A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. Well that satisfies one of the senses but how about sound? If roses were called sticklebacks or reptilians wouldn´t some of the effect be lost? Would´ve Ford sold as many Mustangs if they were called the Ford Insipid? I don´t think so. I´m sorry as much a fan as I am of our Bill he hasn´t fully grasped the point. Johnny Cash emphasises this point by suggesting that having a name like Steve is more preferential than Sue if your a bloke. Names, especially place names have a resonance with the human imagination and played an important and almost inspirational role in my early life. Like most kids in the fifties I was cowboy mad which is hardly surprising considering the amount of westerns that were on TV and in the movies. The Range Rider, Bronco Lane, Cheyenne Bodie, Sugarfoot, Waggon Train etc...My favourite film was "The fastest gun alive" with Glenn Ford and Broderick Crawford as the bad guy, plus the likes of Audie Murphy, Gary Cooper, and Richard Wydmark also mesmerised from the silver screen. Happy days
It was the beginning of my and probably a lot of others' love affair with all things American. Places like Wyoming, El Paso, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Montana, The Rio Grande and the place I would have exchanged eternal happiness in heaven for (and this from a devout Catholic boy) - Arizona. I may have grown out the cowboy faze but at the same time I watched the black and white movies of thirties and forties especially the exciting scary roaring twenties gangster movies involving still great favourites of mine, James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, George Raft and of course Bogie. In my early teens I along with a couple of my peers used to ridicule Britain's grey conservative austerity compared with the exciting colourful flamboyance of the US. They had Elvis we had Cliff¨: they had JFK and we had Macmillan and the Montgomery Burns look-alike Alec Douglas Hume. And of course the names. Chuck Berry sang about Memphis Tennessee, Sinatra found Chicago and New York his kind of towns, Tony Bennett lost his heart Frisco. What did we have,.... Bud Flanagan singing "Maybe it's because I´m I Londoner", pathetic. Where were the British names that could inspire songwriters? 24 hours from Cleethorpes?, I left my heart in Bognor Regis? Even the Beatles had to sing about Kansas City and probably hadn't clue where it was at the time.
One of the areas that we studied in Geography at school in the early sixties was South America. The images were of the driest deserts, the highest volcanoes, amazing lakes, shifting glaciers, and the densest jungles along with huge spiders, boa constrictors and alike. But did they had to have the names to match?: with a vengeance. Cotopaxi, Titicaca, The Amazon, La Paz, Quito, Rio, Montevideo, Buenos Airies, and Santiago to mention a few. The imagination ran rife. Because of all this I was very good at place names around the world and my knowledge of capitals was always pretty comprehensive even in primary school.
The reason I mention all this is that I have discovered a couple of anomalies in Central America. The physical and political nature of CA could not be be more exotic, volatile, tempestuous, forever verging on or involving natural and human violence that seems to be the raison d'etre of these banana republics. Belize has a Caribbean coastline so reggae, creole, and rasta influences add to its other CA attributes. It has a history of piracy and Captain Henry Morgan pillaged and ransacked the old capital, Belize City, but did not cause as much damage as Hurricane Hattie in the sixties which more or less wiped out the city so much so that a new capital was built further in land. I didn´t know the name of the capital, which was hardly surprising as it had been named.......BELMOPAN. What?!!. It sounds like a commode room-service for an hotel chain. The only thing I can think of is that Belize was British Honduras at the time before Independence in 1981 and today still has the Queen on their postage stamps so maybe a committee of bowler hatted Reginald Molehusbands from the Foreign Office came up with it.
The capital of Honduras has also always escaped me which again is not surprising as it's a five syllable tongue-twisting inappropriate monstrosity called Tegucigalpa (Teg-oo-see-galpa). I´ve spent an inordinate amount of time trying to master and remember it, but then someone out of the blue asks where's my next stop and I say umm..umm Tag.....umm ..umm,...the capital. Linguists have spent less time learning ancient Sanskrit fluently. I shall now refer to the capital of Honduras using the abbreviation on my printed bag label, TGA.
