It’s about getting up close and savoring the journey. Air travel surgically transplants you from one place to another.  The whole experience anesthetizes you from real space and time.  You often arrive tired, but more from cabin pressure and tedious procedures than physical exertion.  A road trip literally and psychologically keeps your experience close to the ground, in touch with the gradual changes and differences, enhancing your senses, not dulling them. 

After numerous road trips around the United States, I backpacked Europe and witnessed travelers with motorcycles loading on and off Greek ferries. What a concept!  Forget trains...this was an even closer way to see the countries...and actually economical.  Three years later I’d saved up, bought a one way ticket to Europe, and found myself back in Greece...with a motorcycle I’d bought in Italy. Talk about freedom to explore...every odd ruin or relic that happened along...castles and harbors...camping in olive groves, on beaches, even a Byzantine monastery near Sparta.  Wandering and learning, up close.

That’s when I met Bobby Friedman.  He’d been traveling around Europe working odd jobs to extend his journey. By the time our boat landed in Haifa, Egypt, we’d made a plan to travel together.  Epic adventures followed from Jerusalem to the Sinai Peninsula, Cairo, and mud brick villages near Luxor.  That was fifteen years ago. Since then, we’ve traded travel ideas and made a few minor excursions together.  Inevitably, the idea to travel the world in a sailboat emerged.

For me, the desire for new travel adventure coincided with an interest in sailing.  Living in Seattle with water and islands all around, boating is hard to avoid.  I bought an old 30-foot sailboat. It was more boat than I’d ever known, but, being a furniture de-signer, I knew how to make and repair things pretty well.  I told myself that a boat is just a big piece of furniture...with an engine. I went thru that boat and learned everything I could about it... repairing and improving. 

I spent three summers sailing it all over the Puget Sound, San Juans, and Vancouver Island with my girlfriend. Just like camping, only on water. Again, I was hooked.

Coincidentally, Bobby was having a similar experience in San Diego with a 32-foot sailboat he’d bought. Over about two year’s time, casual discussions became ‘what if’ scenarios which encouraged reading and research and eventually the formation of a plan. Bobby would sell his house and buy a boat, and we’d sail off together for as long as budgets and personalities could tolerate.

Mexico
Following an all-night bus ride from Chetumal, I arrive in Xalapa (or Jalapa), Mexico at the home of an old friend. Peter North was originally my design professor at the University of Illinois many years ago. He’s encouraged my design thinking through push and pull and planted many of the ideas and questions I still ponder. I need to check in with him periodically to refresh my perspectives and share a few laughs. That means either a trip to Mexico, where he teaches design at his college during the school year, or in summer, finding him in his native Austria, at a small lakeside village a bit south of Salzburg. This trip, I spent a leisurely week with Peter and his Mayan-Mexican girlfriend, Gloria. Peter enjoys the indigenous cultures of any place, but especially Central America. He always plans some good adventurous outing to give me an inside peek at local customs, rituals, food, and design. The last time, we drove for days thru the lower Yucatan and Chiapas stopping at every Mayan ruin along the way, wandering beaches sifting thru whatever washed up, sketching, and discussing design.

This trip, we head for an very old village an hour or so north of Xalapa with a towering cathedral and a traditional indian market. Centuries ago, the efforts of Spanish colonizers to convert the indigenous people to Catholicism often meant merging native religious beliefs with Christian practices. The results can be amazing. One example, the indigenous of the Xalapa-Veracruz area practice a death defying custom of swinging off tall poles... up-side-down from ropes tied to their feet. Not exactly sure how this ties in with anything Christian, but... they do it on Sunday... from a 50-60 foot pole set in front of the cathedral doors. In full costume, five guys start by climbing boards roughly nailed to the tall pole... that alone defies death if you’ve seen Mexican carpentry. Once reaching the top, four guys sit on a rotating frame and face inward toward the fifth guy who stands up on the pole playing a flute. After a few minutes, the flute stops and the four, in unison, pitch over backwards off the frame. They drop only a short distance before the ropes tied to their feet catch, then they all begin to rotate around the pole and slowly descend, playing flutes or little drums as they drop. During the set-up, the four ropes were wound around the pole and now unwind as the frame rotates and pays out rope, gradually lowering them to the ground.

Yeah, I’m sure their insurance companies hate it, but the scene in front of the towering old church was timeless - Indian men and women dressed in traditional garb walking the cobblestones of the busy market, hawkers selling spices, baskets, and tools... and above all, the spinning characters dropping into the fray.

