The Lonely Planet Matrix

"A traveller doesn't know where he's going; a tourist doesn't know where he's been."
– Paul Thoreaux

The Swede was beet red from all the beer sloshing around in his stomach, and his face was so close to mine that the sweat from his hairline was practically dripping onto my face.  "The deaf gay midget bar!" he shouted, spraying a bit of the sweat that had trickled as far as his lips.  "You mean you haven´t gone to the deaf gay midget bar!"

"Umm... no I haven't."

"You have to go... you see there´s this midget there, and he can´t understand anything you say to him, cuz he's deaf, right, and he just wants to hug you..."

Me and Jeff hitchin'

I was in the Bearded Monkey Hostel with Jeff, a relaxed Peace Corps alum from San Fransico with whom I'd begun to travel with a few days before.  We had got into Granada, Nicaragua during the heat of the day after getting a lucky hitch across almost half the country in one morning.  The heat there came shimmering up from of the pedestrian boulevard, it settled on our shoulders and seeped between our packs and backs, sapping our energy.  The sun reflected off the chrome fronts of the tourist restaurants and craft shops, searing our eyes with brightness.  The guide book had said this town was the highlight of Nicaragua, with elegant colonial architecture along the shore of a giant lake.  But instead of finding refreshing waters in a city of industrious people, we staggered along the bone dry and mostly deserted boulevard.  We had a budget place in mind, and as we came through the doors out of the monstrous heat we were met with a wall of frigid air and a polished chrome bar.

¨We´re not open yet,¨ boomed a tall American in his mid-fifties with a head as polished as his bar, "we´re still putting the finishing the touches on the rooms.¨

"Oh, we must have the wrong place," I said.  "This isn´t the Hostel Lago?"

"Backpackers hostel!?" he snorted.  "No man... this place is going to be nice.  We´ve got air conditioning, cable, everything you need."

"Ok, well, we´re going to keep going to check out our options."

"Yeah but make sure and come back for the games tonight.  It´s the final four in the NCAA tournament and this will be the place to BE."  He motioned to the flat screen TV dominating most of the wall behind the bar.  Next to it were two big Dallas Cowboy banners.

We finally found a hostel.   We sat around sweating for a few hours. We thumbed through the guide book.  Apparently the Bearded Monkey across the street was the place to party! We went over to check it out.

"The deaf gay midget bar!" the Swede was emphasizing, in case I hadn't caught it the first time around.
 Behind the Swede I could see that the Bearded Monkey was packed with twenty-somethings from all over Europe and North America who hadn´t showered or shaved and were guzzling beer with gusto.  I figured the hostel's namesake probably smelled better than most of them.  I could hear snatches of the conversation Jeff was having with another guy: "Then I got smashed up there in El Salvador... and this other time when we were destroyed in the Bay Islands... and later with this other bloke we just got trashed, totally trashed."

After a conversation with a spring breaker from Miami who was just raving about how she had never been to South America before and how great it was and how about all the people were so nice, I couldn´t take any more and went to the bar and slurped down rum and cokes until peoples' voices began to blur together and then we were in some other bar and then we were in some place trying to dance salsa with not a latino in sight and no one who actually knew how to dance salsa and all the places began to blur together and then I was lying on top of my sheets in the hostel cot with a pounding head watching to fan blades go round and round and round in the dark and someone was yelling "but the deaf gay midget guy, what about the deaf gay midget guy?"

The next morning Jeff and I both decided to get out of there.

But before we did, we had to see the famed Lake Nicaragua, the largest freshwater body in Central America, so big that it has its own species of freshwater sharks.  We walked the half mile to the shore expecting crystalline and endless waters, and maybe a dock to jump off.  Instead, sludge oozed along a ditch into a brown cove and all along the shore were mounds of old tires, wrappers, syringes, rubber gloves... trashed.

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We went to San Juan del Sur to surf, a town that felt much like Granada but was more bearable because the ocean was there with its blue horizon and scouring salt water.  Late at night, when everyone else was either in bed or belly up in the Ballena Bar, we went down to the ocean.  The combers glowed as they came in. We slid into the water and  swarms of sparks shot out from our hands at each stoke and our legs flickered pale green as we treaded water.  A current had surged up from some dark depth of the ocean and brought to shore this bioluminescene, the light of millions of small creatures living and dying in the vast tide.

