by Levison Wood
Wiping the sleep from my eyes and stretching, I realised that the man who had been next to me was gone. We must have stopped off somewhere in the night, although I had no recollection of it. It felt as if I had slept for only a few minutes, but it must really have been several hours. The passengers around me were shuffling about, collecting up their belongings as we waited for the doors to open so that we could get off and stretch our legs. I stood up, giving a vague nod to the lady sat in the chair in front, and reached for the overhead compartment.
Suddenly I felt sick. I stood on my tiptoes, looking left and right, but it was not to be seen anywhere. My bag was gone.
No, surely not, I thought, panicking. I looked under the seats, but it wasn’t there either.
The bastard, I thought. It could only have been the man next to me. I had been travelling light, inside my bag was everything that I owned. It had my laptop, some travel money, some nice sunglasses. But most importantly, it contained my shiny new camera and lenses, and all the bloody photographs that I had gone to some incredible lengths to take.
Crestfallen, I sat down and noticed a couple of things. The bottle of water that I had been drinking was still in the seat pocket, and it looked odd. I couldn’t put my finger on it, perhaps it was a little cloudy. I could not tell for sure, but it occurred to me that maybe I’d been drugged. That was why I had slept so well. But when? How? Then I remembered I’d got up to use the toilet just after the man had got on. Perhaps it was him? Surely it was him. The fucking bastard. And then I saw something else. Tucked in behind the bottle of water was my passport. Shit, my passport, what was it doing there? It had been in my bag.
And then it dawned on me that the thief, the man next to me, must at least have had the grace to leave behind my passport. Fucking bastard.
I stormed down the aisle, pushing past the other passengers, and shouting at the bus driver, ‘Who was the man next to me? Show me the passenger list!’ The driver just shrugged, looking bored.
Another passenger, a lady, then said in English, ‘Sorry, amigo, it happens all the time. You won’t get an answer from this man, it isn’t his fault, you can blame the company, they let on undesirables who steal things from tourists.’
I wanted to punch the driver out cold, for surely he must have known what was going on. What bloody corruption.
‘Hope you didn’t have anything valuable?’ said the lady in a conciliatory tone. I wanted to tell her that I’d just lost a three-thousand-pound camera, not to mention a month’s worth of photographs. Instead, I said nothing and sulked off the bus.
In Mérida, I told Ceci about my loss. She let me feel sorry for myself, while I reported everything to the police. They simply laughed and shrugged their shoulders, as if it were my fault for not knowing about the scams that go on in these parts. I was suddenly very much out of love with Mexico.
‘I have a plan,’ said Ceci the day after. ‘I know a guy, he’s a photographer. I’ve made a call and he’s said he’ll lend you a new camera.’
‘But I don’t have any money now, half of what I had was in that bag.’
‘He doesn’t want any money. He’ll just lend you the camera, and he said he’d love for you to visit his studio.’
I figured that she was doing her best to comfort me, and while I was in no mood to socialise, I thought it best to humour her and meet this chap who had made the generous offer. I arrived at his studio on a suburban street in Mérida. From the outside, it looked like a ramshackle little place, but inside it was all mod cons. The blast of air-conditioning came as a relief from the relentless heat outside, and as I wiped my brow of sweat in the reception, I noticed a beautiful and flirtatious girl behind the desk.
‘Hola,’ she said coyly, about to carry on, but was interrupted as a man burst into the room from the doorway.
Alberto, a trendy, good-looking man with wide-set eyes and a chunky nose greeted me with enthusiasm. ‘’Ello Levi,’ he said, with such a characteristic Mexican accent that I couldn’t help breaking into a smile, despite my foul mood. ‘I heard all about you and your problem. So, you had your camera stolen, eh? Fucking assholes, no?’ He grinned. ‘Fucking Mexicans!’
At that, we both laughed out loud.
‘Well, no problem, amigo, come this way.’
I followed Alberto through the glass door into the studio itself, where big lights shone against bright white walls, and sheets that were draped as backdrops. There was a white table in the middle of the room. On it there was a selection of fruits: bananas, grapefruit, kiwis and a solitary apple.
‘Hang on, my friend, I just need to finish this.’
He picked up a plastic spray-bottle and squirted a haze of water over the fruit.
‘Makes it look fresh and tasty,’ he grinned, with a conspiratorial wink.
Picking up his camera, a large, full-frame professional SLR, battered from years of use, he began snapping away with a close-up macro lens.
‘It’s for a restaurant. They want bananas, not so glamorous as bikini girls,’ he chuckled to himself.
When he’d finished, he put the camera down and led me to a cabinet that contained a collection of camera bodies and lenses.
‘Which do you need?’
I was embarrassed. I was a complete novice in the presence of a true professional. My meagre snaps were the vain product of a restless desire to eke out a career in anything other than finance or security, which were what most of my army pals had gone into. I knew nothing of lenses or formats or apertures. I knew still less of f-stops and ISOs and colour balance.
I think Alberto sensed my hesitation. He smiled, ‘Here you go, it’s a good camera.’ He handed me another Nikon similar to his own, and three lenses; a long telephoto zoom, a 50mm prime and a wide-angle, too.
‘Now, let’s go explore.’
3
The Americas
The history of Central America in the decades and centuries after Colombus’s rediscovery is generally seen as a rather dismal time, particularly for the indigenous inhabitants. Disease, war, famine and genocide were the inevitable consequences of the Spanish invasion of the region. It was one of the darkest periods in any colonial expansion, resulting in millions of deaths. Moreover, the loss of human life was compounded with the loss of entire civilisations. Cities, cultures and languages succumbed to the new order and the old ways disappeared, it seemed, without a trace. Well, almost.
