We are finally leaving the western world. The swarm of bodies at the Guatemalan border tells me so. About 10 of them jump into the road as we rock up offering their 'tramitadore' (helper) services. I am nervous about this first step into a developing country so I have decided in advance to enlist their help. I probably should have taken my chances with the officials but at least I have one very small Guatemalan called William to ask questions of as we do paperwork on each side of the bridge. He tries to get me to buy a permit for all the CA4 countries (Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama) for $250 but I resist and he eventually takes me to an official who sells me a Guatemala-only permit for 161 Quetzals (13 GBP). Then he wants $70 to jump the queue for the bank. We say no and suddenly it turns into Q200. He just hands the documents to someone halfway up in the line while we sit an eat a peanut ice lolly from a bucket. Q12 to fumigate the bike ie spray the wheels with a some chemical that probably violates several international conventions.
Volcanos burst through the lush green hills and elephantine leaves overflow the roadlines as we bounce on down the potholed roads.
We stop at a little graveyard.
Maps and GPS seem silly here so we just ask at each junction and are in Quetzaltenango in a couple of hours. Tiny Amanda at 'Don Diego' has tiny room for us and bizarrely there is great Indian food nearby. The ATM will only work if I lean on the buttons with my full weight.
Up through a cloud and then down down to Antigua. We are diverted by a parade and end up arriving via an alley no more than an inch wider than the bike. We take a room from David who describes himself as a greenbelly, meaning mostly Spanish roots, he has a stunning toucan called Bruno. It's a lovely colonial town with a labyrinthine market
and we spend a day wandering all the quake-felled churches and cobbles
and eating fresh banana bread in the main square while a bunch of 8-12 year-olds go through their breakdance routine. Strong cocktails at "Frida's". The owner and her friends spend hours on a lesbian dating site at the next table.
After a dusty and grimy ride to Chiqimula we hit the Honduran border. We buy lempiras from a guy in a cowboy hat wandering the carpark. The Hondurans appear to have something against trees as they send me off to get FOUR copies of ALL my documents. Of course the only photocopier is back on the Guatemalan side so I have to walk back through no-man's land and duck under the gate. Then I am treated to a virtuoso display of Zen typing - each keystroke of my details entered with deep thought and consideration. Then he writes it all out by hand again just for good measure. We talk about his favourite spots in Honduras, gender issues in Spanish, my Danish ancestry and the correct pronunction of the word "hot". Then he sends me back to Guatemala for more copies. By this time it's lunchtime and we have to wait for the bank to reopen. Eventually we are speeding on our way, or at least we would be if we weren't halted by a policeman who checks all our papers and a skinny man with a spray-machine to further disolve my wheels.
Bumpy and steep cobbles hit new heights in Copan Ruinas.
Such a pretty town and I have a good feeling about Honduras. Friendly, Beautiful and Odd. Although rule number 1 - never order nachos south of Texas - is flouted for the 2nd time this trip. We plead inebriation. What kind of human toilet bowls eat this agent orange cheese whiz?!
The ruins themselves are awesome and we commune with them for a couple of hours and watch the scarlet macaws in the trees in their jaw-dropping rainbow livery. Their screeches roughly translate as "help! I'm being disemboweled with a corkscrew".
A beautiful exhibit of glass-plate photographs from the 1890s shows how much the ruins have been restored. They were just random-looking piles of stones in the middle of the jungle back then.
Slightly disconcerting visiting an ATM here - there are guys across the street covering my every move from different angles with chunky shotguns. Standard practise across central america it turns out. Even pharmacies and restaurants have this kind of firepower on display at times.
Our hosts in Tela, on the Carribean coast are a Québécois ex-biker couple in their 60s. Tiny sun-leathered Nicole, her outrageous breast augmentation almost tipping her over, shows off her babies, a pair of white-faced monkeys. They wrap their soft tails around my neck and pull my hair petulantly when she won't let them eat the nearby tree's leaves. Sometimes she takes them for a spin around the town in a double pram that sits by the gate. She calls her husband 'Daddy' and he rustles up cold beers and a delicious breakfast while issuing travel advice through a nicotine-stained handlebar moustache.
The beach is smelly but the water is deliciously warm and there are locals splashing nearby as sharkbait. The town's dusty little streets feel vaguely threatening as it approaches dusk. We are not reassured when a truck towing three lions in a cage stops at the petrol station.
Getting to Trujillo is a ballet of pothole dodging but so worth it.
