An American Abroad

Three Names, Two Countries, One Island

Forty five minutes out of San Juan, the turboprop began its descent over the waters of the eastern Caribbean. We dropped lower, lower, lower and all I saw out the window was water, water, water. When it seemed like we were about to ditch, a strip of sand flashed under the wings. We cleared a chain-link fence by inches and plunked down on a short runway of Princess Juliana International Airport, better know as SXM. I was on the island of Saint Martin.

This small island is unique in the Caribbean for being the territory of two European nations. The southern 40% of the island belongs to The Kingdom of the Netherlands and is called Sint Maarten. The larger northern part, known as Saint-Martin (note the hyphen), is governed by The Republic of France. The island itself is called Saint Martin (note the lack of a hyphen). The locals don’t seem to care much about those distinctions, though and just refer to “the French side” and “the Dutch side.”

I checked into one of the less-expensive hotels on the boardwalk in Philipsburg, the capital of the Dutch side. This was my view as I walked to my room.

Outside, the boardwalk was lined with bars and restaurants that backed a shallow beach studded with lounge chairs. I got the impression that alcohol and coffee are popular here.

I walked out to the end of the boardwalk to get a shot of the bay and hills in the background. My hotel was the white square building on the right.

From the Blue Bitch Bar, I could look across the bay at the enormous cruise ships that were docked at a terminal large enough to handle seven ships at once. Tourism is THE industry here.

Hurricane Irma, which hit the Caribbean just two weeks before its better known sister, Maria, did significant damage to Saint Martin. A lot of the destruction was still evident one and a half years later.

That night, I had dinner at Antoine’s, a French restaurant that overlooked the beach. It was a scrumptious meal. Heaven may be a place where the government is Dutch, the food is French, and the vibe is Caribbean. The place wasn’t crowded, and when my crème brûlée was finished, one of the waiters came over to chat. We hadn’t talked for more than two minutes when he allowed that he was attracted to “older men” and invited me to go out with him. I didn’t know whether to be insulted that I was now in the geriatric division of sexual desirability or flattered that I was still decent-looking enough to inspire a come-on. Gently as I could, I let him know that I wasn’t into guys — but I enjoyed the ego boost.

The next day, I hailed a taxi and rode over to the French side. There are no immigration or customs posts at the border, just a sign that says Bienvenue à France. Easiest border crossing ever.

My destination was the southern, clothing-optional end of Orient Beach. Having gone sunbathing au naturel in Antigua last September, I was interested in doing it again. But while my experience in Antigua was largely a solitary one, Orient Beach was crowded. It was my first-ever experience with social nudity at scale.

I walked through a bar at the edge of the parking lot where I’d been dropped off and breezed past a sign that warned me I was entering the clothing-optional section of the beach. Another admonished me not to take pictures. Once I stepped out onto the sand, I stripped and walked toward the water’s edge. I headed toward the yellow beach umbrellas and passed scores of lounge chairs occupied by thoroughgoing sun worshippers until I found one that was unoccupied. I paid a few dollars to a fellow who tagged the chair as paid for and then stretched out to catch some rays. The sun and soft ocean breezes felt good on my body.

People strolled by me, most naked, a few in bathing suits. I saw white people who’d been baked to an Indian shade of deep brown. I saw people who were in fine physical shape and those who were overweight. The nudists skewed toward middle age, with folks in their forties comprising the largest age demographic. Everyone behaved in a friendly but chaste way; the only public display of affection I saw came from a couple walking along the beach together holding hands. The comings and goings of the roughly 150 naked people quickly became normalized; really, it felt very much like being at any other beach.

As nonjudgmental about people’s appearance as I tried to be, I was irritated by a fellow who was wearing an unbuttoned Hawaiian-style shirt and nothing else. He was probably dressed that way to avoid a sunburn, but the effect was to call attention to his genitals in a way that being fully nude would not. It seemed like a deliberate display, which I interpreted as a breach of nudist decorum.