After Guatemala City I had spent several weeks in a beauty competition going from one safe picturesque village to another in Guatemala and Mexico, now heading to TGA it was nitty gritty time again. For the first half of my trip everything has gone very smoothly which is amazing considering my ability to self destruct and some of the dodgy places I´ve visited. I encountered the first hitches in attempting to travel from Copan Ruinas to TGA. I, along with others, arrived to catch the 9.00am bus and were told that it wouldn´t arrive until 2.00pm. The reason they gave, which turned out to be genuine, was that there was an ethnic demo on the Guatemalan side of the border and the buses had go to pick up stranded passengers. The bus actually arrived at 3.30pm. In the meantime I had several conversations including one with an Honduran chef who works in New York City. Lonely Planet states that the posh district of TGA called Colonia Palmira is generally safe, Downtown is OK in the day but dangerous at night and where the bus station is, Comayaguela, is just plain dangerous. Bus stations throughout Latin America always seem to be located in gangland areas. It´s a chicken and egg situation. Do the dastardly hombres find a habitat where there is a sufficient supply of prey to sustain them or do the bus companies seek out the cheapest real estate, and which came first? Well because of the lateness of the bus it meant that I would arrive at about 11.00 pm on a Saturday night without a hotel reservation. But that's OK I'll just get a taxi to the hotel area. However the New York chef said make sure you write down the taxi's number and ensure the driver sees you as some of them cannot be trusted. Someone else said that if you pay before getting your bags out of the car or boot they will drive off. No worries then. Most of the passengers were getting off at St. Pedro Sula about half way to TGA. I made an executive decision to transfer my ticket to 5.00am the following morning. This did not go without a hitch as two hours into the journey there was a hold up (traffic not guns) because a tanker had overturned and caught fire. There were rumours of a stoppage of between one and six hours but we were back on our way within two. We actually stopped near a roadside cafe so we got in first and had the breakfast we missed because of the early start and a nice chat amongst Italians, Spanish, and some Americans
The extra night in Copas Ruinas turned out to be a lively affair. I noticed during the day that scaffolding and platforms were being erected and streets had been cordoned off. I thought it was to be a night market, but it turned out to be a stage for rock bands and there was also a Harley Davidson rally with a stack of choppers and greasers in town and serious partying. All this seemed rather incongruous as this is a sleepy little village in the middle of nowhere. Getting up at 4.00 am the following morning wasn´t easy.
Arriving in TGA in daylight wasn´t plain sailing as I was taken by a young macho taxi driver on the scenic route to a hotel downtown that I had selected. I lodged my objections and pointed him in the right direction. He was ripping me off. I knew he was ripping me off. And he knew that I knew he was ripping me off. I paid him the $10 which turned out to be over twice the correct amount. However 10 minutes later I was ensconced in a very comfortable room with cable TV, free interent and coffee, and a fab shower for $16.00 per night. Backpacking, especially in Latin America, has done wonders for by patience in recent years. Even when told about the five hour bus delay in Copas Ruinas unlike some younger travellers who became quite irate and demanded compensation, I along with most others just shrugged our shoulders and I took the opportunity to finish off Graham Greene´s "Our man in Havana" The Hotel Granada was "manned" by two large, formidable middle aged black women: The early shift and the late shift. At first they were unsmiling and uncompromising. The early shift woman was from the Caribbean side of the country, spoke English in a Jamaican accent and reminded me of Lenny Henry´s impression of his mother, strict and maternal. I found the formula though, which was to tickle their fancy, make them laugh and after that they were putty in my hands and couldn´t do enough for me.
TGA is a polluted gridlocked mess which can describe many cities and capitals in Latin America. But the chaos is part of its charm especially if like me you don´t have to get anywhere quickly. Because of urbanisation new shanty barrios are spreading up the sides of the mountains and volcanoes that surround TGA. Apparently the barrios are a fine example of enterprise, and social mobility. The new arrivals from the countryside build homes from scrap metal cardboard and alike. After earning some cash in the capital they upgrade to wood, then stone and masonry. All very admirable. I spent an extra day in TGA because of the comforts of the hotel, to chill, and get my clothes laundered. Next stop Leon in Guatemala.