My Happy Place

Not every day on the road has to be a disaster and some days, even if they start before dawn can work out okay. Pretty good actually after a peaceful free night in the back lot of a gas station, we came late and left early. 

We drove fast to Oaxaca, three days from Laredo to our campground and we used toll roads, about $120 worth of four lane. We slept in the truck stops and pressed on. We’ve talked to other overlanders who think truck stops are noisy and unsafe and so forth. We find roads go dead in Mexico late at night and truckers don’t idle like Americans so we sleep pretty well. 

Our summer in the States showed us how overdue infrastructure maintenance and repair is at home. In Mexico some freeways are excellent and others are just as ghastly as we’ve seen. I was encouraged by our van check up that we had no damage to our van from the holes, ridges, speed bumps and dirt.  

Some travelers turn their noses up at toll roads saying you don’t get to see the “authentic” Mexico from toll roads. However in this country Mexico comes to the highways and you will find yourself driving a four lane through villages with food sellers on the median and tire shops she roast chicken stands lining the travel lanes. And if you want to get somewhere the toll roads save hours of dodging speed bumps. This was not an official rest area but it worked well to give Rusty a walk plus we got to dump our trash. 

While we wait in our safe comfortable campground to see what happens in Guatemala I have to confess I miss driving. Some overlanders here say driving is a necessary evil and most drive to see things they can’t find at home, mostly the sort of natural phenomena like canyons, lakes wildlife, waterfalls and volcanoes. This picture below looks more like a painting as I was stretching a short lens to do a telephoto’s job. It’s a cone called Popocatépetl.

Mexicans call the volcano Don Goyo or El Popo and last year it erupted throwing enough ash into the atmosphere to close down Mexico City’s main airport. The nickname “Don Goyo” comes from a local resident called Don Gregorio who communes with the spirits in the mountain and warned his neighbors of imminent danger. 

Middle class housing along the road with water tanks and satellite dishes and high walls. Many Mexicans are much more fearful of Mexico than travelers. We have friends who refuse to eat road food and if you listen to non travelers every road is perilous. 

Life in the campground is pleasant of course and easy but I miss the color and variety of the road. Layne saw a tamale vendor alongside the toll road so we pulled off. 

Rusty likes to keep an eye on her when she wanders. 

$2 corn husks for breakfast…

Soft savory corn meal sprinkled with cheese and peppery jalapeños were what we really had to break our fast. And yes it comes in styrofoam in a plastic bag and single use plastic forks. 

Rusty had his breakfast, he doesn’t eat much in the morning and then he took his ease in a patch of grass in the sun. He loves to sunbathe. 

We didn’t spend the night but we could have. Van travel allows you to close the door and live in your own world when you are on the road. We eat our food and watch our TV (on an iPad) and read our books and sleep in our own bed (and Rusty on his). It’s 70 square feet but it’s home. 

We are working on a couple of plans to get around over or through Guatemala but the political situation is getting worse over the weekend. The party of the outgoing President is claiming election fraud, and doesn’t that sound familiar, so the people who voted for the President -elect (who is supported by the US) have taken to the streets. From 20 road blocks last week Prensa Libre, a Guatemalan newspaper yesterday reported 50 with students and shopkeepers joining the peasants and the Mayans on the barricades. 

If the ejectors losers don’t back down this could take a while especially as the outgoing President who was term limited out of office is threatening to declare martial law to get his preferred replacement into office. And you thought Mexico is a mess? Clearly Guatemala is no place to be but we are not giving up. We are looking at some creative solutions to ship our home and ourselves around this problem. I miss the road but I’m not a fan of being stupid for no purpose so we shall see. 

I’m Toad of Toad Hall hankering for the open road! 

El Tule

I am not a fan of bicycles and I know it’s an awful thing to admit but bicycles annoy me. They are inherently uncomfortable as the seat will numb parts that should never be numbed and the fact that you are pedaling and not walking puts you in the traffic flow like any other machine. I like walking, looking, seeing, pausing, photographing and bicycles get in the way. Rant over. 

It cannot be argued that bicycles are efficient so I took a bicycle for a brief excursion into the nearby village of El Tule. Layne thought out loud and muttered she’d love a Coke. Your wish is my command so I put Rusty in the van with her so he wouldn’t miss me and I took one of the campground bicycles out onto the dirt road to El Tule, numbness be damned.  A pause for a black and white industrial view in the back of town. Grim, eh? 

