2000 Central America
Mexico, January
In the Museo Antropológico de México there are instructions on what to do in the event of an earthquake. They are posted, rather thoughtfully, in the toilets: one evacuation calls for another. One should stop smoking, avoid being struck by falling standard lamps, and leave the museum.
Another sign: the advice impressed upon all Hitchhikers of the Universe reappears in the lift at Mar’s apartment. If the lift gets stuck, it reads, “Don’t panic.”
The surreal is the normal state of things: it is the unifying law of existence.
all is absurd
all is magnificent
The double helix of the plumed serpent, Quetzalcoatl , enters deep earth and flies in the heavens. Inner and outer entwine and move ever onward.
The Oaxaca bus traverses the infinitely self-replicating sprawl that is D.F., trees joining cement in urban marriage, the forgotten and the unforgiven. In the mid-distance, where cacti point the fingers of the mind, clear blue air turns to a convoluted haze, and snow smokes on Popacatapetl.
Oaxaca
It is easier to send e-mail than to buy cigarette papers. One signs in with name, country and e-address. Communications are continentally instant, so that morning glory blossoms fall on Vishnu in Madras as we drink tea, chat and play chess on the terrace at the Magic Hostal.
During the course of a normal day, the real you may be almost wholly absent.
Francis Crick might say, and quite correctly: “You are nothing but a pack of neurons,” but he is only talking about the self.
“Consciousness — and our sense that we possess a unified self — (is) an illusion arising out of the interaction of many different ‘subprograms’ run on the brain’s hardware.”
Daniel Dennett in “Consciousness explained”
Bohm proposed an “implicate order” of quantum potential, a field of consisting of an infinite number of fluctuating pilot waves. The overlapping of these waves generates what appear to us as particles, which constitute the explicate order: what we perceive.
Physicist John Wheeler: “Surely some day, we can believe, we will grasp the central idea of it all as so simple, so beautiful, so compelling that we will all say to each other, ‘Oh, how could it have been otherwise! How could we all have been so blind for so long!’”
I don’t want to be right. I want to live.
In the Museo Antropológico de México there are instructions on what to do in the event of an earthquake. They are posted, rather thoughtfully, in the toilets: one evacuation calls for another. One should stop smoking, avoid being struck by falling standard lamps, and leave the museum.
Another sign: the advice impressed upon all Hitchhikers of the Universe reappears in the lift at Mar’s apartment. If the lift gets stuck, it reads, “Don’t panic.”
The surreal is the normal state of things: it is the unifying law of existence.
all is absurd
all is magnificent
The double helix of the plumed serpent, Quetzalcoatl , enters deep earth and flies in the heavens. Inner and outer entwine and move ever onward.
The Oaxaca bus traverses the infinitely self-replicating sprawl that is D.F., trees joining cement in urban marriage, the forgotten and the unforgiven. In the mid-distance, where cacti point the fingers of the mind, clear blue air turns to a convoluted haze, and snow smokes on Popacatapetl.
Oaxaca
It is easier to send e-mail than to buy cigarette papers. One signs in with name, country and e-address. Communications are continentally instant, so that morning glory blossoms fall on Vishnu in Madras as we drink tea, chat and play chess on the terrace at the Magic Hostal.
During the course of a normal day, the real you may be almost wholly absent.
Francis Crick might say, and quite correctly: “You are nothing but a pack of neurons,” but he is only talking about the self.
“Consciousness — and our sense that we possess a unified self — (is) an illusion arising out of the interaction of many different ‘subprograms’ run on the brain’s hardware.”
Daniel Dennett in “Consciousness explained”
Bohm proposed an “implicate order” of quantum potential, a field of consisting of an infinite number of fluctuating pilot waves. The overlapping of these waves generates what appear to us as particles, which constitute the explicate order: what we perceive.
Physicist John Wheeler: “Surely some day, we can believe, we will grasp the central idea of it all as so simple, so beautiful, so compelling that we will all say to each other, ‘Oh, how could it have been otherwise! How could we all have been so blind for so long!’”
I don’t want to be right. I want to live.
Pisté
Pass by the classy hotels, keep on and the highway gives way to a number of chicken-and-rice eats, a liquor store called La Cucaracha, a village hall rigged up with speakers to pound out music, and dusty football pitches where the lads specialize in hitting posts and crossbar rather than scoring goals. On a couple of stony streets parallel to the main road is a tropical hotchpotch of cement houses and other made of poles and thatch, beautifully grubby children, palms and orange trees, big porkers that squeal as if something obscene is being done to them, hens and roosters. I find a spick-and-span posada and sit out the warm dusk on a patio to the scent of blossom.
Where the Spanish address you as señor, the Mexicans say amigo, suggestive of a more egalitarian mindset.
As always when I travel, my nails have grown at an astonishing rate.
In “Mitos y Leyendas de los Mayas” R.R. Ayala relates a proposition that the name Maya originates in a divinity found at Copán, an image which appears to be Vedic Indian, where Maya denotes Illusion. In the Upanishads: “el producto del vínculo material que durante la vida restringe el alma inmortal a considerar cosas distintas de su propia naturaleza, o sea este mundo de ilusiones, placeres y dolores.”
However, he also writes that centuries before the Spanish arrived, the Mayans had arrived at a monotheism whose idols were emanations of the Creator, intermediaries whose intercession with Him could protect man from particular phenomena: hurricane, drought, sickness, earthquake. It explains how the conquistador priests’ Christianity could so effectively usurp and establish itself as the dominant religion, while elements of the existing beliefs coexisted long after, such as the phallic cult deriving from the desire for perpetuity that one sees in artifacts everywhere.
Above all, the Mayans had an obsession with measuring and determining time. Copán was the site of an extraordinary assembly to celebrate the precise calculation of the orbit of Venus, some time between the 4th & 7th Century A.D. If Tikal was the spiritual capital of the Mayans, Copán was the scientific capital. The path leading the Copán ruins passes under tall trees. During the rains, these are covered in red flowers, “llamas de bosque” and the name given to the trees is “árbol del amor”, red symbolizing love.
Palenque
Everyone has special places in the world, no more than the fingers on one hand. This is one of mine. It is even greener and more jungly than I remember it ten years ago. Elephant ear fronds and the clear pool to wallow in.
Pass by the classy hotels, keep on and the highway gives way to a number of chicken-and-rice eats, a liquor store called La Cucaracha, a village hall rigged up with speakers to pound out music, and dusty football pitches where the lads specialize in hitting posts and crossbar rather than scoring goals. On a couple of stony streets parallel to the main road is a tropical hotchpotch of cement houses and other made of poles and thatch, beautifully grubby children, palms and orange trees, big porkers that squeal as if something obscene is being done to them, hens and roosters. I find a spick-and-span posada and sit out the warm dusk on a patio to the scent of blossom.
