Autobiography - The Galindo Group

Ram Galindo THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN Page 190
the neighborhood of Tapachula on the border between Mexico and Guatemala, we
encountered a couple of mountain streams that we had to cross on bridges made of two
felled split logs unattached to each other. I would get out and Joe would drive watching
my signals to stay on track. Luckily, he negotiated them successfully. On one occasion
in Guatemala we got stuck in mud so deep that only a friendly Cat D-8 tractor could pull
us out. In Costa Rica we got covered with ash still coming down from a recent eruption
of a volcano near San Jose.
We arrived in Panama on the eve of the country’s independence day. It was nighttime
and raining, Joe was driving. We were on the road out of the town of David going to
Panama City. It was the best and newest highway in the country. Suddenly, a drunken
reveler materialized in front of us. Joe swerved to save his life but put us on a head-on
collision course with on-coming traffic. He swerved again and we wound up shaken but
safe in the ditch across the highway.
Central American fields were bountiful and the people prodigally friendly. As much as
we could, to save money and also to savor the adventure, we tried to eat off the land.
Joe had never tasted sugar cane right out of the fields and neither of us had tried to
survive on fruits or raw vegetables alone. Whenever a friendly local person would treat
us to a meal, as a rancher in Northern Guatemala did, we thought cooked food had
never tasted so good. Joe got sick before me, which was very good because, when we
hit the high altitudes of the Andes between Peru and Bolivia, I was sick and he was
already well.
A significant source of revenue in the countries we traversed was duty on imported
automobiles. Consequently, their rules were very strict about letting an undocumented
vehicle in. No country took chances on us possibly selling our car without paying taxes.
In El Salvador, Ecuador and Bolivia we had to carry a policeman with us in our whole
passage through the country. In Guayaquil, Ecuador, which was the port of
disembarkation for our freighter from Panama, we stayed locked up in a customs
compound for two days until they decided what to do with us. We slept on empty cars
parked in the same lot.
The crossing of the Guayas River at its mouth, from Guayaquil to Puerto Bolivar, in a
barge not much bigger than our jeep was a scary experience, as was the Tiquina Strait
crossing at the Lake Titicaca border between Peru and Bolivia. Driving on the littoral
highway on Peru’s Pacific coast made the California Big Sur small by comparison. The
sand slopes are impressive and when they slough-off over the highway they are like
huge sand avalanches that bury everything in their wake. An eighteen-wheeler that had
rolled down the precipice and was stuck half way to the water seemed like a little toy
from where we were on the road.
On November 22, 1963, the abusive Bolivian customs police released us after four days
of detention in their La Paz compound, where they had taken our Scout because we
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