4/16/14
En route, CA-9, Guatemala
I suppose this is as fitting of a dateline as any to head today’s
entry, since it is where I will be spending more waking hours than anywhere
else. Only seasoned readers of my
Travelogue will understand the intricacies of today’s entry, so I encourage any
first time readers to read the entries for 4/14/14 and 4/15/14 before proceeding. There is an old poem that goes something like
“For want of a nail, a shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe, a horse was lost.
For want of a horse, a rider was lost.
For want of a rider, a battle was lost.
For want of a battle, a kingdom was lost. For want of a nail, a kingdom was lost.” For me, the poem might be “For want of a suit,
my 30 Goals were lost.”
We woke up and
quickly got a move on, getting on the road right at 5AM as planned. Last night, I had come up with a great
plan. I would leave the minibar key and
a cigar band next to my cell phone. I
had left my cheese in the fridge and my suit in the closet. Since today would be the only day where I
would not have to cross an international border, I would not need to wear my
suit, and I could wear casual clothes.
That meant that I would need to bring my suit with me and not forget it
in the closet. By leaving the minibar
key and cigar band next my cell phone, I would remember to get the cheese out
of the fridge, and I would put the cigar band in the pocket of me suit, which
would mean I could not forget it. It was
a perfect plan, or so I thought. I lit
up a Punch, and we stopped at a gas station for bottled water, which I much
needed to refill my water bottle, gas, and batteries. I looked around for some meat, but they
didn’t have any ready. I thought I might
have some of my cheese, which was in my suit pocket. By the time we got back to the car, I decided
that I wasn’t hungry, so I forwent the cheese, and we continued on our
way.
The basic route of the trip, after
the first few kilometers, would be to take CA-9 for 250km, followed by CA-13
for 250km, which would take us right up to the park entrance. I decided that I would drive on CA-9, we’d
get lunch, and then Fernando would drive on CA-13. I will clear up a point of potential
confusion. I keep talking about CA-4
Complete. In that context, CA-4 are the
4 Central American countries we are visiting, so called because they have
entered into a customs/border agreement.
CA-9 and CA-13 are highway numbers.
Fernando had to take a U, so we pulled into a gas station. It was at that point I realized what was
missing. My suit. This was not like the shirt I left in Key
West, which, after a moment of panic, I was able to have mailed to me from the
hotel. No, I would need this suit
tomorrow morning, and there was no way to get it, except for one. We would have to drive back. “Fuck,” I announced. While Fernando took his U, I put the hotel
back in the GPS, and I was pleased to see that we were only about 30 minutes
away. Figuring city traffic and the time
I would need to get the suit, I estimated it would add about an hour and a half
to our trip, which meant an hour and a half less time at Tikal. I had budgeted about 4-5 hours there, but
this now meant we were looking at a 3PM arrival, if everything went according
to plan. Of course, not everything went
according to plan. There is always a
Plan B, but, in this case, the Plan B was a very shitty one and would have made
today’s long drive to Tikal and tomorrow’s drive from Tikal pointless, along
with wasting an entire day. Fernando
thought that the park might have closed as early as 4PM, which left us less
than an hour of Dutch Time, and we hadn’t eaten, and we would need another tank
of gas. It was not looking good.
I lit up a Davidoff Colorado, and we were
back on the road, having minimal difficulty getting out of the city before we
were back on CA-9. Then we hit the
traffic. It was very bad traffic, so I
decided we’d stop for breakfast, figuring that it couldn’t get any worse. I was wrong.
However, we also learned that the park was open until 6PM, but I did not
want to arrive there at 5:45 PM and hope for the best. I had these delicious fried pork skins, and I
lit up a Padron before getting back on the road. The traffic got worse. I was vigorously calculating how much traffic
we might hit, figuring we could afford an hour of traffic. Traffic can’t last forever, can it? It came to a complete standstill a few
times. I calmed myself down, saying
that, until the GPS said 4PM, I would not panic. That would allow us enough Dutch Time to get
to the park by 4:45 PM. Puffing on my
plugged Padron, I managed to calm down.
Soon enough, the traffic broke.
It turned out that there was an accident, which can really fuck up
highways with one lane in each direction.
That was that. We had an arrival
time of 3:45 PM, and everything was starting to look all right. I said that we could switch after I finished
my Padron, which would be around 10AM.
I
hit the nail right on the head, and it also coincided with us passing another
one of those towns that slows down traffic.