Where the Spanish address you as señor, the Mexicans say amigo, suggestive of a more egalitarian mindset.
As always when I travel, my nails have grown at an astonishing rate.
In “Mitos y Leyendas de los Mayas” R.R. Ayala relates a proposition that the name Maya originates in a divinity found at Copán, an image which appears to be Vedic Indian, where Maya denotes Illusion. In the Upanishads: “el producto del vínculo material que durante la vida restringe el alma inmortal a considerar cosas distintas de su propia naturaleza, o sea este mundo de ilusiones, placeres y dolores.”
However, he also writes that centuries before the Spanish arrived, the Mayans had arrived at a monotheism whose idols were emanations of the Creator, intermediaries whose intercession with Him could protect man from particular phenomena: hurricane, drought, sickness, earthquake. It explains how the conquistador priests’ Christianity could so effectively usurp and establish itself as the dominant religion, while elements of the existing beliefs coexisted long after, such as the phallic cult deriving from the desire for perpetuity that one sees in artifacts everywhere.
Above all, the Mayans had an obsession with measuring and determining time. Copán was the site of an extraordinary assembly to celebrate the precise calculation of the orbit of Venus, some time between the 4th & 7th Century A.D. If Tikal was the spiritual capital of the Mayans, Copán was the scientific capital. The path leading the Copán ruins passes under tall trees. During the rains, these are covered in red flowers, “llamas de bosque” and the name given to the trees is “árbol del amor”, red symbolizing love.
Palenque
Everyone has special places in the world, no more than the fingers on one hand. This is one of mine. It is even greener and more jungly than I remember it ten years ago. Elephant ear fronds and the clear pool to wallow in.
Guatemala, February
I decided on a shortcut from Palenque to Flores, which I did in one day and this is how:
Palenque 6 a.m. combi as far as the crossroads for highway 353.
Wait for the second-class bus to Tenosique. We have left Chiapas and are now in Tabasco.
From Tenosique, a taxi to the Mercado in Benito Juárez. A cervezaría here has a sign: “Prohibido la entrada a menores, uniformados y retrasados mentales.”
Then a combi to La Palma where I barter for a boat and exit through Mexican passport control. I pay over the odds for a dodgy private lancha and didn’t care. At the border, the regular Mexican border guard clearly approves of my presentation-for-officialdom look — clean shirt, shaven, no dark glasses — and stamps me straight out.
We stop at a jetty down the river, presumably on the political borderline, where three young army cadets are slouching in T-shirts. Another, clearly the new recruit, the only one in full uniform and shouldering a rifle, attempts to take down my details but is unable to hold pen to writing pad without one slipping away from the other. After the third column he keeps losing his place, drops the pad to his side in resignation. I get back on my little fibreglass launch and we head off.
At El Naranjo in Guatemala, another newbie just about manages to stamp my passport, points out the bus stop and changes some dollars for me. At a food shack, as I am about to buy some biscuits, a grubby individual with his shirt hanging out comes up to me and asks to see my passport. I am more or less looking down my nose at him with a “You taking the piss?” expression when he says: “Yo soy migración.” There was no ill will. He clearly wanted to make sure the kid hadn’t screwed it up completely.
On the grassy mound of El Naranjo landing stage, I make out carvings on some ancient stones and crunch crisps as I wait for the one o’clock bus to Flores. It bumps in and four hours later, I get off, walk three blocks and cross the causeway to Flores on Lake Petén Itzá.
I decided on a shortcut from Palenque to Flores, which I did in one day and this is how:
Palenque 6 a.m. combi as far as the crossroads for highway 353.
Wait for the second-class bus to Tenosique. We have left Chiapas and are now in Tabasco.
From Tenosique, a taxi to the Mercado in Benito Juárez. A cervezaría here has a sign: “Prohibido la entrada a menores, uniformados y retrasados mentales.”
Then a combi to La Palma where I barter for a boat and exit through Mexican passport control. I pay over the odds for a dodgy private lancha and didn’t care. At the border, the regular Mexican border guard clearly approves of my presentation-for-officialdom look — clean shirt, shaven, no dark glasses — and stamps me straight out.
We stop at a jetty down the river, presumably on the political borderline, where three young army cadets are slouching in T-shirts. Another, clearly the new recruit, the only one in full uniform and shouldering a rifle, attempts to take down my details but is unable to hold pen to writing pad without one slipping away from the other. After the third column he keeps losing his place, drops the pad to his side in resignation. I get back on my little fibreglass launch and we head off.
At El Naranjo in Guatemala, another newbie just about manages to stamp my passport, points out the bus stop and changes some dollars for me. At a food shack, as I am about to buy some biscuits, a grubby individual with his shirt hanging out comes up to me and asks to see my passport. I am more or less looking down my nose at him with a “You taking the piss?” expression when he says: “Yo soy migración.” There was no ill will. He clearly wanted to make sure the kid hadn’t screwed it up completely.
On the grassy mound of El Naranjo landing stage, I make out carvings on some ancient stones and crunch crisps as I wait for the one o’clock bus to Flores. It bumps in and four hours later, I get off, walk three blocks and cross the causeway to Flores on Lake Petén Itzá.
Flores
The people strike me as more collected and decisive than the Mexicans, who come across as resigned and putty-like with their unspoken grumblings. Perhaps not being direct neighbours with the Gran Gringo helps.
I am reading Ursula Le Guin’s rendition of the Tao. I faff around distinguishing “self” from “real you”. She: self and soul.
The people strike me as more collected and decisive than the Mexicans, who come across as resigned and putty-like with their unspoken grumblings. Perhaps not being direct neighbours with the Gran Gringo helps.
I am reading Ursula Le Guin’s rendition of the Tao. I faff around distinguishing “self” from “real you”. She: self and soul.
El Remate
El Gringo Perdido on lake Petén Itzá. What can I say? It is beautiful.
The city is the self. As you walk the streets, it is important to know that here are two cities, identical, or one which at all times and in all places mirrors itself, although it shifts always and changes. A friend’s house may move from one day to the next, or a boat may be waiting where you expected to swim. Most notable are the gates, some of which remain in place for years, while others spring up in front of you. As the city is its mirror, there is no right or wrong way to go. A gate will melt away and reappear elsewhere. If you pass through the gate of kindness in a given moment, be mindful of its partner, the gate of meanness, or you will walk straight through it another time.
Lao Tsu:
Heaven and earth and the ten thousand things
are born of being.
Being is born of nothing.
