In the four years I have been working here I have never been to a Guatemalan beach on the Pacific coast. The numerous comments I had heard about them, from both locals and foreigners, had only ever served to put me off the idea. However, one weekend recently I had planned to go and visit some friends in the country, a plan which fell through at the last minute. Having planned to get out of town for the weekend it struck me that I was in fact desperate to do so and in the absence of other ideas I thought I might as well see for myself what the beaches were like.

The most popular beach within reach of where I work is a place called Champerico. I had heard stories of there being rubbish all over the beach with pigs rummaging through it. In addition, one friend's most memorable part of her day there had been seeing two prostitutes fighting on the beach with broken beer bottles. So I decided to head for a less popular place. A speck on the map called Tulate. As you can see, English pronunciation makes the name of this place To Late, a translation which is not entirely unfair.

Wary of the connotations of the name, but undaunted, I took the chicken bus into town on Saturday afternoon. Being the coast it was of course hot and steamy. I organised a room in the only hotel in town. This establishment was yet another Guatemalan architectural marvel. The room I reluctantly accepted was modeled on the second world war concrete bunker design, the only real difference being that this one was only constructed to withstand small arms fire.

Speaking of which. Small arms fire is common enough along the Pacific coast and the proprietor had advised me not to walk on the beach after dark. Given that advice, that night I did what I do whenever I'm in a spot which seems a bit dodgy. I rigged up an alarm on the door of my room. In this particular case it took the form of a hard plastic hair brush which would make a terrible clatter if dropped on the tiled floor. I sat it delicately, handle first, in the gap above the top of the door. It was still there in the morning.

For all its bunker like style, the owner had nevertheless gone out of his way to soften overall look of the place. He seemed to have a penchant for ducks and had attached two foot high, brightly coloured concrete ones to every available post. To add insult to injury, despite the fact that I was the only guest, the price was double what it would have been if it had not been next to the beach.

I was yearning for a meal of fresh fish and was anxious to see the beach so I stuffed a few mangy bank notes in my pocket and left the other of my prized possessions in the security of the bunker. Guatemalan paper money gives the impression that it could be carrying leprosy. It is the habit of indigenous women here to carry their stash tucked into their bra. And it is unusual in village life to have access to a shower or bath. The result, as a woman slogs her way, heavily laden, up and down through the mountains, is that the stash of bank notes become soaked with sweat. This, combined with the fact that the central bank doesn't change them for new ones as readily as it needs to, leaves a large percentage of the local cold folding in a pretty disgusting state.

So, armed with currency and an after lunch cigar I headed down the last fifty metres of the main and only street for a look at my beloved Pacific Ocean in which I have spent so much time, albeit on the other side of the world. When I got to the beach everyone was standing around watching the surf. Or more accurately, watching the effect of the surf on the six foot sand drop-off they were standing on. This drop was a beach version of a ha-ha in an English garden. It was an effective edge. Lands end, but with a sting: if you went any further, you drowned. Looking straight west, give or take Easter Island, Fiji and some sheep, the next stop was Australia.

The swell was a churning reflection of the immensity of the ocean pushing it. There was a six foot swell which started breaking a hundred yards from the beach and kept doing so right up to near the ha-ha. The effect was such that the owners of the bars and restaurants along the beach must have been both nervous about the future of their businesses and glad they had not invested much in construction and décor. They were nothing more than branch and palm leaf shelters, furnished exclusively with plastic tables and chairs from the local beer company.

Even while I was having lunch (the fish was lovely) twenty yards behind the safety of the ha-ha, a group gathered and lifted the large heavy life guard's stand and moved it back ten feet from the edge. I didn't ask how long it would be before they would have to move it again.

This was, as I say, my first visit to the Pacific coast in Guatemala. I have however visited it in various other parts of Latin America and have long known that it can be pretty rough. In some places the result is wonderful surfing conditions but more often than not it tends to be just plain wild.

It was in fact one of those other visits which was the reason for starting this story in the first place. So I will now do what I set out to do and relate that particular exploit. It took place in El Salvador in 1998.

I was doing an investigative trip to see whether I wanted to move to this part of the world and a Salvadorian guy I had met in Australia was showing me a piece of land on the coast. He thought we, well, actually me, should buy the land and then we, as in him and all his mates, could turn it into a backpacker retreat and demo ecological farm-come-training- centre.

Not exactly original, but a nice idea nonetheless. I met up with him in Guatemala City and we went down to El Salvador, where we met up in turn with a group of his mates. The mates were evidently keen to be involved and were a terrific group of fellas. All ex-guerillas. All had various bullet wounds and were either missing or dragging limply parts of their bodies. They made for fascinating and entertaining travel companions. Nothing like other blokes being shot up to make for good yarns.

The stepping off point to cross the large estuary between the mainland and the small peninsula which held our potential El Dorado was called El Triunfo. I don´t know what the bestowers of the name thought the triumph was, but whatever it was it escaped me completely.

