The Adventurer's Son(32)
I wasn’t surprised Roman eschewed guides. After twenty-five years of travel with him, I could count on one hand the number of times we’d used them—a night walk in Australia looking for tree kangaroos; scuba diving; on a wildlife-watching tour from an eco-lodge in Borneo; in Bhutan where all foreigners must be guided.
Following Orizaba, Roman climbed more volcanoes, including Tacaná, a 13,800-foot mountain that straddles the Mexico-Guatemala border. Because alpinism had been both so addictive and dangerous for me, I had purposefully resisted introducing it to him. But climbing volcanos is, in essence, uphill hiking at high altitude without the objective hazards of falling rock, ice, or snow—or the subjective ones of falling off a cornice or into a crevasse.
A French traveler had recommended Tacaná and suggested Roman hire a guide to do it, probably because land mines from previous conflicts were rumored to booby-trap its slopes. Roman ignored his advice. Instead he asked a hotel desk clerk about the route while near the base of the volcano in Mexico, bought water, chips, cookies, and chocolate, then caught a colectivo (the cheap minivan used by locals as transport all over Latin America) at dawn that took him to the end of the road. There he followed the obvious trail leading up.
As on nearly all of Central America’s mountains, campesinos farm Tacaná’s slopes, where they grow potatoes and beans and graze cattle and goats. Near villages, the trail braided out confusingly and he asked the friendly villagers where to go. Their Spanish directions led him over the border into a clean, Guatemalan village. Next, he followed goat trails marked by little cloven hoofprints. He climbed higher into the clouds, where, with limited visibility, he scrambled over boulders and wandered through tall pines filled with birdsong. Unlike rural Mexico, there was no trash, and little sign of humans. “It was nice to feel alone for a little while and the white-out clouds obscured the myriad villages below,” he wrote. “The air was fresh, too, above the perennial smog that hangs over Latin America.”
By the time he reached the summit cone, a thunderstorm hastened the arrival of night. His headlamp beam bounced uselessly against the mist, so he picked his way down in the fog and darkness without it, unsure where he’d arrive—Mexico or Guatemala—at bottom. With farmers in bed at sundown, there was no one around to ask for directions.
Luckily, I’ve followed Roman Dial around the wilderness all my life, so my instincts led me to the right place. I missed the last colectivo, but caught a crowded taxi. Driving was terrifying, since the same problem with my headlamp was 100-fold with the headlights. Three of us hung out the windows in the rain and clouds shouting “Derecha! Derecha!! Izquerda!” to keep from going over a cliff.
The next day he bought a pound of local Chiapas coffee for 50 pesos—about $2.50—loaded it in his pack and left Mexico for good. He entered Guatemala with his clothes smelling like the fresh grounds: “Amazing,” he wrote. Guatemala, Roman surmised, was “a legitimate Third World country,” recalling how Indonesia, rural Malaysia, and Bhutan had felt, sounded, and smelled. Stories of robbery and murder, he said in an email, gave Guatemala an edgy feel.
Roman soon set out to tackle the highest mountain between Mexico’s Orizaba and Colombia’s Andes: Guatemala’s 13,845-foot Tajumulco. To increase the challenge—and hence the reward—he decided to skip even the Internet and guidebooks. He wouldn’t ask any Frenchies, he emailed, but just ask locals, as a good way to sharpen his language skills. His plan was to navigate the rural confusion of dirt roads, trails, and farmlands with just his wits and his Spanish. It would be a different sort of hard and risky, he said. And more like true exploration, I thought.
Chapter 15
Guatemala
With friends, San Pedro La Laguna, Guatemala, March 2014.
Courtesy of the author
After his almost three months of traveling alone and translating for others, Roman’s conversational Spanish edged toward proficient. Knowing only that the closest town to Tajumulco was San Marcos, he befriended an old cowboy campesino who showed him where to catch the bus. In San Marcos, he asked for directions from a group of middle-aged women. With his mother’s cheekbones and heart-melting smile, he had good luck with this demographic. “Plus,” he said, “they had great directions.”
Roman found his smile went a long way in Guatemala, especially with the Maya. The Maya reminded him of the Malays in Borneo. They were short-statured, friendly, and smiley, with no outward aggression—except the Maya seemed more willing to thieve than the Malays. Thieves or not, it was clear from his emails during his seven months of travel that he preferred Guatemala over all the other countries he visited.
Near Tajumulco, he jumped in a cab with five locals. Dropped off at a hotel, he went to the desk where three “tittering little girls” and a teenage boy checked him in. Roman tried to pry information from them about the climb, but couldn’t understand their directions. Then the children’s charismatic father appeared and in “tourist” Spanish gave “spectacular directions” (which I made him repeat about a dozen times).
Hungry after a long day, Roman asked where he could find food. “The bossiest little girl took me to the house next door and asked the grandmother there to make dinner.” As he waited, three little boys grilled him in Spanish about everything, which, he said, was fun. Over the course of the meal, the entire extended family trickled in. An older brother had spent eight years in the States, so he and Roman traded stories, each practicing their second language on the other.