Journey to the Bottom of the World

On the road in Honduras

The morning after the electrocution, I headed east from Huehuetanango to Coban, on one the prettiest roads Guatemala has to offer.  There wasn´t much to see or do in Coban, so I was up early the next morning and on my way to Lanquin, a small little town in the mountains, complete with rivers and caves.  I stayed at a little mini-resort there that is popular with backpackers, and it ended up being a comfortable place to relax for two nights.

While in Lanquin, I met Omer, a guy from Israel who´s also riding south on a motorcycle.  We decided to ride together for a while and started by taking back roads out of Lanquin and over the mountains to Lake Izabel.  That was the best ride I had in Guatemala and we were definitely off of the beaten tourist track that is really hard to avoid in Guatemala.  We passed through a ton of villages that showed varying degrees of interest in us.  In some places, people run out to the street to watch you go by, and in others, people do everything they can to not make eye contact.  It seems that the entirely indigenous communities are alot more standoffish of outsiders. 

Only 2 days after leaving Lanquin, Omer and I crossed into Honduras.  I don´t really have much in the way of final thoughts for Guatemala.  I enjoyed my time there, but it just didn´t inspire me the same way Mexico did.  To start, it´s hard to truly visit any place off of the tourist-track.  Guatemala is extremely poor and there aren´t hotels in areas that aren´t heavily visited by foreigners.  While in Mexico, I could stop at a comedor in any town and attempt to have a conversation.  In Guatemala, I never felt like the people actually wanted to talk.  That may just be me though.  Again, there are exceptions, and I met some really nice people there, but in general, I found the place ¨cold¨.  ¨Cold¨doesn´t mean bad, just different.  To answer the big question though, with the exception of walking the streets after a late-night-out in Xela, which is always a bad idea, I never once felt that I was in danger in any way.  Even the police smiled and directed me through a town after they caught me riding the wrong way on a one way road. (there weren´t any cars and I thought I could get away with it). 

It´s interesting how every country looks at the country below it with such fear.  In the States I was warned about Mexico.  In Mexico, the people there told me repeatedly that I would be most definitely robbed and probably killed in Guatemala.  And to make my hypothesis an actual proven scientific theory, several Guatemalans shared the same words of wisdom with Omer and I about Honduras.  Just an interesting observation.

Honduras has been awesome, and I´ve had the best days of riding on my trip here.  After visiting the ruins at Copan, and the town of Santa Rosa de Copan, Omer and I took a variety of back-roads and horse trails to the town of Gracias.  This was a pretty hard-core route and it was a lot of fun as well.  Omer and I are thoroughly convinced that the children in some of the towns we visited may have never seen a motorized vehicle, let alone two guys suited up on motorcycles. 

Somewhere in between the first river crossing and tipping my bike over in the second, I had an epiphany.  I, plain-old Jeff Roy, from Enfield, Ct, was riding on horse trails, fording rivers, and visiting remote villages in the mountains of Honduras.  This isn´t a Discovery Channel show, made for TV movie, or documentary, but my actual life!  How cool is that!...if I may say so myself without sounding too pompous.  More than anything else, I can´t get over how lucky I am to have this opportunity.

