Roads

A lot of the roads that we have travelled on have been great.  They’re smooth, scenic, and safe.  A lot of them are not.

If you stop and think for a minute what roads are you can really see the benefit of them.  Without a road, you have to make your way across whatever surface is natural in that area.  Grass, logs, rocks, ditches, mud or whatever.  Roads give you speed.  They make the natural landscape more uniform so that your car can travel smoothly which means that you can go fast.  This seems kind of obvious, but I don’t think I ever really thought too much about roads and their benefits before this trip.  I think about roads a lot more now.  I like smooth roads that you can go fast on.  I like roads that you can trust.

You probably don’t think that you trust roads but you do.  You trust that they won’t suddenly end or that they won’t suddenly present you with an obstacle that might break something on your car or even crash it.  I don’t have as much trust in roads as I used to.  Now I drive cautiously along the road, looking along suspiciously at its expanse as it unfolds itself in front of me.  The road watches me too.  It takes measure of my concentration.  It searches for moments of inattention with devious hope of catching me unaware.  It waits for me to glance at the radio.  It presents a shiny object along its side, an attempt to distract me so that it can reveal a gaping sinkhole or a mountainous, suspension-shocking tope in front of me.  Roads are not to be trusted, my friends, and I hope you’ll remember that should you ever head this way. 

We’ve already lost a shock mount to topes in the past.  Recently, the road hid a steep tope in the shadow of a tree and I slowed, but not enough.  I heard the road chuckle just as I hit the tope, which launched the front of the Rattlevan skyward and back down with a clunk.  We didn’t think any damage was done until the next one.  I rolled over that one slowly, but we felt a nasty clang, pulling over to see a hanging torsion bar beneath the van.  The first tope knocked the bar loose and the second bent the mount.  That lurky road hit me with a double whammy. 

The fix for this one turned out to be mostly painless with the exception of the drunk guy.  I backed the van up into a side road and climbed underneath to remove the torsion bar.  The plan was to get it off so that we could limp along to a shop and get it fixed. 

As I was working on the rusty mounting bolts, a guy with a wheelbarrow kept walking by and pausing with his load by the van.  He was obviously trying to decide if I needed any help but decided each time he passed that, based on the determined clunking and wrenching sounds underneath, I didn’t. 

When I emerged victorious with the offending part, I saw him there waiting and I asked him if he knew of a shop nearby.  Relieved, he finally got to tell me that the shop was right there, not 40 feet from where I struggled underneath the van.  He worked there and each wheelbarrow load past me was going into the shop. 

Beth and I walked into the shop yard with the mangled torsion bar.  It was pretty clear what we needed, so a mechanic grabbed the bar, slung it into a vice and started beating it back into shape.  Meanwhile, a very small and very drunk man struggled up off the shop floor and proceeded to slur at us. 

He was, apparently, hilarious, but my drunk Spanish is no better than my sober Spanish so I could only make out some insults about the gray in my beard and how it meant that I was too old for my young wife.  Then something about how his wife was even younger than  mine (creepily younger actually) and then something further about shrimp and neck ties that didn’t make any sense at all, even for a drunk guy. 

He began to get tiresome, as short very drunk guys do, so we flagged him off, and he resigned himself to thumbing his nose at OSHA and “helping” his mechanic friend with the repair under the jacked-up truck.

The tiny drunk was annoying his mechanic buddy instead of us, which was good, although I don’t think the mechanic was enjoying it (and wouldn’t have called it helping, either).  Fortunately, it was only for a minute or two before the little guy dozed off.  This sped things up a lot and, in no time, the mechanic slid out, woke his boozy and diminutive friend, and charged us about six bucks for the repair.   

 

 

 

Topes are one of the most constant road hazards.  They come in all shapes and sizes and despite my mistrust of the road, the road actually doesn’t create them just to get me.  Some are placed there by a DOT-like body but many are actually created by the people or the townships that live nearby.  Although there are speed limits, there don’t seem to be any penalties for ignoring them, so people pretty much drive whatever speed they like. This is almost uniformly and exclusively limited by topes.  People driving too fast by the front of your shop? No problem, just get out some concrete, invite some friends over, and build yourself a tope.  No more fast drivers in front of your shop.   It works very well.  Even in places where there are no topes, drivers fear them lurking in the shadows and slow down anyway.  The only downside to the whole tope speed-control system is  the roughly $42 trillion in annual costs of fixing and replacing suspensions.   

