Like a procession of ancient shamans carefully picking their way single-file on stony soil, a band of tourists walked slowly in the black of night and gaped as blood-red lines of lava dribbled down the cone of the dark mountain.
The volcano’s ominous silhouette gradually took shape against the onyx sky, and within moments, as though on cue, a low rumble began to shake the night and rise to a trembling crescendo. A gray plume of steam and smoke stormed toward the stars — and once again, as it has for centuries, Arenal unleashed its might before an awe-struck crowd.
Arenal and its hourly explosions is but one treasure from a chest of natural wonders along or near the Pan-American Highway in Central America, an intriguing land endowed with stunning natural beauty but cursed by human violence. Our 2,477-mile drive across Central America began in Mexico City and ended in Panama. It was a journey crammed with endless lines of volcanoes, with cloud forests that only lacked Indiana Jones and deserts that would have bedazzled Ansel Adams. There also was the nagging threat of marauding bandits and guerrillas who stalk stretches of otherwise docile straightaways and who occasionally ambush travelers on death-defying mountain roads.
Our goal was to drive a company car from Mexico to Panama, the only country in which it could legally be sold due to our having purchased it there three years ago. It was our second journey along the Pan-Am in two years, a highway saga that took us twice across seven nations.
We had to negotiate for auto-entry or -exit permits with stone-faced border authorities at 12 separate frontiers. Many roadway and bureaucratic inconveniences would stalk us, but the drawbacks were forgotten as we shook our heads in disbelief over mountains, valleys and shorelines so stunningly beautiful that the word “paradise” became a trip cliche. Volcanoes, cloud forests, rivers, birds, legends, spirits, flowers and sanctuaries so often blended together in near-perfection.
We would break down and be left vulnerable on one of the hemisphere’s most dangerous, bandit-plagued roads, and spend the night in a Salvadoran town so potentially rowdy that the rooms in its best hotel were separated from its saloon by jail bars, complete with cell door.
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We were mindful of the perils of driving at high altitudes on narrow mountain roads void of guardrails and crammed with daredevil trucks. And nagging our thoughts was the memory of our dance with death in 1994, when our engine and brakes cut out and we spun out of control on a black-dark, cloud-bound hairpin turn on Costa Rica’s dreaded “Mountain of Death.”
“Driving the Pan-Am through Central America? You really want to do that?” asked a friend who follows the news that often tells of crime and death by ambush in some countries along the way.
Clearly, this is not a journey for travel neophytes or adventurers lacking tact or bluster. But given a fair degree of tenacity and reliable wheels and spare parts, the rewards can tumble like tropical rain.
We began our second Pan-American journey in Mexico City and crammed a week’s worth of sightseeing into three days of travel south to Guatemala. But those visits to Cholula, Atlixco, Oaxaca, El Tule, Teotitlan del Valle, Mitla and then, finally, San Cristobal de las Casas are another story for another time.
Guatemala
We arrived at the Guatemala border a bit anxious. Although we had copies, our original car documents had been lost through a bureaucratic mixup in Mexico. But the customs and immigration officials on Mexico’s southern frontier were friendly and professional, and after a half-hour we cruised into Guatemala.
The first border crossing would prove to be our easiest.
Our initial contact with Guatemala was the guy who wanted to fumigate the car. Most countries have abandoned this practice, following studies that showed it did little good in keeping out unwanted pests. But Guatemala, Nicaragua and Costa Rica maintain the policy, mostly as a way to derive income.
Our attendant was an amiable sort. Not too many gringos pass through the mountain crossing at La Mesila–most cross at Tecun Uman to the south–and he was eager to chat. We told him we were from Chicago, and were astonished when he said he’d never heard of it.
Within a few miles of the Mexico border, Guatemala’s nicely paved roads gave way to dirt and rock, large patches that appear to have been opened by landslides. Deep, green valleys and gorges that fell off hundreds of feet to trickling rivers below variously awed us and put us a bit ill at ease on a road that clearly had caved in elsewhere.
The stretches where the road narrowed to one lane were well marked, but at night we might have had trouble making them out. We also had to keep an eye peeled for drunks in the road, wobbling down the center or, in one scary case, lying in the middle of the northbound lane.