After a couple days of riding dirt, Omer and I beelined it across the country to Trujillo, a town in the northeast part of the country.  The ride itself was almost entirely boring, except for one moment of sheer terror.  While cruising at 50-60mph with Omer in front of me, the hood of the car ahead of Omer suddenly ripped off the front of the car and shot up 20 ft into the air.  From then on, everything happened in slow motion.  As the hood reached it´s cruising altitude, Omer actually road underneath it.  But now the hood was lingering directly over my path of travel, and teetering back and forth, from left to right.  I glanced to the left and there was traffic coming the other way.  I didn´t know whether to speed up and try to go underneath it, swerve and hope it didn´t swerve the same way, or slam on the breaks and hope the car behind me didn´t hit me.  It was all so surreal.  The way the hood stood upright and seemed to float made it look harmless; like nothing more than a big piece of cardboard sailing through the air.  But after working at the Honda wharehouse, I´m well aware of how heavy hoods actually are.  I decided to swerve right and I´m lucky I did.  Once I had committed, the hood drifted slightly to my left and came down like a sack of bricks; landing to my immediate side.  If I had continued straight or gone left, I wouldn´t be writing this.  With the distances involved, all of this must have happened over the course of a couple seconds, but it really felt like I had time to think it all through as it was happening.  The reality is that either one of us could be dead right now if the stars weren´t perfectly aligned...again.  Omer and I couldn´t help but laugh over a beer at how random the whole thing was.  We can´t imagine that hoods fly off of cars on a regular basis.  So with that said, what´s the chances of being behind a car when it happens?  I think I need to buy a lottery ticket.

Trujillo, is our staging point for the next stage of the journey and it´s the part that I am inexplicably excited for.  In two days we are going to head into La Mosquitia, a remote area of Honduras that we know nothing about.  Well we know it´s going to be a challenge, but how much of a challenge we´ll have to see for ourselves.  I´ve learned to take opinions with a grain of salt.  I´m sure people have taken bikes through there before, but I´ve never heard or read of anyone doing it, and that´s what makes it so thrilling.  I feel like I´m a pioneer about to head west in the 1800´s. (although this is a much shorter journey)  Omer and I have enjoyed the facial expressions and jaw-drops that everyone, without exception, has given us when we tell them that we are going there.  The owner of the hotel in Trujillo has assured us that we won´t make it and that the bikes will be a liability.  That may be the case, and if we have to turn around then we´ll turn around, but we´re going to give it our best shot and see what happens. 

That´s all for now, and I´ll see you on the other side of La Mosquitia...or maybe back here in Trujillo in a couple of days :)  Either way, there´s going to be a good story and some good pics!

La Mosquitia

After stuffing our faces with eggs, beans, and toast, certain that we wouldn´t be eating a good meal during the next couple of days, Omer and I set off to La Mosquitia in search of adventure.  Each of our bikes had two extra gallons of fuel on board, along with a pack of survival cookies. (generic Oreos)

We took a paved road south out of town, to a really dusty but smooth gravel road that took us east.  After passing through a couple small Garifuna towns, we came to a point where the road was flooded.  The Garifuna are people of African descent and their ancestors came to the new world as slaves.  A couple of guys offered to take us across in their rowboat, but a woman fording across confirmed that we could ride it.  Only a couple hundred meters further down the road, we came to a lagoon that was too wide and deep to ford, so we put our bikes on a barge made of barrels and wood, and two men pulled us across using a rope that was strung across the river.

   

The ride had been really easy up to this point, but all of that changed when the road became a beach.  Our map depicted the road more inland, but this was definitely the route.  Within the first 50 meters of deep sand, I realized that this was going to be a nightmare.  I have never ridden a motorcycle in sand before, let alone a fully loaded bike.  Omer, who rides sand dunes in Israel, made quick work of the beach.  Within the first 30 minutes I had dropped the bike several times.  Don´t let the pictures fool you, those were my best moments on the hard packed stuff.  The reality was that I was either picking up my bike or trying to get it moving forward again about 90% of the time.  A couple of miles down the beach, a soft sand road diverted from the beach to a small village, and I began rejoicing at the thought of getting out of the sand.  The happiness was short lived though, as the road dumped us back onto the beach 2 minutes later. 

   

Things didn´t get any better.  The intense fear I´ve had of breaking my legs on the panniers only became worse when the bike came down on my right leg.  With aluminum panniers it´s best to keep your feet on the pegs, but in sand (at least in my experience) there are times when placing your foot down to keep your balance happens whether you consciously want it to or not.  If the foot stays down for a millisecond to long, the pannier runs it over and breaks your leg.  Again, a skillful rider may not see this as an issue.  The oppressive sun and heat, made worse by the riding gear and lack of airflow from riding so slow, really drained the energy out of me.  The bike seemed to get heavier each time I picked it up or tried to maneuver it.  For those of you who know me well, you can imagine how happy I was when I wasn´t able to ride sand like a pro in the Dakar Rally.

