyone who has some serious space limitations on board their home on wheels, for anyone who doesn’t spend much time at RV parks or hotel parking lots, for anyone who wants the ability to look and feel fresh at a time of their choosing, after a long, hot dusty drive parked up by the roadside.

Basically the key to this is to use a typical metal, flat-bottomed sink as the base and a cheap, submersible water pump to provide the shower power. The total floor space of the shower itself will take up little more than the sink (i.e. the sink with most of its corrugated drainer cut off) at its minimum – the advantage of the submersible pump is its flexibility in use, in a variety of situations, locations, temperatures, etc. – it can feed from a container that you have filled with solar-heated water, wood fire heated water, propane stove heated water filtered river water or just plain cold water.

1. Cut the draining board part off the metal sink. Not too much – leave around 20cm to act as a step into the shower.
2. Make a hole in the floor of the van to take the plug hole of the sink. Depending on the thickness of your floor you might have to attach a drain hose as you install the sink. Remember to check under the van to see where the water is coming out. You have to decide whether you want the water to drain into a grey-water tank or just out into the nature. As we only use environmentally sound cleaning products, we just let the water out onto the ground. The outlet is just behind the rear wheel which means we can back up onto a piece of grass or even over a city rain-water sewer. Ultimately we could just put a container under the outlet to catch the water – we don’t have space in or under our truck for grey-water tanks and, in any case, they wouldn’t make much sense in most of the countries we travel.
3. Build a box under the lip of the sink so that the whole thing sits level on floor and won’t distort or bend if you stand in it.
4. Build the rest of the shower, with the size of the sink as your minimum limiting size and the size of you and your truck as the maximum. My average physical build finds the 45cm x 60cm sink sufficient. The cheapest shower build would be plywood with a good coat of waterproof varnish and paint. I noticed that in North America, showers in houses were always a one-piece plastic surround which must be pretty easy to find, recycle and adapt. You can even tile the shower if you don’t have any issues with weighing your truck down. Surprisingly, well done tiling will survive thousands of miles of bumpy roads although you can use vibration-proof glues, grouting and polymers to be super safe.
5. Seal the entire structure, paying extra attention, of course, to where the walls meet the metal sink. Also the draining board segment that you have left is corrugated so seal that up well too.
6. Make sure the doors are as snug and tightly fitting as you can get them – and put a shower curtain in that’s long enough to hang inside the sink itself.
7. For the shower itself,  use a 12V submersible pump that can be dropped into any tank or container (with an opening big enough). These pumps are notorious for not lasting all that long – remember never to use it out of the water and always let it dry off after use. We had problems finding such a pump in USA, where they prefer these massive RV in-line pumps that cost $100 and are too powerful. Too much power means you’re going to be using a lot of water – they’re designed for a mammoth American RV where the tank might be 7m away from the actual shower and the owner is after, essentially, a real-house-experience. With a submersible pump, you can put the water container right outside the shower. A good quality pump (which will still only cost $30 in Europe) will lift water 3m and still give a good pressure at the business end. This means you can lead the shower hose out of a window to a container that’s been heated by the sun or by wood and is too heavy to bring inside. The point is that if you don’t fix the pump to anything, and leave it free to move, you have endless options in terms of your water source. Remember, however, to take a spare along with you…
8. 12V submersible pumps have a waterproof cable attached to them. You need to add an extension to this, as lengthy as your hose will ever be. At some point close to the shower, take the positive wire to bring into the shower to feed into a switch and then back out towards your batteries. It doesn’t have to be a fancy waterproof switch. As long as you don’t direct the shower directly at it, putting the switch higher up the shower wall then you won’t be having any problems here. Remember, it’s only 12V.
9. You can also put a light with its own switch onto this positive feed – unless you’ve got a skylight in the roof and you only take showers during the day.

That’s it basically. It’s not a fancy shower but it’s very practical. Your dedicated water container can be kept inside the shower itself when you’re not using it. Aan advantage of using a metal sink is that it’s a single piece of strong metal that will with stand you or a 30l barrel bouncing around on a rough road.

It’s surprising how small a space you need to have an adequate shower – even the smallest of vans will have room for this as long as you can you just about stand up in it. If you don’t have the headroom, leave more of the draining board attached and you can have a sit-down shower using the same design.

Just a few words, then, about, why you should have a shower installed at all. The mission we’re on is through many different countries: Some developed, some not so developed; some tropically hot, some sub-zero; some which tolerate public outdoor nudity, some which will quickly have 50 people gathered around watching how a foreigner washes themselves. You can use this shower after a hot, sticky ride into a crowded city where you don’t want to pay $5 for the privilege of refreshing yourself in a smelly, cockroached concrete room. Or in a cold, cloudy landscape where your out-door, black-bag, solar shower isn’t going to cut it.

Coming from a nation of, ahem, notorious soap-dodgers, this is the first truck I have ever had with a dedicated body-cleaning space. In the past, I’ve managed to get away with jumping (screaming) into cold rivers – I’ve flooded the van a few times in the process of a bucket-and-sponge-bath – I’ve talked endless crap with people for hours in the hope they might invite me in to use their bathroom… Do yourself a favor; unless you have a real posh, factory-built RV, do it the way I’ve described.  And if you don’t ever end up using it, you got yourself a nice big cupboard.

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It’s not often that we write so specifically about what we are doing – I really wouldn’t want to bore you with our day-to-day. And it’s not often that we’ll go on about a particular restaurant, hotel or bar – basically because we don’t go to any of them that much. But as it was my birthday, we thought we’d splash out on a few days at D&D Brewery at Lake Yojoa, in the mountains of central Honduras. For nearly a week we pretended to be more like real tourists and for now, I’m going to pretend to be a real travel blogger.