On top of that, Guatemala has suffered a rash of kidnappings and other crimes against Guatemalans and foreigners alike. The nation’s nearly four-decade-long civil war still sputtered along as well. (An agreement to end the war was signed last month.) Those things nagged at our mind as we drove east.
We headed toward Lake Atitlan, cradled amid stunning mountain scenery, and pulled in at Hotel Atitlan just outside the town of Panajachel. When we arrived it was dark, cold and windy. But we relaxed comfortably over a dinner of lake trout, ignoring the wind that whipped against the windows of the hotel restaurant.
Morning brought a hot sun and a terrific view of the lake that has held European travelers and conquerors spellbound since the 16th Century. The three volcanoes that surrounded the water were bathed in fog and wispy clouds, backdropped by a navy blue sky.
Panajachel is a mainstay on the old hippy trail, and it remains popular with American tourists and residents. We rented a boat to take us across the lake to the timeless village of Santiago Atitlan.
The lake was ringed by several small villages, each of which offered handicrafts and considerable pressure to buy. You can rent small motorboats by the trip, hour or day to ferry you from village to village. Or ferry service runs a couple of times a day from Panajachel to the more popular destinations.
Santiago Atitlan had a thriving tourist market popular with French, Dutch and German visitors–one of whom was seen with a Cafe Ba-Ba-Reeba T-shirt from Chicago. Bargaining here, as in much of Guatemala, was expected and could be quite frenetic.
We lunched at Posada de Santiago, which had excellent food in its rustic, vaulted-ceiling restaurant facing the water. The inn, owned by an American, had several bungalows spread out along a beautifully gardened hill that climbed up behind the main building.
Outside the restaurant’s picture windows, the centuries filed past. Wiry men, their faces etched with dust, jogged along the adjacent dirt road, bent from the weight of enormous batches of firewood draped across their shoulders. Women in brilliantly colored gowns that flowed to their ankles walked in elegance, balancing fat wicker baskets of vegetables and fruit on their heads.
Next morning we pushed on to Antigua.
We booked an old favorite, the Casa Santo Domingo. It is a restored 17th Century convent, with thick stone walls, impeccably maintained floors of brick and tile, haunting ceramic saints and lovely gardens.
Antigua was once the finest city in Central America, but a massive earthquake in 1773 left much of it in ruins. Many of those ruins had been restored, and charm dominated nearly every street of the small city. Intrigue emanated from another trio of towering volcanoes, only one slightly active, that dominated its northern flanks.
Antigua’s Spanish language schools, natural beauty and air of relaxation draw visitors year round. With more than 450 years of Hispanic history, Antigua is a city of legends.
“We’ve got a few ghosts here and there,” said Elizabeth Bell of Antigua, a former Californian who is now a leading proponent of cultural tourism. “This city is old enough.”
El Salvador
Less than four hours from Antigua, after dodging and overtaking trucks carrying everything from Pepsi Cola to cement, we reached the El Salvador border.
Although El Salvador had its share of breathtaking ridges and valleys, it was here that a Pan-American traveler can get a swift lesson on Central America’s tragic history of terror and man’s inhumanity to man–and women and children.
San Salvador, the nation’s capital city, is for most tourists a place to skip. But for students of the Central American wars, the city dishes out plenty. This has been the city of death squads in a country where the rate of death by violence in peace time is keeping pace with the death rate racked up during the brutal, 11-year civil war that ended in a truce in 1992 and left 75,000 dead.
Within hours of our arrival in San Salvador we saw our first gunshot victim–a man in his 20s sprawled dead on a busy street corner.
Heading east along the Pan-American Highway from San Salvador toward Honduras was a visual treat. The market in Cojutepeque straddled the highway and exploded in the rich variety of colors provided by the local gowns worn by women selling cellophane packets of juices, fruit and vegetables from broad reed baskets balanced on their heads.
Four hours east of San Salvador, just beyond the bedazzling slopes of the San Vicente volcano, a left turn away from the Pan-American at San Miguel took us to Morazan Province, where sawtooth mountains rose like badlands from the Pacific coastal plain. This was one side-trip we deemed worthwhile.
Morazan remains a danger zone despite the war’s end. Deadly bandits menace the Pan-American late into the night outside San Miguel. This is one stretch that you take by day.