Finally, about 20 miles from where we first hit the sand, we arrived at a lagoon that made the beach impassable.  There was a Garifuna village there, where we spoke with several boat owners who bring people across the lagoon and to points further down the coast.  After listening to the sales pitches of the boaters, and the input of locals hanging around the launch site, we decided that this was as far as our La Mosquitia journey would go.  The deal breaker for us was the boats: Picture an over-sized canoe with a motor.  Neither of us could fathom getting the bikes in or out of the canoe, let alone placing it on-board in a way that wouldn´t capsize the thing in the middle of the lagoon.  This wasn´t going to be a one time thing either.  The road we had wanted to take through the heart of La Mosquitia was impassable, and we would have to take two more boats to bypass it.  So with all of that in mind, I swallowed the reality that we were going to have to ride the god-forsaken beach back to where we had started. 

There was no accommodation at this lagoon-side village, and I didn´t care for the vibe there to begin with.  There were two strings of gunfire in our immediate vicinity while we were chatting at the launch site.  It was probably just someone trying to unsettle the gringos, and I wasn´t going to give whoever it was the satisfaction of looking concerned.  I just continued on with my conversations, and pretended to not notice anything, even though it was probably no more than 30 yds away.

We made our way back down the beach.  I had gotten better at not dropping the bike, but my pace was still really slow.  We took one of the paths off of the beach to a Garifuna village we had passed through earlier that day.  I asked a man on horseback if there was accommodation there, and one of the boys that had gathered around to check out the bikes, offered us a place to stay.  He led us to his family´s home, and his siblings, mother, and a few neighbors were hanging around outside.  Before we could even put our kickstands down, they had brought us a bucket of water to drink, ad they were making arrangements with a neighbor to use his water pump to wash our bikes.  After treating the water with my steripen, I chugged down several bottles of water.  I have always felt awkward when people in remote places offer me water and I have to treat it first.  They probably think nothing of it, and I do my best to explain why I have to, but it still seems awkward, especially when my water purifier resembles a glow stick that I stir the water with.

 

The boy showed us our rooms, which were in a storage shed of sorts, but there were two mattresses.  This place was definitely rugged.  In a town of 200 people, the only place with electricity was the local store.  After showing us our rooms, the boy asked if we would like dinner.  After seeing a portion of some variety of fish hanging on the clothesline next to a couple of t-shirts, I had some reservations at first, but how could I say no to a home-cooked meal.   

Dinner was great.  We went to the family´s home, where they had two plates of food and some tea waiting for us by candlelight.  The meal consisted of fried plantains, and some sort of fried and breaded fish with cheese.  The cheese in the fish was a little unique, but edible.  When the mother dropped an additional block of cheese on my plate, I asked Omer if he would like to share it with me.  He gave me a quick ¨No thanks, Jeff¨ and suddenly took a lot of interest in his food to hide a grin.  I eventually made it through the cheese, and washed it all down with the tea made from grass, which was surprisingly good.

I awoke in the middle of the night to the deafening roar of rain on the tin roof, and to water dripping on my face.  Several hours later the storm subsided and I squeezed in another hour of sleep.  Within seconds of being up and about, the son was at our door offering us coffee and bread for breakfast.  We enjoyed the quick eat and packed our bags.  I asked the son how much we would like for the accommodation and the food and he said that he didn´t want anything.  Omer and I left the family some money, but I couldn´t believe that he didn´t ask for anything.