 We first arrived at Pulhapanzak Falls, a short drive up from the plains along the Caribbean coast. Arriving just as it was getting dark we pulled into the privately-owned park next to the cascades. In the twilight, the place looked a little industrial with a couple of big trucks lined up amidst heaps of wood. A guy with a gun came over and wanted 180 Lempiras for us staying there plus 60 Lempiras for entrance to the grounds. Now so far in Honduras we had been sticking to the Costa Garifuna, which differed in two ways from the present situation, here in Honduras proper. Firstly, we’d only been paying 100 Lempiras for a night of parking, when we paid at all, and that was all they had asked for; and secondly, this was the first gun we’d seen for a while that wasn’t attached to an actual cop or soldier. Hmm. Anyway, the instinct to negotiate kicked in – the guy settled for 150 for both parking and entrance – told us not to tell the other campers about our deal – told us to definitely tell his boss the next day otherwise the boss would think he was cheating on him – and we were in, choosing our spot in the vast, lightly forested parking area and trying to predict where there’d be shade in the morning. I think it was a Beretta P x 4 Storm Compact but I’m no expert.

So, yes, the Falls are pretty spectacular. You can swim in the river at the top, if you don’t fancy clambering over rocks to get past the white water and into a beautiful, fresh pool at the bottom of the 43m waterfall. Make sure you’re camera’s waterproof if you do go that far down, that’s all I’m saying. There’s a zip-line course that takes you out right over the precipice a couple of times. Not so much like a canopy tour than a really short hang glide into space. All in all, a nice place to spend a hot day.

As the big day approached (my 40^th birthday slash yet another attempt to give up smoking), we motored back to Pena Blanca, got lost for a bit then found D&D Brewery at Los Naranjos close to the Lake Yojoa itself. Do yourself a favor and click on their link now if you want to go but don’t want to do the getting lost bit. I used to enjoy getting lost. Taking half a day to get out of Chelyabinsk, Siberia, (which has a friggin’ ring road, for chrissakes – you only need to go in a straight line) or laughing at our hopeless transliteration to Latin from the Hangeul scripted signage in South Korea was always great fun. These days it’s just too hot to bother getting lost.

D&D Brewery proved to be the perfect place to celebrate our few days of the high-life. It was what is known in the trade as posh. It is very well planned out and built in a piece of almost jungle, centered on a swimming pool. It has loads of books, WI-FI, info on the surrounding attractions, university-trained staff, vaguely warm showers, a restaurant and a bar. It is also, of course a brewery of the micro kind producing various fruity and non-fruity ales. Even if you don’t like that kind of stuff, they break up the monotony of Central American lager perfectly. And they do their own root beer and cream soda, two of my favorite flavors.  The best thing about the place, though, was the people we met there. We’d been off the tourist trail for a while now, we felt, having met a few ex-pat Floridians here and there who were completely non-tourist and more like pirates sheltering from the windy season. And the problem is; I don’t talk very good Pirate. Have you ever changed your Facebook language to Pirate? No? Well as the only Pirate tuition I’ve ever attempted, I have to say that these Pirates that we had met along the Caribbean coast spoke something more like a kind of American deep beneath their beards. The Garifuna people offer little relief to the hard-of-hearing conversationalist either – their language veers from a mysterious creole to Caribbean English whenever it wasn’t simply Spanish. And so, here at the D&D, the poshest gaff I’d seen in a while, my birthday imminent, apricot ale in hand, we had the immense fortune to meet a load of British people! Not only that but they spoke wiv a proper London accent! Truly, I felt spoilt. Passports aside, it was the variety of people we met at the D&D that was  refreshing. Backpackers, foreign teachers taking a break, professional rafters organizing a competition in neighboring Costa Rica, local and distant Hondurans passing through – even journalists driving the Americas whose latest story was that their van was out of action for a month and currently on bricks 100km north. Come to think of it, the D&D Brewery doesn’t have a very large car park – two overland vehicles would have dangerously filled it up. The place is also a bargain. That is if you don’t pay to get hooked up with electricity. In the grand scheme of things, I suppose that energy should cost more than space in a kind of economical-astrophysical sense but it seemed still strange to be asked to pay for 150 Lempiras to be plugged in but only 120 Lempiras for the parking along with the Wi-Fi, showers, swimming pool, etc.  The only problem, of course, was that we’d promised to give up smoking the next day.

It started out well enough – the nicotine patches were handed out and we had a nice traditional birthday fry-up. Then, we rented a couple of oars from a place round the corner and went to choose a boat on the canal that leads onto the lake. Drip, drip the patch must have been feeding that most addictive of substances into my bloodstream but it seems I still couldn’t row straight. One side always kept having more pull than the other and we zigzagged around the place, covering maybe 20m of actual canal-length in twenty minutes. Dunia had a go and we zigzagged some more, this time 20m in about fifteen minutes.

Vaga, our dog, seemed uninterested in contributing – she looked like she was wandering how long this could go on for and deciding whether to make a jump for it on one of regular approaches back towards dry land. But the frustration didn’t make us want to light a cigarette up at all; the drip, drip from the patch was doing its job and for this reason they’re always my weapon of choice in the battle against nicotine addiction. However, what with all the exertion of getting out onto the lake and back again in a fashion that minimized our embarrassment before our fellow boat people (OK, some young lad actually towed us along for a bit), what with all the sweat under a hot sun, the patches slipped off and wouldn’t stick back on.  We didn’t see much in the way of wildlife out on the lake. The patch-slipping sun was at its zenith when any sensible animal was sheltering out of sight. Instead, you have to go early in the morning with Malcolm, who you will find at the D&D. A pro-bird-watcher with binoculars, a keen eye and years of experience. He doesn’t zigzag – at least not while rowing. A trip with him should have been my birthday present – as it was we’d only had those two patches and, soon after returning the oars and getting back to a D&D for a perfectly, vaguely warm shower, we started smoking again.

