Tom Parkinson

I was inspired to take up travel writing by a group of authors who attended a guidebook author workshop in spring 2005. Tom Parkinson was one of those authors.

Last week I learned of Tom's untimely death from a heart attack while writing up his latest research on Madagascar. Colleagues and friends put together this tribute to his short life.

His hilariously written blog on what guidebook writing is really like had me laughing out loud in recognition. You get a sense of just how talented a writer he was from the entries.

Tom was still in his 20s when he died.

Caffeine highs

C-O-C-A C-O-L-A: the huge letters are propped proudly in the mountainous jungle that dominates the west of San Pedro Sula. They spell the city's commercialised answer to the giant Hollywood sign in California. You can make a pilgrimage to the biggest advert in town from the city centre. You just keep following the main road through the wealthy districts, then swing a left and keep climbing the mountain for about an hour.

It's worth doing. You leave behind the last exclusive residence and suddenly you are in the jungle. People who do the walk regularly say they often come across snakes and exotic birdlife. There were quite a few day-trippers out on a Sunday stroll when we climbed so most of the wildlife was in hiding. All we saw were a lizard and a squirrel. But the real reason for the climb is the view. You climb a few hundred metres above the city and look down at the surprisingly lush urban scene below. Houses and roads seem to poke out from the jungle. You don't realise how green the city is when you are at street level.
We climbed at the height of the day's tropical heat. My water bottle was almost empty by the time we reached the giant 'C', so we headed a bit further up the hill to a modest little pulperia (general store) selling cold drinks to day-trippers. And, of course, there was only one caffeine soft drink on sale: Pepsi.

they dined on mince

I had loyally carried around a box of mince pies given to me by some good friends from my running club (whose backpacking days I suspect might be behind them). These mince pies had been through a lot to make it to a dinner table in the El Salvador highlands. Flown across the Atlantic, stored with boxer shorts, ferried across to the Caribbean, thrown onto the top of a chicken bus in my backpack which then promptly fell off (my first thought was for the mince pies NOT my digital camera...work that one out), they weren't in the most pristine condition when they were unveiled late on Christmas day ('how long did you say you had been on the road?' one peace corps volunteer asked). But they were a welcome hint of Christmas anyway.

On Boxing Day I was back to Honduras, over the border into the highlands. The bus journey was a stunner through the mountains, although my mind was taken off the view when a Honduran soldier sat beside me at the back of the bus, his rifle casually slung over his lap pointing at my ankles as we jolted and bumped over the unpaved road. Thankfully his colleague suggested that he point the barrel toward the roof and keep the gun secure between his lap... which saved me a a pretty nervous journey.

Anyway, here's a quick glimpse of how stunning this country can look, taken in one of the main national parks, where we saw precisely no other walkers all day. The only down side was the person supposed to be my guide had drunk my $10 deposit the previous evening and failed to show up the next day.

It's the final leg now and I am about to celebrate new year with some new friends in Copan Ruinas, where some famous old mayan ruins are. Feliz Ano Nuevo and see you soon!

El Mozote

Our Christmas Day guide didn’t look like an ex-guerrilla. In his late 50s, slight, wiry and well turned out, Matilde spoke to us in measured tones, possibly adapted to his foreign audience. This consisted of me, Carolyn, the author of the El Salvador part of the book, and Dave, a mountain-climbing Yorkshireman on a month-long jaunt down Central America. Matilde explained the background to the civil war that blighted this beautiful mountainous part of El Salvador throughout the 1980s. As we walked in the mid-morning sunshine, he relaxed and spoke more naturally. He told us how he joined the guerrilla movement after government bombs destroyed his family home. He had been making his living from the land, but was now an insurgent in a movement protesting about El Salvador’s social inequalities. The guerrillas were being ruthlessly pursued by the country’s military and Matilde went into some detail about the hardships involved – days with little or no water and learning which twigs you could eat for sustenance.

If that sounded harsh, it was nothing compared to what we were about to see. We arrived in a small, poor village called El Mozote, a few kilometres down the road from our base in Perquin. In December 1981, El Salvadoran troops had rounded up all the men, women and children in the village. After killing the men and adolescent boys, they raped and killed the women. They then killed the children in one massive assassination, international forensic teams later confirmed. The youngest of the children killed was 3 days old.

Cold facts on paper, but they had an extraordinarily raw affect when we stood in the well tended children’s memorial garden on a beautiful sunny day. A wall with all the names of the children under 12 massacred that day stands there – 140 in total with an average age of 6. A local senora showed us round the village. With one little child running round her, and heavily pregnant with another, she explained how she happened to be out of the village on the day of the slaughter. Three of her brothers and three of her sisters were not so lucky.

Signs of the violence remain. We saw a bomb crater and bullet holes in houses caused by air-force strafing. Much of the ammunition was US-supplied. Under Reagan, the American government used millions of dollars of funds each day to help the El Salvador government crush the red ‘threat’, which apparently included newly-borns.

A pretty intense experience, especially for Christmas Day, although we did do some normal festive drinking and over-eating (including some mince pies battered after more than a month in my backpack) that day – more of which later.

