Building Bridges

The first road in 8 years that defeated El Conquistador

But it was done to assist with this bridge building project.

Generic Travel Photos

Another Weapon Against Tyranny

I didn´t intend to get another photo of this church, but the van stalled and died directly in front of it. So I blocked the graffiti and took another one. The composition is better for this one but the lighting was better in the other one.

Not an uncommon position for Oggy

Hammock

Now I have everything

I should write a tale about how I installed this hammock, not only the details but also the philosophic implications. I bought 2 hammocks because I couldn´t decide between the one you see here and a traditional loose cotton weave...and then I found a third hammock that was made of jersey cotton and seemed more plush, like a combination of the two...but this particular hammock with the tight weave seems the best one with the least stretch. I don´t have much room to droop. The problem was the heat soaking into the foam mattress would not dissipate for hours after I laid down. Even then no air could reach the underside of Oggy´s tortured body. So, I thought a hammock would be an improvement and even allow me to leave the piano on the bed.

Rear Hook: One hole was too high to put the nut on so I drilled another through the curtain holder

But hanging it required some serious thought, and it turned out I over-thought the whole thing and bought a bunch of eye bolts and carabiners and rope, but in the end only needed to drill one hole in the back and hang an S hook from the front.

Front Hook: Merely bent the lip low so I can put the hook in. Double strength so it will hold anyone.

The rear hook was an epic feat of engineering as the rear metal is a stamped box with no access to the inside area except through the tiny area where the door latch enters when I close the door. But it was big enough to glue a nut to the end of a coat hanger and push a washer (arendelas) and the nut (tuerca) into the boxed area and blindly thread the nut...but it worked because I am Oggy and nothing can stop me.

Eventually, someone will try to determine how I did this...and they will conclude that I put the nut and the washer through this latch hole glued to a small coat hanger...threading it blindly onto the hook...and they will be right. But they won´t know I did it all in the dark next to a coffee processing plant in Esteli, Nicaragua...

There is just enough room to hang the hammock and be freely swinging. Not enough room to play the guitar while in the hammock but I can´t have everything. I have moved to the higher altitude so the heat isn´t as bad here but soon I will know if this is viable.
Traveling with this much crap really wouldn´t be so bad if I were just going from Point A to Point B but I´ve managed to find a project that will involve some hopping around and dwelling indefinitely in pueblas and cities and that is when everything gets tedious because I have too much shit piled around to do any specific living. Like, trying to find my sewing kit and do some impromptu embroidering was painful. And Installing this hammock would´ve been so easy had I not done it on the side of a cigar factory

In other news, the gasoline companies in Nicaragua add a red dye and also water to their gasoline. Yes, water. A trucker told me that and it explained why the performance had gone haywire recently. Not only was the altitude messing with the mixture, but the mixture included water...and red dye...and crappy octane gasoline...and the attendants will not reset the dial to ZERO...in order to sell you 400 Cordobas worth of gasoline at a cost 500 Cordobas...because the dial says 500, which includes 100 from the previous customer. And other times, they will simply hope you don´t confirm the dial says the amount you paid for, such as asking for 500...and they merely pump 400 and ask for 500. But the water in the gasoline really irks me...and I think there is a water remover additive I can look for.

It occurs to me that the idle issues came with less than 1/4 tank of gas...much of it probably water...stalling the engine randomly...and at high altitude.

Viva La Revolution

Central American farmers and students got caught between two super powers fighting for world dominance. Stalin's ridiculously paranoid forced Socialism by Proxy was on one side, and the fantabulist Milton Friedman inspired Capitalist Utopia was on the other side. They both, unfortunately, required massive repression and genocide in order to properly establish the groundwork for the future utopia. You can spot a dictator in training by how many body bags he orders as part of a plan to make the world perfect. So, the Friedman lunatics convinced Eisenhower and Kennedy and Nixon to defend free market exploitation of fruit farmers AT ALL COSTS, and Stalin and Khrushchev made lots of promises to student rebellions. The lies and deception on both sides was epic. Cuba, Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Panama...they are all battlegrounds between two ideologies that actually had no direct interests here, besides cheap bananas, so it was a perfect situation for them. Families in Kansas or Kiev, for example, would never feel the effects of thousands of land mines planted randomly in the jungle, so if that's part of the plan, then fuck it, go ahead. Let the Nicaraguans suffer the consequences. Oh, but that's delusional thinking, isolationist fantasy, the world is round and every evil deed has its day in court eventually. Eisenhower and Stalin set in motion a ripple effect that is still washing blood on our ankles today. The crime is that those responsible are usually dead and buried (sometimes honored as heroes) by the time everyone realizes they should be punished as villains.

I arrived in Nicaragua 36 years to the day Somoza was exiled after a few decades of indiscriminate destruction funded by American military. They celebrated with reenactments in Leon where the "students" demonstrated and the "soldiers" attempted to disperse unlawful assemblies. Fireworks replaced real guns. The actual tank that was involved in the resulting insurrection is still here in Leon, rusting in an open air museum with photos of the insurgents following the tank down main street next to Shell gas stations, Somoza's pawns fleeing like rats to their Florida mansions.