The Tikal Experience
For me it meant: no bus, hitching rides, two breakdowns and slipping in before sundown just as they were closing. This was my plan all along. It was a full moon night and I wanted to be there for that. As I wandered eerie tracks that joined forest to ruin to forest in the pale moonlight, I was startled by a guard some ways off who held out his rifle and told me to stay where I was. In that moment I figured that he wasn’t about to shoot a foreign tourist and kept going, walking quickly into shadow and bush and then scarpering. He didn’t catch me. I climbed Temple IV and looked out over it all, got tired of the whole thing, wandered some more and lay down on uncomfortable stone ledges. When I got back to El Remate, I slept for fifteen hours.
There was a small Big Bang here: 500 little children. Betty at El Gringo Perdido is the second of nine. A woman she knows had 24, including three triplets. Seventeen survived.
The lake and the spell-weave of the lake.
El Gringo Perdido on lake Petén Itzá. What can I say? It is beautiful.
The city is the self. As you walk the streets, it is important to know that here are two cities, identical, or one which at all times and in all places mirrors itself, although it shifts always and changes. A friend’s house may move from one day to the next, or a boat may be waiting where you expected to swim. Most notable are the gates, some of which remain in place for years, while others spring up in front of you. As the city is its mirror, there is no right or wrong way to go. A gate will melt away and reappear elsewhere. If you pass through the gate of kindness in a given moment, be mindful of its partner, the gate of meanness, or you will walk straight through it another time.
Lao Tsu:
Heaven and earth and the ten thousand things
are born of being.
Being is born of nothing.
The Tikal Experience
For me it meant: no bus, hitching rides, two breakdowns and slipping in before sundown just as they were closing. This was my plan all along. It was a full moon night and I wanted to be there for that. As I wandered eerie tracks that joined forest to ruin to forest in the pale moonlight, I was startled by a guard some ways off who held out his rifle and told me to stay where I was. In that moment I figured that he wasn’t about to shoot a foreign tourist and kept going, walking quickly into shadow and bush and then scarpering. He didn’t catch me. I climbed Temple IV and looked out over it all, got tired of the whole thing, wandered some more and lay down on uncomfortable stone ledges. When I got back to El Remate, I slept for fifteen hours.
There was a small Big Bang here: 500 little children. Betty at El Gringo Perdido is the second of nine. A woman she knows had 24, including three triplets. Seventeen survived.
The lake and the spell-weave of the lake.
Livingston
I see another side to Guatemala.The mis-toning bells of the church: discontent in a town turned in on itself, turned to drink drugs, craziness. In an cheap bar-restaurant, I play the fool and pretend I am a vampire with two chips sticking out the corners of my mouth and what looks like blood, which makes a black guy sitting with French tourists (drinking their wine) freak out. He starts raving about how he is going to be a priest in two months, that he is a shaman, that a woman’s spirit wanted to murder his buddy when they were younger and a bunch of them went to the cemetery (the biggest landmark in Livingston) and drove a stake through her heart. At this, he apes a vampire death. Then he’s off on one about how they nail a guy up on a cross every Easter and by now he’s crying and repeating himself.
“I swear it was only ketchup,” I say.
Paola reckoned he saw himself reflected in his image of me and I am inclined to agree. He spent time in the army and who knows what he saw, what he did.
Another night, a drunk Rasta at Karina’s Place grabbed a nice big knife.
The native Indians go so quietly about their business in town that you barely notice them. They go like the wise among the foolish.
Decided to risk a shiatsu massage. I knew it was going to be okay when half an hour had gone by and she still hadn’t brought the dog out.
I see another side to Guatemala.The mis-toning bells of the church: discontent in a town turned in on itself, turned to drink drugs, craziness. In an cheap bar-restaurant, I play the fool and pretend I am a vampire with two chips sticking out the corners of my mouth and what looks like blood, which makes a black guy sitting with French tourists (drinking their wine) freak out. He starts raving about how he is going to be a priest in two months, that he is a shaman, that a woman’s spirit wanted to murder his buddy when they were younger and a bunch of them went to the cemetery (the biggest landmark in Livingston) and drove a stake through her heart. At this, he apes a vampire death. Then he’s off on one about how they nail a guy up on a cross every Easter and by now he’s crying and repeating himself.
“I swear it was only ketchup,” I say.
Paola reckoned he saw himself reflected in his image of me and I am inclined to agree. He spent time in the army and who knows what he saw, what he did.
Another night, a drunk Rasta at Karina’s Place grabbed a nice big knife.
The native Indians go so quietly about their business in town that you barely notice them. They go like the wise among the foolish.
Decided to risk a shiatsu massage. I knew it was going to be okay when half an hour had gone by and she still hadn’t brought the dog out.
Honduras, March
La Ceiba
From Tela and a shoreline of litter and dead fish and crabs to La Ceiba. From one shithole to another. A mood of corruption and cynicism hangs about the town. In the Hotel Royal hang smells of burnt plastic and pervasive seediness. Someone in the room above stomps and clatters the ceiling. The room needs a better lock and in the streets where men hang about in small groups I have seen at least one gun. When I go out to look for supper with two Italian girls I tell them to walk with me down the middle of the road and not make eye contact.
Utila
I find it hard to believe that this is still Honduran territory. From an ugly, rotting port I have been ferried to a tropical island of myriad delights. A warm welcome, a light, airy room looking out to sea, hammocks, and those extras that every traveller appreciates: washing facilities and a kitchen. It is peaceful, attractive and safe. Locals zip along the road in open buggies and foreigners explore slowly on bicycles. There are kingfish, banana cake, café-cinemas, book exchanges, a hodgepodge of colourful wooden houses, derelict warehouses, flowering shrubs and trees, Mrs Patricia’s store, Gladys’s Kitchen, a bar called “The Bucket of Blood”, Internet and churches, including a “Church of God”.
At Trudy’s Inn, my oceanside hotel, I am told that for 168 dollars I can have a beginner’s course in scuba diving with three night’s accommodation thrown in. Well why not? I am so happy I could buy a T-shirt. I go to one of the cinema-cafés and sit on the ground to watch “Matrix.” Here is Maya, the world as a hologramatic projection.
Hanging above Main Street between the electric cables and a tree is a great colony of long-legged spiders.
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Utila is that English is the main language here, the enduring consequence of long-ago colonization by Britain and occupation by British pirates. I keep seeing local blokes who look like they’ve been transported from an English brickyard. Add Brazilians, resettled Garifuna and escaped African slaves to the mix and you get white people with scrunched-up faces and ruddy Anglo-Irish complexions, some of them formidably gross, alongside Black Caribs, all conversing in the same warm, thick English creole. “Der no salt” (short “a”) and “Goin daan airport,” was all I understood. I would not have liked to arrive by plane. The island is so narrow that the runway runs through forest from virtually one side to the other.