We decided to ensure our survival further by renting a four-wheel drive vehicle in San Salvador to negotiate the tortured roads of the back country. We would pick up our Peugeot when we resumed our trip to Panama later in the week.
It was on the road leading to Honduras that our rented 4×4 broke down. On the same road some months earlier one of us had narrowly escaped death at the hands of a war-crazed or drunken campesino swinging a razor-sharp machete.
Down the road, close to the growing town of Segundo Montes, lives Rufina Amaya, who personifies the unspeakable tragedy that war sprays upon the innocent. Amaya was the sole woman to survive a 1981 night of killing frenzy in the mountain hamlet of El Mozote by soldiers of the Atlacatl, a Salvadoran battalion equipped by the United States and led by officers trained in the best U.S. military schools.
They say in Morazan that as many as 1,200 may have died in El Mozote and some nearby hamlets that night in the army sweep ironically code named “Operation Rescue.” Outsiders put the number upward of 500.
Amaya had told her story so many times that her words now were articulated, totally void of emotion. But emotion was hardly necessary.
“I lost everything: my children (all five of them along with their father), my house, even the dress I was wearing,” Amaya said. “My kids were holding onto my skirt, and I was clutching them by the hand with the baby in my arms. Finally, they struck my kids and tore them from my arms. I was fighting so hard to keep my kids; I was the last one in the house . . . They began killing children. I heard my own children crying, `Mamma! Papa! They’re killing me! Mama, they’re sticking me with a knife!”‘
Rufina escaped death by plunging into a nearby bush when soldiers guarding her and other women marked for execution became distracted by screams. She crawled away amid a herd of cows that had ambled past and moved into a line of trees.
A siege mentality continues in the rough-and-tumble town of San Francisco Gotera, where we overnighted. During the war, fierce battles raged in or near the town, which serves an army regional center.
The best hotel in town, a single-story structure with a saloon up front and its rooms around the perimeter of a courtyard, denoted San Francisco Gotera’s siege mentality. It was here that patrons of the saloon were separated from the hotel and office portions by jailbars, in a setting that brought to mind the bottle-throwing scene in a country bar in “Blues Brothers.”
We drove our rented 4×4 back to San Salvador, picked up our company car and headed back again toward San Miguel and took the road toward San Francisco Gotera.
The Pan-American turns toward Honduras at a Y in the road a few miles to the southwest of San Francisco Gotera.
Honduras
John Wayne would have felt at home here. Jagged mountains backdropped dusty land sparsely populated by a hardy people inhabiting dirt-floored adobe huts. Ox carts with primitive wooden wheels competed for road space with massive trucks. A team of goats pulled another cart carrying two men sitting on scrap iron.
Only a few miles inside the border, a pothole got us. Hissing air escaping through a dent in our right-front rim made it clear we’d better pull off the road before the tire took damage. Luckily, we came to a stop next to a clay-walled home. Two small boys watched curiously while we removed the damaged wheel and replaced it with a spare.
Watching from a hammock inside her darkened doorway, a woman in her late 20s whispered low to one of her daughters, who disappeared behind the house and returned moments later with a bowl of water. She had seen us trying to remove the dirt from our hands with dry paper towels.
“Use this,” she said, waving us over to her porch and pouring the water into a bowl. A moment later, she held out a cake of homemade soap.
The highway trip through Honduras is a relatively short dash, spanning scarcely more than two hours with luck and without a flat or breakdown. Soon the Nicaraguan frontier loomed into sight.
Nicaragua
Just inside Nicaragua’s northern frontier, a long line of volcanoes stood like timeless sentinels scarred through the centuries by the violent fire exploding skyward through their vents from hell. Throughout the ’80s and early ’90s, this northern zone was a no-man’s land where Nicaragua’s Sandinista army fought Contra rebels supported by the United States. Today it’s a region of idyllic splendor.
Some travelers call Nicaragua one of the hemisphere’s best-kept tourist secrets, with picturesque Spanish colonial cities, pristine Pacific beaches and inexpensive native craft work. The downside was the nation’s lack of tourist facilities and the abject poverty that its former dictator, Anastasio Somoza, and the Contra war left in their wake.
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We headed straight for Managua and the Intercontinental Hotel, the capital’s principal hotel, where hundreds of foreign correspondents during the war years ate cheap shrimp and lobster around its inviting pool. Although the view of the city and the distant volcanoes rising through the mist over Lake Managua was stunning, the musty odor in its corridors appeared to date back to the days under Somoza, when billionaire recluse Howard Hughes occupied its top floors.
