Perspectives of a Wandering Geographer

I  woke up early on Sunday morning remembering it was November 10, my mother’s 120th birthday.   What a different world she was born into on November 10, 1904, in rural northwestern Ohio.   My grandmother was working in her garden on the family farm in Henry County when she went into labor.   The midwife was sent for and Mother was born on the dining room table! So here I was 120 years later waiting to be picked up by a van at a hotel in Copán, Honduras.   I think Mother would be pleased to know of my many travels (she died in 1981).   The furthest she even traveled was to the Panama Canal Zone where she was teaching school in 1941 when she met my Bostonian father (a sergeant in the US Army Air Force) a couple months before Pearl Harbor. The same driver that got us through the border the day before picked me up at 6:20 AM, 20 minutes late.   There were a handful of other passengers.   We arrived at the border in about 10 minutes to find a huge...

The Drive (ugh!) I wondered if I was a bit nuts to commit to a 12+ hour round-trip over only two days to the Copan Ruins in Honduras.   In order to make the trip and have time to see the ruins during the first afternoon, I had to have my ass ready and waiting in front of my lodgings in Antigua at 3:30 AM on Saturday.     The tour van arrived only 5 minutes late and I was the first passenger.   I started to climb into the passenger’s seat at the front, but the driver, a quiet and sullen 60ish grayhead, insisted that it was against “las reglas” (the rules).   “¿Qué reglas?” I replied, insisting just as strongly that I always rode in the front seat in tour vans.   He had other passengers to pick up and probably didn’t want to waste time arguing with an assertive gringo who spoke Spanish, so he relented, and I climbed into my coveted front seat. Heading east out of Antigua on a serpentine four-lane highway, we climbed about    1200 feet in 5 miles...

When I was first assigned to the science lab at the beginning of my second week at the School of Hope, the teacher, Eunice (pronounced A-OO- NEES -A in Spanish), asked if I could come up with a simple lab exercise related to work I had done professionally.   I thought it over and told her I could tell the students about where gasoline comes from and how oil spills are cleaned up.   She liked the idea, so I put together a short PowerPoint presentation with photos from the internet showing oil wells, storage tanks, an oil tanker truck, and a refinery.   This was followed by some photos of a bird covered in oil, a stream choked with oil from a spill, and guys in hazmat suits cleaning up oily messes at a well site and a gas station.   I wrote out the 5-10 minute presentation and went over it with my Spanish teacher, Oscar, when we had our weekly lesson at a café.   As usual, I had made a few grammatical errors which I fixed with his help.   When will I ever sto...

I arrived back in Denver last Wednesday night and have not had time to publish more stories so far.  In the meantime, here are a couple of short, related anecdotes from my friend, Andy, in Uruguay.  I hope you find them very entertaining: Your story of the El Salvador border crossing reminds me of my travels in Central America in the late 1990s though I was driving a school bus I had converted into a very rustic motor home.   When trying to enter Guatemala from Mexico, I was put in line with the trucks, and the Guatemalan customs guys tried to extort money from me.   So instead of paying, I made popcorn and hung out with the truckers who all had hammocks suspended under their truck trailers.   The truckers said their average time in line was three days if they refused to pay bribes for better service. They loved the popcorn, and it started a party of sorts which the customs officers did not appreciate.   Therefore, they ushered me through to the front of th...

I was pleased when my cell phone alarm went off at 3:25AM – not that I like getting up at that hour but I was just pleased that the alarm went off at all.   I had been having trouble with my cell ever since waiting for my flight to Guatemala in Fort Lauderdale.   I kept periodically getting messages that there was moisture in the charging port and when that happened there was a noisy alarm and a message telling my to unplug the charger immediately.   It was acting up again in El Salvador and there was barely enough of a charge left to keep it going until the alarm was supposed to go off.   In defense of my cell phone, it’s old and used to Colorado’s low humidity. I was out at the gate at 3:55AM for the driver’s scheduled 4:00 arrival.   Four AM came and went, so I did yoga poses on the dark street in front of the gate to pass the time.   Finally, he arrived at 4:45 and muttered some excuse that I didn’t understand.   As I opened the door to the front...

Up at 6:15AM on Sunday, November 2.   I’d planned to sleep in, but it was light out and a bit cool.   So, a good time to walk on the beach and take some photos in the early morning light.   I walked out to the highway and crossed the bridge over the little river that divides the town in two.   From there, I turned at the road which I followed for ½ kilometer down to the beach.   It was almost low tide, but big waves were crashing and I could see the attraction for surfers, a few of whom were already out waiting to catch a quick ride.   The black (volcanic) sand beaches were interrupted by promontories of volcanic conglomerate bedrock.   Eventually, I got back to the little beach on the other side of the river where most of the bars, restaurants, and surf shops are located.   It seemed like most of the tourists here are young (under 35), be they foreigners or Salvadoreños.   It was time for breakfast at Canegue (right off the beach), the be...