Still, it’s hard to be disappointed with your decision to spend time around the Lake Yojoa. You can take a trip out onto the lake with a pro-bird watcher, early in the morning or there’s a couple of interesting walks nearby via coffee plantations, a  partially excavated Lenca site (i.e. pre-Colombian) trails, and swimming holes known collectively as the Parque Eco-Arquelogico Los Naranjos. Further afield, trips can be arranged to some hot springs south of the lake and two National Parks in the west and eastern areas. This is where you might see the lushest and mistiest of cloud forests. Parque Nacional Cerro Azulmeamar also has caves that were  first occupied thousands of years ago while Parque Nacional Santa Barbara contains Honduras’ second highest peak which is 2.7 km high.

Getting Lost in Los Naranjos

There’s something about the Lago de Yojoa area. It was peaceful. It seemed somehow like a different part of Honduras than its very central location suggests. Maybe that’s it – crossroads can be interesting places, especially one with a beautiful lake focusing the attention of the surrounding areas…well, I’m over egging the travel blogging (yeah, I know, it was pretty well-egged by paragraph two). Lago de Yojoa – highly recommended. Use nicotine gum.

Road-side Honey Seller

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I can’t say I’ve ever met that many Dodge 50s outside of Europe. But that could just be because they were only really for sale in Britain and I hardly meet any British over-landers on anything more than two wheels (this year it’s French and Belgian). But having clocked over 200 000 km in Dodge 50s I still think they’re the best vehicle to take on a long, long trip – even if, at the moment, I’m covered in oil, grease and muck, with a layer of soot from the exhaust, finely sprinkled with grit and gravel, as I wrestle with a broken shock absorber. Even if the combined Central American mileage has rattled our suspension apart, I wouldn’t regret bringing a Dodge 50. Maybe the four-wheel drive version, next time, mind.

Speed bumps are, of course, the culprit. (And muggins here behind the wheel is the accessory). Jigsaw tried its best – those big old chunks of metal propping up the rear end had spent most of their life gently bouncing their way round the gently rolling hills of North England – they valiantly survived the challenge of Russia and Cascadia, only fatally complaining after thousands more miles of abuse, shouldering and shocking a full 3 and half tonnes over millions of fucking speed bumps.

There’s definitely a story to be had with speed bumps – a history to be told, to be sure, but also an examination of their place in modern human cultures.  Certainly a topic on our minds, anyway: There aren’t too many useful signs out here on the roads – the vibrators, redactors, topes and tumulos are eagerly read and processed and mentioned in conversation and then… whoa, 50 meters later, bump, bump, slowly over the lump of concrete known, funnily enough where I come from, as sleeping policemen. That’s if you’re lucky and you get a sign at all. Between Guadalajara and Mexico City, on the free roads, they pretty much decimated our average speed with their ubiquity. But they can have their individuality, too, and a singular speed bump becomes, if not famous, then notorious; fifty-odd km into Pakistan from the Iranian border there’s a bump usually hidden beneath the wind-blown sands of the Baluchi desert where train tracks cross the road. Many remember it, speeding through the evening, hoping to reach their secure destination by nightfall, when ‘BANG!’ – it’s like the shooting started already. The Dodge survived that one too.

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The Garifuna peoples live on the Caribbean coast of Belize, Guatemala and Honduras and Roatan, an island that now belongs to Honduras. There are communities in St.Vincent and in the largest of North American cities, notably New York. Theirs is an interesting, intriguing story – and an invaluable part of the American landscape after the turmoil of colonization, slavery and suffering shook everything up for a while.

History picks up the story in 1635 when Spanish ships with captured West African people were ship-wrecked close to St.Vincent. The indigenous Island Carib people took them in. St.Vincent , at that time, was not colonized – in the late eighteenth century, Britain was awarded the island by some deal or other with the French. In 1797, Garifuna surrendered to British forces, deporting 4000 Garifunans with the blackest skin first to a nearby island and then to Roatan. Half of these people died during that journey and their new home could hardly support the rest so they got permission from the Spanish authorities to settle on the Central American mainland coast.  Since then, they have managed to prosper and have always remained a free people preserving their unique way of life, traditions and language which is a blend of two Carib indigenous languages with many English and Spanish words. Their number system sounds like French.

It is a story full of questions about their time on St.Vincent. At first, it seems they were enslaved by the Caribs living there but then some inter-breeding and cultural synthesis took place. And then, the British made their cruel attempt to divide the society that had evolved…

Happily, today, the Garifuna Nation seems strong and well connected – celebrating together in April every year, their arrival on the Honduran mainland from Roatan and other important cultural events. They have a particular form of music and dance, traditional medicines, food and drink, all of which make their existence on the Caribbean coast an important component of each state’s push for tourists – while many of the people themselves are returning from life in New York, L.A. or London or, at least, have family members there.  I was surprised to see such a firm identity surviving the Spanish-speaking hegemonies of the area, not least the problems Central America has suffered – I shouldn’t have been. The Garifuna know who they are.

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It’s not every day that you come across an alcoholic beverage that’s (a) said to be beneficial for the health, (b) descends from a mysterious and secret indigenous tradition and (c) hits the spot. Guifiti is such a drink, made by the Garifuna from rum, herbs and roots – a medicinal concoction designed to promote well-being and cure all kinds of ailments as well as getting people (locals and travelers alike) relaxed and mellowed out.

Infamously, it is also laced with certain herbs and roots that aren’t quite legal – you won’t find a bottle in the shops although it is fairly ubiquitous along the Honduran Caribbean coast where the Garifuna people live. They brought the recipes from their homeland where they had co-existed with the indigenous Caribs, each family having its own particular way of making it and passing the method down the generations.