It was the perfect place to pull over and switch, which we did. I grabbed my computer, and proceeded to write
this entry. Back en route, having
written this entry to put it all in perspective, it all seems so
insignificant. We are looking good on
time, though we are not nearly out of the woods, and we are well fed. If need be, other than gas, we can drive
straight to the park. It is now showing
95km to CA-13, which I hope will be a better road than this one, especially
since it is more remote. I will save the
philosophical section for tonight’s portion of the entry and now close.
Tikal, Guatemala
In Saint Lucia, I said that it was sometimes about the journey, sometimes
about the destination, sometimes about the perfect souvenir, and sometimes
about that one perfect photo. Like that
day that I tried to climb the Pitons, today was about all four. Writing this entry in the heart of the Mayan
city of Tikal, staring at the nomination photo of the WHS, some replicas in my
tour guide’s backpack, and smoking a Cohiba Siglo II, I can say that today went
well. It was a true Munich Run in every
sense of the word. After I closed, I
decided that I would try to take a nap. It
didn’t take. I was too worried. We kept hitting more and more traffic, that
4:45 PM deadline looking more and more unlikely. I think I lit up another cigar, though I
can’t remember which or if I did. Each
time we came to small town, traffic came to a standstill as people slowed down
to pass through the town. Fernando drove
like a maniac, making up precious minutes where he could, doubling his tip in
the process. The GPS got closer and
closer to that 4:45 PM arrival time, and we still had to stop for gas.
I am fuzzy on all the details of the drive,
since stress blurred everything in my mind.
The crux of it was, I realized that there was nothing that I could do
about. Fernando knew how important it
was to me to get there on time, and he would do his best. A different man would leave his hands to
God. That was not an option for me. I took a nap, hoping for the best, preparing
for the worst. I woke up with a start as
I heard my cigars come crashing to the floor.
There was an unpainted speed bump.
I knew that no more sleep would come, but Lo! Our GPS was still right around that 4:30 PM
mark, and, behold! there was no more traffic.
Fernando announced that we were now in the jungle and that it would be
smooth driving from then on out.
For the
first time today, I finally appreciated the beauty of where I was and took
copious pictures of our surroundings. We
stopped for gas and food at the next gas station, and I lit up a Tatuaje
Monster. I then saw the sign that made
my heart cheer, “Welcome to Peten,” which I knew to be the department where the
park was located. We had to go through
an agricultural in inspection, which cost us 3 minutes and our mango, but we
were on good time. Soon enough, I saw
the entrance to the park, and we congratulated one another. Sure, it was mostly an issue of him making up
for me forgetting the suit, but we did it.
We had plenty of time, or so I thought.
We first had to drive to the parking lot, and then there was a
substantial walk to the plaza, the place where the nomination photo was
taken. I knew that we could make it to
the site before dark to get the picture, but getting back could be a
problem. I had estimated 50 minutes to
the site. I had wanted to write this
entry here, but that would not be an option if we were short on time. The souvenir shops would close before we got
back, so I loaded up, though I hate doing it in that order. We were told it was 25 minutes to the Gran
Plaza, and I told Fernando that would give us just enough time to take a
picture and turn around, but that was okay with me. Twelve hours of driving and an hour of
walking, just to take a picture and turn around? A-okay if it’s the perfect picture.
As we were walking, we saw a monkey, and that
meant I could also check off the natural part of the site, since it was a mixed
inscription. Score. I grabbed my cigar case to light up my
Cohiba, but the case fell. The one cigar
that hit the ground and cracked? My
Cohiba. “That’s not good,” I announced,
just like the rest of the day, but, like the rest of the day, it all worked out
in the end. All’s well that ends
well. We made our way, and I christened
the site by taking a U in the jungle portion.
It only took us 15 minutes to get to the site, which left me 20 minutes
to write this entry. I showed Fernando
the nomination photo and said, “You know the drill. We recreate this photo.” He knew the drill and helped me find the
spot, which was midway up one of the other pyramids and where I am now
sitting. He took my picture, and I took
his. He asked to be excused, which was
fine so that I could have some peace, and I proceeded to write this entry,
which I will now close, since it is now exactly 5:30 PM, the time we need to
turn around, and my cigar is done. The
philosophy section will follow tonight.
San Jose (El Peten), Guatemala
Despite what I wrote earlier, as we left Tikal, I was planning on
publishing as is with no philosophy section, yet sometimes entries write
themselves. The Mayan run, as I will now
be calling it was adventure enough, but I would be remiss not include these
thoughts. The first part will be about
attraction. I have waned and waxed
enough about the gorgeous girl from my high school will always be my Form of
Beauty. There is no need to further
expand. She was smart,
independent-thinking, Jewish, white, petite, and about 5’7”. I say this because I am singularly attracted
to smart, independent-thinking, Jewish, white, petite girls between 5’3” and
5’11”. I have a type, and the type is
women who remind me of that girl from high school. I very consciously avoid applying a Freudian
analysis to this.
