Asphalt: The most underrated invention of all time.

You’re in the middle of nowhere on a mountain road that has gotten so bad over the last few hours that it is pushing impassibility. You haven’t seen another vehicle pass you in over an hour, to the point where you’re wondering if you made a wrong turn on the maze of trails or if everyone knows something about this road that you don’t… Huge landslides have taken out chunks of the road and the makeshift trails that cut through the destruction and rubble are dangerous and unstable from the rainy season. The drop off to your right falls away into a gorge that is hundreds of meters deep. The mountain to your left is an almost vertical slope that towers above your head.  Long ago the road lost its last battles with rain and rock, and now it slopes at crazy angles and boulders the size of cars sit on the road where they fell from the mountain above. Fuel is getting desperately low, and the bike is overheating from the arduous climb and tropical heat. Exhaustion is setting in from hours of difficult riding and fever and infection are spreading up your leg from the accident you had two days before on a similar road. It has taken 3 hours to go no more than an estimated 45km with at least that far to go ahead before hitting another unknown road. If you attempt to turn around the last fuel stop was hours and hours ago and well out of range. The loose jagged limestone is like riding on billiard balls, horribly unstable and the edges are slowly shredding your tires. It’s already late afternoon and the prospect of spending a night on the side of the abandoned road is only slightly less appealing that pushing on. Even that option became untenable when the last time you stopped to let the bike cool down you heard explosions in the distance. As you pick your way around some more boulders and struggle for traction you turn another slippery corner. Everything is on empty or in the red. And then you see it. A whole group of men armed with automatic weapons walking along the road towards you. You can’t turn around on the narrow road; you can’t even stop without sliding on the loose rolling rocks, there is nothing you can do. There are excited gestures and pointing coming from some of the men and grim looks on the others. As you slow down you madly contemplate your next move. You rack your brain for options, everything from motocross to MacGyver. You’ve got nothing. Absolutely nothing but to keep riding towards them with a smile and a wave and see what happens. As you slowly approach them you raise your hand in a wave, and put on your best idiotic grin. You grin like an absolute idiot. One of them waves back, others look pissed off. You look quite the sight riding towards a group of armed men with your excitable waving and massive, moronic, shit-eating grin. As you pass the first guy no one yells or makes any motions for you to stop, and as you pass amongst them you see they are wearing green army fatigues. Turns out it’s just the Guatemalan army doing a patrol along the road. Heart attack averted… The military, presumably still worried about guerrilla activity in the area and the large amount of explosives being used to blow a way through the mountains, has provided armed escort of the road workers cutting their way through the mountains and repairing the road from the opposite direction. Happy days. Welcome to Guatemala.

But your problems are all still there, you are running on empty in every respect. Only now you have to look out for men laying explosives and avoid the huge LX excavators tearing apart the mountain, and presumably whoever the army is there to stop. The road is another kind of worse now with loose limestone everywhere and churned up mud making your wheels spin and slide towards the edge of the raven. And then you see the most amazing sight, the most underrated invention of all time. Bitumen, Asphalt, you can call it whatever you want. I’ll call it bliss. It is peace of mind freshly layered in all its beauty. Your cares melt away and you fly along the deserted road weaving and hugging the road. The wind flies through your hair, you taste the mountains, the trees, the air. And as you fly down the road on the smell of an oily rag, with the throttle to the limit and leaning into the turns with the road so close you could touch it, it’s all the sweeter for all the trouble.

Three weeks before we woke up at 4am and got what might turn out to be our last chicken bus in Central America. With the bike being worked on by a mechanic we found in Antigua and our intensive language course winding up in Xela, we were anxious to get on the road and off it. After going over the bike with a fine tooth comb with Taz, finding any last minute problems and using a healthily dose of superglue and ingenuity to fix most of them, it was time to find helmets. Little did we know that Guatemalans have the largest heads known to mankind. The “small” helmets we tried were all ridiculously loose, and after visiting every store in town we found one that just fit Jack and a child helmet for Nett. Who knew?

As we pulled out of town the Pan American Highway awaited. The road was terrific and we would have appreciated it a lot more if we knew what lay ahead, but even on this road which joins all of Central America there were landslides and parts of the road literally missing as they fell into gorges. Nothing could have phased us less, and we flew past cars picking there way through the worst parts without a care.

