Mental Maps

Perhaps the craziest journey I have ever undertaken was this one, in the late summer of '89 along the Rio San Pedro from El Naranjo towards Tenosique in Mexico.

I'm not going to recount it again in any detail, but tracking it today on Google Maps led to some novel reflections.

Back then, we had no map, no fully-formed big picture mental image as we moved along. Or maybe it was the medium-sized image that was missing.

So, arriving in El Naranjo we had no real concept of where it was in relation to where we were going. There was a border post with a Customs office in a shack, so we must basically be on the frontier, I then assumed.

Prior to each trip to Belize I had visited Stanford's Maps in Covent Garden where, stashed away in a big drawer at the rear, one could find massive folding aviation maps of that nation, marking the key townships and some of the features of the terrain, and these proved useful...but in Guatemala we were basically operating blind.

There was nothing in the guidebooks, because there weren't really any. Guatemala was best covered, via a page or two, oddly enough, in the South American handbook, and none of its maps were of any use here.

This attempt to reach the ruins of Palenque by exiting 'the top' of Guatemala began as a dare.

Someone, the sort of someone who regarded themselves as a living gatekeeper of local knowledge, had coldly informed us that it wouldn't be possible, that we should in fact believe the imaginary guidebook when it said one needed to commence this trek from the southern highlands, NW along the Panamerican Highway and up into southern Chiapas. Attempting the Petén route was soon going to make us feel like Lope de Aguirre etc etc.

What amazes me now is how willing I was back then to undertake such an expedition through what was essentially an active war zone with the absolute bare minimum of information, either prior-acquired or real time. I didn't yet speak Spanish either. Nowadays I have become completely Google Maps dependent, even inside rather straightforwardly laid out small towns.

V asked me once 'how did you even know where to start?' and I honestly couldn't answer that one. There has to have been some word of mouth, but whose mouth? My travelling companion was just as much in the dark as I was. I think perhaps a Texan archaeologist in Belize had mentioned El Naranjo to us and so we'd jumped on a Bluebird bus at Santa Elena that was displaying that name above the windscreen. Simples.

I have fond memories of the ride along the San Pedro, in a kind of motorised, long wooden canoe. We'd equipped ourselves with a bag of Gallos. (The road route and the new border post actually on the border at El Ceibo would appear later on, just after the Millennium.)

Less fond are the memories of Tenosique, the nearest substantial Mexican town, beside the Río Usumascinta. Maybe one day I will return to see if it is still as weird, but probably not via the same eastern approach!