I waded into the warm, clear ocean waters. The ocean bottom was sugar-sand smooth and the waters were calm. I saw dozens of small fish swimming with me. Discreetly, so people back on the beach wouldn’t think I was taking pictures of them, I held a camera underwater and snapped some fish pix. I think this one is a Palometa, also known as a Great Pompano (Trachinotus goodei), a game fish that likes the clear waters of the Caribbean and swims close to shore. It looked almost translucent from my vantage.

I waded through a school of long skinny fish with swordlike beaks in front and Y-shaped fins in back. I was delighted to learn these are called Ballyhoo Halfbeaks (Hemiramphus brasiliensis). Whoever came up with that name had a real way with words.

After my swim, I walked down to the far end of the beach. There I found the ruins of Club Orient, a naturist resort. Before Hurricane Irma, the club featured scores of little cottages and a big clubhouse that served as the bar, restaurant, and entertainment center. But Irma showed it no mercy. Some cottages had been blown clean off their foundations. Others were missing walls and most were missing roofs, windows, and doors. The clubhouse was ripped apart. Judging from the comments I’ve read about it online, Club Orient was a much-loved place. This notion was reinforced by the many cairns that had been carefully stacked on a rocky section of the waterfront. Some were Stonehenge-elaborate, others were simple towers. They looked to have been there a while. I was a little surprised no one had knocked them down.

I walked among the ruins, venturing into the clubhouse and some of the cottages. I was barefoot and naked and had to step carefully. As I stood there amid the debris, I flashed on the final scene of the original Planet of the Apes where an almost-naked Charlton Heston finds the ruins of the Statue of Liberty on a beach and weeps in rage and sorrow at the folly of humankind. As I walked through the ruins of Club Orient, I felt like I was looking at our possible future, a world where climate change and wars have destroyed much of civilization and the remnants of humanity are left to wander naked through the rubble and build little remembrances to what was. It was a powerful and bleak vision.

To cheer myself up, I walked back to the other end of the beach, took a seat at the bar, and washed down a slab of ribs with a couple bottles of Carib beer. The place was full of naked people eating, drinking, and talking. That was the one and only time the clothing-optional scene seemed jarring to me. Not wrong, not bad, just somehow out of place. On the stool next to me was a fat Floridian fellow somewhere on the shady side of 65. Upon learning that I liked to travel, he proceeded to regale me with bawdy tales of helling it over Latin America. And I thought to myself that this is not the kind of conversation I’d normally have with a stranger sitting next to me in a bar, but the circumstances seemed to invite disinhibition.

After catching a little more sun, I packed up my few belongings, put my bathing suit on, headed back to the parking lot, and flagged a shared taxi van. The family of four in the back were there on a cruise ship port of call and had been taxiing around the island to see the sights. As the driver looped around the parking lot, we came within view of a small group of unclothed people lined up at the Porta Potties. The two kids, maybe 12 and 10 years old, howled “Oooh, gross!” and pointed and laughed and made fun of the nudists. The parents did nothing. I sat there biting my lips so as not to say something I’d regret.

Back in Philipsburg on the Dutch side, I took advantage of the remaining hours of daylight to walk around the town a little.

All too soon it was time to head home to Puerto Rico and nurse a blistering sunburn. I got only the barest taste of Saint Martin, but it was enough to leave me wanting more. For me, the three spellings of this place symbolize Dutch efficiency and tolerance, French cuisine and joie de vivre, and Caribbean mindset and beaches. No matter how you spell it, that’s a good combination.

From Flores to Tikal

I flew out of San José, landed in Guatemala City in the early evening, and checked into a small hotel. In less than ten hours, I was back at GUA boarding a Transportes Aéreos Guatemaltecos Embraer ERJ 145 to Flores.

After landing at Mundo Maya International Airport, I met up with the outfitter that was to take me on a day trip to the Mayan ruins of Tikal. I was in the northern Guatemala lowlands, about 60 kilometers west of the Belize border. We set off on an easterly road that tracked the shore of Lake Petén Itzá and then turned north.