Guifiti belongs to the class of drinks known as ‘bitters’ which are made by steeping the herbal ingredients in alcohol. They originate from various places around the world but became more popular in western cultures after a German physician first commercialized a Venezuelan version that was adopted and adapted by Great Britain’s Royal Navy to be a cure for stomach problems and sea sickness.

I have always liked the taste of bitters, my favorite being the Czech varieties such as Fernet and Becherovka. Unicum is a Hungarian version that is almost undrinkable to most people and Guifiti tastes very similar. Possibly this is why I like them – one’s enjoyment is unlikely to be diminished by having to share the stuff. Of course, you can add a spoonful of sugar or mix them up in a cocktail. This is what the good people of Wolfenbuttel, Germany did with Jagermeister and it has become one of more popular brands worldwide.

Jagermeister is made from 56 herbs and roots which, if you think about it, is quite a few more natural substances than you could probably name unless you had your herbalists’ hat on or the internet at hand. I always figured that, out of 56 ingredients, the chances are that there must be one or two that really synched with my synapses so I was very happy to come across Guifiti which makes a point of playing with your mind…

In Sambo Creek, then, a Garifuna community on the coast of Honduras, not far from the tourist-diving meccas of Roatan and Utila, I managed to score a bottle of Guifiti. The mama of the family wouldn’t tell me what was in it – my questions met with a big smile and a laugh. Of course, this is completely right and proper – the individual recipes are kept secret, passed down through just one member of each generation – knowledge is power, of course, and, for the Garifuna, their hard won heritage can be closely guarded. Descended from a unique mix of African and indigenous Caribbean traditions, Guifiti is fundamentally a medicine and, as with all medicines, they work better if you don’t know how they are made; think herbalism backed up with voodoo and a good dose of the placebo effect.

Consequently, there is not much public information out there about Guifiti. Here’s a list of the typical ingredients:

• Garlic
• Cloves
• Cinnamon
• Palo de hombre
• Coconut
• Marijuana
• Allspice
• Jicaco Negro
• Dead Man
• Manstrength
• Noni
• Rum (the cheaper the better, apparently)

I can’t guarantee that some of these are just duplications in different languages or imported varieties of locally available plants, however. The only people who would talk to me about the stuff were invariably people who hadn’t received the family secret – invariably, too, they’d already had a couple of shots. The one thing that everyone agreed upon was that Guifiti was an excellent aphrodisiac (I think that’s the Manstrength one). I can certainly attest to this and the tingly feelings that arrived after I had a few glasses. However, as with all alcohol based aphrodisiacs there is a law of diminishing returns in this regard – better still to savor the general feelings of well-being, after a meal of fried chicken and plantain, take in the Caribbean sunset, the distant sounds of Reggaeton – because, unless you come here, you won’t be tasting Guifiti anytime soon.

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Honduran Tourist Office freebies - you'll need the sweat towel but only because of the heat.

Not so much on the internet about this border but it’s an easy, quiet one and if you want to stay on the Costa Garifuna, Corinto is where you want to cross between Guatemala and Honduras. The broken bridge sometimes still mentioned on old blogs and forums is just a bit of road over a ditch – it probably got replaced moments after it went down. Our only concern was whether this was going to be our first insane Central American frontier crossing. But it wasn’t – pretty much the opposite. The Guatemalan side was easy and even had the English Premier league showing on a flat screen for the queue to watch. Then it’s a 7km drive to Honduras and within seconds of parking up next to the passport control office, we were besieged by workers from the Honduran Tourist Board offering us free maps and a sweat towel. I started to help out a guy with a flat tire, chatted with a taxi driver about Stoke City Football Club, looked up and we’d all finished the passports and vehicle ingress and were ready to go.

There should be a couple of money-changers on both sides. Entrance for passports is US$3, payable in Lempiras or Quetzals – the receipt comes in dollars so I guess you can pay in that. For the vehicle you need the usual copies of passport, driving license, vehicle registration and you get a choice of paying the Lempiras as US$40. The fumigation on the way out costs something up to 100 Lempiras, depending, I think, on how large your wheels are and how many of them you have. Then there’s a little police passport check and the quickest of snoops around the bus.

Junction on CA9 leading to Corinto.

SAT Office to register/de-register your vehicle with Guatemala.

Guatemala Passport Control

Halfway down the 7km drive from Guatemala to Honduras, this is the fixed bridge.

The building on the left is Honduran Passport Control. On the right is the vehicle check-in.

Just before the cops is a fumigation unit because they have 'bad virus in Guatemala'.

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OK, most people have heard of the Mayan people, their ancient, lost cities, their complicated calendars about to be reset – maybe even their life and culture as it is today. The Mayan history has become devolved to three different modern nations: Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize. If it had all turned out differently, this would be the Mayan Nation. The Mayan people have always been fractured politically, making it possible for invading armies and colonialists to divide and rule. There have been quite a few independence movements and rebel insurrections over the years but they have generally lacked a Mayan Identity, focused as they were on the particulars of the day, fighting for their present situation.

However, driving south and east towards the Yucatan Peninsula, this is the beginning of the jungle, the cloud forests hanging above mountains trapped by hot, tropical air. The culture is obviously changing too; the peoples keep their own traditions and, even if they have different nationalities now, those traditions can be seen all the way to Honduras. For an outsider, their heritage seems united. Their future could be the same.

