[11/4/21]
After 1500km of traveling in Mexico on our bicycles, we finally reach Guatemala !!
After a brief break in the friendly town of Jonuta due to a fever that weakened one of the team members, we set off for the famous Mayan city, Palenque.
Bad start. Two days of cycling, 300 mosquito bites and a night on a ranch among pigs, we are forced to take another break in Palenque. This time, we’ve got some things to worry about and we hang out through the Mayan ruins in search of the hidden Jade Stone(s).
Once fully recovered, we set about crossing Chiapas. In this jungle, we first visit the Zapatistas, an autonomous anti-globalization community in Mexico. We are invited by our host, Jorge Guzman, to a political meeting of the highest importance the next morning in order to strengthen the ties of the Zapatistas with France. A little too accustomed to local habits, we arrive late and seem to miss the heart of the debate.
We then take the path to Selva Lacandana to meet the Lacandons people, followers of Mayan traditions and speakers of Ch’ol. Modern Mayans seem more inclined to benefit from tourism, although they are keen to develop ecological tourism.
Finally, we arrive at the Guatemalan border. Our first steps are going to be difficult, we have just given our last pesos to the ferryman when we are told that the nearest bank is two days of cycling on dirt roads. Fortunately we meet Carlos, a schoolmaster, artisan jewelry maker and newspaper delivery man, who takes care of all our worries and we take the road to Guatemala City more serenely.
[11/19/21]
We reach 2000km shortly after crossing the border with El Salvador.
Before that, we cross Guatemala from North to South. In the mountains, our Spanish which is slowly but surely improving is useless to us as the villages are populated by q’eqchi ‘families speaking the dialect of the same name and wearing colorful traditional outfits. However, one evening when we arrive in the middle of a large family in the middle of renovations, we quickly understand that we are invited to participate. After unveiling our talents as concrete mixers in Mexico, we are assigned to paint.
Another evening, when we finished our stage at nightfall, we didn’t miss a beautiful fall on the way due to a huge hole in the road and were given the contact of a said bicycle repairer who could welcome us in San Andres Itzapa. We end up finding our friend in the workshop of Maya Pedale, an association that tampers with bicycles to be used for shelling corn. He invites us to pitch the tent in the middle of the workshop and we do not fail to test his funny bikes.
Arrived in Antigua, we venture onto the Acatenango volcano which is located 4000 meters above sea level. After Pierre lost his headlamp and knowing his myopia, I make the mistake of giving him mine so that he can trace the path. Unsurprisingly, we find ourselves a few minutes later lost in the middle of the night in the middle of the volcanoes. In an apocalyptic setting with the roars of the erupting Fuego volcanoes in the background, we wander for several hours in search of our tent. At 4 am, after a short night and facing a wind that insists on taking our ears off, we finally reach the top.
When we return from this excursion, it takes us two days to erase the traces that this hike has left in our adductors. We hang around the cobbled streets of Antigua, a colonial city and the former capital of Guatemala, and too impatient to get back on the road, we get on our bikes and cross the Salvadoran border at the same time as we reach 2,000 kilometers.
[11/26/21]
El Salvador, the country with the highest rate of intentional homicide, has passed through the eyes. Faces and arms have been spied on for tattoos revealing membership in a Maras group, armed gangs, particularly violent drug traffickers that infiltrate the country and spread to Honduras and Guatemala. Luckily, we encounter the phrase “Aquí no es peligroso, pero allí sí”, and the allí never appeared and was being pushed from beach to beach to the Nicaraguan border. In truth,It must be said that we avoided the capital and followed the coast on quieter paths.
After a first night spent in hammock “fishing nets” in front of the water, it felt impossible to leave the seafront. So every day, we managed to find her at all costs and pitch the tent among the palm trees. We loved our fishermen so much that we even ended up sleeping with them, in the middle of a rather lively fish cooperative.
My 21 candles blown out and celebrated with a big dish of pasta for breakfast, we landed on a beach that we struggled to leave. While we were a little lost on an island crisscrossed only by sandy paths that are difficult to cross, we came across a rough Santos. Santos is not the sea, she is a Salvadoran exiled in the United States who returns to spend time on HER beach, THE beach, the most beautiful she has ever seen. So when she ran into us, who were about to take a boat to get back to the coast without setting foot there, she couldn’t stand it. It was necessary, and without regret, to turn back to the sand paths to arrive at an infinite horizon inhabited by a few free horses. And it wasn’t until the next morning, after being greeted and pampered by Santos and her husband, that we set off for the coast, escorted by much of the village.
In the end, we still had to leave El Salvador and briefly cross Honduras to reach Nicaragua. From Honduras, we have few memories, but its border with Nicaragua will have marked us. It must be said that we spent almost as much time there as in the country, and after long and long hours of waiting, we arrived in the evening in Nicaragua and crossed the 2500km mark.
