Fourteen volcanoes, eleven active; add one colonial city, with a clutch of pueblos and you have the makings of a ‘Ruta del Significant Somthing’. What’s pleasing about this touristic designation is that there actually is some physical presence on the ground to substantiate the Tourist Secretariat’s grandiose claims. We’ve ridden a few of these designations, often ‘Rutas del Intoxicants’, where there’s been little evidence, merely token patches of grapes or some gesture of a cactus agave; whilst others are just plain enigmatic creations, like ‘Roads of the Heart’ or ‘Route of the The Sun’.
‘Ruta Colonial y Los Volcanes’ starts with that fishing launch and a hot black sand beach, backed by Volcán Cosiguina, a long, swaybacked hill that harbours a crater lake but doesn’t meet my expectation of ‘Volcano’, be that living or sleeping.
So the search is on.
Early morning. Woodsmoke suffusing the still air, an empty gravel track, our tyres hunting the smooth line, being overtaken by the very occasional motorbike and the hourly service bus that connects our arrival shore and it’s fisherman’s shacks with the rest of Nicaragua. It’s ‘hard-tack’ dry country that serves as yet another differing, unique initial signature to a new country.
Yet again I’m struck by the fact that these small countries were, for three centuries, Spain’s dominions, then followed just five years as one single independent nation, only to fracture apart along the borders that still exist today. Still, they would have had that common history, heritage, language, and yet they are so diverse. I might have expected that drifting down the Central Americas’ spine that each border hop would be a moment of frenetic activity, followed by an immediate return to ‘same’, back to that which had gone before.
Not So.
Eventually our reverie of silent solitude is shattered when a major road intercedes, an incision that fortunately coincides with a segregated cycle lane. The cycle being more commonly the trike taxi, rather than the wide loaded gringo tourer and so makes for interesting passing; for lane discipline and correct direction of travel is an optional extra.
A series of volcanic hills lie to our left, but none fit the desired Fuji-esque standard.
So the cinder cone search continues.
Then we reach the shores of Lake Managua; and there, across an interruption of grazing stock, banana plantation or dry tropical forest, is a perfect cinder-cone volcano. Volcán Momotombo. Aesthetically pleasing , symmetrically perfect. It even has a steam-plume.
Lago Cocobolca (aka: Lake Nicaragua) will follow and it too has its iconic cone, this time in the conical shape of Volcán Conception. And to prove it’s ‘interestingly active’ status, gives a grumble and burps some ash, which discolours the constantly recurring lenticular cloud on its summit.
Volcán Conception is an island, 30,000 people 
live under its slopes and as an island with that population, there is of course a ferry service. And where ferries go we need to follow. A day trip to circumnavigate the perfect volcano can’t be missed. We’ve been assured that there is a road right around it, reassured that cars can drive at fifty miles an hour right around it; this from an expat Confederate Flag-flying hotelier who’s lived in the area for seven years.
Standing at the bow as the craft pitches it’s way towards the island mountain, rolling through swells that come in two differing directions, neither of which match with the gusting winds also moving in yet another two differing directions. A complicated chop of water; a complicated weather system that looks to be replicated on the upper slopes. Clouds are constantly forming, then dissolving only to reform again, a roiling mass of atmospherics, that will just as suddenly spawn a solitary cloud that drifts casually away, slowly breaking up in a vast blue expanse.
A cloud-caster, weather-maker mountain.
Maybe there’s something Zen Buddhist in this search for the perfect mountain, for we cycle Conception’s girth: anti-clockwise, once only, not the seven that a stupa’s veneration would require. Still there’s a degree of pleasurable satisfaction, a privilege to watch it transform through out the day as it throws off its nighttime vaporous mantle, to see it from all its changing, always identical silhouettes. For I no longer have that consuming need to see the mountain from its summit, no longer needing to gather it’s ‘tick’, happy to be in it, rather than on top of it.
(As for our circumnavigation road, a little over half is ‘crete monoblock; the rest is a rubble of volcanic scoria, soft sand and polished river stone over which the sporadic traffic skitters at walking pace).