A half-hour from Managua, the Pan-American Highway passed through lava fields created through the centuries by the massive Masaya volcano, called the Mouth of Hell by the first Spaniard to see its fire.
A turn to the right through the entrance to the Volcan Masaya National Park led to a blacktop road that climbed through the lava field and rose to the rim of a gaping crater that plunged a thousand feet to the volcano’s hardened floor. A cauldron of percolating lava in its center cast off pulsating hues of red waves, which were sometimes obscured by puffing volumes of sulfuric smoke that lifted above its outer rim.
Local Nicaraguans told us that this is where virgins were tossed into the volcano as human sacrifices to satisfy angry fire gods, a practice said to have stopped when the local Mayans were converted to Christianity by a Spanish priest.
Our next stop was Grenada, one of the hemisphere’s forgotten gems in Spanish colonial elegance. Cobblestone streets gently spilled down to the shores of Lake Nicaragua from a picturesque central plaza studded with the kind of buildings you’d expect to find illustrating the Brothers Grimm. Seventeenth Century Spanish architecture blended with a touch of baroque clustered in the city’s center. Pastel-colored churches reached for a sky locked in perpetual blue.
Swashbuckling pirates such as Henry Morgan and Sir Francis Drake left Grenada in flames, but tenacious Grenadans always rebuilt and restored the city to a grandeur appreciated by 19th Century European and American travelers.
We drove down to the lake, where at the small Port of Asese we rented a tin-covered water taxi for a $12 ride through the Isletas de Granada, some 350 small keys created by lava flung from the Mombacho volcano hovering overhead. Ten minutes from port, we tied up at Tania’s, a rustic restaurant that took up an entire key.
Massive mango trees provided shade for the thatched-roof kitchen and patio. Men and women, who live on nearby keys, paddled past in long dugouts through tall water grass and lily pads. Soaring herons and cormorants completed the picture.
Within minutes, we were downing white channel bass cooked brown in a vat old enough to have fed the Spanish conqueror Pizarro, while watching the sun do a green and golden paint job on the Concepcion and Madera volcanoes rising from the depth of the lake farther south.
Costa Rica
A short drive from Grenada was Costa Rica’s slumbersome frontier.
Costa Rica seemed to have mastered the secret of combining volcanoes, cloud forests, rivers, birds, legends, spirits and flowers. Stress ebbed gently here.
One simply couldn’t remain tense during a hike through the Monteverde cloud forest or while watching Arenal display its might to the heavens or when absorbing the moonlit splendor from the cliff at El Ocotal, just west of the better-known Coco Beach. It would be foolish to travel the Pan-American on a schedule that did not allow detours such as these.
Of the three, El Ocotal is closest to the Nicaraguan border and was reached by getting off the Pan-American Highway at Liberia, about 50 miles from the frontier, and heading southwest.
The quiet resort of El Ocotal sat like a nesting swan above an aquamarine cove whose serenity was interrupted only by occasional waves striking the jagged rocks that sheltered it from the Pacific. In early morning, a parade of cabin cruisers headed seaward from a fishing port, their decks bristling with arrays of fishing poles designed to bring in sailfish said to fill the sea.
“It’s just fantastic; it couldn’t be better,” an American vacationer said while sipping a pina colada on the hotel’s restaurant patio. “I caught three sailfish in just one outing.”
We picked up the Pan-American Highway again at Liberia and continued southeast for an hour or so until we reached the hamlet of Rancho Grande by the 112-kilometer marker (measured from the capital city of San Jose). A wooden sign on the left pointed to the dirt road that led to the 26,000-acre Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve, a trail-laced tropical cloud forest so enchanting that you’ll be tempted to visit it at least twice in a lifetime.
“Angels are thought to hide in clouds like these . . . and who could blame them after all?” Bill Jeffcott wrote of Monteverde in his book “Visions in a Cloud Forest.” Indeed, if angels could choose where they gather, Monteverde has to be at the top of their list. This detour off the Pan-American was exhilarating.