We stay out of town at Casa Kiwi which has that end-of-the-world feeling. Picking through the flotsam at dusk all you can hear is the gulping of the water and your sandy footfalls.
Various local characters drop in, one pair, with drop-dead-gorgeous Hondureña girlfriends in tow, do a great line in fishermens' tails over ron (rum) and offering diving trips providing we bribe the commander of the nearby naval base. José is another, he lets us zoom around on his slightly broken jetski.
Chaz, the Kiwi of the title, is lovely, she teaches us Honduran pool and serves up great food and cunningly crafted cocktails.
We take the bike, gloriously free of luggage for a spin around the Garífuna township. People call out friendly hellos but we are not quite comfortable enough to stop and chat. Too much bad-mouthing of central america rings in our ears. If we were traveling through a little more slowly it would probably be different. The sun melts into the palms as we head home along the sandbar.
Up at dawn to tackle the direct road to Tegucigalpa through Oloncho. 100 miles of dirt with all the delicate texture of a dried up creek, winding up and down densely forested mountains. I love it and the romance of such intense isolation but Emma is over the revving and dusty bouncing pretty quickly!
Halfway, at La Unión, we eat at a tiny comedor, I chat with the señora and her bright daughter about films as they flick towels at flies about our ears. If only my Spanish were better..
12km short of Valle des Angeles disaster strikes as the rear tyre deflates. I bless the pressure sensors which give me a few seconds to pull over safely. Still it's just getting dark and with the raucous cacophony of the jungle all around, I extract a huge nail and set to work by torchlight.
Complicated by the nail having gone right through and out the sidewall, it takes a couple of attempts but manage to gingerly roll the last few miles into town on the bodgy repair. The bored teenagers on reception have me drive right in up some steep steps, through the lobby and narrowly avoid the pool, invisible in the dark.
Having endured a tough day, Emma is not best pleased when the hot water doesn't work despite my protracted negotiations with the slackjaws. Her ice-cream is gross so I give her mine. Then the TV remote won't work and the bed is comically soft. Not our day.
I'm up at the crack worrying of course. Honduras is worst-case scenario for getting a new tyre. At least we are not far from the capital. A local mechanic gives me an address which may be able to help. I chat to a kid there having his moped fixed. Despite looking about 15, he turns out to be a 'secret policeman' he shows me a huge handgun in a shoulder holster. My dodgy repair gives out on the way to Tegucigalpa but after another sweaty grovel at the roadside
we make it to the tyre shop. The only suitable tyre they have is a bit small but it will have to do.
After a stopover in grim little Danli we are on to the Nicaraguan border. The Honduran side is a breeze and I feel smug as I brush aside the tramitadores and moneychangers. As a monument to Honduran roadbuilding, there is one final kingsize pothole right before the chain that separates Honduras from Nicaragua. A guy called Raymur comes and takes our picture for his motorbike magazine.
Then two official-looking guys with clipboards usher us to the fumigación and take our documents. Too late it dawns on us that they are tramitadores. On the plus side they probably speed the process a little. On the minus, they demand $20 'tip'. I refuse and they tell us to come to the police. We take a deep breath and just ride past them, having managed to retrieve our documents. They still get away with about £10 in overcharging for the fumigación and some change they don't return. Oh well. The irritation is washed away by pretty mountain scenery as we descend through Ocotal on roads that seem like rails after Honduras.
We fly along and lunch in Estelí. The bike gets even more attention than usual here. There's practically a queue outside the restaurant to point at it and I get wrapped up in two long conversations about it. In León, we put the pool players off when we ride right into the bar of Via Via to our room. Stunning building and a beautiful room.
I set about emailing about my boat across the Darién Gap which is prooving tricky as the one boat I can find so far doesn't leave til March 6th - a month behind my schedule - would dump me in rainy season in Colombia. We wander the pretty streets of the town
and take a ride to the beach at Las Penitas. We walk to the Guadalupe cemetary but some kids hanging around deter us from staying long. If it was SE Asia it would be different but here you always feel you have to watch your back. Shame. We find an amazing sushi bar with lovely panelled walls. The cocktails are so strong I have to water mine down!
A car goes by with the sound system to end all. Nicaraguan distortion would not be out of place on an MBV recording. The night ends over Nicaraguan rules pool back at Via Via with locals who take their game very seriously. I acquit myself honorably.
The new cathedral in Managua is pretty stunning. As if a lifelong multistory carpark designer finally got his dream job.