[12/04/21] – 3000km
Finally, we arrived in Nicaragua. We found ourselves surrounded by volcanoes and we had to choose which one to climb. We set our sights on Cerro Negro, a small volcano whose ascent looked rather cute. But as usual, everything had to be complicated… So we decided to go to the bottom of the volcano by bike, a heavy task. We were starting to get a little used to pedaling in the sand, that didn’t fail. The summit of the volcano in sight, we resolved to hide the bikes in the bushes and finish the journey by walk, leaving a new friend on the road. We met an iguana hunter with a slingshot, in the middle of nowhere, proud to show us its prey stacked in a big bag, still alive. No guide, no toboggan. We almost missed the unavoidable descent of the volcano while sliding and then finally we slipped on the buttocks adding pretty holes to Pierre’s already lacy shorts.
Leaving this desert of volcanic sand, dead of thirst, we landed in Léon, a large colonial student city. There, we spun our spider web on a trendy terrace in the city. It didn’t take long for a father and son to fall right into it. After great debates, the father pointed his phone to let me know that the Nicaraguan government were listening to us. We rode at full speed, sharing two bicycles for four until we reached their house. We finished the evening “in the clouds” with Maveric and his dogs at the bottom of the garden.
Another evening, approaching the great Lake Managua, a local banker on a motorbike accosted us. It was absolutely necessary to follow him, he knew a family of loyal customers, with whom we had to spend the night. We obviously didn’t have much choice so, a little wary as we drove into poorly lit dirt roads and we followed him. At the end of the paths, we met the unmissable family of Ivania with whom we started the evening with a fishing session at sunset and finished it 15 dishes of fried fish, donuts, and specialties with unpronounceable names later, the belly all swollen.
We ended our tour of Nicaragua with a detour to the island of Ometepe where FINALLY, after months of suspense and excursion sessions in the jungle, guided by their howls without ever finding them, we met monkeys! It must be said that on this island, there were animals on all sides. So much so that one morning we woke up from a drunken evening in the middle of a herd of cows that almost crushed our tent.
[12/15/21] – 3500km
Costa Rica lived up to its name. We had long looked for white tourist faces in the middle of the crowd and in the bars, we were served. Here, no horde of children shouting “gringos, gringos” as we pass, otherwise they would have no voice. So life was sweet, we found the coast and its beaches but this time welcomed like kings. Houses, the gringos, they have them in spades, so here it was not a corner of the garden that we were offered, it was downright the key to the second secondary house of the family.
We still managed to spend some time with the funnier ticos. Fransisco, in his twenties, park warden Manuel Antonio, who is amused to hear us tell him that we have found a secret passage to access the park without paying and invites us to spend the night in his little home. Merery, a supermarket cashier, who takes it into her head to call all of her address book to find us accommodation when we buy her a bag of rice, telling her with a laugh that we’re going to spend the night with it, under the rain; and who ends up almost apologizing for welcoming us with pleasure if we are willing to wait for the end of his service. Alfredo, alias Elvis Presley, owner of a terrific hairstyle and a clandestine bar all in bamboo braving all the curfews, who invites us to pitch the tent squarely in the middle of the dance floor.
We finished Costa Rica with a little culture point, which is not a strong point of the country. On the archaeological site of Finca 6, one of the most famous, we had to redouble our imagination to see the different buildings of yesteryear in the large, absolutely empty spaces of the site. We can’t really say that they were empty, it’s true, when we opened our eyes wide we could see “bolas de piedras” big round pebbles inherited from the indigenous peoples, which were pointing the end of their noses.
Finally.. We arrived in Panama where it was difficult to leave the pana. Any deviation from this big highway that crosses all of Latin America was quite adventurous.
Our first swerve led us straight into the bar of a small village where we were planning to quietly stretch our canvas. But this time we got caught up in it. As soon as our buttocks were resting on one of the wobbly plastic chairs in the cafe, a swarm of tipsy Pan-Americans accosted us. All of them, believing that we did not speak Spanish (and still believing it even after we had spoken to them quite a bit) tried to lure us into their homes with sweeping gestures, mimes and insistent looks. We opted for the nearest house, leaving with regret a great friend who had become especially fond of Pierre.
During another detour, we found ourselves in a completely different setting. Embarked in a pick-up, we had no idea that we were going to be taken to one of the luxury hotels, still under construction, on the coast of Las Lajas. When we opened the door, we found ourselves in a large, sparsely furnished living room, with in the middle, caught in a cloud of smoking, a Romanian man in his fifties who was tapping on the keyboard of his state-of-the-art computer accompanied by his sweetheart, of whom he was 20 years the eldest. In the middle of the evening, while we were all sipping our beer in the hotel swimming pool, I had the misfortune to talk about Pierre’s hidden, rather well hidden, talents as a photographer. Ten minutes later, we were all there, moving around the hotel to arrange the rooms, and watching Pierre take “pro” photos for the website, when in reality he had taken out his new camera twice since the start of the trip. It was a bit of a flop, as one could imagine given that night had largely fallen.
Date:
2021-12-29