Guatemala
I wake up before sunrise on a rustic wood pier buzzing with anticipation. Today I will finally see the ancient Mayan city of Tikal. I got in late from Rio Dulce and found this great spot on the north shore of Lake Peten Itza. After a swim I roll my bedding, load my pack, and start the mile hike to the bus stop. I hear howler monkeys. It’s going to be a great day. The gates to Tikal open at 6AM. I’m there at 6:15AM. Buy a map and study it over breakfast with several cups of coffee. Gonna need it. This place is vast. Acres of pyramids and temples. Miles of trails. I stash my pack at the restaurant, lace up the running shoes, check the camera gear, water bottle, then run off toward the most remote group of pyramids. Tikal is at the edge of the jungle and in the jungle. Huge mounds mark future archeological sites yet to be explored. Supposedly, many exotic birds and animals wander the ruins before the tourists show up. So I figure getting to the ruins farthest off gives me the best chance of seeing something interesting, or at least solitude in an ancient place. 

Feels great running the shaded trails between sites, jumping thick roots and rocks, passing the occasional astonished local who stops to look. Why is that crazy gringo running in this heat? Up hundreds of steep narrow steps, legs burning at the top, all wobbly on the way down. This might be the best workout location I’ve ever seen. 

So many vantage points, and I want to stand in them all. Interesting sight lines - geometric plazas surrounded by smaller shrines.  360 degree temple top views over the broad jungle. I can only imagine this place fifteen hundred years ago with 100,000 inhabitants. Like the Egyptians, religion heavily ruled the lives of the Mayans. Any serious community undertakings required ritual prayer, appeasement, or sacrifice. Divine leaders and their hierarchy of priests translated the will of the gods. Things related to religion advanced to high levels in Mayan society - astronomy, ceremonial ceramics, mathematics for temple architecture and masonry - while other useful skills never developed. The Mayans independently invented the concept of zero, but they never figured out the wheel. What? I mean, if you draw a zero, right there you have the design for a wheel. Amazing none of them noticed. 

Visitors eventually crowd the central temple areas, so midday I refill my water and head north off the map, running along a footpath through the forest. Immediately I hear a deep growl not far away. Didn’t sound like a monkey. I stop. Turns out to be one big ticked-off howler monkey screaming and banging around up in a tree. Their howl is like a deep hoarse bark. 

After 20 minutes, the trail brought me to a small ruin, then another with some excavation and a shallow pit. A large stone carved with a face and hands stuck partially out of the pit.  Great place for lunch and maybe a nap. I climb down into the pit. After a couple tortillas and fruit, I stretch out in the shade of the stone. Running and hiking further on, I scare off something about the size of a smallish dog, but see no more ruins. Back at the main Tikal site, I run up the same pyramids again checking the light for photos - always different from morning to late day with different shadows and highlights. 

At one point, I’m watching a group of eight or nine monkeys playing. Three babies chase each other and hang from their tails. In the same moment two toucans land on nearby branches, their bodies black with huge yellow beaks. Ancient temples on the right, monkeys straight ahead, and toucans on the left. No doubt, I know where I am.

Note: The Mayan symbol for zero actually doesn’t look anything like our zero.

Honduras - Tegucigalpa.
First morning, I hike up steep narrow streets for a view over the city and to make a plan for the day. So narrow, pressing my body flat against buildings to allow cars to pass. Glimpses here and there of nice homes behind tall cement walls with iron doors, steel grates, and barbed wire deterrents. barbed wire looks almost friendly with dense tropical flowers. Bored security guards slung with shotguns leaning against walls give me suspicious looks. 

I gaze out over the vast city of a million people spread among several low hills. Church steeples here and there poke up thru the mass of red tile roofs and sooty grey buildings. At the edges, shanty neighborhoods of the poor splash up the sides of the hills waiting for mudslides to wash them back down. 

On almost every corner, electrical wires string out in all directions from utility poles making rat's nests of cables. On reaching intended building, the wires then drape over windows and architectural details like tinsel, some dangling useless, older ones painted, plastered holes and anchors falling out as modernization meets crumbling colonial masonry. 

Armed guards stand outside even basic businesses like furniture stores or bakeries. I watched a grubby machete armed guard open a large swinging steel door while his employer backed out a shiny German car with tinted windows. The driver got out a moment - crisp white shirt, sunglasses - then ducked back in and zipped off. The guard is paid by four adjacent houses to stand there all day and watch over who comes and goes. Is this the future of Homeland Security? A preview of how we all might be forced live someday?  Where does it stop? 

I give every city a chance, but throughout the day I came across closed museums, graffiti and litter strewn plazas, parks with almost no trees or grass, honking traffic, ...all steeped in a sweltering haze of polluted air.  Locals cautioned me against walking up a prominent forested hill with a monument and view. Thieves and muggers supposedly wait in the bushes. A trickling wide river bed divides the city between bad and worse - brown water mixes with a shade of green while a man actually rinses clothes in it and lays them on rocks to dry. From a bridge I see blue tarp tents clustered here and there. Two men hack at a huge pile of animal bones with small axes. Tegucigalpa’s market is on the bad side of town, but it’s broad daylight and I stick to main streets and the wider aisles crammed with small wooden stalls. Bruised fruit sold from a wheel barrow, cell phone accessories, ladies shoes and underwear, parts for toasters... 