The old cathedral, and most of the downtown was razed by earthquake in 1972. We cruise around that area too - a weird sort of ghost-shanty-town of trailer homes and such.
In Granada, everywhere is lleno but we eventually find a room with a lady with a slightly disturbing 'strictly ballroom' standing-to-attention fringe and fastidiously plucked eyebrows. She has arranged the towels into the shapes of swans and pleated little loops over the shower curtain rail. The room is separated from the entrance hall by a flimsy curtain. The family sits the other side and watches soaps.
Having a band play at your table is possibly the most excrutiating experience in touristdom. We choose a table well back and avoid eye-contact but still a trio, in matching orange shirts, hunt us down. The song is mercifully short. The payoff is the people watching on La Calzada. A complicated little dance between a streetgirl, her pimp and her trick. Several nine-year-olds don doll costumes and, accompanied by drums and hoarsely yelled story crumbs, simulate sex on the cobbles.
One of the great pleasures of travelling is getting your hair cut by someone who doesn't talk to you. In the Himalayas they poke burning sticks in your ears as a bonus. In Cambodia, in the shade of a flame tree, you marvel at the scissors worn thin by 3 generations of sharpening. This octogenarian is all business in his little shop stuffed with yellowing memorabilia.
Without a word he wraps me up and spins me around and I am shorn and shaved in 3 minutes. Then a fistful of nameless glob from a plastic bottle and I am someone's husband from the 1950s. £1 time machine.
The view from the tower of the Iglesia de la Merced is a dreamlike walk across the tiles to Lake Nicaragua.
A hyperactive teenager springs up the stairs and grabs the ropes.
We stuff our fingers in our ears and survive the passing of the hour slightly shaken.
Best people watching of all is sitting barefoot on a crate in the market while the muchacho hunches over ancient tools repairing my sandals.
The moneychangers fanning themselves with giant wads of cordóbas. A lady looks pleased with herself as a grisly old man renews her fake Gucci handbag with bootpolish and a toothbrush.
At the quayside at San Jorge, granny sells us some pastries. They taste like granny. Out of her sight, we spit them out. A giant truck brimming with plantains stumbles off the ferry and the ferry sighs relief and returns to a safe buoyancy.
The bike is lashed down and what looks like a 5 minute trip is an hour across the lake to the twin cones of Isla de Ometepe.
A Brasilian woman reminisces how she used to be so skinny that her boyfriend once drove his motorbike 100km before realising she was still in the last gas station. An American backpacker scowls into her Lonely Planet and shows her ticket with a surly gesture. A cheery boathand strips to the waist, ties a fat rope around and swims to a buoy to fasten it. We cruise along the one figure-of-eight road on the island, across a little spit joining the two volcanos and head for Finca la Porvenir where grumpy Ereras feeds us a 3-day-old milkshake while we gaze at Volcán Concepción with its' fluffy little cloud toupée tugged off in clumps like cottonwool on the lee side but mysteriously never diminishing.
We make a circuit of the rougher-than-rough road around Volcán Maderas. Big smiles from the locals we pass. A downpour only makes everything look more evocative as we skirt the little beaches and dodge piglets. A horse bathes by an impossibly tranquil jetty.
A colourful cemetary dreams under steamy jungle slopes.
As dusk falls, my face is whipped by flying creatures and my eyes sting. While we eat, the palms are lashed by freshwater waves and our lips sing with lemongrass and steamed plantain.
Back at the plantation, Em finds a trashy Australian celeb mag and I continue my surreal voyage through Murakami's 1Q84.
This haven of eco-tranquility is less peaceful than advertised with an obnoxious French family talking loudly and slamming doors into the night. Their baby cries at all hours, presumably lamenting its' genes. The saving grace is a torrent of rain at dawn that pummels the roof and carves out a glittering morning.
On our circuit of Concepción, we spy a little park in Altagracia. There's a 4 metre high model of the island complete with baby turtles swimming in its' seas.
A lifetime from London, a truck is loaded with plantains and a bus slaloms the craters.
At Punta Jesus Maria the jetblack sandbar pokes out into the lake and we sway on a forgotten swing.
Very relaxing until an ant sneaks into my t-shirt and tries to gnaw my arm off. At 'Ojo del Agua' the ticketman tells tall tales - a bald man emerging from the waters looking like Bob Marley - but the water is from heaven at this little swiming hole.
We ride back to Mérida and, where a trail falls into the lake, catch a fishing family, sunset-framed, wordlessly drawing in their wriggling nets.