We arrived back in San Pedro, which is fast becoming one of our favourite places and picked off where we left off. Lying in hammocks and drinking beer. While doing the later we were lucky enough to run into an old friend who we first met in Mexico, then in Xela for the language course, Dimitri. An Irish bloke who introduced us to a few new crazy people and told us about an interesting experience he had with something called the ‘Chocolate Sharman’. Intrigued we rode over to the other side of the lake on our bike to a town called San Marcos and eventually found the Sharman himself. Keith- an ex American and the biggest hippy in the universe.

When we arrived Keith started the ceremony by informing us that San Marcos was exactly 14 months ahead of the rest of the world’s energy? When we inquired how he knew this he said he ‘talked to people’, oh... Apparently it had previously been 2 years ahead but somehow the world caught up in energy. The chocolate ceremony involves drinking 43 grams of pure unprocessed cacao which has been clinically proven to increase blood flow to the brain by 40% and produces some weird effects. You can also add a green juice with some unknown herbs which we were told would help us connect with the spirit world. We were game and added dashes of everything before drinking the bitter liquid. What happened next is difficult to explain. People around the circle started channelling spirits and energy into one another. Some laughed hysterically and others sobbed uncontrollably with rapid variation between the two. It was a weird feeling, kind of like being stoned but with a sugar rush you might get if you ate 4 blocks of chocolate all the while accompanied by a feeling of being hugely emotionally unstable (Probably because we were surrounded by crazy people) but there was no denying that it was doing something to us.

Then the circle got really really intense, with Keith probing people to bring up repressed memories or feelings. One lady called Brenda was in hysterics, angrily pounding the floor and yelling that she was angry at god. Others people in the room started channelling spirits into her and others could see her bad energy and were trying to suck it out of her. It would have looked insane to anyone who hadn’t taken it, and it was. We certainly couldn’t see any spirits but the raw emotion in the room and the effects whatever was in that cup were palpable.

We were pretty transfixed on the scene around us and despite our best efforts hadn’t ‘opened up’ to the level of crazy shown by others, but Keith was having none of that. He looked straight at us and with a wild scarily intense look said ‘You two are in trouble…’. The place might have been in a cult, and by the expressions on the faces on his devoted followers as they suddenly turned to look at us with the same scarily intense look, it was.

Keith then told Jack to ‘open his heart’ and was soon teaching Annette how to channel spirits to his body by placing a hand over his chest. We were profoundly uncomfortable, what with the group now so focused on us and trying to accomplish the insane. But it got worse as Keith started berating our relationship and telling Jack to ‘open his heart’, and open an imaginary door to it. While we were trying to figure out what the hell he was talking about, Keith told Jack to tell everyone what he saw once he opened the door. Jack, dutifully visualising someone opening a door in his head saw exactly what someone opening an imaginary door in their head sees, absolutely nothing. But things were about to take another turn for the crazy. Keith kept telling Jack with increasing vigour to ‘Open the Door’, and ‘Open His Heart’, but when Jack responded that his heart (and presumably the door to it) was open, Keith screamed “SHAM” and his followers around the circle repeated it. It was getting way to cult like in that room and the atmosphere was charged and intense. The effect made Annette to burst into tears and made both of us want to get the fuck out of there. Which we promptly did, but not before realising we had been sitting there for 4 and a half hours. Weird.  

It was one intense experience, but in our opinion it was full of shit. In our minds Keith was probing people while they were in this altered state to bring up repressed emotions to the point of breakdown, as a kind of justification of his chocolate god’s power. And his ‘therapy’ and advice once someone was brought to breakdown was often contradictory and frankly nuts. When a person in the circle was in hysterics his solutions could vary from “you have to put your box back together’??  To “you must hold onto your pain so you can tell god ‘I told you so’ when you see him”. Maybe therapy should be left up to someone who doesn’t claim to have personally met the chocolate god… Oh, and it turns out that Brenda, the ‘women’ angry at god, was in fact previously Brendan. I don’t think a cup of chocolate is going to help anyone get over emotional scars like that.

Despite the chocolate Sharman experience we left San Pedro feeling refreshed and relaxed for our last week of studying in Xela and our last week living with our host family. Our little Guatemalan family was incredibly kind and we grew quite close over the 5 weeks we were there. We were sad to say goodbye but we can’t say the same about Xela. At 2500m, the days were cold and the nights freezing, and when everyday is punctuated by thunderstorms and endless rain we were pretty over it by the end.

