Lava Cocktails

Unbelieveably I've been a year on the road [and occasionally the sea] with Dragoman. I celebrated the anniversary in style at the Volcan Arenal in Costa Rica, the World's second most active volcano, which erupts every twenty minutes or so. Though the summit is invariably swathed in cloud, you can spot the red glow of the odd pyroclastic flow rolling out under the night sky from beneath the cloudline. The volcano has a very sticky form of lava forced to the surface by water pressure which also cools the magma sufficiently so that it rolls rather than flows. The same water is itself heated in the process, which means there are numerous thermal springs dotted around the place. After peering through the murk at the red glow, we journeyed around the mountain to a fabulous hot springs bar where you can sit in a pool of warm water sipping the cocktail of your choice and gazing up at the night sky. The whole complex with its smartly dressed waiters serving bikini clad boozers late into the night has a quite sureal feel to it, like some sort of space age fantasy bar out of Star Wars or perhaps The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy. It was all a very long way from that first night in a cheap motel in Dover.

I've been rather gorging on volcanos having recently scaled the active Masaya Volcano in Nicaragua. It's an incredible feeling to stand on the rim of a giant smoking hole in the earth, breathing in a sulphurous smelling air and understanding how ancient inhabitants of this land came to see these places as portals of the underworld. Despite their destructive power, these places are responsible for generating the incredible fertility of this part of the World too. Travelling through Costa Rica, a country which for once is really striving to preserve its unique ecosystems, you cannot fail to be amazed by the immense richness and diversity of the landscapes contained in such a small amount of space. The rivers and forests are literally teaming with life and the are skies filled with birds of every colour imaginable. It's a wildlife lover's fantasy country come true.

Sandinistas

It's easy as a tourist to imagine that the history of Central America is simply the story of the Aztecs and Mayans, culminating in their ultimate demise at the hands of the Spanish Conquistadors. You can choose to travel the isthmus visiting Pre-Colombian ruins along the way while basing yourself in a series of lovely old colonial towns laid out by the first wave of Spanish settlers and now reinventing themselves as relaxed backpacker destinations. However, if you stray off the established tourist routes a little, it isn't so difficult to bring yourself up to date with much more recent history of an equally dark shade.

Throughout Central America a legacy of the colonial period was the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a narrow elite of old Spanish families. The majority of the population remained politically and socially marginalized, poor, ill educated and bereft of much opportunity to improve their lot. In the 1970s and 1980s a wave of popular protest against the old regimes sparked by the communist Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua unleashed an evil epoch in Central American history as the region became caught up in the final phase of the Cold War. Oppressive military regimes with appalling human rights records were propped up by American money and military equipment as President Reagan became obsessed with the idea that only extreme measures were going to prevent a domino effect of countries turning communist. Somehow the land of the free lost sight of the fact that the will of the people is the ultimate litmus test of liberty, and chose instead to back the oligarches in pursuit of ideological principles. The result was a terrible and drawn out tragedy for the people.

In Honduras, the the US strategy paid off and the status quo was preserved, leaving a country which today seems unusually stable for the region, but where the most extreme social inequalities still persist. In Guatemala, new life was breathed into a forty-year civil war in which Government targeting of the large indigenous population of the country was a particularly unpleasant dimension.

Perhaps the saddest chapter of this history was played out in tiny El Salvador, a country ripped apart in the 1980s by a savage civil war in which an estimated 100,000 people died. We made a special flying visit to the country to visit the civil war museum at the former FMLN guerilla headquarters in the eastern mountains. The low-key museum aspires to be non-political in aim and explanation, acting simply as a repository of memory for all the people of a country scarred by war. Of course it's a difficult aspiration to achieve when the guides are themselves ex-guerillas, and it was interesting to observe that the leader of a visiting school party from an obviously wealthy school had a somewhat different take on the war to our guide. Wherever the truth lies, and museum doesn't hide the fact that human rights abuses were perpetrated by the guerillas as well as the Government, it's difficult to visit the place and not be profoundly moved by the terrible suffering of El Salvadorean people in this period. Massive US backing of the Government and military ultimately failed to defeat that FMLN who signed up to a UN brokered peace settlement in the early 1990s. What most saddened the people I spoke to was that having in a sense fought a successful revolution, the FMLN and other political leaders had lost sight of many of the aims and objectives that had carried them forward in the first place. Indeed, there is some irony in the fact that a country that suffered so much at the hands of US foreign policy, and lived to tell the tale, has fairly recently opted to adopt the dollar as its currency.

In Nicaragua, the illegal backing of the right wing Contras (remember Colonel Oliver North and the Iran-Contra scandal?) failed to dislodge the Sandinistas, but severely damaged a country that ought by rights to have been one of the richest in the Americas. The Sandinistas eventually disappeared at the ballot box as the people became disillusioned with Soviet Block style hardships and food shortages, even if literacy rates had soared. Today Nicaragua still looks badly battered by its experiences. There are giant potholes on all but the main roads and much evidence of war damage and untended decay in buildings outside of the old colonial tourist centres (which have now been patched up). Unemployment in Nicaragua is at a staggering 73%. Some stability does seem to have been achieved, the economy is improving at last and there is little nostalgia for the ideological extremism of the Sandinistas. Instead local people here in Granada tell me they want to enjoy the benefits of capitalism but with a strong social dimension so that its fruits are shared more widely amongst the people. Nicaraguans strike me as perhaps the loveliest people I have met in Central America and I can only hope their fortunes significantly improve in the years ahead.

Honduras

Honduras is one of the poorest countries in Central America and one of the most beautiful. Its western mountains are in many ways similar to those in neighbouring Guatemala, but here the landscapes seem less damaged by man. The forests are less scarred by slash and burn agriculture and the telltale marks of subsistance farming. The towns seem well ordered and surprisingly neat and tidy compared to elsewhere.