I read Bill’s comic book travel gift: “Tomorrow’s Stories”, Jack B. Quick and First American.
On Sunday afternoons in March it gets so hot that no one even swims. Your legs poach in the water. Once a man made a cup of tea and had to wait until Wednesday until he could drink it.
“January on, it blow hot like this, fucking right. We don’t have no winter clothes here. The stores don’t sell’em.”
I make my first open-water dive and discover an entire new world, the sub-aquatic, previously unknown to me. I see parrot fish, hosts of waving corral in gorgeous blues and purples and the Tunicate, not unlike soft, blue, tubular pasta, a creature from which Mark, my diving instructor, says we may have evolved from.
I exchange Louis de Bernières for Henry Miller’s “The Books In My Life”:
“We believe that there are mighty secrets to be unlocked. We hope that science will point the way, or if not, religion... Yet the writers of books have ever given evidence not only of magical powers but of the existence of universes which infringe and invade our own little universe and which are as familiar to us as though we had visited them in the flesh. These men had no ‘occult’ masters to initiate them. They sprang from parents similar to our own, they were the products of environments similar to our own. What makes them stand apart, then? Not the use of imagination, for men in other walks of life have displayed equally great powers of imagination. Not the mastery of a technique, for other artists practise equally difficult techniques. No, to me the cardinal fact about a writer is his ability to exploit the vast silence which enwraps us all... he has caught the spirit which informs all creation and he has rendered it in signs and symbols.”
In silence is our very being: here we are united.
Walt Whitman: “After all, the great lesson is that no special natural sight — not Alps, Niagara, Yosemite, or anything else — is more beautiful than the ordinary sunrise and sunset earth and sky, the common trees and grass.”
Miller again: “The most difficult thing in life is to learn to do only what is strictly advantageous to one’s welfare, strictly vital.”
Follow life, and life never fails you.
Sandflies. A small price to pay: or so I thought until I arrived back in Spain with festering leishmaniasis and nearly lost my left hand to it.
La Ceiba
From Tela and a shoreline of litter and dead fish and crabs to La Ceiba. From one shithole to another. A mood of corruption and cynicism hangs about the town. In the Hotel Royal hang smells of burnt plastic and pervasive seediness. Someone in the room above stomps and clatters the ceiling. The room needs a better lock and in the streets where men hang about in small groups I have seen at least one gun. When I go out to look for supper with two Italian girls I tell them to walk with me down the middle of the road and not make eye contact.
Utila
I find it hard to believe that this is still Honduran territory. From an ugly, rotting port I have been ferried to a tropical island of myriad delights. A warm welcome, a light, airy room looking out to sea, hammocks, and those extras that every traveller appreciates: washing facilities and a kitchen. It is peaceful, attractive and safe. Locals zip along the road in open buggies and foreigners explore slowly on bicycles. There are kingfish, banana cake, café-cinemas, book exchanges, a hodgepodge of colourful wooden houses, derelict warehouses, flowering shrubs and trees, Mrs Patricia’s store, Gladys’s Kitchen, a bar called “The Bucket of Blood”, Internet and churches, including a “Church of God”.
At Trudy’s Inn, my oceanside hotel, I am told that for 168 dollars I can have a beginner’s course in scuba diving with three night’s accommodation thrown in. Well why not? I am so happy I could buy a T-shirt. I go to one of the cinema-cafés and sit on the ground to watch “Matrix.” Here is Maya, the world as a hologramatic projection.
Hanging above Main Street between the electric cables and a tree is a great colony of long-legged spiders.
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Utila is that English is the main language here, the enduring consequence of long-ago colonization by Britain and occupation by British pirates. I keep seeing local blokes who look like they’ve been transported from an English brickyard. Add Brazilians, resettled Garifuna and escaped African slaves to the mix and you get white people with scrunched-up faces and ruddy Anglo-Irish complexions, some of them formidably gross, alongside Black Caribs, all conversing in the same warm, thick English creole. “Der no salt” (short “a”) and “Goin daan airport,” was all I understood. I would not have liked to arrive by plane. The island is so narrow that the runway runs through forest from virtually one side to the other.
I read Bill’s comic book travel gift: “Tomorrow’s Stories”, Jack B. Quick and First American.
On Sunday afternoons in March it gets so hot that no one even swims. Your legs poach in the water. Once a man made a cup of tea and had to wait until Wednesday until he could drink it.
“January on, it blow hot like this, fucking right. We don’t have no winter clothes here. The stores don’t sell’em.”
I make my first open-water dive and discover an entire new world, the sub-aquatic, previously unknown to me. I see parrot fish, hosts of waving corral in gorgeous blues and purples and the Tunicate, not unlike soft, blue, tubular pasta, a creature from which Mark, my diving instructor, says we may have evolved from.
I exchange Louis de Bernières for Henry Miller’s “The Books In My Life”:
“We believe that there are mighty secrets to be unlocked. We hope that science will point the way, or if not, religion... Yet the writers of books have ever given evidence not only of magical powers but of the existence of universes which infringe and invade our own little universe and which are as familiar to us as though we had visited them in the flesh. These men had no ‘occult’ masters to initiate them. They sprang from parents similar to our own, they were the products of environments similar to our own. What makes them stand apart, then? Not the use of imagination, for men in other walks of life have displayed equally great powers of imagination. Not the mastery of a technique, for other artists practise equally difficult techniques. No, to me the cardinal fact about a writer is his ability to exploit the vast silence which enwraps us all... he has caught the spirit which informs all creation and he has rendered it in signs and symbols.”
In silence is our very being: here we are united.
Walt Whitman: “After all, the great lesson is that no special natural sight — not Alps, Niagara, Yosemite, or anything else — is more beautiful than the ordinary sunrise and sunset earth and sky, the common trees and grass.”
Miller again: “The most difficult thing in life is to learn to do only what is strictly advantageous to one’s welfare, strictly vital.”
Follow life, and life never fails you.
Sandflies. A small price to pay: or so I thought until I arrived back in Spain with festering leishmaniasis and nearly lost my left hand to it.
Nicaragua, March
León
City of rocking chairs and revolution.
A guitar in the courtyard carefully removes and reorders my innards and bones, leaving me weightless, my hair blue. If it plays on, I shall become smoke and curl through a keyhole to the sleepless land. It plays, prises the traps from my teeth. My lips are warm and unmoving; white, my eyes. My shoes have lost their master, my heart is servant to the sound.