It was time to hit the road and the real adventure was ahead. We cut down our luggage to bear bones and everything that was expendable was left behind. We set off from Xela and went willingly straight towards a road that our Spanish teachers had said was almost impassable. It was time to test that theory and we rode for about 5 hours into the mountains before we found the road. The road used to be the main artery connecting Hue Hue Tenango and Coban, about a 5 hour drive but in 2008 disaster struck. The road was hit by some of the worst flooding and landslides in Guatemala’s history from four massive cyclones during the season and the road was irreparably damaged and completely destroyed in parts. It now requires an 8 hour detour to get around it and only the well prepared or crazy attempt it now.

As we got closer to the region where we knew the road was damaged the traffic died away and the road started to get bad. It was so strange though as the first 50km of road was in almost perfect condition except for where four years of neglect could be seen.  Small landslides were strewn across one lane but there were trees and shrubs growing out of them. The effect was like a post apocalyptic world where nature is taking over. There was almost no traffic and weeds grew through cracks in the road, but the ride was beautiful and the day sunny as we descended into a deep valley and even had a midday swim in a stream.

As we left the stream and started a windy road up the mountain, the bitumen road petered out and then even that got hard to see. We rode for hours and it got no better and the landslides increasingly worse. What was left of the road was unstable and unpredictable at best. Whole hills had collapsed and at one point a whole mountain. Four years after the storms have passed and it was still chaos as locals, left to themselves, tried to resurrect a road through the rocks and mud. We paid 5 quetzales (50 cents) as a road toll going to the locals digging through the 2km of utter rubble. The road was awful but the people were the opposite. Everyone we passed beamed smiles and waves and every vehicle or truck honked as people climbed out windows to wave. The local industry was devastated when the road closed and every traveller is met with the most sincere welcome. We passed stunning mountains and tiny villages nestled amongst them where everyone wears traditional dress and big mangos are 30 cents. The detour around the road is about 8 hours and we spent the same time on a much more difficult and dangerous road, but it’s often the roads less travelled where the best experiences are found, and this was no exception.  When we finally got to Coban after 8 hours of gruelling riding is was all we could do to pass out.

In Coban we went to a stunning orchid farm with the rare ‘White Nun orchid’ (Guatemala’s national flower), but it was only a stop over. We were eager to see what has been described as ‘the most beautiful place in Guatemala’, Semuc Champey.

The karst limestone of the region might be a bitch to ride over, but it makes for some stunning scenery.  Towers of rock jut out into the sky, covered in jungle and with turquoise little lakes at there base. Semuc Champey lies deep in a cliff lined river valley and consists of a series of turquoise green and blue pools.  We have no idea how it geologically formed, but the river has created a 300m long rock bridge with the pools on top and the river running underground below. The pools all link up and cascade into one another in a series of waterfalls. We can understand why so many travellers make the long trek to see it.  We whiled away the afternoon swimming in the pools and being cleaned by dozens of tiny fish that nibbled on our skin.  We also visited a cave system nearby, with a Mayan shrine deep inside and a fast flowing river emerging from its mouth.  But disaster wasn’t far around the corner. 

The road to Semuc Champey was one of the worst we’ve seen – despite it being a national icon, the road in was a 22km round trip of limestone rubble and deep muddy pools across the road.  As we rode through one of the deeper ones, we found out first hand how treacherous a rear tyre with low tread and a greasy muddy pool can be.  As we went through the water, the rear tyre was coated in thick mud and essentially became a slick.  When we came out the other side of the pool, the road sloped steeply to the right.  The rear tyre slid viciously on the limestone, jerking the bike sideways.  It would have been possible to recover but the front wheel dove into another pot hole, causing the bike to twist sideways 90 degrees in the air and slam us onto the road.  Jack put his left leg out to arrest the fall but it was twisted awkwardly underneath the bike, tearing a ligament in his left knee.  His right leg landed on the hottest part of the exhaust, searing the flesh.  As he jerked away, the lip of the exhaust tore away the burnt skin and flesh leaving a nasty wound the size of a hand.  Remarkably, Annette was unharmed save a bruise or two and some scratches.    