Feliz Navidad

If you’re hoping for another shot of either my shoes or a bird’s eye view of my shoes, you’ll be leaving this blog disappointed today. I didn’t use my camera in Tegucigalpa , largely as I heard I would survive about 30 seconds before a crowd of thieves, vagabonds and gangsters overwhelmed me if I ever let it be seen in public.

In fact, I was most in danger of being overwhelmed by the traffic. It was unbelievable.
It was virtually gridlock when I arrived. For some reason, Tegucigalpans seem to think honking their horns will make things better but it doesn’t really seem to work. Maybe it just makes them feel better. Anyway, the jams did provide some entertainment. Most of my friends over the last few days have been taxi drivers and some go to extreme lengths to overcome the city’s over-population of cars. Take Rene: a very likeable man who drove me right up into the unpaved – and relatively traffic free – heights of the shanty towns before careering onto a main highway in the wrong direction and then weaving through mostly stationary car queues to get on the right side. Gulp. He had some interesting stories to tell too. Once he was held up by three pretty girls, one of whom was holding a gun. He said he didn’t believe it was real, so they fired a bullet (not at him). He handed over his cash. Another time he was kidnapped and was forced to drive a gunpoint to an isolated and very dodgy part of the city. He decided to crash the car rather than go up there. He escaped unscathed. The kidnappers got away with his radio.

The dodgiest thing I have come across in the city, however, is the number of moustaches. I actually counted a random sample on the bus journey on the way in (it’s for the book, I should add). 39 % of men surveyed were wearing facial hair on their upper lips. That’s exclusively moustaches – goaties and stubble did not count. Fascinatingly, this means the moustache ratio is even higher in the capital city than it is in cowboy country, where I did another survey of 100 people – only 33 were moustachioed.

Anyway, there should be slightly fewer handlebars where I am now, in a Honduran border town. I went over to Nicaragua today, where the highlights were the ridiculously corrupt border officials and the amount of people that managed to cram the six different forms of public transportation I used today. On one bus there were four people on a seat designed for two US schoolkids. It was topped later on in my final ride of the day in a minibus where there were 5 people on the backseat, including a pudgy kid and his even pudgier mother.

So in the relatively open space of an internet café booth, here’s wishing Merry Christmas to all who happen upon this blog just in case I don’t get the chance to update it again. I will be spending 25 December in El Salvador with the author of that section of the guidebook. Definitely an alternative yuletide. I may even get some pictures of my shoes at some point.

Feliz Navidad all!

chicken bus

Had the biggest heart-in-the-mouth moment so far on my journey from the Caribbean coast into Honduras' cowboy heartland. Took the chicken bus (so-called because of its reputation for transporting the locals' livestock) across an unpaved country road. It's been raining here quite a lot - I think I may already have mentioned that - and the road, already badly potholed, was in a very bad state in some places. At one point, the road support seemed to have practically been washed away by a creek. We got over that, but couldn't get up the hill on the other side. For one moment I thought we were about to career back into the water. Somehow the vehicle managed to stay put.

The conductor took control: "All the men out now to push." I didn't need any encouragement to get out as quickly as possible. All the women and children then disembarked to make the load lighter. The local guys gathered right behind the truck where the mud was thinnest - maybe to preserve the shine of their shoes. I went right to the rear right-hand side (ie out of the way if the vehicle slipped backwards) where the mud was thickest - definitely to preserve my continued existence on this planet. Then we pushed as hard as we could. Thankfully we pushed it out of the bog and up the hill.

Here are the bus guys cleaning their pride and joy before she continued to the capital:

And here are my shoes (I am ashamed to say they remain festering in a plastic bag in my hotel room):

to make matters worse, there was a teachers' conference in the cowboy town where i stopped. No hotels had room - apart from one. It is the type with naked lightbulbs and marks on flaky painted walls. It also had a 9.30 curfew and none of the guests were supposed to drink - even outside the hotel. I was very rebellious and had a bottle of beer to wash down my steak supper.

i am now in the capital, Tegucigalpa, a chaotic, massively crowded city typical of Central America with shantytowns perched up the surrounding hillsides, street hawkers lining every available space of the pavement and black bus smog choking the streets. Which is nice when you spend most of the day as I did hanging around bus stations (to check the timetables and prices just to clarify).

hasta pronto.

Gecko

Just a quick update from a crooked Internet café. Spent one night in an interesting hotel. I had a room-mate that evening, a little gecko who ran away when I tried to take pictures. They blasted out reggae music at the dodgy nightclub next door. I owe my current sanity to Boots own brand ear plugs.

I have changed to a lovely hostel just outside Trujillo, a sleepy little place where Spanish conquistadores used to ship gold pillaged from the interior back home. This used to attract pirates and some big battles occurred in the bay in front. The famous buccaneer Henry Morgan was involved in one. There is also a strong Garifuna community here.

I went for a dusk swim in the ocean in front of the hostel last night. Actually more of a night paddle (I still remember Jaws). Tomorrow I am going into cowboy country, taking the bumpy ride along unpaved roads to get to the capital.

I might not get to the internet for a while, but will blog on as soon as I can.

Adios xx
jol