Another significant road hazard in the mountainous terrain where we’ve been is landslides.  Guatemala is pretty geologically unstable and it doesn’t take a geologist to see that when you get a look at the roads.

This one looks pretty recent but you never know.  We saw some landslides that looked liked they were on someone’s to-do list for long enough to start growing trees.  One particular landslide was so huge, so hard to deal with, that the bypass around it became the new road.  We heard ahead of time that the landslide, years old, had taken out a very large section of road and that there was a bypass traversing private property that everyone used, for a small toll to the landowner.  The warning did not prepare us for what we saw. 

The entire section of rocky hillside you see beyond the vegetation in the foreground is the aftermath of a massive landslide.  The road that you see winding across it is the bypass which is about 400 feet down hill from the former road.  Those are clouds that hang above it and our hearts hung a bit lower than them when we saw the whole thing.  It was scary.  We almost turned back right there.  It was so narrow that vast sections were one way at a time and trucks were cued up awaiting their turn to run the gauntlet.  It seemed as if someone came in, moments after the landslide and just bulldozed a new road, started collecting tolls and called it good.

The toll booth/shack was unoccupied so we crept towards the road.  After we stopped whining and crying and counting the hours that the long way would take, we went for it.  It wasn’t as scary as we thought, actually, and only a few sections seemed like they would give way beneath us.  We found that the steep drop-offs beside the road didn’t seem very bad if you avoided looking at them too much.  Before long, we were off the mess and back to the usual, normally sketchy road. 

Some sections of road that were once speedways and are now holes have been marked so you don’t fall in.  Sometimes this seems to have been done by a road crew and sometimes it’s just a couple of rocks piled up in front of the hazard by helpful citizens. 

I like the warning markings for the particular hazard in this pic. “forward…, forward…, okay, now start veering left to avoid the giant, gaping hole....”

If you look carefully at the pic on the right, you can see that the whole section of roadway is shifted about a foot.  It appeared to be a small fault line that shifted the road down and over.  This was pretty common in one area.  Some of the shifting seemed to be explained by mini slides that took whole sections of earth with them, intact.  Some seemed like classic earthquake fault lines. 

Some of the roads are so steep that the van can barely make it up.  One was so steep that we had to bail out and give up completely on the destination.  The poor rattlevan just didn’t have the power (or a low enough gear) to make it up the hill.  Those same hills on the way down can be pretty nerve wracking and are often so sustained that we have to stop and let the brakes cool several times.  Most of the vehicles that travel these roads are tough Toyota pickup trucks.  Just like ours but unfettered by houses on their backs. 

One road in particular shook me and made me rethink the whole plan of traveling on back roads.  After hours of slowly creeping through pot holes we arrived at a terrifying section of muddy holes.  Fear struck me.  The van has very little clearance and I knew that the holes ahead of me likely would be too much for it even if they were only as deep as I could see, but several of the massive holes were filled with mud, hiding their true depths.  We had trucks behind us and a queue of trucks on the other side of the section. Turning around on the narrow road would have been almost impossible even if we decided to.  We had hours of travel behind us for the day and there was no other way around this without a day and a half of travel.  

It was my turn.  I hesitated long enough for the huge fire truck across the pond to start honking. I’m pretty sure that I translated the honking sounds correctly to “man up gringo, we don’t have all day.”  The only consolation was that we would have plenty of help getting us out if we got stuck. 

We went for it.  We splashed into the first mud hole and the next and banged the bottom and then banged the bumper so hard that it broke completely free.  We made it limping to the other side, where I tied the bumper on the van with rope while a line of trucks looked on and took their turns in the mud.  I really, really want to get more clearance on the van and I really, really hope I never see a section of “road” like that again.