I’m scanning a guidebook when I come on this stated fact: Granada was the colonial Spanish’s ‘Atlantic port’ and ‘the oldest’ city in the Western Hemisphere. Two things initially struck me, as so often does when the words ‘Europeans’ and ‘discovered’ appear in the same sentence; weren’t all those Mayan, Aztecan, Zapotecan ruins not originally vast centres of cultural wealth when places like London, Paris and Toledo were squalid little villages? It’s an old trope, much chewed over, but what intrigued me more was the ‘Atlantic port’ report.
Granada lies on Lake Nicaragua, a vast body of water, (13 times greater than all of Scotland’s freshwater lochs), but is a mere twenty kilometres from the Pacific coast. It’s worth looking at a map just to confirm and digest such an incongruous fact; the same map will explain why.
The Río San Juan flows east out of the lake, all the way to the Caribbean Sea, which is, de facto, the Atlantic Ocean and a direct sailing back to the Spanish Crown. It’s the route taken by all that phenomenal silver wealth that was extracted out of Peru. Much the same route was also used by the east coast 49ers heading for another commodities bonanza, the Californian gold rush. A long way round, but quicker, safer than the direct land route. Another neat reminder to my terra-centric mind, that once, historically, the connectivity of place was by blue water rather than by blue motorway. Something that a long distance sea-based navigator would better comprehend that an tar-based long distance cyclist.
Seven passengers, ten panniers, five large rucsacs, two bicycles and a motorbike. Master and mate sit by the outboard motor and are therefore unable to see where we’re going; fortunately we don’t run down any of the three nations’ gunboats as we pass through their territorial waters. The engine only shudders and dies once, so with two hours sailing time we arrive at that same shore front that’s been lurking in my memory.
Through the surf, up the beach and into immigration, whose solitary officer will process just seven people today, our row-boatload of seven people. He fully intends justifying his existence; prolonging the process by spending more time on the ‘phone than the one finger ‘hunt and peck’ keyboard entry. Individually handwritten receipts, fees collected, but only in dollars, no coins please, no change given.
However, we’re now in Nicaragua.
Many hotels have a secondary business; some are pharmacies or beauty parlours, others are hardware stores or party planners; this one’s was a lorry-park. As such, it had, of necessity, an armed guard. As to whether they stayed awake, I can’t say. What I do know is that all those drivers were sleeping, chatting, you-tubing on the verandah outside our window, and It took some planning to negotiate our bikes through the strewn bodies in the gloom the next morning.
Kids are heading to school, immaculate in pristine uniforms, three to bicycle, four to a moto. A horse cart trots past hauling milk churns to the creamery; a black Brahman bull, dappled in the shadows of a shade tree, chews meditatively on a sugar stalk. The first ‘Chicken Bus’ passes: sedately, quietly, fumelessly. Positively unsettlingly.
Then the first of many cane trucks growls by, tandem trailers that have that ‘suck – blow – suck – spat out’ effect, which could be disconcerting if it wasn’t for the fact that El Salvador has some of the best roads in Central America, and they all come with a two-metre asphalted hard shoulder. There for the wandering herds of cows, diesel cans awaiting the tanker, occasional bullock cart, and two well satisfied Bike Tourers.
Downhill to near sea level, losing all that hard-won ascent, heading for another potential frontier confrontation. Downhill to flatlands, a place where the bike seems to ride all by itself, leaving me free to mind-wander, a chattering inner monologue that flitters randomly across continents of spurious thoughts. Throws out word pairings and collective nouns whilst salivating on a deep-pan pizza.
Hence: ‘The Guatador’: an emotional, private equation of questionably cycle-able road gradient, one whose permutation takes into account the stupidity of hauling down filled jackets in the tropics, with a coefficient correction for ‘The Presbyterian Effect’… the purity of the journey that doesn’t allow for a cop-out by taking the wimp’s bus uphill.