The rain from the storm made the beach much easier to ride, by firming up the sand and smoothing our the ridges.  We were making good time up until a point where a lagoon/river was flowing with last night´s rain into the ocean.  Without walking across on foot first, Omer drove into the river and almost completely submerged his bike.  Before I could even take a picture of what is now a hysterically funny situation, I was running into the water to help.  The current was really strong and Omer did a good job of not loosing the bike.  For the next 15 or 20 minutes we tried to muscle the bike out.  Each time we wiggled the front wheel r stopped moving, the bike would sink into the sand, the same way your feet do when walking in the surf.  If he or I were solo in the same situation, the bike would have been lost.  We eventually got the bike out, but it wouldn´t start; not that we expected it to.  While Omer worked on the bike, I removed my panniers to lighten up my bike, and carried them across the river.  As much as I hated the idea of subjecting my bike to the same thin, we had no choice, and the tide was coming in.  With the engine off, we pushed my bike across (much easier said than done), and since there was no water sucked into the engine, it started up right away.  Eventually we got Omer´s bike to start as well.  After having a good laugh, we loaded the bikes up and made our way back to Trujillo.

 

Although we didn´t have the trip to La Mosquitia that we had hoped to have, we knew going in that we may have to turn back.  In all honesty, the first day on the beach was the most exhausting thin I´ve done in a very long time.  The experience with the family and the village was priceless, and it was almost worth turning back just for that.  So even though the jaunt was a short one, I certainly found the adventure I was looking for.

Nicaragua

After a couple days in La Mosquitia, our bikes were in desperate need of a bath to get the corrosive salt and sand off.  After stripping my bike down, giving it a good scrub, and then coating it with WD-40, the bike looked like it had never seen dirt.  It pained me a little to clean the bike for the first time since the trip began.  The DR´s an undeniably-ugly bike (but it has a great personality), and I thought that the layer of dirt and grease that had built up over the last 11,500 miles, was the only redeeming quality that it had.

Omer and I wrapped up our time in Honduras with a two-day ride from Trujillo to the border of Nicaragua.  The ride brought us through the mountains and along the edge of a couple National Parks.  You know you´re spoiled when a beautiful dirt road through the mountains of Honduras, that rivals anything I have ever ridden in New England, now seems like par for the course.  We spent the first night in the small town of La Union, and made our way to the border the following morning.

 

Honduras was so much more than I ever expected it to be.  Unlike Guatemala, it was really easy to get off of the beaten path.  Aside from our first day at the Copan Ruins, we never saw another traveler.  The riding there was the best I´ve had on the trip.  If you missed the other posts from Honduras, check out September´s Posts to read more.  We did some rough calculations, and approximately 90-95% of our riding time was spent on dirt roads, horse trails, or on the beach.  In addition, the people were some of the friendliest I have met on this trip.  If you ask a group of Hondurans for directions, be prepared to wait a minute or so while they battle it out over who will get to tell you.  It´s actually quite comical, and I found myself asking bigger groups just to see what would happen. 

The border crossing into Nicaragua was as easy and straightforward as the others.  I don´t want to jinx myself, but I never imagined it being this easy to import and export a bike.  I heard so many horror stories of bureaucratic nightmares and having to ¨grease the wheels¨ in order to get anything done, but I haven´t experienced anything like that.  I do have all of South America ahead of me though... 

Nicaragua was the first border crossing at which I was bombarded with ¨helpers¨, or people ranging in age from 7 to 45 and wearing an assortment of semi-official looking vests, badges, etc; most of which I presume are fake.  The helpers offer to navigate you through the post for a fee; although one of them said that he didn´t want money and that his help was by the grace of God.  Something tells me that God would have wanted payment when it was all said and done.  I´ve heard mixed reviews on the ¨helpers¨.  Some people consider them an inexpensive life-saver, while others claim that they are useless, expensive, and sometimes outright thieves.  Since we´ve each navigated every other border without problems, Omer and I declined their services, but a few insisted on tagging along anyways.  I finally reached the point where I had to explicitly tell them to go away.  I could understand the instructions of the border officials just fine, and having three "helpers" repeat every spoken word with differing translations, was actually making things 100x more confusing than it had to be.  Finally, the helpers caught on to the fact that they weren´t going to make any money from us, and let us be. 

