My New Love: El Rey

I think I may have discovered a new king to add to the list of musical talents I love. Move over King of Romance, there´s a new mustache in town, Vincente Fernandez.

Central America has been gripped by Estos Celos fever. The last few weeks the song has been on every radio station and played in every local cantina in town. It´s a great heart-wrenching ranchera lovesong, trumpets and all.

The man does have a striking resemblance to someone else though.... Someone from long, long ago...
It took a bit of internet research to figure it out and while I was online I discovered a great little book this hunking piece of 70s machismo wrote back in the day. First I must find a computer that will let me download some software but here´s the backcover as a teaser.

A brief stop in Tilapita

My attempts to save the lifes of unhatched seaturtles was unsuccessful last weekend. Instead the weekend turned into a beach fest with fourty other foreigners who had also been misled into believing that turtles appeared in abundance on the beach at Tilapita to lay their eggs. The notice in the XelaWho made no mention of the fact that none of the participants over the last three years had actually ever seen a turtle come out of the sea at midnight much less collected freshly laid eggs to take to the hatchery. Once we were given this information we decided to take Saturday night off and have a bonfire on the beach before returning to the concrete sweat boxes that were our hotel rooms.

The chicken bus on the way back was a brutal ride that erased all memory of the relaxing weekend on the beach. Chicken buses are ordinary American schoolbuses that are too old to use on North American streets and find their way onto Central American roads. Only now, they cram three people onto each bench and as many people as possible into the aisles.

Monday it was back to class with a fresh tan. Last week I had the ex-guerilla fighter as my teacher. He was an old geyser who joined the guerilla movement in Guatemala without the knowledge of his upper middle class family. He gave me a couple of very unexpected pep-talks and mentioned my origin and language skills to anyone who even dared to say hello to him on the street during our afternoon walks.

This week I´ve had the pleasure of experiencing the Guatemalan metrosexual. He lathers himself in sunblock while we sit on the roof under an umbrella and uses his index finger quite vigorously to rub his nose.

This is week three of language instruction and I am still not fluent. My spanish has improved a little. I am still stuck in the present tense but am making headway using the language during my five hours of class time.

Speaking to Guatemalans in English is still one of my favorite activities though. Monday night I met a nice university student that is part of another Spanish students homestay. Cancun came up in conversation and I swear he told me he saw on the Discovery Channel that American girls go there to participate in wet t'shirt contests. He then proceeded to tell me that fornication was abound during Spring Break and then it was only a natural progression in conversation to abortion. Apparently National Geographic has been making TV shows claiming that hippies loved to keep their aborted fetuses in jars around the house.

No conversation about slutty American girls and abortion is complete without a brief mention of the obviously raging hormones and unprotected sex Guatemalan teens are having. Jamie Lynn Spears and Sarah Palin´s daughter would not create a media circus in Central America for being pregnant. Girls in Guatemala, and Central America as a whole, get pregnant quite early and it doesn´t seem to be too much of a disturbance to family life with the parents. I´ve heard some travelers joke that it´s impossible to find a 16 year old Nicaraguan girl that isn´t pregnant. It´s definitely an obvious phenomenon but at least they don´t keep their aborted fetuses in jars. I don´t think the Mexican border officials would let them (abortion is illegal in Catholic Guatemala, so some people will take a quickie trip to Mexico to take care of things).

Xela and Juan Sizay

After two weeks of eating myself fat in Mexico we made it to Xela, Guatemala. It feels like a little hilltown but is in actual fact the country´s second largest city. Xela is in the northwest of the country and is best known to most travellers as a place for really cheap Spanish lessons. To my chagrin one week of being here hasn´t been sufficient for me to form sentences yet. I really hoped to be completely fluent by week three.

The school is great. Chris ended up with the local drunk as his teacher the first week which has been great fun for him. He owns a bar and has bloody mary´s for breakfast every morning while trying to teach Chris to conjugate verbs. My teacher is an older pyschologist who can´t find work outside of teaching Spanish. The students are a mixed bag of travellers and missionaries. Chris refers to the group of seven or eight American students who are on their way to an orphanage mission in Honduras as Jean Paul´s Army. At least one of them is definitely not looking forward to going to church every week for the next two and a half years. He told me this yesterday over a few shots of tequilla. Needless to say I like him best.

This weekend was independence weekend (hence the tequilla). I spent most of it frequenting various bars and going to the Santa Georgina hostprings outside town. It´s cool in Xela and there´s no hot water or central heating here, so soaking in scalding water was definitely called for after all those 30 second cold showers I´ve been taking.



Week two begins tomorrow. Jean Paul´s Army will be leaving after this week.

An update

The last four months in Africa have been intense.

I kept asking myself if I was getting old or if the travel was really, really hard. Thankfully a few other travellers I encountered let me know it wasn't me but the conditions under which we were travelling that made it so difficult to relax for at least a day after getting out of the latest overstuffed ground transportation. I suppose you can't really expect a completely tarmacked, pot hole free road or car that doesn't lose a tire on the road or flip over or break down in the world's third and fourth poorest countries.

Most of my Africa posts will be written in hindsight I think. Internet was extremely difficult to come by...actually, let me rephrase that, an internet connection that WORKED was extremely difficult to come by.

The same goes for good food. I guess this explains why there are no great Malian, Gambian, Ghanian or Togolese restaurants back home. The Lebanese saved my hungry ass quite a few times. Thank God for felafel and hamburgers! It seems that our Arab friends have set themselves up quite comfortably in West Africa. There's a whole sub-culture of Lebanese people everywhere from Senegal to Togo. They run restaurants (thank the Lord once again for that) and grocery stores and generally stay away from the local population.

Travel plans have changed as some of you are aware. No longer will I be roaming the vast expanse of foodless Africa where the people are the kindest I've encountered in the world and the poverty breaks your heart like in no other place. A place were you pay 30 bucks a night for dirty low end hotel rooms and five to ten bucks a meal for a piece of chicken that consists of skin and bones with plain rice. This is the continent in which we had a tire pop off our car on a highway, where four by fours flipped on sand dunes on our way to Timbuktu, where we drove into an ambush on a deserted highway in the middle of the night and walked away unrobbed and unharmed.



We arrived in Mexico last week and spent an amazing week eating our way through the street stalls in the countries capital city. Here is a little review of what I've consumed in the last 7 days. I must say that my favorite thing, corn with lime and chili, is not pictured. I could never hold the damn thing in my hands without immediately devouring it.

Other than that I spotted a penis plant* and then one night we got the royal treatment from the Mexican police. We left with our wallets 30 bucks lighter for holding open containers walking down a dark, dark street. I suppose that's better than being kidnapped by them and held for ransom. We assumed drinking in public would be okay as we had just watched a very drunk cleaning crew holding large bottles of tequila being serenaded by mariachis in a public square.

I should be in Guatemala by next Monday ready to start my Spanish language instruction before making it by road down to Peru. Clearly, this is not what I expected of my travels this year but it is definitely what I want and am looking forward to.

*there was no real proper segway to that statement but I have a picture!