Still ‘mind-wandering’, we cross into El Salvador, to find flat country roads that all, without exception, come with wide shoulders. On occasions our domain on the outer edge is in an infinitely better condition than the main carriageway. The only true hazards being the competition for shade, competing with wayward herds of cows, cyclists hauling wide loads, drying maize corn and assorted jerrycans awaiting the diesel truck. Still, the kilometres slip easily into the past, and we’ve got many leagues of this ease to come.
There is a shadow looming on the horizon, further down the coast: Costa Rica, a nation that comes with volcanic mountains. Will my new found ‘Scale’ require further adaptation, requiring the addition of a prefix, creating ‘The Costa Guatador’?
We’re wandering the cobbled streets of Antigua, keeping to the shaded side, avoiding a hot sun carried on a blinding light. Incredulous at how the Chicken buses have been tamed by the random, irregular cobble setts; literally the only occasion that I’ve seen one reduced to a crawl. One is even being out-manouvered by two pizza delivery motos. (I do wonder if the cheese topping is stuck to the bread’s base or the box’s lid)
Being in a state of ruin means that it’s possible to see, to appreciate what’s behind the plaster, under the paintings, hidden beneath the draped fabrics that adorns these great buildings. There’s an element of deja-vú; the floor plan equates all too neatly to so many of Scotland’s religious ancient monuments. The same sweeping interlacing arches, the same impedimenta of ritual, the same plays of lights and shadows, and despite the damage, there’s still some tantalising fragments, traceries of plaster detail, fading geometrical paintwork and one column left exactly as it landed after the 17th century shake. 
With the exception of the latter, the similarities should be no surprise, they all have the same Vaticanical antecedent, it’s just that one was destroyed by an unpredictable nature the other by a disgruntled English king.
As you leave the ‘quaked church, the parochial offices are symmetrically etched against Volcán de Agua, a perfect, reposed, extinct cone, that flies a tethered cloud. Then, on turning the street corner, its near neighbour sends a grubby plume, a smoke of gritty ash through the pristine white lenticular cloud cap that clings to it’s summit. We’ll cycle down between these two on our descent to the coast, getting excited by the active vulcanology, even getting to participate in a taste testing – ingesting a few pecks worth of Volcán Fuego’s erupted innards, scoured dust carried on a violent tailwind that comes roaring down from its slopes. A micro-climate nfluenced katabatic wind that out-trumps the more traditional nor’easter trade winds that will suddenly reassert as that predictable cyclist’s headwind, further along the road.
In Xela we wake to a frost. Rime crystallising the plastic detritus along the roadside. Proof positive that we’ve reach the top of the hill, that from here on the countryside will roll along and has by the laws of physical geography to eventually go downhill and tumble through a ladder of ‘lapse rates’. Three days ago we were down on the lowland planes, down in the heat, only to climb up through a clima of ecological zones, through a falling temperature gradient that equates perfectly to the accepted norm of 2°C loss for every 1000ft ascended, just as that tweed jacketed, leather-elbow patched geography teacher taught.
The pavement covered by street food stands, the nearside lane carpeted by shoe sales, the outside lane clad in fruit stalls. Leaving the central reservation, a rough scrub of broken rock and soft sand, there for the weaving double-trailer semi-articulated lorries and buzzing moto-taxis, wayward pedestrians and amused cycle tourers acting as makeshift ploughs. 
You just have to smile at the absurdity, the normalcy the otherwaysness of what no local would question. Build a motorway: convert it into the Sabbath’s market hall.
Then we hit the fall line, our road runs out of ascendable mountain, it’s pay-back for all that climbing, now it’s back down into the hotscapes. On the way we have a target. A colonial town. After a near surfeit of such places through Mexico, where there was a time when I might have been tempted to comment that tonight’s stop was “just another colonial town with the inevitable gold gilded basilica and tree sculpted plaza, secluded secretive courtyards and dark caverns of tortilla production: in Guatemala we’ve been starved of such architectural culture.
