(An excerpt from “Cold Feet,” a blog entry written in Cusco, Peru on May 15, 2015.)
Small gringas on motorbikes generally make easy targets for Central American border helpers. They gang rush you, "official" ID tags in hand, promising swift and easy passage, without quoting you a price for their services (you have to dig that out of them yourself). Sometimes they are honest and will save you several hours of hassle, especially if your Spanish is crap. Sometimes they're not. In order to avoid being conned, one must ask a) what their fee will be, up front, and b) that they present receipts for all transactions, for passport stamps, copies, permit taxes, etc. If they get a blank look on their face, you ride away and hope like hell you can sort it out for yourself.
I was scared shitless to cross into El Salvador. Yeah, because of the gang violence and the wild schmorgasbord of fearful ideas forever circulating about the country, correct and otherwise. It didn't help that there were literally miles of semi-trucks waiting in line, sidelong stares thrown my way by their bored and restless drivers as I blew past them to the front on my XT. But Anthony made it easy. Anthony with his aging face, clean English and calm demeanor, disarming me to the degree that I happily gave him $20 for getting me through immigration and customs, without his asking for said sum. The crossing took 3 hours and it was nearly dark when I rode off, shakily, into one of the worst countries to move about in without the comfort of sunlight…but I was grateful to this guy whom I thought was watching out for me. So when he contacted his "brother" at the Honduras border, I thought I had it made. There'd be nothing to worry about there either.
2 weeks later I would experience the horror show that is the Honduras border. Everything was grey and tan and searing hot. Bits of trash clung to the roots of trees, and there was at least one exploded car carcass, burnt primer black, propped up on cinder blocks with jagged bits of glass left where windows had once been. The buildings were unmarked, with bars covering windows and doors. And there were bored-looking guys everywhere. Most of them had their shirts rolled up to their titties, guts hanging out to catch the occasional wayward breeze. Others were missing limbs.
As expected, around 5 or 6 fixers ran up to me all at once, waving their hands in the air, touching my bike, etc. "Busco Ronni Garcia" I said.
"Ahhhh, Ronni Garcia.. siiiiiiiii...."......
Señor Garcia didn't look anything like Antony. His eyes were glazed over and they refused to look at mine. He had a high-pitched voice and he twitched a lot. But I chose to trust him anyway, handing over my passport and every other piece of paper vital to the act of moving self + machine across country lines. After two and a half hours of mad paper shuffling and waiting in the slowly lengthening shadows of the aduana office's jail bars, Ronni demanded $65, including $20 for the stamping of my passport, and $40 for my vehicle permit for which there were no receipts. The computers were down, he said (I'd find out later that I should have paid around $5 total for these things). He had my documents in his sweaty palms…so I had no choice. When he suggested the services of a friend at the Nicaragua border, I very nearly spat in his face.
I tore off across Honduras, pissed off and humiliated, ready to write off an entire country because of one bad experience. I was done with the heat, the detritus, the gang violence stories, the harshness of all of it. Throughout the entire journey I had worn my white-female-gringa-motociclista dorkiness on my sleeve, brandishing it like a suit of armor, plunging into potentially intense situations with the assumption that the guardian angel on my back would spare me of harsh, negative experiences.
Still, I had a piece of artwork in my tail bag that belonged to this country. I was committed to that. As the Pan American Highway took me out of oppressively hot flatlands and into steep live oak covered hills, I started to wake up, scanning the landscape for a place to put it and/or a person to give it to. My attitude changed, and I felt an urgency to make this place meaningful for myself, despite, or because of the discomfort I felt here.
Barbed wire fences lined the twisting highway, separating weed-choked ditches from hand-built concrete shacks with tarpaper roofs and deteriorating porches. Something fluttered on the left, and a woman smiled at me cautiously as I pulled over onto a rare flat spot at the side of the road. Tiny shirts, socks and underwear clung to rusting barbs, blowing about in the breeze, a little faded from the sun. I wanted so desperately for one of my embroideries to join them on that fence, though putting one there would mean stepping onto this lady's private property.
For the next 15 minutes I threw myself at her mercy like a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman. In my horrible Spanish I presented the embroidery to her, describing the project, asking her permission to photograph her, her family and my piece on her fence, after which point it would be hers to keep. She was clearly confused ("baffled" is a better term), but she put up with me anyway, her four kids huddled behind her wearing sheepish smiles.