I have no idea what the villagers think of these camper gringos rolling through town every day but they treat me with calm indifference. I weave through their lives and zip back to my campground, the walled off diplomatic zone just out of town. 

Laundry in a two way street indicated by the double headed arrow. In Mexico laundry is typically done for you and returned folded and stacked in plastic bags for not much money. Yeah and they pump your fuel for you at the gas  stations in Mexico. Little touches of luxury on the road. 

The streets of Mexican towns are lined with small businesses and everybody is busy doing something. They paint their advertising on the walls which gives these stores an air of permanence. 

And then there are the dogs. They are everywhere and the reason I can’t easily walk Rusty here. He just gets overwhelmed even if I keep them away. You scare off Mexican dogs by bending down and pretending to pick up a stone because Mexicans throw them to hurt. 

They aren’t necessarily strays either and their lives in the streets aren’t as terrible as you might think. People do buy dog food, it’s in stores everywhere but for working class Mexicans dogs aren’t indoor animals. They are free to wander their neighborhoods and they play together in “street gangs” and I wish they were loved and cherished the way Rusty is. I carry extra food and hand it out in a vain gesture of …solidarity?

The town functions without us, the dogs live their lives and we are here and gone tomorrow. 

Guatemala is still in an uproar over election stealing by the outgoing party and most of the country is expected to be shut down until Sunday at the earliest. Our neighbors have friends in campers on the road in Guatemala and they are stuck in a small village. They were in touch with the German embassy staff who told them to expect to be stationary through the weekend at least. 

I cannot deny I have a desire to be on the road, I want to see new places and I really enjoy piloting the Promaster on these roads and the fact that I cannot is making me restless.  

I’ve been reading an endless Ken Follett novel “Pillars of the Earth” and I struggle to concentrate. My non fiction book is 1939 about daily life in that pivotal year. And yet I struggle to stay focused. I get up and check the situation in Guatemala, I check the map and I ponder choices. 

Rusty likes it here, that’s all he knows. 

Karrie and Roan from Central Florida are experienced travelers going in our same direction also in a Promaster van…levity to talk about as we wait for the roads to reopen. They got some local mechanics into the campground to change their oil…

…and Mattias from Germany in a converted Sprinter took advantage of them being here and had them rotate his tires. Job done! 

So it goes in El Rancho. I brought back some beers for Sandro our Austrian neighbors and a Coke for Cali the caretaker. 

And a couple of Coke zeros for us and we watched a British cop show and listened to the rain and pondered pizza night on Saturday. Seems like we’ll still be here for that! 

Guatemala Blocked

Life is what happens while you are making plans. I got a message from a neighbor yesterday making it clear there is no point in us getting back on the road right now. 

Every red circle is a reported road block in Guatemala caused by nationwide riots protesting a perceived stolen presidential election. The country is in an uproar after June’s presidential vote as the president elect’s victory is not being accepted by the losers who are trying to upset the results. So the country is in ferment with ports, roads and border crossings all blocked. A quick look at the map will tell you we have to drive through Guatemala to get south. Therefore we aren’t going anywhere. 

The fact is we are in a comfortable spot for $20 a day with all facilities and friends with whom to discuss plans. We aren’t the only ones heading toward Panama so there is some shared perplexity.

At this stage the “bloqueos” (road blocks) are a nuisance and will eat into the extra time we had set aside for tourist activities in Central America but for Guatemalans it’s a much graver problem for people with few resources and no reserves. The question is how long can an economic blockade continue when people are already surviving dsyvto day.  

On top of that there is a gang war underway in Chiapas State, the mountainous zone of Mexico bordering Guatemala. The Sinaloa Drug Cartel is in a war with the Jalisco New Generation to control the refugee and drug smuggling routes into Mexico. There has been a great deal of fighting reported near the main Mesía border crossing into Guatemala with several deaths abd police unwilling or unable to control the mess. So for the moment we have to suffer in our campground which is a very safe two days journey away from the border and here we read books, swim in the pool and play bocce. It’s not that tough for us. 

Layne got her stitches out which she had as a present from a dermatologist just before we crossed into Mexico. Her skin cancer spot has healed well and she is free to get it wet in the pool now. To get the stitches out we went up a pharmacy with a doctors office on premises and with no fuss and a few dollars the job was done. You know how you have to fill out pages of paperwork at a doctors office in the US? Here they ask for your name and phone number and then they get to work. 