As can be seen from this map, Tikal is in the boonies. Flores looked to be a very nice lakeside vacation spot with an airport that calls itself “international” only because there’s Tropic Air puddle-jumper that flies out of it to neighboring Belize. (Do click that link to get the full flavor of aviation in rural Central America!) But once we were three kilometers out of the airport, there were scarcely any towns, just handfuls of buildings here and there clinging questionably to the side of the road.

I say “we” because this was a group tour. I’m innately leery of that kind of thing. Maybe this is my travel twist on Groucho Marx’s disinclination to join clubs that would have people like him as members. But this group was excellent, people I would be happy to travel with almost anywhere. We were collectively heavy on lawyers and teachers, but with a congressional staffer and a photojournalist on assignment for TripAdvisor thrown in for variety’s sake. We all synched politically, which isn’t that surprising. I don’t know whether liberal people travel more or travel makes people more liberal, but there’s definitely correlation, especially in unsung places like Guatemala where the cruise ships don’t dock.

Not long into our journey, we stopped by the side of the road to admire the lake. The landmass off to the right in this picture is called The Crocodile for obvious reasons. It’s said that sometimes, if you picnic by the side of the lake and drink enough beer, you can actually see it move.

Midway to Tikal, we stopped at a roadside café/souvenir stand. I’m not a fan of the genre. I groaned as we pulled up, but I had to pee so I climbed out of our Toyota van and went inside. There were craftsmen working on the souvenirs that would be sold. There was a large diorama of Tikal, which helped orient me to the place we were heading. And there was a cheesy plastic skeleton surrounded by equally cheesy plastic limes inside a plexiglass case. How ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm once they’ve seen something like that?

The premises backed right up to the jungle and a riot of flowering plants.

Across the road was a much more homely refreshment stand. The proprietor looked like she needed the business more than the big café, so I bought a glass of powerfully sweet fruit juice from her.

After we got back on the road and drove north for a while, the scenery began to change. Soon we entered the Maya Biosphere Reserve, the largest protected tropical forest in North America. As if the lush vegetation on both sides of the two-lane road wasn’t enough to announce that we were in the forest, the road signs clearly conveyed that we were’t in Kansas anymore.

Finally, a little more than two hours after touching down in Flores, I entered the Parque Nacional Tikal, a UNESCO World Heritage site that’s powerfully deserving of the designation. More on this to come…

San José After Dark

There are cities in Central America where you’re advised not venture out after dark, but San José is not one of them. Sure, there’s an area known as the Zona Roja that’s supposed to be dangerous, but every city has districts like that. I walked around San José from dusk til midnight and never once felt ill at ease.

I started in Chinatown, where I had a fine dinner at Restaurante Holiday Hot Pot. I was drawn in less because I wanted to eat and more because the way the place looked drew me in.

The decor was a mix of whimsical and industrial, Chinese and international. Whoever decorated the place knew what they were doing. Everything felt purposeful, fun, and harmonious. I felt so comfortable there that after I finished my meal, I stayed and read a chapter or two in Shantaram, the book I was carrying. One of the joys of travel is having an open schedule that allows for a lot of reading time.

By the time I was ready to press on, it was dark out. I walked without any particular destination through Chinatown and into a light industrial area.

I saw evidence that unions are alive and well in Costa Rica. This one, the CCTD, was founded in 1943 with the support of the Catholic church. Today it represents workers in the banking, agricultural, railroad, insurance, and public utilities industries.

Soon I found myself in an area where you could drink, dance, vape, and get your hair cut.

I wound up back in the skate park where I’d had an earlier encounter with John Lennon. I was unable to decipher the iconography of the nearby church. I’m guessing that this is supposed to be a representation of Mary, but what does the propeller signify? Is she the patron saint of aviation?

Even late at night there were lots of people on the main streets. This fruit vendor was doing a good business.

I found my way back to my quarters in Barrio Amón. It was still early by Costa Rican standards, but I was operating on very little sleep after a late flight out of San Juan caused me to miss my connection in Bogota. A more thorough exploration San José’s nightlife will have to wait until next time.