My would-be business partners had organized a guy with a launch to transport us across the estuary. The guy was impressive. He was well above the average height for a Central American, about thirty-five years old, lean and tanned darker than his natural brown. His face was a little lined from years on the water, he had a straight thin nose, generally angular features and he carried himself very upright.

I thought the crowning glory to his impressiveness was his weather beaten and stylish sombrero, the inevitable white straw cowboy hat. Cool people have a knack for picking cool looking clothes even if they cost virtually nothing. But I had jumped the gun, so to speak. I soon noticed that his consummate accessory was in fact a large pistol tucked in the rear waist band of his trousers, loosely covered by his untucked shirt.

I asked one of the guys "why the gun?" The answer was that it would be crazy to bring a foreigner into that area without an armed guard. Right. We were going to look at a place with the intention of attracting lots of foreigners. I presumed this revelation meant that all Swedish nymphs would be abducted and raped and all male gringos would at the very least, be robbed. A glitch had already appeared in the mission statement.

We crossed the estuary in half an hour and left our guard with his launch. At the risk of sounding pathetic, frankly I would have been happier if he had come along with us. I tried to guess whether he figured that his boat was of greater value or at greater risk than a foreigner.

We removed our shoes and started walking up a small sandy-bottomed creek which was being encroached upon by intrusive mangroves. Within a hundred yards we came across a dugout canoe which someone had tried to conceal in the mangrove roots. One of the guys assured us he was a friend of the owner. We dragged it out and got in.

The next twenty minutes consisted of paddling, poling or dragging the canoe up this tidal creek. It was reasonably interesting despite the size and number of mosquitoes, which I presumed all carried either malaria or dengue fever.

At a point in the mangroves, indistinguishable by me from any other, we left the canoe and walked through the low coastal scrub for another fifteen minutes. When we came out of the bush onto cleared farm land we were at the designated place. The hopeful vendor was there and had the local contractor in doing some work on his land.

The contractor had a single furrow ripper made of wood, which was rigged on a shaft between two huge zebu bulls. They were working their way up and down between rows of three foot high corn. The ripper being dragged was for weed control and very effective. I was amazed that two such large animals could do the work with such nonchalant precision. They looked like they were asleep. Deceptively so, though. The smooth execution of their turns at the row ends would have impressed Kieran Perkins.

I was shown over the ten acre block and the whole time I could hear the surf pounding the coast on the other side of a strip of large palm trees. I was keen to see the beach. This was one of the selling features. The backpackers would be able to frolic in the Pacific. As we crossed the hundred yards from the block to the beach the roar of the surf grew steadily louder. We walked up over a small rise in the beach which was formed as a result of sand being prevented from blowing away by the roots of a long line of fifty foot high palm trees.

The sight when we broached the rise left me speechless. I didn't know whether to laugh or gasp. A strong swimmer may possibly have survived in the water. Anyone else would have been dragged out and drowned in the savage surf within minutes.

I have seen rip lines before, where they go out through the waves. But these ones were so savage that you could see them clearly despite the fact that they were running parallel to the beach. The scene was a boiling, thrashing cauldron. To avoid letting the guys see my horror and to put myself out of risk of having to respond to what I saw, I walked the thirty yards down to the waters edge, ostensibly making a closer inspection of this backpackers playground. Standing on the steeply sloping sand, within spitting distance of the whirlpools, I was actually scared despite not even having put a toe in the water.

Once I felt I could keep a straight face I walked back up the beach. The guys said, "so, what do you think, nice huh?" I asked the cocky, our would-be vendor, if the beach was eroding. "Eroding, hah." He says. "When I came here twenty years ago this line of palms was a kilometer inland." I figured at that rate his farm would be turtle nesting habitat quite soon. In fact, given the width of the coastal exposure of El Salvador as compared to its depth, I had a glimpse of why the locals seemed so anxious to risk life and limb to get into the U.S.

I presumed the rapidly eroding strip of beach on which we were standing must have been government land. The big smooth skinned cocky informed me otherwise. Our would-be neighbors were some narcotraficantes from the capital. They had evidently come in a few years ago and bought up miles of sea frontage. To do with, I presumed, whatever it is that narcotraficantes do with such bits of real estate. Terrific.

Since we had left our boatman I had been under fairly steady attack from dive bombing Stukas camouflaged to look like mosquitoes. I mentioned it to the platoon. They were unfussed by them and in their enthusiasm to impress me with local knowledge, said this was nothing. There were evidently two months of the year when everybody left the peninsula we were on, as it was made uninhabitable by the great clouds of the nasty little sods.
We let the cocky go back to his contractor and headed back to our boatman. On the trip home in the boat my newfound friends were keen to hear my impressions of their planned move from Marxism to capitalism.

The conversation was what I thought it must be like to have to sack a complete incompetent, while trying to sound supportive and optimistic about his future. They were nice guys, but I really was struggling to think of a single positive thing to say. What they saw as a golden opportunity was just not my idea of El Dorado.

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