They’ll tell you in Santa Elena, the mountain village next to the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve, that an average car can easily negotiate the 20-mile collection of gravel, rocks and mud that passes for a road between Rancho Grande and Santa Elena. But you wouldn’t want to try it in the rainy season, when even a 4×4 sports utility vehicle might have trouble.
The weather had been dry for a couple of days, so we decided to take the risk. Except for scraping bottom a couple of times on protruding stones, the journey was relatively uneventful.
When we entered the cloud forest, a tropical sun struggled vainly to break through voluminous shrouds of mist hovering over an impenetrable cathedral canopy of tall ficus trees. In the near-dark below the giants, literally thousands of species of plants sprouted, painted every shade of green and bearing leaves sized from nail heads to hotel picture windows.
An astonishing stillness was interrupted only by occasional bird calls and a sudden series of grunts from howler monkeys protesting an encroaching band of simians or strolling tourists.
Life here piggybacks upon itself: a tree trunk supports moss, in which grows a leafy plant, around which winds a plant parasite, which in turn provides sustenance to yet another leafy parasite. Not even plants are spared the violence of life: Choker vines in massive quantities entangle trees in embraces so deadly that eventually they wither and rot, leaving the age-thickened vines to support themselves in treelike structures.
Minute droplets of moisture, locally called Angel Hair, swirled near the canopy. Striking the higher leaves, the mist condensed and then fell to the forest floor in droplets, soaking the earth and providing moisture to the green army of plants fighting for space in the jungle.
Walking one evening, we followed a mystic strain from a distant violin down a path through a tropical grove. The faint notes of the Mozart minuet sounded like they originated inside the forest.
But they emanated, instead, from a room off the dining hall of the Hotel Fonda Vela, a rustic place of hospitality and comfort built amid jungle foliage on the edge of the reserve. Paul W. Smith, Monteverde’s Man for All Seasons (especially seasons involving music and art), sat before a music stand in a room with wooden walls next to the Fonda Vela dining room. Aging sheets of classical scores were scattered about him on the floor and nearby chairs. He was practicing for a dinner-hour chamber trio he would lead with his sister Margaret on piano and a young apprentice on cello.
Tall and gaunt, Smith walked in stocking feet and wore a gray Polo shirt over blue jeans. A shock of disheveled, milk-white hair gave way to a strong, thin face–the face of an Irish patrician. Two paddle fans rotated slowly overhead in the dim light of a table lamp. On the walls around him were a variety of oils showing tropical landscapes and still life–all signed by Paul W. Smith. Propped up here and there were unstained and unvarnished violins and cellos–all crafted by Paul W. Smith.
Smith’s sons, Paul Jr. and Steven, operate the Fonda Vela hotel and its nearby restaurant. The brothers grew up on the property, which originally was the site of the family’s dairy farm.
The elder Smith spoke of his transition from farmer to artist: “I discovered that I was far more interested in painting cows than in milking them.”
Over time, he honed an interest in playing stringed instruments, and eventually began to carve them out of imported wood.
With the dawn came time to leave the magic of the cloud forest and cross the mountain range for the lakeside town of Tilaran and on to Arenal. The road to Tilaran can turn into impassable mud in the rainy season, but that morning it was dust dry. Twisting through the mountains, a traveler easily can lose his way. But a gas station attendant in Santa Elena told of an easy way to avoid getting lost.
Pointing to a collection of overhead wires, he said: “These power lines go to Tilaran. Follow them–never let them out of your sight–and you won’t get lost.” We didn’t get lost.
After lunching at Mary’s Restaurant in Tilaran, which is popular with local American expatriates, we followed the shoreline of Lake Arenal finding it tough not to stare at the Arenal volcano rising a mile high in perfect symmetry straight to the east.
After some 400 years of dormancy, the volcano erupted in a deadly explosion in 1968, flinging rocks the size of railroad boxcars high into the air, devastating the town of Pueblo Nuevo and killing up to 80 people.
Guides from the nearby town of La Fortuna can take more adventuresome groupies up its slope, but most tourists prefer the relatively safe nighttime journey in vans or taxis to a dirt road running along a national park, from which they can watch glowing lava and streaks of red-hot rocks tumble and crash down the slope. Time didn’t allow a journey up the slope; we opted for entertainment from a distance.
Travelers have complained of having made repeated visits to Arenal without seeing its top because of a cover of clouds. Others have found they merely had to wait out the clouds for their reward. It was both clouded and clear at different times when we were there.