I want to focus on
just one of those words: white. One
might think someone as well-travelled as I would have tastes in women that are
as varied as his tastes in foreign cultures.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
I bring this up because I saw something today that shocked me only
because it had been missing since I landed: attractive, (non-Hispanic) white
women. That is not to say that I did not
see attractive locals, just that I was not truly attracted to them. I could never be attracted to a black or
Asian woman. Does that make me
racist? If I said that I could never be
attracted to someone who wasn’t Jewish, no one would give it a second
thought. If I said that I could never be
attracted to an idiot or someone who couldn’t think for themselves, people
might not believe me, but I would not be condemned for it. If I said that I am only attracted to petite
women between 5’3” and 5’11”, people would not judge me for that, either. However, if I were to say that I don’t find
black women attractive, that would open myself to judgment.
I would never apply race or religion or
gender to my business relations, my friendships, or almost any area of my daily
life, except for this one area. When I
say that I am singularly attracted to white, Jewish women, why does the word
white draw the most attention? I had
once argued that the people who decry racism are the people who are most
secretly racist in their hearts. Is it
because I am saying something others are afraid to say? Would someone else, unable to say the words, “I
am not attracted to black women (or white men or Muslims, since I see no
distinction),” just look for other reasons to reject such a woman? Would they enter into such a relationship
knowing how much they despise that woman?
I’m sure such things happen all the time.
Racism is something we feel in our
hearts. Discrimination is the action we
take based on racism. I maintain that
there is nothing wrong with racism if we do not act upon it, if there is no discrimination. Many of the people I mention who so decry
racism probably do so because they are racist in their hearts. They want to remove it from their heart, so
they promote programs that curve the steel back in the other direction,
completely missing the point. If they
would instead accept the way they feel and resolve not to act on it, we would
not have programs such as affirmative action, Black History Month, and whatever
else this “white guilt” causes to try and undo material causes of racism.
I hold that there is no such thing as black
rights, gay rights, minority rights, women’s rights. Only an individual can have rights. A class cannot have rights, other than the
collective rights of each individual member.
That is the way I live my life, treating each individual person with the
respect and love that they have earned through their actions and values. Then, why could I never be in love with a
black woman? For the same reason I could
never be in love with a white man. Any
further discussion of this matter would be too far beyond of the scope of this
Travelogue.
After I closed in Tikal, we made our way back to civilization, acutely
aware that we did not want to be caught here after dark. The souvenir stands were still opened, so I
got another replica. As we drove out, it
got steadily darker, and it was pitch black by the time we got to the
restaurant right by the turn-off to the hotel.
So glad we had made it to the site in time, I told Fernando I was paying
for dinner. There was a suspension
bridge that led from the restaurant to the lookout point, and it was quite an
adventure to get there and back, especially given the broken step about halfway
through. I said that we survived “the
broken suspension bridge: The Experience,” and he replied that it was more like
a challenge. I immediately thought of
the Captain.
During our meal, I smoked a
Heisenberg Uncertainty, both to represent smoking away the uncertainty of the
Mayan Run to Tikal and the coming uncertainty of getting to the hotel, and he spoke about his life
story. He grew up in Tegucigalpa and
moved to San Salvador when he was 18 to study Anthropology. He “got a girl pregnant” and dropped out to
help support them. They separated, and
now he is going back to school in his final year. He wants to be a tour guide full-time, but he
would much rather have a job doing anthropological research, jobs that are few
and far between in Central America. My
respect for him grew. He then spoke
about cultural values, which was the theme of last night’s entry, saying how he
worked for a call center, and it taught him how Americans value things that are
not valued in his culture, such as customer service and punctuality. He said it was hard for him to understand how
important punctuality is to an American.
On the flip side, I am always shocked by how little some foreign
cultures value punctuality. It goes back
to my entry from the Dry Tortugas where I said that I am a man of my word. Just as if I say I am going to do something,
I do it, if I say that I will be somewhere at a certain time, I will, or I will
let the person know I’m running late. It
is a matter of common courtesy, and I am shocked when people, even my own mother,
do otherwise. I suppose that I could
continue on about the difference in cultural values around the world, but I
have done that numerous times, and it has been played out. It was just refreshing finding such a sharp analysis
of that from this bright tour guide I found entirely by chance.