A comedor serves up Pollo a la Plancha in the howling wind. The Italian owner is waiting with rapt attention for the 'Camion de Cerveza' and playing flamenco. We sneak tidbits to the dog.
A herd of cows and a funeral make us late for the ferry. A tiny man called Zack in a huge ute with a glowering girlfriend invite us to stay with them in Gigante. We decline politely but it does make me head for this beachtown not listed in our guide. On the boat we try to ignore the still-revolving Jean-Claude Van Damme movie and the ominous creaking of the overloaded plantain truck. In Rivas, the comedor's baños are over in the corner of the plaza, through an obscure gate and in an outhouse across somebody's chicken-pecked yard. Gigante, at the end of a sandy road, is a forgotten little frontier, its' streets filled with errant livestock and the hopeful hammering of embryonic guesthouses.
A tattooed surfer-dude called Dustin is summoned and he shows us an empty room and assures us that a bed can be installed within the hour. The bathroom is a little lacking in privacy.
He says $20 is half the price of anywhere else. He and his mates are doing up the place while the waves are down. Lazily we take up the offer. The sea is a decidely non-paradisaical frigidity but the pargo (snapper) and lobster is delicious. The surfer-dudes promised us a 15% discount at this place. It morphs into 10% and then 0% when tax is slipped in. We find another bar. Their entirely finished rooms are $20. But the downside is being forcefed Pink Floyd and reggae. Back at our place our money is being put to good use. Two of the surfer-dudes emerge from the rusty toilet door sniffing cokey sniffs.
An icecream in gringoville San Juan and the backroad to Ostional has a police checkpoint and later an army one. They both warn of banditos on the road. I ask what I should do about them. They say drive faster. The army guy says there will be an Arrivada of the giant turtles maybe tonight and says we should come back at 9pm.
In sleepy little Ostional there is a power cut. We move the table in the comedor onto the side of the road and eat dinner under the moon while the family sits there and stares. We make a decent substitute for the TV it would seem. In the mangroves across the road the frogs gurgle and the rest of the ark hums along. We drink beer on the stoop of our cabaña and Alan, a Costa Rican next door tells us of his NGO work trying to foster sustainable fishing here.
In the morning we make for Costa Rica.
Up through a cloud and then down down to Antigua. We are diverted by a parade and end up arriving via an alley no more than an inch wider than the bike. We take a room from David who describes himself as a greenbelly, meaning mostly Spanish roots, he has a stunning toucan called Bruno. It's a lovely colonial town with a labyrinthine market
After a dusty and grimy ride to Chiqimula we hit the Honduran border. We buy lempiras from a guy in a cowboy hat wandering the carpark. The Hondurans appear to have something against trees as they send me off to get FOUR copies of ALL my documents. Of course the only photocopier is back on the Guatemalan side so I have to walk back through no-man's land and duck under the gate. Then I am treated to a virtuoso display of Zen typing - each keystroke of my details entered with deep thought and consideration. Then he writes it all out by hand again just for good measure. We talk about his favourite spots in Honduras, gender issues in Spanish, my Danish ancestry and the correct pronunction of the word "hot". Then he sends me back to Guatemala for more copies. By this time it's lunchtime and we have to wait for the bank to reopen. Eventually we are speeding on our way, or at least we would be if we weren't halted by a policeman who checks all our papers and a skinny man with a spray-machine to further disolve my wheels.
Bumpy and steep cobbles hit new heights in Copan Ruinas.
The ruins themselves are awesome and we commune with them for a couple of hours and watch the scarlet macaws in the trees in their jaw-dropping rainbow livery. Their screeches roughly translate as "help! I'm being disemboweled with a corkscrew".
Slightly disconcerting visiting an ATM here - there are guys across the street covering my every move from different angles with chunky shotguns. Standard practise across central america it turns out. Even pharmacies and restaurants have this kind of firepower on display at times.
Our hosts in Tela, on the Carribean coast are a Québécois ex-biker couple in their 60s. Tiny sun-leathered Nicole, her outrageous breast augmentation almost tipping her over, shows off her babies, a pair of white-faced monkeys. They wrap their soft tails around my neck and pull my hair petulantly when she won't let them eat the nearby tree's leaves. Sometimes she takes them for a spin around the town in a double pram that sits by the gate. She calls her husband 'Daddy' and he rustles up cold beers and a delicious breakfast while issuing travel advice through a nicotine-stained handlebar moustache.