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Tikal is an utterly amazing set of structures deep in a National Park. Many things come together to make this ancient Mayan city so much more of an experience than, for example, Palenque. The lack of people is one thing – no busy, busy car park, no craft sellers, and no massive coachloads of hundreds of kids. This means you can pretty much wander around on your own later in the day; the winding paths through the jungle are deserted except for the wildlife that always live there. The massive temples look impressive soaring up through the trees and  you can identify equally massive mounds with their coat of jungle still keeping them hidden. It kind of gets almost exciting. Climbing the highest temple at the end, using a stairway on wooden scaffolding, past a team of archeologists still cleaning away at the stones, the view from the top is awesome… Still, probably nothing like what a Mayan could see when the place was in action. And, still, can’t get that image out of my head – the one from the film ‘Apocalypto’ with the heads rolling down the temple stairs – but it’s much more of a moment than gazing down on the trimmed lawns of Palenque or Teotihuacan.

That evening, our minds were buzzing with questions – why were these cities ‘lost’ for so long and where did the people go? The collapse of Mayan civilisation is a well theorized topic – the more likely ideas being that over-population around these centres coupled with extensive droughts lasting generations caused the settlements to be abandoned. The actual Mayan people didn’t disappear - they still flourished further north until the day the Spanish and British arrived, and they still exist now. I’m not completely convinced that the environmental theory really explains it completely. These massive cities that took all that time and energy to build were just abandoned to the jungle? I can’t imagine that no one at all thought it was a good place to live…

Tikal costs Q150 to get in, which you pay at the entrance to the National Park. If you arrive after 4pm, the ticket is good for the next day. Supposedly – another guy we asked said that rule wasn’t working at the moment. The campsite charged us Q50 each to park on their field – they wouldn’t let us park in the car park overnight. We wanted to stay because, hey, we don’t often get to sleep in the jungle. The reality was that the Japanese are helping build some Education Center or other right next to the campsite and start up all their machines at first light. The better option surely would have been to drive back to El Remate and park up by the lake.

They don’t allow pets in the National Park. We softly argued for a while at the main gate – they let us hitch-hike 18 km into the park to ask the boss for permission, who appeared after a short wait and said yes, and then 18 back to the hot van and dog. We had to keep her chained up every second inside the park, though: Normally, half asleep Vaga was well up for chasing some of the loads of cute, furry rodent things running around. At least we know she’s properly past her recent pneumonia.

Read up on the quickest way to get to Tikal from Palenque…

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You know when you’re at a big party with loads of people, there’s a cheap bar and a pretty full-on sound system stacking it up over a busy dance floor… But the music just ain’t right – a good DJ, sure, but he keeps mixing in dubstep/goa trance/death metal/jazz (delete as appropriate). Thing is you know there’s another floor somewhere around; you heard that the bar there is not so good but that’s because the sound is perfect and everyone is moving too it. You heard, too, that no one who isn’t there will know where it is, it’s tricky to find, you might have to go out of the building to get back in and there’s another door-crew to get passed. But maybe that’s a myth, to keep the riff-raff out?

Well, Palenque and Tikal are a bit like that. You get to Palenque and the place, well, it’s definitely impressive but there’s something about it. Maybe the crowds of people, the buses, the vendredores, the welcoming door safely admitting anyone who’s paid their $4 onto the neatly trimmed lawns of the ruined city complex. It was a pretty easy glide down from San Cristobal de las Casas – there are the same faces you’ve spotted last week at a bar there and you feel you’re moving with the people on a path preordained.

So close to the end of our Mexican visa and our thoughts are always on whether to check out Tikal just over the Guatemala border. The problem is that it’s a 400 km drive in the right direction, south across the border, but then a 500km drive back north. Is Tikal gonna be worth it, we thought, when we’re so under-whelmed by Palenque? Sure, we heard that Tikal is the superior experience, its true jungle setting, a genuine lost city, hidden on another world. We also heard it was about $20 to get in.

So, you’re wandering around the first party, beer in hand, get talking to this older Canadian guy who seems to know the place well. He mentions that there is a short-cut to the secret dance-floor. It could be a secret short-cut, he says, don’t hear much mention of it. But it’s there. You get to Tikal in just a few hours and the crossing is called El Ceibo.

We checked the guidebooks but the Lonely People doesn’t mention it. Our map from 2010 doesn’t show it and there’s nothing on Google Earth. But there are some reports of it, even a few inconclusive photos, but they are Biker reports – wasn’t there a river crossing to be done at some point between Mexico and Guatemala? It seemed you could just drive through but why wasn’t on any maps?

Hence this post. This is the short cut between Palenque and Tikal; the border crossing from Mexico to Guatemala known as El Ceibo – the Mayan Tree of Life that links the 13 layers of heaven  (its roots are in hell).

From Palenque it’s half a day to get to El Ceibo, first going north towards Villa Hermosa then turning east and back down via Tenosique. There is a short cut turning to the right for a sign to La Libertad just north of Palenque – they are improving the highway further north though and should be the faster route. Tenosique is the last big town in Mexico. The last Pemex, just before and after town. Police Checkpoints everywhere. Nice enough town. Stock up on everything. The Guatemalan side of the border is 40% approx. more for diesel and up to 100% more for everything else with the exceptions of cigarettes, beef and single-scoop ice creams. Also get some photocopies of your passport, driving license and vehicle registration which you’ll need for the Guatemalans.

At the border you drive straight to park somewhere outside the first building. You go the next building to get your vehicle permit canceled. At the last small office on the left near the inbound-fumigation-unit you get your exit stamps – remember the visa slip and also the receipt for paying for it, that you got when you entered Mexico. Walk back to your vehicle and drive on through.

After 20m in Guatemala you pull up next to the truck – that is where you sort out the vehicle. First go the office behind to get your passports stamped in. Ask the guy to stamp the photocopy of your passport which the vehicle import office in the truck requires. The import cost Q60 which you pay at the green trailer next door. They accept Pesos but gave a slightly low rate for them. Next up is the fumigation which cost Q48. Check your change. No more stops or checks, nowhere really to examine or search the vehicle, nothing much, for the few hours drive to Flores.