The bike fared ok, only smashing the left bark buster to pieces and twisting a few of the left side peddles.  The accident has taught us that with our present set of low tread intermediate tyres, our kryptonite is mud.  We plan to replace it soon but until then are acutely aware of our weakness.    

The following day, Jack sore from his injuries, we rested in the nearby town of Lanquin.  But, upon discovering that there was no ATM for a ridiculously large distance and with our money running low, we were forced to make a move.  The nearest town with an ATM was Frey and on the map it didn’t look that far or difficult.  In fact, it was a thick yellow line on the map, often used to signify an important road between major towns.  With Jack’s wound slowly festering in the heat and humidity, we set off eager to return to bitumen and find a hospital.  We couldn’t have been more wrong.  When we reached the top of the exit road and rejoiced, we thoroughly enjoyed 50m of bitumen before seeing the road ahead of us quickly decline into no more than a rocky, slippery, narrow, steep goat track.  With few options open to us and no money, it was all or nothing.  What followed was the narrative at the beginning, and it was as bad as or worse than that described.  At one point Jack, racked by fever and exhaustion, begged to sleep on the side of the “road”, but when we heard the explosions in the distance, we were compelled to continue.  With everything on empty or in the red we were getting seriously worried about fuel and the distance remaining when we saw 10 guys with automatic weapons walking along the road. The region was a hub of rebel activity during the civil war and the military was obviously nervous about the amount of explosives being used by the road workers, asphalting the road from the opposite direction. The explosions we heard where we stopped were from them blowing apart the mountain.

When we finally arrived at the small truck stop town of Frey, we found an ATM but Jack was in a bad way and in no state to ride anywhere.  His left knee had swollen and stiffened, while his right leg was now a festering wound filled with pus and infection.  A Guatemalan policeman, concerned by the sight of Jack’s leg, disappeared and returned with a small maroon bottled with unknown contents.  We were horror stricken when he poured it on Jack’s wound, causing it to bubble, foam and hiss as it dissolved the pus and infected flesh.  It hurt like crazy, like rubbing salt in a wound, but despite appearances helped.  We think that it was a highly oxygenated antibiotic solution, whatever it was it was disconcerting watching part of your leg dissolve...  We went to the nearest hospital, which cleaned the wound and prescribed antibiotics, free of charge.  For all its worries, from what we can tell Guatemala’s health care system isn’t one of them. The doctors and nurses were great and laughed and asked us questions which we answered as best we could with our broken Spanish. From the looks of the other patients arriving, they weren’t fairing the roads too well either. The next Guatemalan guy brought in had lost part of his lip and most of his body was cut to ribbons.

While not an ideal situation, Jack’s recovery in Frey allowed us to acquaint ourselves with some wonderful people in the small town.  People went out of their way to talk to us and the policeman, who was the husband of our hotel owner, kept a protective eye on Jack.  We don’t think western travellers go to Frey, but if they do they sure as hell don’t stay three nights, and we were quite a novelty limping around town, attracting all sorts of stares, comments and kids excitedly running after us.

Partially recovered, we sought out a remote eco lodge that had been recommended to us, called Las Conchas.  It was well off the beaten track, so far that only the most dedicated traveller (and even then) had trouble finding it.  We travelled for hours through farmland and jungle, only to find the gate firmly closed when we finally arrived.  As we sat dejectedly on the track in the middle of nowhere, contemplating our next move, a caretaker arrived.  She had heard our bike coming through the village and could think of no other reason for outsiders to visit.  She showed us to a beautiful wooden cabin, set close to a burbling river full of waterfalls.  With no electricity, we cooked for ourselves and lay reading in hammocks by the fire.  Without electricity, we were awed by the sight of thousands and thousands of fireflies twinkling in the clearing and amongst the jungle.  It was like something out of Avatar, thousands of twinkling lights on every surface and moving about the clearing. Sometimes, there blinking would sync up and the whole jungle would flash in intricate and incredibly beautiful patterns. We stayed three days in the peaceful jungle, seeing few people with only the fireflies to keep us company.

It’s been an extraordinary couple of weeks, perilous roads, crazy charlatans, accidents and adventure. Sometimes it’s good and sometimes it’s bad, and sometimes the bad is good and the good is bad. But it’s been everything we could have hopped for. From Las Conchas we travelled to an extremely remote tropical island paradise off the coast of Belize, but that’s for next time.