A large elaborate church sits surrounded by the market stalls, boarded and tarped up for renovation. A long plank allows workers access over debris and mud. I walk in to look telling them I am an architect and think this a beautiful church and that they have a big job but it looks great. Some guy in charge proceeds to give me a full tour including the highest point of the bell tower where we step along wobbly boards set across the long drop down. Good views and a few pictures. This was the sole highlight of Tegucigalpa, Honduras. 

Border Crossings through Central America
Except Panama, I've now crossed in and out of all Central American countries at least three times.  Mexico is by far the most complicated and expensive.  On the boat in Ensenada, it required half a day, three taxi rides to separate offices, expensive grainy copies, and fees of about $20 each. The boat was lots extra.  I waited over an hour coming into Mexico from Belize because there was only one lady working the passport control office on a busy Sunday.  At one point, she ran out of staples and we waited 10 minutes for more. When I finally made it to the window, she handed me lengthy paperwork that I could have filled out while waiting.  I wanted to staple her face to the counter. A telltale sign of her diligence was the TV blaring soap operas directly behind her.  In contrast, entering El Salvador, the officials motored out to the boat with a translator and finished in 20 minutes - costing us $10 each.  Departure cost nothing but an exit stamp.  Border crossings between Nicaragua, Honduras, and Guatemala consisted of stepping from one shack to another and waiting just long enough for a uniformed man to stamp my passport - the best service found in any of those countries. 

Entering Nicaragua weeks ago, our bus offloaded everyone and everything.  We stood waiting for something. Then I saw a red and green light.  Each person, in turn, pushed a big yellow button.  If the light turned green, which it usually did, you got back on the bus with no inspection.  If red, you went into the building to be inspected. A young sexy, slender Nicaraguan fashionista with huge sunglasses and four matching red suitcases got the red light. I think the border guards just wanted to look in her luggage.  I too got the red light, but as I was the last person, they waived me thru. I guess my weeks old dirty laundry didn't hold as much potential. 

Crossing into Honduras recently, I watched a man load cases of Corona beer into the rear seats of a 4-door pickup. The bed was empty when he prepared to leave. I gave me a lift 45 minutes to the next town. Perfect. This has happened more times than I can remember.  You just have to be a nice friendly gringo and speak a little Spanish - they love driving around in their pickup trucks with a gringo in the back. It impresses the neighbors.

San Juan Chamula, Mexico where it’s OK to burp in church
There’s a famous village north of San Cristobal de Casas where the church has no pews and the floor is strewn with grasses. Many small towns in the area follow religious practices that combine elements of Catholicism and ancient Mayan beliefs. The most interesting is the belief that slight burping while in church dispels evil spirits. I had to see it and hear it. In times past, they used a brown sugary water that was difficult to make as the burp inducer. Today, soft drinks do the trick. 

Only 30 minutes away, is the village of San Juan Chamula, a tourist destination. Buses drop off periodic groups of gringos eager for the exotic. A fruit and vegetable market carries on in the large plaza faced by a basic church with a tall pitched roof, but no bell tower. I slide in at the end of a group of a dozen older gringos into a vast space dimly lit by hundreds, maybe thousands of small white candles. Smoke from many smoldering urns wafts up and disperses into a thin fog at the pitched ceiling. The polished stone floor is mostly covered with grass. Heavy tables here and there support huge clusters of the candles. People... families... sit on the floor in groups. Some in the crowd hold candles and pray, others hold children quietly, some sip from plastic bottles of Coke, Pepsi, Sprite. I don’t hear any burping. The ambient noises of rustling grass, praying, and hushed conversations probably muffle it. Tall cases set against all the walls, many with glass, enclose life-size statues of various saints or important figures. People seem to slowly file past, stopping to give extra attention or make requests at particular figures. 

Back in San Cristobal de Casas, the first rain I’ve seen in many months pours down in buckets. The angle of the tile roofs nicely shoots the water beyond the sidewalk and into the streets forming rivers of white water splashing into gutters. People dash about and duck into any store for cover. Now I know why the sidewalks are 15 inches off the street and doorways even higher. The first rains of the season have begun.

Time to Pause
We are taking a break.  Originally, we planned to sail across the Pacific during the month of May, but there is just too much to see in Central America. The weather window for crossing the Pacific will not reopen until January. So we´ll go to Ecuador. Maybe wander a bit of South America, then Galapagos and across to Polynesia. That is the current plan anyway.

I am jumping ship back to the US to make some money. Bob will stay with the boat.  Ryan is working in Costa Rica.

Until January, hasta la vista.  Signing off…Colin