After dinner, we headed to the hotel, which
was an adventure moving the car and bags multiple times to get to the room,
along with two very bumpy rides in the luggage truck. We tried to plan our trip to Rio Platano
Biosphere Reserve for the day after tomorrow with no luck. I am fully prepared to apply the Darien
exception if need be, but it is a last resort, though I kind of what to do it
to better establish the precedent in case I need it for Iceland and
Hawaii. After that, I uploaded my
photos, headed outside, lit my Avo with lighters that desperately need gas, and
proceeded to write this entry, which I will now close so that I can publish and
get some sleep. Oh, the cigar I forgot
was a Drew Estate Undercrown.
The original Munich Run:
7/17/13
Munich, Germany
From henceforth, I shall no longer call them
Mole Runs but rather Munich Runs. My
race to the Olympic Stadium in Munich made the original Mole Run seem like a
trip to the grocery store. Nothing has
ever compared, nor will anything likely.
I am now sitting down to dinner at the First Class section of Restaurant
181, a Michelin starred experience 181 meters (600 feet) above Munich. There are only 4 tables here, and I am
spinning around right in the heart of Olympiapark overlooking the whole of the
city from above while I enjoy a glass of Hofbrau, one of the best known
Bavarian beers, pretending to be Dr. Steven Margolin of the Philosophy
Department at Patrick Henry University.
I guess I should start from last night. [Snip through a day of racing head from site to site and skip forward the afternoon, my race to get to the Munich Stadium before it closed.] Anyway, I hit some bad traffic getting into
Nuremburg. It is a major city with a
typical rush hour. I definitely felt a
sense of something when I entered the city limits. It wasn’t joy or triumph, but it was
definitely something. I sat in the
courtroom and made a few corny jokes to myself before I left. I grabbed a Fanta from a shop my car and
entered the church in Regenberg as my destination. It showed a 6PM arrival, the exact time I
estimated that the church would close.
Unfortunately, I hit the typical small town issues getting from the
highway exit to the church, and I was few minutes too late. I figured that the name of the inscription
was “Old Town of Regenberg with Stadtamhof,” not “Remeneberg and it Cathedral,”
so I counted the site, even though I got no souvenir, no plaque, and no
brochure. It is a good precedent to
set. I lit up my cigar, took a few
pictures, walked around a bit, and got back in the car, entering the Olympic
Stadium as my address. I estimated that
I would need 15 minutes in the stadium plus add an extra 15 minutes for lights
and other horseshit associated with city driving. My GPS showed a 7:35 PM arrival, 25 minutes
before closing time. It was good. [Snip useless comment about Facebook.] Anyway, as soon as I pulled out, it adjusted
for traffic and showed a 7:56 PM arrival time, but the traffic jam was 76 km
away, so it might have dissipated by the time I hit it. I figured that if I was able to set foot
inside the ticket booth by 8PM and someone was there, I could bribe them with a
large banknote to let me stay for 30 minutes, but, if they were gone after 8PM,
there was nothing that could be done. I
added 8 minutes getting out of the city, so I was now past that 8PM arrival
time. I absolutely floored it as soon as
I hit the Autobahn, 210 km/h the whole time, the fastest my car would let me
go. I divided my time between thinking
about contingency plans for hitting Munich at some other point during the trip
and how this would always be the new Mole Run.
By the time I made the turn to Munich, I had made up about 10 minutes,
allowing me to most likely arrive in time to make the bribe, but my GPS
indicated that I was in the middle of a traffic jam. I didn’t see any traffic, and I figured that
I had avoided it, but I turned out to be wrong.
Sure enough, traffic was jammed up about 1 km later with no end in
sight. It wound up adding 15 minutes to
my trip, with an estimated 8:06 PM arrival time, way too late to do a
bribe. Fortunately, it told me it was
sending me on alternate route, which would get me in at 7:45 PM. Unfortunately, that route had red lights and
speed limits, so it was 7:50 PM by the time I had arrived at the parking
lot. I thought it would be like Berlin,
where I could just pull up by the Stadium and walk right to the ticket
office. Munich actually preserved the
whole Olympic Park, which was cool, but it meant that I had to park far away,
and I had some difficulty getting into the lot.
By the time I had gotten out of the lot, it was about 7:53 PM, and the
stadium was a good kilometer away. I
ran, and I mean ran, with my water bottle in my hand and my camera beating
against my leg. I got to the ticket
office, and it was 7:59 PM. I asked if I
could still walk around, and I was told that I only had one minute. I took out a very large banknote, and he
said, jokingly, that, for that banknote, I could stay as long as I wanted. In all seriousness, I agreed, but they asked
me if I had anything smaller. I handed
them an appropriate note, and they made change for me. I didn’t even bother asking for a student
discount.
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