Rusty took over the print shop where got done copies made of GANNET2’s Paperwork which will be helpful crossing the next several

borders. Rusty took control of the situation. Then we drove to the purified water shop to fill our tank. 

The lady who owns the place was telling me about her youngest son who is a real headache. He hasn’t been able to get a girlfriend pregnant and he’s 32. He desperately wants a family so he’s got together with an older woman with three children.  She has a job the water lady said but she doesn’t do any work after hours and now she has an idiot (“tonto”) to support her she said. 

When I left my abusive husband, she went on, I got a job and then came home and ran my sewing business at night so my children would want for nothing. Not her, she said bitterly, she does her few hours and then does no other work. Her dilemma was clear: does she annoy her son by telling him to drop her or does she feel guilty for not saying anything? If we stay long enough we will need more water and I may get an update. 

We had a lunch planned in El Tule at a taco stand we have come to enjoy. I think it’s the fatty meat he uses which imparts a surprisingly rich flavor. 

Waiting for the bus home: 

Our hour tacos cost $3:50 (60 pesos) for the lot and we sat at a table which attracted a couple of local dogs. One even had a collar but I put out some kibbles for them and they ate their fill. Street dogs do actually get fed in this village so not all of them are technically strays. I just don’t like eating while being watched by a hungry dog. 

I got Rusty out of the van and took him for a short walk but there were just too many dogs around and he got fed up. 

“Talachas” is the local dialect for tire shop:

Then we went by the fruit stand and as I waited in the car I got another of those picturesque sightings typical of Mexican street life. Many Mexicans have cars or failing that motorcycles, but some are still using horses and carts. 

The black bag on our dashboard has our papers in case police pull us over. It’s almost invisible and easy to take with us when we leave GANNET2 parked for a while. 

Rusty waiting for Layne at the fruit stand in Santa Maria Del Tule. 

On the way back we stopped to buy the two campground workers a full sugar coke and I gave a junkyard dog I rather like a bag of food. I wish we were going to the States as I’d take him and find him a home. 

And so back to our privileged compound. It reminds me of the French Embassy in the movie THE KILLING FIELDS when the Europeans in Phnom Penh take refuge from the Khmer Rouge conquerors. Mexico is warm and welcoming of course but in here we live by the rules of middle class privilege with comfort and security and well fed dogs living worry free for the most part. 

I have no doubt Rusty remembers his own life on the road. I wish I could adopt more dogs. 

A Date With The Darien

It just got real.  I’m excited and nervous. 

The question everybody asks when you’re talking about South America is “How do you cross the gap?” The Darien Gap is 60 miles (100 Canadian miles) wide and has no roads. The reason is to keep South American foot-and-mouth disease far away from US cattle which haven’t seen the deadly illness since 1954. That leaves wanderers like us to figure out a way past the gap. A young Panamanian Overlander came home from his travels and saw a market for his services.  The Overland Embassy is the hub nowadays for Overlanders crossing the Gap where they provide all services to ship vehicles back and forth, most by container, motorcycles (and lately small cars) by air, and large expedition vehicles by open containers (flat rack) or Roll On, Roll Off (RORO). 

We now have our loading date and have to be in Panama City by the end of November, the 27th is our goal. The estimated cost for a shared container is about  $2300 for each vehicle which is less than we feared. 

And we also know who will share our container with us. Meet Sandro and Lisa from Austria in a 1998 T4 Volkswagen (a Eurovan in North America). Alejandro at the Overland Embassy says our vans will fit perfectly in a 40 foot high cube container though we probably will have to  remove our roof top air conditioner.

 It so happens Sandro is an engineer and says “no problem” to a job that looks like a huge problem to cluster fingers me. But we speak Spanish and they don’t so the relationship is symbiotic more or less  and they are great fun. Even for an elderly couple like us. 

The youngsters are planning to sail on a charter boat that does the trip through the famous San Blas islands but for us Rusty is not a sailor so Layne has a lead on a private pilot who may fly us three in the cabin to Colombia . We sailed that area in 1999 so we’re okay with missing the sail. Especially if we don’t have to crate Rusty for the albeit short flight to Cartagena. 

Many details to firm up but it seems to be falling into place. All we have to do is drive hard to Panama. Faster than normal for us! If anyone wants to meet us in South America we plan to take a year to reach Patagonia where summer is at its peak in December. Think Alaska no with the seasons reversed. But that is for later. Now we have to drive.