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After going down the Nicaraguan and Costa Rican coast surfing, Jeff left for his friend's wedding and I continued to the famous cloud forest jungle of Monte Verde.  The bus roared and bounced along the dirt road that rose up above the coastal plain and passed through pastures of grass more than head high with satisfied looking cows swishing their tails and looking as if they were about to burst with milk.  Pungent mangoes carpet the ground below the trees and their branches hung to the ground.

We came down into the town at dusk and the minute my foot touched the pavement a woman thrust a flyer into my face. "Come to the Hostel Monteverde!" she almost shouted.  "Do you have a place to be tonight?"  I didn´t feel like answering her so I went around the corner until the busload of tourists and crowd of hawkers they attracted had dissipated. I took a walk around the town and was back to where I started in less than five minutes.  It was not designed for wanderers.  What´s more, I hadn´t seen so much as a slice of pizza for less than five dollars.

I looked in my guide book and found a hostel that offered camping.  The front desk man led me to an enclosed dirt lot behind the hostel, walled in by a bank on one side and a hotel on the other. "You can put your tent here." He pointed to a spot and a that same moment a nearby pipe sticking up from the ground vomited up brown water with a gurgling belch. "Oh, that happens sometimes.  Don´t worry.  It´s clean."

Every time someone flushed the toilet that night the putrid fountain that ensued started me awake from my nightmares of rats scurrying in labyrinths and a world in which instead of feet we had little wheels and that were fixed to tracks and we had to purchase rights to move on them before going anywhere.

Over my breakfast of plain pasta, the only thing I could afford, I met Eliza, a Swiss lady, and we decided to go explore the Monteverde Park together. We were about five minutes in when Eliza started.  "So, I mean, isn't this supposed to be a cloud forest?  I mean where are all the clouds?"  It had dawned a beautiful clear day.

"Well, I guess we got lucky."

"Yeah, but don't you think that this forest looks like all the other forests out there?  I mean it's just green with trees... kinda like in lots of other places."

"Well..."

"Maybe we'll see some animals later... ooh! We better see a sloth!"

Twenty minutes later we had seen nothing more than a small brown bird hopping from branch to branch and peeping angrily at us.  We broke out of the deep forest and onto the ridge, and looked down into the wild and wet valleys leading out toward the Carribean and along the mountains undulating into blue.  We were on the Continental Divide, one long ridge that reaches all the way to my state in Colorado where it holds cornices of snow hanging over blue tarns.  When they were young my mother and father walked along it for hundreds of miles.  Here I was on the very same ridge only surrounded by verdant jungles!  I walked to the extreme end of the trail to see if there was a way to continue along the Divide, into the great wilds. I came to a gate and sign:  ABSOLUTELY NO ENTRY PERMITTED.

"Let's get out of here. The bugs are killing me," said Eliza.

We got out of the park and I left Eliza in the hummingbird garden, watching in ecstasy as the hummingbirds zoomed up to plastic containers filled with sugar water.  "Why would I pay to enter that park when I could sit here for free!" she exclaimed.

I walked back into town and sat down to read among other tourists in the hostel.  I was sick of simulacrae.  I felt like we were all swimmers in a lap pool, back and forth, back and forth without ever daring to cross the lane lines, which for us were formed on one side by the advice of the all knowing Lonely Planet guide book, and on the other by the constant warnings of the "danger out there," the robbers, killers, scorpions, snakes. We were seeing the world as we were told it should be seen by tourist officials with dry coughs siting in drab offices.

I began to remember the hills of the Cuchamatanes where, after a day of walking through the brush on animal trails, I came down onto a small plain and met an old man rattling along on a rusty bicycle and he told me the names of each part of the plain and showed me, off in the corner, two brightly painted miniature houses, below which rested the bones of his relatives.  I remembered the upstairs room of a nameless bookstore on Calle Doncales in Mexico City where a short man in a denim jacket plays blues, jazz, Bach, and Arabian music on the harmonica and fixed my broken reed while revealing to me the infinite possibilities of the instrument.

I got up early the next morning and put on my running shoes.  I searched for the highest point on the horizon and headed for it.    I reached the hilltop and entered a small opening in the jungle at the end of it.  The path went into the forest, with logs with the girth of trucks slowly softening into nothing on the forest floor, and hollow trees with dozens of roots clinging to the soil like the tentacles of enormous squid.  I came to a viewpoint and realized I was on the Continental Divide.  The silence was as thick as the loam on the ground.  I passed a rivulet that sluiced across clean stone.  I kept running, deeper into the forest, deeper into the tangle of wild vines, of plants growing where they sprouted and fighting upward toward the light.