The first time I traveled in Central America was after graduating from university. It was 1994. I was 22 years old. I had less than $1000 for 3 months. There was no internet. And we had no plan.
It began as a road trip with a friend that I met while living and studying in Barcelona. I skipped attending my college graduation opting to set off ceremoniously instead for a roadtrip to Central America. We made it from Chicago to Flagstaff in his beat up car surviving on strong coffee from petrol stations, bean burittos, and a cocktail of typhoid pills we kept on ice in the cooler.
When the car broke down in Arizona he sold it for a couple hundred bucks and we made the journey to California by train. From there, a friend dropped us off at the Mexican border of Mexicali, and we were on the start of at journey by land through all of Mexico and Central America.
The travel was strenuous and in many towns we had a hard time changing a $20 travelers cheque. We took malaria pills, disolved iodine tablets in local water, slept on thin mats in rooms at the back of farm houses where roosters woke us before dawn. We stayed in hotels that charged by the hour and where we unknowingly shared our beds with bedbugs. We once resorted to sleeping on a church floor in San Cristobal de las Casas, where we were unable to find a room because journalists had taken them all that week covering the negotiations with Zapatistas and elections in southern Mexico.
We ate rice and beans daily and occasionally found a Chinese place or a Pizza Hut where a salad bar and pitchers of beer seemed like a luxury. We ate in a shanty town made from corrugated sheet metal in Menagua, where the capital was still recovering from war and natural disasters yet was still alive with constant music and smiles from the local people who seemed as shocked and surprised as we were to be confronted by each other.
We learned to scuba dive, to negotiate in Spanish and how to change dollars on the black market because there were no ATMs. We were treated well in most places but looked at with suspicion in others. We crossed borders without knowing what might await us on the other side. We traveled just because there were roads that allowed us to go wherever they went. There was no trip advisor, no comments page, no reviews, no suggested itineraries.
And now, over 20 years later, I find myself back in Panama, the place we had to turn around and head north again on that trip because there was no way to cross the Darien Gap into Colombia.
This time, the crossing will be possible. And it will be by sea on a sailboat through the San Blas islands and on to Colombia. A new adventure awaits. And as adventurous as it may seem, in 2016, all you need to do it is the desire and an Internet connection, and the rest has been made pretty simple.