About 40 minutes later we were in Nicaragua and on our way to Ocotal.  I thought that "Ocotal" sounded familiar, and then I remembered the slogan, "Pencils for Ocotal".  "Pencils for Ocotal" was a collection my high school did to send school supplies to a town that I had presumed was in Africa.  Well Ocotal is actually in Central America and it´s a comfortable place to spend a day.  We arrived during the middle of a large parade and it quickly became apparent that the people here were just as friendly as in Honduras.

The next day we were off to the city of Leon.  The road to the city was one of the worst I´ve seen...ever.  It was paved, but just barely.  Huge, sharp-edged potholes, comprised more of the surface than intact pavement did.  Most vehicles chose to crawl down the sides, half on the road, and half on the ever-expanding dirt shoulder.  My guess is that the shoulders will eventually replace the paved road completely.  Since our bikes are more maneuverable than the cars and buses, and the shoulders were bogged down with vehicles, we stuck to the middle of the street and made our way through the slalom course as quickly as we could.  Thankfully it´s a relatively short stretch of road, so it was over before it became too tiresome, and before either of us had a flat. 

 

Leon was a pretty city, but after one day we decided to move down to the Pacific coast.  While packing my bike, I noticed that a bolt to my pannier rack had sheared; probably a result of one of the many falls in La Mosquitia.  We made a detour to a machine shop on the outskirts of town, and they were able to fix the rack and drill and tap another sheared bolt on Omer´s bike.  By the time we left the shop, the sun had already set, but we decided to break one of my cardinal rules, and make the 25km ride to the beach in the dark.  I have to ride with my tinted visor up at night, and after a couple minutes of using my corneas as a windshield, eating swarms of mosquitoes along with bigger and tastier insects, and swerving around random cows, horses, and oxen that just seemed to appear in the middle of the unlit road, I realized why I had made the rule in the first place.  We made it to the beach OK though and found a place to sleep.  The next morning we awoke and realized the beach wasn´t anything to get excited about, so we made our way Northeast to Laguna de Apoyo.  The Laguna is set in a volcanic crater, so the hills you see in the photo on the left are actually the inner walls of the volcano.  This was the nicest lake I´ve visited in Central America, with clean and clear water that couldn´t have been any more inviting. 

 

Continuing through Nicaragua, we visited Granada, and from there we took a day trip out to Volcan Masaya, pictured on the right.  On the way back from the volcano, our trip had another interesting event, as Omer tried to pass a bus while doing a wheelie.  He gave the bike a little more gas than he should have after changing gears and the bike almost flipped over on him.  While trying to recover, he collided with the side of the bus and then went down.  Thankfully he slid away from the bus´s tires, but I really didn´t know how bad it was going to be at first.  After a moment of collecting his thoughts, Omer was back on his feet, smiling, and saying how stupid he was, and I was kicking myself yet again for not having invested in a helmet cam at the beginning of this trip. 

We rounded out our stay with a trip to Isla de Ometepe, a volcanic island in Lago de Nicaragua.  We arrived just in time to the enjoy the parades that marked Nicaragua´s Independence Day celebrations. 

 

I´m writing from San Juan del Sur, a beach town close to the Costa Rican border.  After traveling with Omer for nearly five weeks, we finally had to part ways today.  His girlfriend is flying into Colombia on October 21st, and my girlfriend is flying into Costa Rica on October 11th, meaning that he needs to speed up, and I need to slow down.  When I was planning this trip, I had my heart set on riding it solo, but traveling with Omer added so much to my journey, and made for some of the most memorable moments of my trip thus far.  We´re both obviously really independent people, so how we were able to get along for that amount of time is beyond me, but I feel really lucky to have ran into him back in Guatemala. 

I´ve picked up the books in San Juan del Sur, and I´m going to study Spanish here until the middle of next week.  After that, I´m going to make my way into Costa Rica and explore the Pacific Coast while eagerly awaiting my girlfriend´s arrival!  Until next time...