A Contrarian Visit to Costa Rica

Travel writers love Costa Rica. They rave about the biodiversity, the beaches and the surfing, the jungle and the animals, the ecolodges and the pura vida mindset. But the capital city, San José, doesn’t get a lot of attention from them. When this town of 340,000 is mentioned at all, it’s usually described as a place to pass through on the way to and from more interesting places.

I wanted to see if that dismissive attitude was justified, so I paid a short visit there. I left convinced that San José doesn’t deserve its meh reputation. It’s true that it’s not a glitzy town. It doesn’t have the gleaming skyscrapers of Panama City or the socko Spanish colonial architecture of San Juan. Instead, it’s got the comfortable appeal of a city that feels lived-in and liveable.

I was here:

As Latin American cities go, San José isn’t especially old. It was founded in 1736, but didn’t have a charter or a government until 1812. Compare that to Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, which was founded in 1496. Perhaps conscious of its relative youth, San José goes out of its way to remind residents and visitors that it has a past, albeit one that doesn’t stretch back as far as some of its neighbors. It does this chiefly through sculpture. I’ve never been in a town that has as many sculptures per square mile. The statues are generally of Costa Rican men who are unfamiliar to me, but were the leading lights of this small country in their day.

Some of the statues have been, shall we say, edited: “In 1502, the pirate Columbus arrived.”

I stayed in Barrio Amón, one of the older parts of the city. The place is named for Amon Fasileau-Duplantier, a French coffee and real estate developer who lived there in the late 19th century. Unsurprisingly, some parts of the neighborhood have a distinctly Belle Époque feel.

The neighborhood is home to three lovely urban parks, Parque Morazán, Parque España, and Parque Nacional. These well-designed spaces display Costa Rica’s rich ecological endowments and attract both travelers and locals. They’re situated so that pedestrians getting from place to place can’t help but walk through them — a subtle effort by the urban planners of old to force city dwellers to have contact with nature every day.

One of the reasons I chose to stay in Barrio Amón was that I’d hoped to visit The Hemingway Inn. As I look back on my travels, I see I’m developing a habit of scoping out the digs of famous authors: Franz Kafka’s house in Prague, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s mansion and favorite watering holes in Cartagena, and Arthur C. Clarke’s place in Colombo, Sri Lanka. So naturally I wanted to see the place where Papa stayed while he was in San José. Also, the inn’s proprietor, Dennis Hambright, wrote a fine guidebook about the city and I wanted to meet him. Unfortunately, while the building still stands, the inn itself is no longer in business. I contented myself with wandering around the outside of it and imagining Hemingway coming and going.

Barrio Amón is a graceful, gentle place. Even the neighborhood stripjoint and massage parlor are nice-looking, as such establishments go.

The downtown area of the city is dominated by streets like Calle 4 that are closed to motor vehicles. This makes San José a pleasure to walk. I’d like to see more cities adopt this policy; it changes the pace, the mood, and the texture of the streetscape all for the better. The downtown streets that were closed to traffic seemed more prosperous than the areas that weren’t. Perhaps this is just coincidence, but I don’t think so.

The further away I got from Barrio Amón, the more the architecture looked more Spanish than French.

I had only about 48 hours in San José, and almost a third of that was spent sleeping. I told myself that this was just a survey mission designed to assess whether I should spend more time in the city next time I return to Costa Rica. I’ve answered that question in the affirmative.

The Places I Haven’t Been

I’m lucky. I’ve had the privilege of international travel. That’s something that’s been denied to much of the world’s populace.

Some people are denied the pleasures of travel by law. My American passport is powerful talisman that allows me to travel almost anywhere in the world. Other countries’ passports are not so mighty.

Some people can’t afford to travel. Oh, there are far more expensive obsessions, but having the travel bug requires disposable income and the ability to take time away from their jobs. Not everyone has that.

Some people have obligations that prevent them from traveling. If you’re taking care of a child or an elderly family member and no one else can shoulder those obligations, you’re stuck.