Riding through a low morning light infused with wood smoke from the newly kindled wood fired street food stalls, a soft smog that’s weighted in place by cold air and the surrounding caldera of volcanoes. Finding a ‘mirador’, a scenic view point that’s totally shrouded in plastic wrapped trader stands, all selling the exact and the same range of squashes, flowers and pottery urns. Down through fast flowing bends, swinging through hairpins, sweeping under deep-shade trees and rattling over bridges spanning the novelty of water running rivers.
If climbs are long on sweat and time but short on breath , then descents are punctuated by cerebral debates, whether to apply the brakes, will this hurt if I come off, is this fun. Threefold yes. Trouble is, it can take a few moments to get to those answers, by which time I’m into a race with a Chicken Bus.
It didn’t take long. The road reared up in front of us. Percentage angles that we had last met and that had become a personal gradient measure-stick, in Ecuador. I knew that we would have to find ten thousand feet of elevation over the next three days, a fact that we were both more than happy with, for it would offer relief by lifting us out of the coastal, tropical, high-humidity heat. But what we didn’t know then, was that, that first climb would become the new norm and pushing around vertigous bends a regular event. This road is in a desperate haste to climb up to the altiplano. Or it would be if it didn’t lose concentration, dropping down into every river bed only to clamber back up again, before continuing from where it left off. Re-ascents are a psychological challenge, guaranteed to test the most resolute. I’m not sure how resolute I will be, especially as we’re passed by one younger cycling tourer, just as we’re in that most ignominious of positions, pushing a recalcitrant lump of steel around yet another bend. Transpires that he’s cycled from the north down through Mexico, much as we have, only he was sensible and repatriated all his northern winter kit. An idea that has been playing on my mind every time that I clamber off the bike and start to push.
I’m blogging this two weeks after the event, when the graft of effort has slipped into the past tense, when time effects it’s healing balm. Leaving a melange of moulded images: Rubber-tapped plantations, volcanoes erupting out of the jungle, finding the progenitors of a flowering Scottish herbaceous border, or being presented with cold water at the top of one hot climb. However, through out those few days, there’s one recurring constant picture. The Chicken Bus. The exuberantly decorated, fume-reeking, noise-belching, angst-ridden Chicken Bus.
Utterly iconic to two utterly different countries. They start life as the supremely, excessively engineered US county schools’ mode of transport. Driven with decorum, and in the main by ladies in the belief that the US student should always be safe in school. Their original life expectancy over, they travel south, to be reinvented as public transport in the Central Americas and in so doing acquiring the moniker; ‘Chicken Bus’.
A market trader lady is waiting expectantly at the side of the road, her blanket bundle of goods wrapped up beside her, I can hear the tell-tale roar of an approaching bus, it’s horn blazing it’s intention to possibly stop. The conductor leaps out before the bus is stationary and clambers up to the roofrack with the lady’s bundle as she is barely afforded time to board before the bus accelerates off to the next stop. The conductor is still clambering along the roof, only the bus has now reached terminal velocity, the driver happy in the knowledge that a competitor was unable to overtake and so pilfer the next potential passenger. Said clambering conductor now climbs back down one of two rear ladders, crosses from one to the other and opens the rear door to get back into bus.
For our final few hundred kilometres through Mexico, we were being passed by convoys of wrecker autos towing totally wrecker autos, invariably with Texas or Californian plates. Then for a piece of variety we would be passed by a US icon: the ‘school bus’, filled not with students but with once-used lorry tyres. North American castoffs travelling south to a new incarnation. So when we start to approach the border it was no surprise to find kilometres long queues of these composite wrecks waiting at customs. We were watching them, and hadn’t fully noted three semi-official men waiting by the roadside. On hailing us, we reactively slowed down. Probably our first error, for we’d nibbled on the bait. The second error was to stop.
The whole scam was so obvious. The hook was set early, the line yanked tight, the sinker pulling us down, reeling in, reeling-in, reeling-in, all this whilst we pointlessly try to disentangle ourselves. Always knowing that there will be the gutting at the end.