24th March
I meet Marvin Benito Mendoza, an accredited hero of the Revolution, who has cobbled together a one-man museum close to the main square, a tremendous clutter of photographs, helmets, religious artifacts, political posters, testimonials, a parrot, ammunition and books all crammed into one room. We see Marvin in one of the photos, a rumbustious young man running through smoke with his comrades. Must have been ’79. We are interrupted by Luis Manuel, an associate of his, who expatiates in the same namby-pamby newspeak that I recall instantly from CCOO in Madrid on his personal discrepancies with the reformed congressional representation, and at such length in his aftershave and neat shirt that I feel like nutting him. Marvin meanwhile sweeps and mops around us in bandanna and patchwork waistcoat, paying as much heed as the parrot.
I see the bars bent by the poet Alfonso Cortés in the room in Rubén Dario’s house, where he was locked in after going mad. I think his memorial stone bears lines by him which go something like:
¡Tantos muertos que no han vivido
Tantos vivos que nunca morirán!
A sign at the Café Sesteo says:
“Please put the garbage in its place.”
So I oblige: “You’re just trash, you know that?”
Managua
I am walking down to the lake when a would-be young ruffian tries to “touch” me for a peso and then offers to rob me. I do not know why but I invite him to try: “¡Pues venga!”, upon which he thinks it over before replying “No,” shaking my hand and wishing me well. The same to you, I said. The city is a scene of devastation, and yet revolution and earthquakes were more than twenty years ago. I pass by the ruined cathedral, the very colour of death, to the lakeside where a few people are sitting on broken concrete, throwing bits of it into the water. A rusty old boat is crammed with young lovers and older, bored ones, going nowhere.
Granada
At the far reach of my journey I am drawn back in time. I read “Love in the times of cholera” and watch horse-drawn carriages go by colonial courtyards tiled in red, white and black checks. I surprise myself by joining in a tropical fruit-fest at “The Bearded Monkey.” As a memento I buy a picture of a parrot by Abel, who makes delightful pintura primitiva.
León
City of rocking chairs and revolution.
A guitar in the courtyard carefully removes and reorders my innards and bones, leaving me weightless, my hair blue. If it plays on, I shall become smoke and curl through a keyhole to the sleepless land. It plays, prises the traps from my teeth. My lips are warm and unmoving; white, my eyes. My shoes have lost their master, my heart is servant to the sound.
24th March
I meet Marvin Benito Mendoza, an accredited hero of the Revolution, who has cobbled together a one-man museum close to the main square, a tremendous clutter of photographs, helmets, religious artifacts, political posters, testimonials, a parrot, ammunition and books all crammed into one room. We see Marvin in one of the photos, a rumbustious young man running through smoke with his comrades. Must have been ’79. We are interrupted by Luis Manuel, an associate of his, who expatiates in the same namby-pamby newspeak that I recall instantly from CCOO in Madrid on his personal discrepancies with the reformed congressional representation, and at such length in his aftershave and neat shirt that I feel like nutting him. Marvin meanwhile sweeps and mops around us in bandanna and patchwork waistcoat, paying as much heed as the parrot.
I see the bars bent by the poet Alfonso Cortés in the room in Rubén Dario’s house, where he was locked in after going mad. I think his memorial stone bears lines by him which go something like:
¡Tantos muertos que no han vivido
Tantos vivos que nunca morirán!
A sign at the Café Sesteo says:
“Please put the garbage in its place.”
So I oblige: “You’re just trash, you know that?”
Managua
I am walking down to the lake when a would-be young ruffian tries to “touch” me for a peso and then offers to rob me. I do not know why but I invite him to try: “¡Pues venga!”, upon which he thinks it over before replying “No,” shaking my hand and wishing me well. The same to you, I said. The city is a scene of devastation, and yet revolution and earthquakes were more than twenty years ago. I pass by the ruined cathedral, the very colour of death, to the lakeside where a few people are sitting on broken concrete, throwing bits of it into the water. A rusty old boat is crammed with young lovers and older, bored ones, going nowhere.
Granada
At the far reach of my journey I am drawn back in time. I read “Love in the times of cholera” and watch horse-drawn carriages go by colonial courtyards tiled in red, white and black checks. I surprise myself by joining in a tropical fruit-fest at “The Bearded Monkey.” As a memento I buy a picture of a parrot by Abel, who makes delightful pintura primitiva.
The time has come to head back to Mexico, but before I do, there’s an island on the lake that beckons.
A heavy trolley loaded with sacks, bottles, brooms, boxes and baskets is pushed along tracks to where the boat waits patiently like a pack animal. It will take us across the lake to Ometepe. From the dock, trucks will ferry us off to an assortment of guesthouses and fish suppers in Altagracia and I will meet Carl and Marcy from Canada and a very likeable Austrian joker called Christoph.
Ometepe, Villa Paraíso
We rumbled to Santo Domingo on a bus which had a cardboard sign taped to the dashboard:
NO VOMITAR
EN
EL BUS
When we got here, Nico was on the roof sharing a bun with a parrot. White-faced monkey and Villa Paraíso resident thief, this darling little fella would later drink my eye drops, in between darting around other guests’ rooms and squirting out their toothpaste.
You can’t not like this place. Bananas thrive and small, sweet grapefruit. The black sand gets so hot that you have to run across it.
Omepete is an island of two volcanic cones. Tomorrow we are to climb the higher one.
Carl made a hot breakfast of porridge with raisins on the terrace at 4.30 a.m. and an early bus dropped us off at a track that proved soft and gentle through banana and Old man’s beard, before deciding enough was enough and setting us on a steep climb. Over basalt rocks and a hard going through crumbled stone and dust, up past pink shrubs to the low whoops of howler monkeys.
Onward and upward, over rock and piled boulders, the flowers now a deep butterscotch and scarlet, finding an earthy terrain of mauve iris before the toughest ascent, struggling through shingle and cat’s tongue all the way up to tiny white Alpine flowers, which announce the cone.
We are looking down into the crater.
A heavy trolley loaded with sacks, bottles, brooms, boxes and baskets is pushed along tracks to where the boat waits patiently like a pack animal. It will take us across the lake to Ometepe. From the dock, trucks will ferry us off to an assortment of guesthouses and fish suppers in Altagracia and I will meet Carl and Marcy from Canada and a very likeable Austrian joker called Christoph.
Ometepe, Villa Paraíso
We rumbled to Santo Domingo on a bus which had a cardboard sign taped to the dashboard:
NO VOMITAR
EN
EL BUS
When we got here, Nico was on the roof sharing a bun with a parrot. White-faced monkey and Villa Paraíso resident thief, this darling little fella would later drink my eye drops, in between darting around other guests’ rooms and squirting out their toothpaste.
You can’t not like this place. Bananas thrive and small, sweet grapefruit. The black sand gets so hot that you have to run across it.
Omepete is an island of two volcanic cones. Tomorrow we are to climb the higher one.