This seems noble on paper but I met a guy last night who was exactly the right age to have been involved in that insurgency and, indeed, he explained that he had fought for the FSLN and had the scars to prove it. One scar was obvious since his nose was missing the bridge. And his top front teeth were gone. His name was Adolpho...and his Spanish was so slurred because his nose and teeth were gone that I could barely understand anything he said...maybe one word in ten, they were all mumbles and accents, but he didn't really care since I think Veterans may simply want to talk, and the hearing part is secondary. He had bullet wounds in his arm...actually cried speaking about a woman who he had either lost track of during the Contra war or else she had been killed by Reagan's "Morning in America" militants. Maybe he had been tortured. If I could've understood him a little better he would've told me a good story. His drinking buddy actually stabbed me, but that's another topic.

Is "wedding shaming" a thing yet?

My point is that the wounds of war are of the flesh and bone variety, not ideological. So, 20 years of brutal dictatorship, followed by another ten years of Contra war, 30 years. Consider that the American Civil War was only 4 years long...and the effects are still obvious in the division between North and South. Now make that civil war 26 years longer with modern weapons and you get an idea of what Nicaragua has to recover from. I read a statistic that 1 in 5 El Salvadorians had to flee El Salvador because the deported El Salvadorians were running wild. I guess Kennedy could pour support into Somoza's corrupt regime but Obama can't reinforce the El Salvadorian police force. And Honduras has something like 14,000 police and neighboring Guatemala has 85,000 gang members which is part of the reason Honduras leads the world in homicide rates. There were supposed to be 14 military and police checkpoints between El Salvador and Nicaragua...and I counted 1, that was manned by two teenagers sitting in the shade with rifles. U.S. border enforcement cost about $18 Billion in 2012, which is like putting a 40 amp fuse in a fuse box when the 20 amp fuse keeps blowing up and then patting yourself on the back when your new fuse doesn't blow up.

I'd never seen these social art pieces before but a guy here said they are famous. I can't read the artist signature.

I guess Central America is like Haiti, failed social engineering experiments where two super powers with more ego than brains used farmers and students and soldiers as pawns to fight their dirty wars. But crimes like that never go unpunished and the $18 Billion price tag on border enforcement is the price of exploiting Central American farmers so you can get cheap mango juice at the Whole Food fruit section. In the long run it's a question of how deep in debt a country can go before it collapses like Greece. I see America as the dying Bison on the plain with vultures simply waiting for it to collapse into the grass. But the vultures will have big time competition with those refugees from Central America coming with home made potato guns to assault rifles to claim territory. Give me 85,000 organized Guatemalan gang members and I will hand you the keys to Los Angeles or Mexico City. Entropy tends toward chaos and it can be postponed but eventually the bill is due and the puppet masters will run for the hills with their loot. Somoza basically used counterfeit money to pay mercenaries to kill students...and the Contras used Ghetto Cocaine profits to kill FSLN leftists, who were using seized Ukrainian blood money to arm themselves. The details get real ugly and that man was trying to find some sympathy for what he knew he had lost and that he was not entirely sure he had accomplished anything. I said his sacrifice was for the future, maybe not today but I was ashamed that I could not fully appreciate what he was talking about. Che Guevara is a role model here because what he and Castro accomplished in Cuba was supposed to be the program in Nicaragua, but Che got assassinated in Bolivia and the FSLN picked the wrong year to oust Somoza because in 1980 Reagan thought he was staring in some war movie. So, now we have Che posters next to blind legless beggars outside trendy juice cafes where gringos wipe sweat from their aging cheeks and wait for the tour director to guide them to the next historic selfie photo op.

El Conquistador Pillages Church

Vultures in Flight. A 1942 Volkswagon Beetle in front of a 23rd Century Greek Orthodox Church in Hungary.*

I´m thinking I will not tag this photo with information specific to the photo. I´m on the move again and I feel the inundation of photos on the Internet with "Look where I am" kind of narrative is not only geometrically abhorrent but is ruining the experience of travel. My advice is to go to unexpected places. Do not research your trip, but when you get somewhere then ask, look around, surprise yourself. Because if you already know what to expect when you travel then why are you traveling? To complain about the hot water or the price of cod? Stay home, if that is the case. These are photos of my travels but I don´t want to give you my itinerary or have these photos appear in google searches. I understand the desire to commoditize and collate everything under the sun, but it´s honestly making travel more like a pre-planned "connect the dots" experience. fuck that. fuck google. *to prove my point I will deliberately mis-identify this photo.

You want to find a hidden beach like this? Maybe get off you ass and go somewhere.

I can say that the Battery that I bought in Labrador City lasted 4 years and one month...and 14,000 miles of insanity...before finally dying when I entered El Salvador. 14,000 miles from Labrador to El Salvador and I had to do the exact same process of jump starting my own van using the auxiliary battery. The battery had 13 volts but simply not enough cranking amps to even turn the engine over. The connections were tight. It was dead dead dead after a little bit of reading the Spanish dictionary at night. So I had to buy a new battery in San Salvador and that fixed the problem fast. I really hope it lasts 4 years and one month too. I gotta figure out a better arrangement for my interior lightning...right now it all runs off my main battery, but I have a good auxiliary battery and can get LED lights for the interior, not these crazy 20 watt bulbs from 1969. Maybe 2 watts. Run all night long.
Speaking of nights, last night the local Policia were banging on my van like they had captured El Chapo. "Come out with your hands up, we have you surrounded!" Fucking bullshit. I was so delirious and naked that I did not explain myself well as sweat poured from my face. Bullshit.

One thing at a time.

I´m too absorbed by the current situation to reflect on 9 months in Guatemala. It´s not much time. I think I´ll be back. Xela is very nice for long term stay, though in one week I could understand a young person wanting something different. If only I could play Cole Porter songs at a cafe...