This is the country in the region that managed not to have a catastrophic civil war in the 1970s and 80s, instead becoming a prop and base for US military and undercover activity. The legacy of such times is a palpably American feel to the place in patches, both in terms of evidence of affluence and the presence of US tourists. Still the distribution of wealth is strikingly uneven. Honduras was the original Banana Republic and you get the impression that big business still retains control of most of the purse strings and doesn't pay out all that much to benefit the people.

We've been hanging out in Roatan, one of the Bay Islands, these past days. It's a bit of an unreal place, at least here in West End, one of the best places in the World for going scuba diving. It's a haven for ex-pat divers and beach bums who are catered for by a plethora of beach bars and restaurants serving international cuisine. I gave the sport a crack with a one day course, diving very apprehensively down to nine metres for 40 minutes and sort of enjoying myself in a nerve-racking kind of way. On the seabed I was greeted by a very jaunty looking lobster which I left alone to live out another day. It's been fun, but I'm looking forward to moving on.

Under The Volcanos

Western Guatemala is a place of inspiring landscapes with towering cone shaped volcanos looming large over picturesque colonial towns and green hills patchworked with the smallholdings of Guatemala's large indigenuous rural population. It's also a landscape prone to the devasting effects of earthquakes and eruptions, as well as the occasional passing hurricane.

Tourism centres on the old town of Antigua, the colonial capital in Spanish days until a particularly large quake levelled the city in the late 18th C. Its hardy citizens rebuilt it in parts, but left a legacy of gently decaying ruined churches and monasteries in amongst the refurbished mansions. It has a faintly bohemian feel with language schools aplenty catering for young North Americans come down to improve their Spanish by day and kick back in the bars and cafes by night. There seemed to be a lot of weddings going down on the day we wandered about the place, the brides looking rather surly in white while the grooms were generally too squat and rotund to carry off the effect of wearing a double-breasted suit. Perhaps that was what was upsetting the brides.

It was good to push on into the Western Highlands from Antigua to visit some slightly more authentic communities in the mountains. At the highest town in Guatemala (2500m), we divided up to stay in the homes of local families, a fascinating experience. Grace and I stayed with Marina, a middle-aged mother of two who took us for a spin around the market before we helped her prepare dinner in her antiquated kitchen. She lived in an outlying village we reached by cramming into the back of a minivan with around 25 other women and children all dressed in the brightly coloured woven clothes worn by local indigenuous people. Our home for the night was a concrete shack shared with cats, dogs and hens, but it proved comfortable enough once you'd got settled in. Conversation was entirely in Spanish and managed to keep flowing for most of the evening, before Grace was invited to get togged up in traditional clothes and pose for photos in which she towered over our host at almost twice her height.

There were yet more volcanos surrounding Lake Atitlan, an unfeasibly beautiful mountain lake a little like Lake Como in Italy, but without the expensive hotels and luxury boats. Atitlan is home to some of the most traditional communities in Guatemala, each retaining distinctive local dress and customs despite their relative proximity to one another by boat, the only practical way to get around the place. Like a lot a places in Guatemala it's beginning to be seriously impacted on by tourism, with large numbers of local people working in the souvenir selling business in the main villages. It remains to be seen whether traditional lifestyles will survive this latest invasion as well as they managed to survive the arrival of the Spanish and Catholicism over 400 years ago.

Going Underground

Having plunged the depths of the sea, it would have been rude not to have ventured underground to investigate the fascinating Mayan sacrificial cave at Actun Tunichil Muknal. The Maya believed in spirits of the underworld and revered caves as portals of the spirits. Still it is astonishing to discover that they explored up to a mile and half underground through caverns chest high in water to reach the enormous and haunting Cathedral Cavern, where human victims were ruthlessly sacrificed to the gods. It's quite an adventure getting to the Cavern even today with the aid of torches, and it's an odd feeling to be walking through an archaeolgical site at the end of the journey, watching your step in order not to tread on thousand year old human bones and pieces of pottery.

Archeaologists posit some sort of natural catrastrophe which hit the Mayan World in the 10th C and brought their great urban civilisation to an end. Perhaps a drought made feeding vast urban populations unsustainable. Whatever it was, things must have got pretty desperate for believers to venture quite so deep into the underworld to appease their gods with human victims.

Across the border in Guatamala is perhaps the greatest of all Mayan sites at Tikal. Its series of steeply stepped pyramids soar upwards above the jungle treetops to create an arresting image of a lost civilisation. The site is immense and wonderfully atmospheric at dawn as the sun rises through the jungle mist to light upon the stonework. As you wander jungle paths from one temple to another, you share the ruins with toucans sitting in the tree branches and tarantulas skulking in earth holes below your feet. Howler monkeys roar out their calls from up in the forest canopy like spirits of the dead wailing over the demise of a city that was once so great.

Guatamala is a country rebuilding itself after more than 40 years of civil war and political unrest. It seems a surprisingly together sort of a place considering its history. Still, you notice that life is markedly less affluent here than in Belize. Driving southwards through the beautiful jungle clad eastern mountains there is plenty of evidence of slash and burn agriculture taking place as people irreversibly damage a unique ecological environment in order to eke out a living. Eco-tourism is making inroads here though, as elsewhere in Central America, so it remains to be seen how things develop in the future.

And so I find myself at the end of another leg of this trip, sitting by the sea in the Carribean coastal village of Livingstone, home to Guatamala's only significant black community and a place that can only be accessed by boat. It's a last chance to gorge on seafood and reggae music before crossing the continent to end up in the old Spanish colonial city of Antigua. It's a strange thing to be able to drive across a continent in just a few hours.