Carl made a hot breakfast of porridge with raisins on the terrace at 4.30 a.m. and an early bus dropped us off at a track that proved soft and gentle through banana and Old man’s beard, before deciding enough was enough and setting us on a steep climb. Over basalt rocks and a hard going through crumbled stone and dust, up past pink shrubs to the low whoops of howler monkeys.
Onward and upward, over rock and piled boulders, the flowers now a deep butterscotch and scarlet, finding an earthy terrain of mauve iris before the toughest ascent, struggling through shingle and cat’s tongue all the way up to tiny white Alpine flowers, which announce the cone.
We are looking down into the crater.
Yellowish, sulphurous gases steam out of vents. I sit down and have to stand straight back up as the ground is so damn hot. It is windy and cold. My hat blows off and is all but lost to the volcano but Christoph pounces on it! Then the clouds clear and we see the far-away coast, the great Cocibolca lake and the other volcano.
My knee is crocked and in pain all the way down, but a deep sleep after rum and an ibuprofen from Carl work wonders. At dinner, Marcy was so adept at sizing up and setting out my personal romantic situation that I feel quite hopeful. She told me that she went to register pondscum as an email address but it was already taken [these were early days still for the worldwide web]. I wanted to join these good people for the adventure and by golly we did it. They were all three such friendly and cheerful company.
Guatemala, April
Antigua
The theme of colonial town and volcano resumes only this time over-endowed with clothes and jewellery stores and restaurantes con encanto (wholemeal bagels, for pity’s sake) that rightfully belong somewhere else. Venture beyond this clearly demarcated touristic hub at the centre — if only to get away from snotty young English with their laid-back sneers — and you quickly find yourself in streets where no foreigner belongs.
Antigua
The theme of colonial town and volcano resumes only this time over-endowed with clothes and jewellery stores and restaurantes con encanto (wholemeal bagels, for pity’s sake) that rightfully belong somewhere else. Venture beyond this clearly demarcated touristic hub at the centre — if only to get away from snotty young English with their laid-back sneers — and you quickly find yourself in streets where no foreigner belongs.
My Posada had definitely switched to the other side of the street when I got back tonight. I take this as a good sign. I am reading Tim Powers’ “Last Call”. He talks about the archetypal living interplay of the unconscious so: “”shapes ritualistically changing their relationships to one another like planets moving around the sun, in a dance that had been old long before the early hominids had found things to fear in the patterns of stars and the moon in the night sky.”
I was wandering aimlessly in the forest of my life when I found myself in a vast indoor indigenous market. There was a powerful shrine for a seated figure which, even before I even got to Atitlán, was Maximon, and a winged black angel. It began to rain and I had to drink beer. A chill went round the old capital like a pencil line through a puzzle-page maze, and at the market in the city of fallen towers I picked up Le Guin’s “City of Illusions.”
Tim Powers seems to be suggesting that simple neglect of the archetypal dispositions that inhabit and move about our unconscious being may be enough for them to develop a kind of autonomous animation. He lends these potentialities a half life as a ghostly strays.
In “Last Call” and Antigua, a tense expectancy builds as Easter approaches and I remember Flores and the bats, streaming out by the thousand from an upper floor aperture above a shop, as if ejected under pressure.
April 14th
The students staged a political burlesque, “La Huelga de los Dolores”, but were outplayed by the children’s Easter procession when one of the Roman guards they were carrying toppled off the platform and had to be carried back to the cathedral, his arm still extended as if pleading with a small boy to give him his spear back.
On Palm Sunday, the parade had a golden cross, a fortune-teller’s crystal ball fell and smashed, and the band played like right out of “The Godfather”.
In “Last Call” and Antigua, a tense expectancy builds as Easter approaches and I remember Flores and the bats, streaming out by the thousand from an upper floor aperture above a shop, as if ejected under pressure.
April 14th
The students staged a political burlesque, “La Huelga de los Dolores”, but were outplayed by the children’s Easter procession when one of the Roman guards they were carrying toppled off the platform and had to be carried back to the cathedral, his arm still extended as if pleading with a small boy to give him his spear back.
On Palm Sunday, the parade had a golden cross, a fortune-teller’s crystal ball fell and smashed, and the band played like right out of “The Godfather”.
San Pedro, Lake Atitlán
A mad and welcome relief from the oppressive religious rituals and crowds of Easter in Antigua. Drunken revelry with three Vietnam Vets and a white-whiskered dealer called Greg, who conjured up his own reality around him; Sid smoking rocks and Doug looking normal until he opened his mouth and Dave not looking normal and babbling.
Greg was telling me about how the police didn’t get into San Pedro until dead recently when the village was foolish enough make a deal for two paved roads and street lighting in return for letting the police stay for three months, with no going into businesses and no guns. When the contingent arrived they were welcomed by the locals who surrounded them in silence with their arms crossed. Since the elections brought in a law-and-order president, the status quo changed and now the police authority operate almost normally.
Before that, the police weren’t allowed in. The locals would kill them. It happened not long ago in San Marcos, where the veggie hippies chill and go bong. Two cops beating up a local were set on; one died and the other was a mess for life. Now the police drive through and don’t stop. They quit their station there. Last week, he told me bandidos held up the road between Sololá and Panajachel for hours. People had to stand in line to be robbed.
After a man killed a local boy and the police put him in a cell in neighbouring San Juan, the entire village of San Pedro marched over, tore the jail apart, carried the man to the jetty and started stoning him to death. A police launch sped over from the main town of Panajachel and when the boat arrived the people started stoning that instead and forced the police away. Only UN troopers, respected here, were able to intervene and salvage the piece of live meat that was left.
Such is this pretty lakeside village with its tourists and its trippers.
A mad and welcome relief from the oppressive religious rituals and crowds of Easter in Antigua. Drunken revelry with three Vietnam Vets and a white-whiskered dealer called Greg, who conjured up his own reality around him; Sid smoking rocks and Doug looking normal until he opened his mouth and Dave not looking normal and babbling.
Greg was telling me about how the police didn’t get into San Pedro until dead recently when the village was foolish enough make a deal for two paved roads and street lighting in return for letting the police stay for three months, with no going into businesses and no guns. When the contingent arrived they were welcomed by the locals who surrounded them in silence with their arms crossed. Since the elections brought in a law-and-order president, the status quo changed and now the police authority operate almost normally.
Before that, the police weren’t allowed in. The locals would kill them. It happened not long ago in San Marcos, where the veggie hippies chill and go bong. Two cops beating up a local were set on; one died and the other was a mess for life. Now the police drive through and don’t stop. They quit their station there. Last week, he told me bandidos held up the road between Sololá and Panajachel for hours. People had to stand in line to be robbed.