There is a real change coming over the border. The first towns had a lovely chaos to them and reminded me of the Baluchi chaos arriving from Iranian orderliness. The first fuel station I identified was just before La Libertad which is 150 odd klicks from Tenosique. But there must be fuel available at some of the towns before. Thing is, there’s a real lack of traffic, this direct link between two of the biggest Mayan cities. This border has been around for years, so I don’t know why it’s not well known. Of course, as soon as you start partying afresh on the secret, cool dance floor, you’re kind of glad it isn’t.

Customs and vehicle registration building is on the left, passport control further along.

Vehicle check in at the white truck on the right, passport control is just behind it.

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It just dawned on me that we won’t be going to Chixculub in the Yucatán Peninsula any time soon because we have, like, five minutes before our visa ends and we have to chop chop it over the Guatemala border. Well, there probably isn’t much to see anyway – maybe a plaque or something saying how this town was the centre of the crater formed by the comet/asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs nearly 65 million years ago. Would have made a nice blog post, no?

But anyway! Right on cue a story surfaces on the internet about possible future impact mitigation -”Asteroid headed for Earth? Give it the laser treatment…“, which is all about the latest idea for avoiding the next collision coming our way sometime in the future; sending a swarm of spaceships equipped with lasers to rendez-vous with the unwanted rock and nudge out of the way of Earth’s path. Now this is a really great idea – just as great as the many other mitigation theories like mass drivers, painting it white and aiming nuclear missiles at it. The problem with all of them is actually we haven’t the technology to make it happen and we haven’t the information to guess whether it would work (or even worse – only half work)

So regarding the article; it would be nice to see an asteroid story without the mention of Bruce Willis in the first paragraph.

Anyway, a couple of issues that might be of interest:

1. Lasers, mass drivers, solar sail attachments and nuclear missiles are, of course, all untested when it comes to moving an object out of Earth’s way. The technology required is immense. And no government or organisation seems particularly interested in doing the R&D. Which is a shame because one day an asteroid/comet WILL impact and cause a right old mess the like of which humanity hasn’t seen for a while (think Noah’s Ark, rain for forty days, worldwide destruction and the collapse of civilisation to such an extent that the whole disaster becomes merely a long-lost myth that few believe could happen again).

2. The comments moaning about the weaponization of space have kind of got it half right. In fact, the asteroid/comet is the real weapon: Imagine the object is due to hit the Atlantic Ocean causing tsunamis that will wipeout the US East coast. Imagine then the lasers are sent up (or the missiles, or the solar sail attachments) but they only manage to move the asteroid half of the way required to miss Earth completely. Imagine, then, that ‘only half’ means the asteroid is due to hit Saudi Arabia instead. This is the big problem, first identified by Carl Sagan, that any impact mitigation attempt could do more harm than good.

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The unofficial story that I was told was that the local name for Zipolite is the Beach of Death, la Playa de los Muertos, because of the deadly rip-tide and current. Local fisherman who had become tired of life came here to die. They stripped off their clothes and walked up and down before finding their moment to rush into the sea and drown. I think there must be a connection between the current nudist policies here and this old tale – maybe the first hippies came down and saw some naked old geezers… I’ll certainly be keeping an eye on the nudists even more than usual in case of any sudden waterborne disappearance.

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Place and time: Enforced three week stay in Mexico City waiting for a new passport to be sorted out.

Cash: Not much at all – our emergency budget allows us 2 dollars each and even that means we arrive in South America pretty skint and dependent on a plan to somehow power the truck and move it using just the solar panel.

Mission: To use up that time wisely without spending any money.

It behooves the contestant to do some research before arriving – first internet port of call is couchsurfing.org, facebook.com or whatever your favorite social website tool. A good webizen advised us of a cool place to park right in the middle of town:

Parque Las Americas, four-star curbside, free.

• Central location; 40 mins walk east of Downtown and 50 mins walk south of Centro Historico. 5 minutes west and north of the standard complexity of DF Urbana.
• Park up with other crusty looking vehicles, some of which are three times your size, some of which are also lived in.
• Water from various mysterious taps around the neighborhood (remember to take that mole wrench).
• Electricity can be used temporarily at the back of the Urban Vigilantes’ Hut.
• Free Wi-Fi from a couple of unidentified sources (strongest standing on the park bench nearest the south-east corner).
• Full security from Vigilantes, passing Police cars (one every 10 mins, 6am to 11.30pm) and the numerous public-service ambulances, on-call telephone engineers and roadside recovery vehicles parked up around you taking a break.
• Meet the people of Navarte, the characters, the immense parts, the bit parts and the lost souls on their way around the Mexican Play of Life – dog walkers, joggers, alcoholics, vagrants, con artists and many other kinds of ambulantes vendredores.
• Once a week, you can wake up to the sights and sounds of a traditional fruit and veg market – remember to move the truck the night before…

That’s the accommodation sorted, then.

For eating, there are a couple of big supermarkets around and a few smaller markets with the usual bargain eateries located somewhere within their cores. To be avoided are the little coffee-shops/bars that dot the area and charge multiple dollars for basically snacks. There are also, of course, the ubiquitous taco stands.

Activities during the day in Mexico City include walking around getting a feel for the place, catching up on some European football at the competitively priced bars  around the Zona Rosa, seeing the sights with all the other tourists around the Zocalo or browsing the various commercial zones – near us was a Car Parts Area and a Printing Area (where you can spend a couple of days designing your own t-shirt, base-ball cap and cooking apron). Lovely, what else? Well, of course, the museums, galleries and stuff are free on Sunday when there’s also a massive flea market between Centro Medico and Lazaras Cardenas that’s good for a laugh. Of course, the metro is really cheap – like 15p a ride – it’s entirely possible to spend a few weeks getting out at strange metro stations and having a look around. But be warned: Mexico City isn’t that big.