A short distance down the road was the Tabacon Resort, built beside a creek down which tumbled waters heated by the volcano overhead. Lushly gardened, Tabacon offered four thermal pools and one cold-water pool. Before entering the pool complex, the warm waters plunged down a series of waterfalls framed by jungle foliage and backdropped by the volcano’s ominous cone.
Although the resort operators did not offer hotel accommodations, the spa did have a restaurant where tuxedoed waiters served a variety of Costa Rican and North American dishes.
We basked in the waters and wondered what would happen if Arenal chose this moment to really blow its top.
We headed back to the Pan-American highway, diverted from it once again to take a coastal road that traverses the Costa Ricas banana country and leads to Quepos, gateway to the lush Manuel Antonio National Park. We rejoined the Pan-American again south of Quepos. Soon we arrived at the Panama frontier.
Panama
By the time we worked our way through the Panama border crossing, we could taste victory. We would make it to Panama City after all without having been barred at any border, without being confronted by bandits or guerrillas and having had to pay tribute to only two highway cops–one in Nicaragua and the other in Costa Rica.
Panama’s countryside was spectacular: distant mountains of purple and gorges with greens so deep they were almost blue.
The fresh mountain air also can get quite cold. Some excellent hiking can be found not only from Bambito but also from Bajo Boquete and Cerro Punta as well, a charming town of Alpine-style houses sometimes called “Little Switzerland.” But on this trip, we didn’t have time to linger.
Plowing on toward Panama City, we passed through David, Panama’s third city, and steamed toward Santiago when a slight misfortune befell us. Approaching a police checkpoint, one of several we encountered in Panama, we slowed down with other cars.
When we reached the stop sign, we stopped, which turned out to be a big mistake. An officer waved us over to the side of the road and said we’d committed a violation–stopping in the middle of the street.
The stop sign, we told him, the stop sign. He said that meant only to slow down and that we should have just continued on through the checkpoint carefully.
Now, given that our license plates for Panama were from 1994, we didn’t want to push our argument, or our luck, too far. The cop pulled out his ticket book and said he wanted $43. We laughed. He said that in Panama traffic laws were very plain and that they would have to take our car if we did not pay the ticket. We told him that the “violation” was as much his fault as ours, given the lack of clear instruction at the checkpoint, and so the fine should be no more than half. He shrugged, we paid him $20, and he warned us not to stop at another police checkpoint again. Good advice?
It was dark when we approached Panama City, but we could make out the Canal Area and the Pacific Ocean. We worked our way through the capital to the Caesar Park Hotel–the end zone. The valet gave us the once-over as we climbed out of the car, which was caked with mud and filled with empty water and soda bottles, food wrappers, cassettes, maps, scribbled notes and guide books.
We had just come from Mexico, we told him. Yeah, the country. Yeah, by car. It was partly a boast, partly an excuse for the way we looked.
Fourteen days, hundreds of gallons of gas, a couple of cases of car sickness, one flat tire, several stallouts and near-death experiences on mountain roads, a few near-collisions, some road kill and maybe a tiny bribe or two.
“Was it fun?” the valet asked.
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Fun. That word had become a kind of in-joke between us, because people who’d never traveled like we just had assumed it must have been a blast. In reality, a trip like crossing Central America by car can be wearing and terribly frustrating, a logistical nightmare, a literal and figurative pain in the butt.
That was what our trip was. But fun? Fun?
Yeah, maybe it was at that.
GUIDE BOOKS FOR THE HIGHWAY
Regional guidebooks on Central America usually contain some information on the Pan-American Highway, but a more specific guide is recommended. Two new ones:
– “Driving the Pan-American Highway” by Raymond F. and Audrey Pritchard (Costa Rica Books; $17.95) includes a journal of the authors’ trip, along with sightseeing tips and lots of practical information. If you can’t find a copy at a bookstore, it can be ordered from the publisher (P.O. Box 1512, Thousand Oaks, Calif. 91358; 805-496-1625 or 800-365-2342) for $20.95.
– “Central & South America by Road” by Pam Ascanio (Globe Pequot; $16.95) has good general information on driving, but since it covers such a large area, its coverage of the Mexico-Panama trip described here is limited.