After a man killed a local boy and the police put him in a cell in neighbouring San Juan, the entire village of San Pedro marched over, tore the jail apart, carried the man to the jetty and started stoning him to death. A police launch sped over from the main town of Panajachel and when the boat arrived the people started stoning that instead and forced the police away. Only UN troopers, respected here, were able to intervene and salvage the piece of live meat that was left.
Such is this pretty lakeside village with its tourists and its trippers.
There was shot-away Doug, who couldn’t believe he had slept out by the school yard. “I mean: I hate those dogs.” And Greg dead proud at having woken up in his own bed.
Backbreaking rides across the lake on the fast bouncing launch that hits the water like it’s wet cement.
One night leaves me at the mercy of the morning sun. It started innocently enough in a cubby hole bar with Doug who ordered a litre of Gallo. Another guy tells the girl not to serve him: “Hombre malo,” and she puts the bottle back in the freezer. “It’s okay, it’s for me not him,” I say and am told “No queremos problemas.” It takes a while to get it back but from then on I couldn’t stop. Mind you, I had done a couple of lines before stepping out and had picked up more along the way. With the other bars closed we end up at an Asturian’s place singing to Mártires del Compás. I am saved only by fresh pasta and Chilean wine at Pinocchio’s.
Greg: “You’re always alone.”
The lake, a deep cauldron, is always more distant, intriguing and elusive than Petén Itzá or Cocibolca.
Backbreaking rides across the lake on the fast bouncing launch that hits the water like it’s wet cement.
One night leaves me at the mercy of the morning sun. It started innocently enough in a cubby hole bar with Doug who ordered a litre of Gallo. Another guy tells the girl not to serve him: “Hombre malo,” and she puts the bottle back in the freezer. “It’s okay, it’s for me not him,” I say and am told “No queremos problemas.” It takes a while to get it back but from then on I couldn’t stop. Mind you, I had done a couple of lines before stepping out and had picked up more along the way. With the other bars closed we end up at an Asturian’s place singing to Mártires del Compás. I am saved only by fresh pasta and Chilean wine at Pinocchio’s.
Greg: “You’re always alone.”
The lake, a deep cauldron, is always more distant, intriguing and elusive than Petén Itzá or Cocibolca.
Good Friday
They still do crazy druggy things round here regardless of the police presence. “The back end of the old ways,” says Greg. Easter is celebrated with a kayak race whose participants have to smoke a bong both before and after, D’Noz is serving a turkey dinner whose every dish is made with marijuana and last week, Hanna tells me, friends of hers in Panajachel got hold of a bottle of nitrous oxide and “had themselves a balloon party,” The swirl of activity behind the Easter procession and the swirl in my head as children scoop up the multicoloured sawdust in their hands...
San Marcos
I opt for El Unicornio, the cheaper of the cabin hotel-cum-massage centre-cum-twee tea garden-cum-meditation retreats among coffee and banana by the lake. On the usual jarring launch that smacks the waves mightlily, jolting and splashing all the passengers, was a skinny old American who held out his hands with eyes closed and intoned “Ooooom,” trying to convince himself that none of this was happening or impinged upon him.
David reminds me, “If you start judging, you’ll never stop.”
There are riots in the capital and burning buses after they put the bus fare up from 8p to 12p. When you only make £1.50 a day that hurts. The government responds, as governments do, with teargas and armoured vehicles.
Santa Cruz
Cut foot, put it up, hang it on a bunny tree
Use the tail as cotton wool, the one with alcohol’s for me
They still do crazy druggy things round here regardless of the police presence. “The back end of the old ways,” says Greg. Easter is celebrated with a kayak race whose participants have to smoke a bong both before and after, D’Noz is serving a turkey dinner whose every dish is made with marijuana and last week, Hanna tells me, friends of hers in Panajachel got hold of a bottle of nitrous oxide and “had themselves a balloon party,” The swirl of activity behind the Easter procession and the swirl in my head as children scoop up the multicoloured sawdust in their hands...
San Marcos
I opt for El Unicornio, the cheaper of the cabin hotel-cum-massage centre-cum-twee tea garden-cum-meditation retreats among coffee and banana by the lake. On the usual jarring launch that smacks the waves mightlily, jolting and splashing all the passengers, was a skinny old American who held out his hands with eyes closed and intoned “Ooooom,” trying to convince himself that none of this was happening or impinged upon him.
David reminds me, “If you start judging, you’ll never stop.”
There are riots in the capital and burning buses after they put the bus fare up from 8p to 12p. When you only make £1.50 a day that hurts. The government responds, as governments do, with teargas and armoured vehicles.
Santa Cruz
Cut foot, put it up, hang it on a bunny tree
Use the tail as cotton wool, the one with alcohol’s for me
Quetzaltenango, May
A terrific little city with purpose, buzzing with small businesses, workshops, tailors and a carpenter’s on the main square. When hot and sunny turns to cold and rainy by the afternoon you don’t mind a bit because there’s a confident sense of getting on with life, and if nowhere else in the world is going anywhere , well Xela is! Unlike sickly Antigua, which sucks its wealth out of dumb tourists, this is a real town with modern guatamaltecos living more amicably alongside indígenos without Antigua’s demotion of the latter to street refuse. Here there is authentic street. A few Spanish schools and the spacious Casa Argentina apart, the city ignores us foreigners. Its comfortable bustle is for itself. The cafés and small eating places are for locals, not prettified, just simple and welcoming. Repair yards and stationers, Indian women making palm crosses, a flower market and a touch of sleaze with “Sueños eróticos” showing at the cinema — just enough to maintain the momentum of reality without sinking into ugliness. Garnachas a quetzal each and arroz con leche, cobbled streets to walk by night, litter never allowed to accumulate that much but disappearing from the scene. A last licuado de banana with Maggie in the Blue Angel while Eli does things with the diábolo that you could not pay to see, and I leave the Americans glued to a basketball game on the TV to go prepare my leaving of Guatemala.
Early morning fire crackers and weirdly tolling bells through cool mist, bicycles, coffee smells, a man sweeping, schoolchildren in their varied colours, two brothers holding hands, the church’s red light warming the man in its steps, a city wakes quietly and in the cold of the morning it is good. I leave in a bus with the radio off-station and full volume, the drive pressing down an accelerator pedal in the shape of a foot, complete with toes.