DF night life is slightly trickier. There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of proper old -skool parties. You might get lucky and get the invite to a kind of self-organized event where your ten quid cover charge buys load of food, drink and the opportunity to meet drug dealers but these aren’t the massive entities we’re kind of used to in our own capital city. Up until midnight you can hang around for free in the Plaza Garibaldi which is apparently the only place in town where you can drink openly in public. And there are lots of bars, sure, but they seem, like, undistinguished – the more interesting ones had cover charges of 100 pesos – I ask you: five quid to get into a Rasta Bar? Enough to buy weed for a fortnight… And in fact the absurd economics of going out might put you off the whole experience. We tried a few ‘squats’ too but we had no answers banging on the door and no answers over on facebook either – I had the feeling we were just between events, though. The most entertaining experiences will be had, of course, in the kitchens, bedrooms and dining rooms of the locals you get to meet. They are a crazy bunch, it has to be said.

Three weeks later, Portuguese Passport in hand but 100 bucks lighter – we’re off to the beach…

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When you make an arch you use framework to keep all the bricks in place until you install the keystone – the piece in the center that keep it all together – then you smash away the framework and, as if by magic, all you see is the self-supporting arch. The metaphor is used to illustrate theories on the beginning of life: there was some kind of system or framework (for example crystal substances)  that helped evolve DNA replication but disappeared as soon as  the beautiful arch of Gaian life spread around the world. Anyway, what I am trying to say is that renovating structures from the antiquities, repairing Stonehenge or redecorating Teotihuacan would be like reconstructing some of that framework to see how humanity arrived here today.

(The Ark is also the fabled ship spoken of by cultures all over the world. The ship that carried humanity safe during an apocalyptic moment of destruction.But that’s another story).

For the moment, we’re at the Mexican National Museum of Anthropology.

Hmm. Standard kind of layout starting with models of naked little men trying to kill a mammoth and ending up at the magnificent sculptures of the Aztecs. Most stunning are the replicas of  pieces of Mayan pyramids that gave us a foretaste, hopefully, of things to come as we’ll soon be in the Mayan heartlands, in South Mexico, Yucatan and Guatemala.

But the Campaign to Renovate Antiquities (CRA) thing comes out into conscious thought when viewing replicas of what the Teotihuacan pyramids would have looked like. You know, the impressive set of stones that we saw last week – imagine if they had been renovated to look like the magnificent replica that they had in the museum, towering red temples decorated with hundreds of alien gods and creatures…

The arguments against doing so are kind of obvious – we should touch as little way as possible the original stones. And there is a danger that if you repair Stonehenge and reclad Teotihuacan, then hordes of tourists will come here expecting people dressed up and re-enactment, hot-dog bars, places to sit down and it’s all fucking Disney-Land over again. Build your Disney-Land if you want but leave untouched the original stones, man.

The arguments for such renovation are less overt, however. There is the metaphor of the arch-building at the top of this post for example. Here is another illustration about that other structure lost from time, Stonehenge, that is crying out for renovation (indeed it has already been renovated a few times but possibly never finished); there is the latest spot of research (possibly wacky, I haven’t checked, but this is only an example anyway) that Stonehenge’s stones were arranged on a pattern resembling certain aural characteristics (i.e. the way sound waves reinforce or cancel each other out) – very basically, if a piper was blowing away in the center then, for the listener, the volume of the sound would increase and decrease in a circular pattern – strikingly similar (apparently) to where the stones are (or were or would be) standing. The argument for renovation would point to this theory and say; there, we would never know the reality of that proposition until we reconstruct the Henge how it was.

The same applies to the wonderful possibilities of seeing the Teotihuacan complex in something like its original splendor (what we know of it) – archeologists spend time wondering about the significance of the structures – there was no language discovered to even name anything correctly, even less to understand the inhabitants motives and ideas. An enormous clue, though, would be provided by renovating, however: Untold information could be gleaned from completing the hidden stories that they built – maybe astronomical significance, maybe shadows creep their way across the terraces, maybe the gloriously fearsome structure at sunset itself would inspire the appropriate responses in the visitor…

These are mysterious, old things – most of them built, if not by unknown civilizations, then by civilizations acting for unknown reasons – if we should ever have any chance to understand them and reconnect with their thinking, (thereby understanding our own evolution and better-guessing the future), then we should mimic their physical efforts and reconstruct.

Anyway, big up to the national Museum of Anthropology for at least doing a couple of replicas and generally educating the people. As you may or may not know all Museums in Mexico City are free on Sunday. They are also very busy on Sundays. This all proved to be the case the week before at the National Art Museum but if you’re sufficiently non-Mexican looking then you’ll be asked to pay the normal price of two quid unless you have proof that you’re a resident. Given that tourists, as much as anyone, should pay something in tax toward the common good, there must be nicer ways of doing it then basing the payment on skin-color and Spanish language control.

Outside the museum is an event in itself – loads of people and families; fast-food and fruit stalls; Replica Aztec Drumming, Dancing and Shamanistic New Age Blessing Ritual; non-replica Hari Krishnas doing their thing and feeding hundreds for free close by in the park – and the mighty Velodores who do a replica of an ancient ritual that is pretty impressive and even looks authentic if you blur your vision a little to obscure the fact they look a bit like Morris-dancers up to some mischief but rapidly re-approaching sobriety. I dunno, they could try and look a bit less bored about doing it a hundred times a day – maybe let some other people have a go (for a cut in the enormous takings they take from the spectacle-hungry crowd). And, of course, one other activity to be undertaken outside of the Museum; getting interviewed by some kid who has to do some foreigners for their English class. Beware! They got Dunia both times we were in the area and we saw many a group of tourists being hassled by posh kids accompanied by their parents (floating around, prompting the shy ones and video recording the thing for evidence in future litigation with the school when their brat completely fails or something).