We take the bike, gloriously free of luggage for a spin around the Garífuna township. People call out friendly hellos but we are not quite comfortable enough to stop and chat. Too much bad-mouthing of central america rings in our ears. If we were traveling through a little more slowly it would probably be different. The sun melts into the palms as we head home along the sandbar.
Up at dawn to tackle the direct road to Tegucigalpa through Oloncho. 100 miles of dirt with all the delicate texture of a dried up creek, winding up and down densely forested mountains. I love it and the romance of such intense isolation but Emma is over the revving and dusty bouncing pretty quickly!
12km short of Valle des Angeles disaster strikes as the rear tyre deflates. I bless the pressure sensors which give me a few seconds to pull over safely. Still it's just getting dark and with the raucous cacophony of the jungle all around, I extract a huge nail and set to work by torchlight.
I'm up at the crack worrying of course. Honduras is worst-case scenario for getting a new tyre. At least we are not far from the capital. A local mechanic gives me an address which may be able to help. I chat to a kid there having his moped fixed. Despite looking about 15, he turns out to be a 'secret policeman' he shows me a huge handgun in a shoulder holster. My dodgy repair gives out on the way to Tegucigalpa but after another sweaty grovel at the roadside
After a stopover in grim little Danli we are on to the Nicaraguan border. The Honduran side is a breeze and I feel smug as I brush aside the tramitadores and moneychangers. As a monument to Honduran roadbuilding, there is one final kingsize pothole right before the chain that separates Honduras from Nicaragua. A guy called Raymur comes and takes our picture for his motorbike magazine.
The new cathedral in Managua is pretty stunning. As if a lifelong multistory carpark designer finally got his dream job.
In Granada, everywhere is lleno but we eventually find a room with a lady with a slightly disturbing 'strictly ballroom' standing-to-attention fringe and fastidiously plucked eyebrows. She has arranged the towels into the shapes of swans and pleated little loops over the shower curtain rail. The room is separated from the entrance hall by a flimsy curtain. The family sits the other side and watches soaps.
Having a band play at your table is possibly the most excrutiating experience in touristdom. We choose a table well back and avoid eye-contact but still a trio, in matching orange shirts, hunt us down. The song is mercifully short. The payoff is the people watching on La Calzada. A complicated little dance between a streetgirl, her pimp and her trick. Several nine-year-olds don doll costumes and, accompanied by drums and hoarsely yelled story crumbs, simulate sex on the cobbles.
One of the great pleasures of travelling is getting your hair cut by someone who doesn't talk to you. In the Himalayas they poke burning sticks in your ears as a bonus. In Cambodia, in the shade of a flame tree, you marvel at the scissors worn thin by 3 generations of sharpening. This octogenarian is all business in his little shop stuffed with yellowing memorabilia.
The view from the tower of the Iglesia de la Merced is a dreamlike walk across the tiles to Lake Nicaragua.
At the quayside at San Jorge, granny sells us some pastries. They taste like granny. Out of her sight, we spit them out. A giant truck brimming with plantains stumbles off the ferry and the ferry sighs relief and returns to a safe buoyancy.
This haven of eco-tranquility is less peaceful than advertised with an obnoxious French family talking loudly and slamming doors into the night. Their baby cries at all hours, presumably lamenting its' genes. The saving grace is a torrent of rain at dawn that pummels the roof and carves out a glittering morning.
On our circuit of Concepción, we spy a little park in Altagracia. There's a 4 metre high model of the island complete with baby turtles swimming in its' seas.
A herd of cows and a funeral make us late for the ferry. A tiny man called Zack in a huge ute with a glowering girlfriend invite us to stay with them in Gigante. We decline politely but it does make me head for this beachtown not listed in our guide. On the boat we try to ignore the still-revolving Jean-Claude Van Damme movie and the ominous creaking of the overloaded plantain truck. In Rivas, the comedor's baños are over in the corner of the plaza, through an obscure gate and in an outhouse across somebody's chicken-pecked yard. Gigante, at the end of a sandy road, is a forgotten little frontier, its' streets filled with errant livestock and the hopeful hammering of embryonic guesthouses.
An icecream in gringoville San Juan and the backroad to Ostional has a police checkpoint and later an army one. They both warn of banditos on the road. I ask what I should do about them. They say drive faster. The army guy says there will be an Arrivada of the giant turtles maybe tonight and says we should come back at 9pm.
In the morning we make for Costa Rica.