A terrific little city with purpose, buzzing with small businesses, workshops, tailors and a carpenter’s on the main square. When hot and sunny turns to cold and rainy by the afternoon you don’t mind a bit because there’s a confident sense of getting on with life, and if nowhere else in the world is going anywhere , well Xela is! Unlike sickly Antigua, which sucks its wealth out of dumb tourists, this is a real town with modern guatamaltecos living more amicably alongside indígenos without Antigua’s demotion of the latter to street refuse. Here there is authentic street. A few Spanish schools and the spacious Casa Argentina apart, the city ignores us foreigners. Its comfortable bustle is for itself. The cafés and small eating places are for locals, not prettified, just simple and welcoming. Repair yards and stationers, Indian women making palm crosses, a flower market and a touch of sleaze with “Sueños eróticos” showing at the cinema — just enough to maintain the momentum of reality without sinking into ugliness. Garnachas a quetzal each and arroz con leche, cobbled streets to walk by night, litter never allowed to accumulate that much but disappearing from the scene. A last licuado de banana with Maggie in the Blue Angel while Eli does things with the diábolo that you could not pay to see, and I leave the Americans glued to a basketball game on the TV to go prepare my leaving of Guatemala.
Early morning fire crackers and weirdly tolling bells through cool mist, bicycles, coffee smells, a man sweeping, schoolchildren in their varied colours, two brothers holding hands, the church’s red light warming the man in its steps, a city wakes quietly and in the cold of the morning it is good. I leave in a bus with the radio off-station and full volume, the drive pressing down an accelerator pedal in the shape of a foot, complete with toes.
Mexico, May
Zipolite
Instantly bored by Zipolite and its muggy heat at the fag end of the season, I settle into reading “Donnerjack” by Roger Zelazny and Jane Lindskold. It quotes Eliot like “Last Call.”
The first thing I notice on returning to Mexico is the resentfulness behind the mien. By adopting the USA as a role model, the Mexicans are onto a double loser, relinquishing what distinguishes them and makes them special while setting themselves up to be permanently piss-poor “cousins,” not even part of the family.
Brenna tells me that one street stall in Todos Santos sells coffins and foam rubber mattresses.
The iridescent green tails of the lizards and the thundering Pacific.
The lodges and restaurants have names like “Shambala,” “Lo Cósmico,” “El Alquemista.” I can’t abide this kind of shite.
Oaxaca
A chicken bus ride over the mountains takes me from the coast’s mouldy damp heat to cool and rain. How rain gives comfort. Rain and lakes. Tamed water.
You know you are nearing “civilization” when the bog paper thickens. Oaxaca is neat and tidy, one of those friendly, easy places a traveller can rest up in.
A grand water fight at the Magic Hostal, chess games at the Santa Isabel, and in the Santo Domingo a church that even the baroque-allergic me took his hat off to.
The mushrooms in honey we ate along the way were a flop but it didn’t matter, because the walk from San Juan to San Mateo del Río was through the most tremendous, inspiring country, following and crisscrossing the river for three hours or so.
I think you have to live stuff out before you can die. Best get on with it and not avoid experience or you’ll never be allowed to!
On the bus, a musician asked me if it was true that no one in England lives beyond sixty. He understood that on reaching that age, people were got rid of — specifically, that they were thrown into the sea from boats.
D.F.
I am among spoiled, rude people and a lot of fussiness. In a restaurant I just want to be served food, not waited on. A few extra dollars and people straightways think that they are better than their fellow human beings. Pretentiousness should be sanctioned by law: to the stocks with them!
In the zócalo, I turn my back on a dull and burbling Compay Segundo to watch the Aztec dance of a gorgeous Guerrera indígena.
In the Palacio Nacional: “El mundo debe a México: el maíz, el fríjol, el tabaco, el cacao, el algodón, el henequén, el tomate, el jitomate, el cacahuete, la tuna, el aguacate, el chicle, la papaya, el chile…”
They forgot the chihuahuas.
The poor in Central America number 200 million.
I thought that the police presence in the zócalo demonstration was bit excessive until I realized that the demonstrators were the police, then I couldn’t understand why to their rear they had the support of the taxi drivers, filling a quarter of the square with their green and gold VW Beetles, but of course it was a separate protest and there was room for even more: for jailed UNAM students, for indígenos in Veracruz etc etc
Van Gogh’s night of stars in the Virgen de Guadalupe’s cloak, blue and gold.
Zipolite
Instantly bored by Zipolite and its muggy heat at the fag end of the season, I settle into reading “Donnerjack” by Roger Zelazny and Jane Lindskold. It quotes Eliot like “Last Call.”
The first thing I notice on returning to Mexico is the resentfulness behind the mien. By adopting the USA as a role model, the Mexicans are onto a double loser, relinquishing what distinguishes them and makes them special while setting themselves up to be permanently piss-poor “cousins,” not even part of the family.
Brenna tells me that one street stall in Todos Santos sells coffins and foam rubber mattresses.
The iridescent green tails of the lizards and the thundering Pacific.
The lodges and restaurants have names like “Shambala,” “Lo Cósmico,” “El Alquemista.” I can’t abide this kind of shite.
Oaxaca
A chicken bus ride over the mountains takes me from the coast’s mouldy damp heat to cool and rain. How rain gives comfort. Rain and lakes. Tamed water.
You know you are nearing “civilization” when the bog paper thickens. Oaxaca is neat and tidy, one of those friendly, easy places a traveller can rest up in.
A grand water fight at the Magic Hostal, chess games at the Santa Isabel, and in the Santo Domingo a church that even the baroque-allergic me took his hat off to.
The mushrooms in honey we ate along the way were a flop but it didn’t matter, because the walk from San Juan to San Mateo del Río was through the most tremendous, inspiring country, following and crisscrossing the river for three hours or so.
I think you have to live stuff out before you can die. Best get on with it and not avoid experience or you’ll never be allowed to!
On the bus, a musician asked me if it was true that no one in England lives beyond sixty. He understood that on reaching that age, people were got rid of — specifically, that they were thrown into the sea from boats.
D.F.
I am among spoiled, rude people and a lot of fussiness. In a restaurant I just want to be served food, not waited on. A few extra dollars and people straightways think that they are better than their fellow human beings. Pretentiousness should be sanctioned by law: to the stocks with them!
In the zócalo, I turn my back on a dull and burbling Compay Segundo to watch the Aztec dance of a gorgeous Guerrera indígena.
In the Palacio Nacional: “El mundo debe a México: el maíz, el fríjol, el tabaco, el cacao, el algodón, el henequén, el tomate, el jitomate, el cacahuete, la tuna, el aguacate, el chicle, la papaya, el chile…”
They forgot the chihuahuas.
The poor in Central America number 200 million.
I thought that the police presence in the zócalo demonstration was bit excessive until I realized that the demonstrators were the police, then I couldn’t understand why to their rear they had the support of the taxi drivers, filling a quarter of the square with their green and gold VW Beetles, but of course it was a separate protest and there was room for even more: for jailed UNAM students, for indígenos in Veracruz etc etc
Van Gogh’s night of stars in the Virgen de Guadalupe’s cloak, blue and gold.