The thought does come to mind of starting up the old child-sacrifice thing at any resurrected ancient temple…

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Teotihuacan is 50 klicks northwest of Mexico City – a pleasant couple of days out of town – just remember to have a good charge on your camera battery…. Read on:

Nice bunch of pyramids – the interesting thing about them is that their proximity to the capital city (as opposed to the remoteness of some of the much more recently discovered Mayan pyramids) doesn’t mean that we understand these people more than the Mayan cultures, say. We don’t – they left no writing system. Our knowledge about them is evolving as we speak. In the various out-of-date guidebooks I quickly referred to, and reading the information at the museum here, already that massive pyramid of the sun has possibly become now the pyramid of the water due to the recent discovery of child skeletons at the corners of the pyramids – something that is associated with the water-god of the time. Hmm. We know so little.

Camera run out of battery just as we had entered the complex:  How many people know that if your camera batteries run out just as you arrive at a country’s premier tourist attraction – you can warm them up under your arm or down your trousers to give them some extra life. The pictures you see here were all taken with a camera that had been registered as empty – it was a bit of a palava; removing the battery from my pants, quickly installing it in the camera, taking a shot and then stuffing it back down into the body-heated warmth. But if you want those pictures – and there’s little chance of returning soon with functioning equipment – then, this is the way to go…

The funny thing is that the last time this happened to me was at a Stonehenge Summer Equinox Event and at the time I remember thinking that maybe it was the power of the stones that kept my battery alive. Now that it’s happened at some ancient, mysterious pyramids, I’m thinking that my battery dies because of  the sudden proximity to ancient constructions we know so little about… Hmm.

Oh and boondocking is available at the restaurant/tourist traps just outside the perimeter fence. They get coach loads of people on package tours from Cancun or somewhere so aren’t too bothered about the odd independent RV.

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Lovely, old city with too many vowels in its name – from now it’s GDL. It’s well-known that GDL is one of the safest cities in Mexico and we were told the only reason for that is that the boss of one of the biggest cartels has the family residence around these parts… A case of not defecating on your own doorstep even if that means plenty of poo everywhere else. In addition, the only reason that the place looks fairly neat and tidy with rubbish bins on every street corner was the recent PanAmerican Games held here, a temporary blip in the normal run of things that made me think of home and the coming Olympics… All in all, it’s a very relaxed and friendly place  - by night we parked up near the compact centre of town within range of the free GDL wi-fi – by day we found a spot on a busy road not far away where we met one of GDL’s graffiti aficionados. Cue a spot of spray decoration on the yellow side of Jigsaw – the first of a series of graffs from everywhere before us, a kaleidoscopic art mural, representing the nations of the world on a van that has driven through them… that’s the idea anyway – stay tuned on that…

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With the sun setting on our first day’s drive inland towards Guadalajara, we arrived in Tequila. Parked up for the night outside one of the many breweries and strolled into town to sample the atmosphere, the tacos and the alcohol. In the end we decided against purchasing anything more than a few postcards – most of the liquor looked like it had come from the nearest cash-and-carry wholesalers to be honest. On the way out of town in the morning, we stopped to shoot some video, and otherwise annoy, a team of workers hacking their way through a field of blue agave, piling the heavy cores high into trucks. We’d seen loads of these trucks around and while the chemistry of distillation and the well-advertised brewery tours held little attraction, the sight of these weird-looking, alien egg things certainly intrigued us. I remember reading somewhere that there was a shortage of mature, ten year old, blue agave plants leading to a possible world shortage of tequila and, as it turned out, talking to the plantation owner, they were now being brought to the bottle after six years. Does this mean inferior tequila is being produced these days? He wouldn’t say…

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We were pointed this way weeks ago and we will forever be grateful for that – San Blas is the perfect stop on a round-the-world journey. Especially after many weeks of driving with not more than a few days stopped anywhere since leaving North California – this was the Tropical Paradise we had been waiting for…

But beautiful beaches aside, it was the people we met and spent time with that made this a wicked two weeks off the road: Special mention goes to Alex and Katie, a UK couple cycling around North America, with whom it was a pleasure to hang out with – on the beach drinking tequilla, the boat trip around the crocodile infested mangrove swamps or the early morning whale watching.

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This is the first RV park that we have ever stayed in so far on this journey. Not the first time that we’ve paid money – that has happened to thingy’s mother for a place in her front garden in Irkutsk and again in Seoul at the World Cup Stadium car park which was pure tarmac heaven but the toilet did have heated seats that squirt water up your bum.

So we’re a little green with the trailer park etiquette – do you leave the lights on in the toilets at night? – Is it OK to run power tools on the hook-up? Is it OK to empty the contents of the van out onto the pristine grass and cause a right old rag and bone mess by day that is only superficially tidied up as the sun goes down but manages to get away with it cos, well, Los Cocos RV Park is a well cool and chilled out place.

I’d like to state here that I think it’s OK to arrive in a tropical paradise and then spend the next five days building cupboards, painting rubberized coatings on the undercarriage, fixing fans, etc. My essential point is that I’d rather do them here, with pleasant weather, dog walks on the beach and cheap tacos everywhere, than, say, rainy old Czech Republic or housed in a gloomy warehouse under imminent eviction from the London Olympics Force. Some people must think it’s sad but, possibly, their only experience of tropical paradise is the expensive ten days book-ended by Heathrow Airport that demands no work and all play. But this trip is, of course, fundamentally different – we are looking at the next six months at least in the Tropics and we feel we need working fans, rubberized undercarriages and cupboards in order to make the most of that time.

Next week I’m going to justify why I like to spend my days staring in a computer screen even though I’m at a surfer’s beach internet caff sipping an ice coffee or was it fresh coconut and rum?

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