And some people don’t travel for purely internal reasons. This is especially true of Americans. They’ve been taught to fear the people in the next village or the foreign country. Or the spark of curiosity and the tinder of imagination haven’t come together inside them. This can be the most stubborn impediment to travel, because it can’t be cured by simply giving people a passport, some money, or a helping hand with their family obligations.

I’m a travel evangelist and addict. The more I travel, the more I want to–and the more I encourage others to do so. When I’m flying home from a trip, I pick up an in-flight magazine and page to the back where the maps are and start thinking about where I could go next. Not long ago, a friend showed me how I could make my own travel map. So I did.

Maps like these are marketed as a way to visualize all the countries you’ve visited, but I look at them the other way around. This is a map that shows (in red) all the countries I haven’t been to yet.

Here’s an interactive version:


Of course, this Mercator projection exaggerates the size of countries in the northern and southern quarters of the globe. A projection that was more faithful to the actual relative areas of different countries would show that there’s even more of the world I haven’t been to. And of course, countries are artificial and arbitrary ways of dividing up the world. If there were a map that simply showed the municipalities I’d visited, the map would be a sea of red spattered with a few hundred blue dots.

People who are thought to be “well-traveled” usually have seen a small percentage of the big wide world. Keeping that in mind make travel both a humbling and frustrating thing to do. No one’s seen the whole world. But that shouldn’t stop us from trying.

Goodnight Miraflores

On my last night in Peru, I wandered the length of Avenida Jose Larco from the sea to Parque Kennedy. I started at the Larcomar shopping plaza, a handsome Miraflores shopping complex perched on the edge of a cliff overlooking the Pacific.

There I visited a gallery that was hosting an exhibition of photographs staged by the World Press Association. This being news photography, the photos tended toward the sad and disturbing, but there was much to learn from their composition. So much of photojournalism, it seems to me, is about knowing when the perfect split second is about to occur.

Elsewhere in the complex was a mixture of shops and restaurants of American, European, and Peruvian brands.

It was nearly dark when I left Larcomar and headed north. The darkness didn’t stop a utility worker from repairing some underground lines.

I passed by the usual parked motorcycles, fruit stands, apartment buildings, and convenience stores on my way to Parque Kennedy.

It was bicycle night at the park. I saw about a hundred cyclists queued up and waiting to ride around the city. Miraflores has bike lanes, curbed on both sides and painted red, that make bicycling around safe and easy. You can see one on the right side of the picture below.

Around the perimeter of the park were restaurants, cafés and stores where people indulged in less vigorous pursuits.

The public chess games, while less vigorous than bicycling, were definitely more intense. The two guys in the foreground were playing speed chess and completed half a game in the time it took me to take pictures of them.

When the hour got late, I walked back down Avenida Jose Larco to my hotel. I hadn’t taken a trip like this in three years, one where I’d spent eight days in two different parts of a country or region, explored UNESCO World Heritage Sites and ordinary street life, been out in the country and in the thick of a major city. Peru felt like a return to a life I love. It seemed like going home.

Miraflores: Faces on the Bus

I’m fascinated by the glimpses I get of people as they pass by me on buses, trains, and subways at night. There’s a freeze-frame view of another human who inhabits the same planet I do and then that person is gone from my gaze forever. The people are lit as if on stage, characters in a stop-action play.

Maybe I’m a transit voyeur.

In the Miraflores neighborhood of Lima, I tried to capture some of what I saw. Buses are common and crowded there, so there’s no shortage of subject matter. Unfortunately, my visual reach exceeds my photographic grasp. I’ve got to work on my technique. But I write my blog as much for myself as for other people. It’s a notebook of ideas, some of which I later turn into better things. So here are the results of my most recent photographic experiments.

Lima Centro: Plaza de Armas

During my stay in Lima, I fell in love with Miraflores, Barranco, and the Parque de la Reserva. However I felt less passionate about the Plaza de Armas, the main square in the center of Lima. Though the Cathedral Basilica of Lima, the Municipal Palace, and the Archbishop of Lima’s Palace are nice old buildings, none of them are examples of amazing architecture.

The way buildings and other features are arrayed around the plaza seems haphazard. The space looks unfocused and visually incoherent. Trees, flagpoles, streetlights, and a fountain add too many vertical elements to the square. Less would have been more.

I found more appealing things to look at in the side streets. On one pedestrian mall, the Lima Municipal Band was playing lively dance numbers. People (mostly older folks) were dancing in the street. And I just loved the fact that Lima has a municipal band. I thought of my parents, both of whom played in bands in high school and beyond. My father played the baritone horn while my mother was a very accomplished trombonist. They would have loved hearing what I heard.

One of the side streets dead-ended into the Casa de Correos y Telegrafos. It must have been inconceivable to the people who built this back in 1897 that letters and telegrams would be well-nigh obsolete 120 years later.

I also wondered if rendering a mail slot as a lion’s open mouth was really the best symbol for the Peruvian postal system. People want their letters delivered, not devoured. Still, it was pretty cool.

The streets around Plaza de Armas were the only places in Peru where I saw government security forces on display. I don’t know whether this is a regular occurrence. Three months before I arrived, Peru’s president was forced to resign in a corruption scandal and was replaced by the former vice-president. Perhaps that ripple of political instability prompted greater vigilance. Or maybe this is just a sad feature of the world we now live in.

On a happier note, there was a fine-looking bookstore nearby. I’ve remarked before on how many bookstores there are in Lima. Their presence always makes me think well of a city.

Of course, bodegas, street vendors, and convenience stores are common too.

Lima Centro certainly gave me the opportunity to indulge in some of my photographic obsessions: motorcycles and bicycles. They tell me stories about the place and the people who inhabit it.

I strolled through the arcades that ring the Plaza de Armas. And I wondered when I would return.

Meet The Beetles (of Peru)

Original Volkswagen Beetles were once common on the streets of Latin America. But now these sturdy machines are getting rarer. There are still some stalwart old Beetles on the roads of Peru.

The ones I saw there seemed somehow brawnier than they do in the States. Possibly they have larger tires? For whatever reason, they look to me taller and more capable of going over rough terrain than their North American cousins.

Nearly every Peruvian Beetle I saw had been modified in some way or another, making identification difficult. So I’d be glad if Beetle experts reading this could give me their estimate of the year of each vehicle here and weigh in on the larger tire question.

I saw this one in Cusco. It appeared to be in the best shape of all those I photographed.

This one was parked on a side street in Miraflores. It was one of several I saw that had a roof rack of this design.

This battered bug was driving around Plaza de Armas in Lima Centro.

I saw these four Beetles in Barranco. Being a mecca for hippies, artists, and other Bohemians, it didn’t surprise me to find a fair few old VWs there.

When I was growing up, we had a book of classic Volkswagen ads on our family bookshelf. They were clever and quirky — some of the first ads I actually enjoyed. During my trip to Peru, I remembered this ad and found myself thinking about how common Beetles used to be in Latin America. It says a lot about why these cars were once so popular in certain parts of the world.

Parque de la Reserva

At the time of its dedication in 1929, Lima’s Parque de la Reserva was intended as a monument to Peruvian troops who fought against Chilean forces in 1881 in The War of the Pacific. In 2007, though, the purpose and meaning of the park changed significantly. The grounds were substantially renovated to include 13 large fountains that were designed less to inculcate Peruvian patriotism than to celebrate Peruvian children, friends, families, and lovers.

The fountains are colorfully illuminated at night. Some have sensors that vary the water flow and light color as people approach.

Some of the fountains entice people into them and then spray bars of water up from holes in the ground, creating a kind of water prison.

At the perimeter of the park are benches set into small gazebos where cuddling couples can watch the water and light show.

Encouraging love seems to be part of the park’s design and intent. There are love seats in several strategically scenic places around the park that are very popular with couples and families who want photos taken.

The evening I was there, I saw two wedding parties having photos taken. This one looked a little strange, though.