If it were not for the curiosity of a couple of amateur archaeologists, perhaps the ancient Mayan civilisation would never have been uncovered. The story of two friends who set off on one of the most remarkable expeditions of the early nineteenth century changed the way everybody in Europe and the United States thought about Central America for good.
John Lloyd Stephens was a thirty-three-year-old American writer and lawyer and Frederick Catherwood was a thirty-seven-year-old British artist and architect.
At a time when almost all of Central America was involved in violent rebellions and insurrections, the adventurers boarded a boat in New York bound for Belize, which was then known as British Honduras. They were on a mission to explore something that the Spanish, in their endless quest for gold and riches, had overlooked – the ancient cities of Mayan civilization, now engulfed by the rainforest.
Through his fame as a travel writer, Stephens had managed to land himself a job as US ambassador to what was then the United Federation of Central America – a loose jumble of countries and city states that had recently become independent from Spain. The only problem was that the loose jumble of countries and city states now wanted independence from their new federation. Countries and territories jostled for autonomy; the entire peninsula was alight with civil war.
That didn’t deter Stephens, whose passion for antiquities had resulted in him meeting the equally fanatical Catherwood at an archaeological dig in Egypt. So, when Stephens landed the new job, he sent his English friend a letter asking if he would like to come along on a free trip to see what ruins they could fin
d in the jungles of Mexico and Guatemala. There were rumours, he said, of entire lost cities awaiting discovery. But even so, Stephens – enthusiasm and wide-eyed curiosity aside – remained a little sceptical. He wrote that their journey was in the hope, rather than the expectation of finding wonders. Surely no one could have anticipated the wonders that the two men would actually find.
When they reached Belize, Stephens and Catherwood travelled inland without the vast entourage that was so common at the time. They based their movements on word of mouth, often arriving in an unmapped village and trusting the hearsay of the locals to locate the ruins of their ancestors in the next.
It took them weeks of hacking through jungles and avoiding the warring tribes until they finally rediscovered the city of Copán. It must have been a joyful moment for the pair of explorers:
Working our way through the thick woods, we came upon a square stone column … The front was the figure of a man curiously and richly dressed, and the face, evidently a portrait, solemn, stern, and well fitted to excite terror. The back was of a different design, unlike anything we had ever seen before, and the sides were covered with hieroglyphics … The sight of this unexpected monument put at rest at once and forever, in our minds, all uncertainty in regard to the character of American antiquities, and gave us the assurance that the objects we were in search of were interesting, not only as the remains of an unknown people, but as works of art, proving, like newly discovered historical records, that the people who once occupied the Continent of America were not savages.
Stephens would write and Catherwood would draw – impeccably documenting the ancient monuments in intricate detail. They would log the time it took to walk from one settlement to another, meticulously listing ornaments, pyramid shapes, sculptures and skulls. They soon identified hieroglyphics and complex systems of astronomy amongst the ruins. It seemed that the civilisation that created these monuments was far more complex than anyone could have imagined.
Where the conquistadors hadn’t destroyed the Mayan edifices, they had paid no heed to them – preferring instead to paint the indigenous Americans as bloodthirsty savages who lived in huts and worshipped the devil. Clearly, nothing could have been further from the truth.
Over the course of the next decade, the explorers documented all the magnificent relics they found in a series of travel books and illustrations that became standard texts on indigenous Central American culture. Both of the men died tragically young. Catherwood drowned at fifty-five, when his boat sank crossing the Atlantic, but not before having cashed in on the boom in San Francisco in the wake of the gold rush. Stephens had moved south, taking on the running of the Panama Railroad Company. He died at his home in New York, aged just forty-six, plagued with the ailments of his jungle days.
But even though neither of the explorers lived to see their work celebrated, they left a legacy that changed world history forever. When the intrepid pair set out to uncover the Mayan story, Stephens wrote that the inhabitants of Mesoamerica were still viewed by many as a separate race – without art, architecture, culture or language. But Stephens and Catherwood demonstrated that long before Christopher Columbus set sail, an advanced, massively developed and intelligent civilisation had flourished in the Americas.
I had been fascinated by the Mayans since learning about ‘American Indians’ as a child from story books. I remember reading about the myth of El Dorado, and the legends of these strange tribes that lived in the jungle – but what really intrigued me was how far they’d come – not just in terms of civilisation, but physically, across the world. I couldn’t work out how pyramids could exist in the jungles of America when they should really be in Egypt – that was where they were supposed to be in my seven-year-old mind.
And how did a people who didn’t really exist come to know an alphabet, learn to read the stars, travel across oceans on canoes and build massive cities without any metal, or even the use of a wheel? None of it made any sense, and even as I grew up and properly studied the history of the world, there was something unnerving about the fact that these ‘Indians’ knew more than ‘we’ did, when the Europeans were still in the Stone Age.
The only conclusion I could reach was that these people were the ultimate explorers. They were the ones who had travelled the furthest away from the original home of Homo Sapiens in Africa, were they not? They’d walked all the way from the rift valley, across the Middle East and China, and somehow over the frozen Bering Strait into Alaska. Not content with that, they continued south. Forming clans and tribes along the way, and over the course of thousands of years, but these early explorers kept on going. The hardest, most curious of them, the ones who refused to settle, walked all the way through the jungles of Central and South America and formed three of the great civilisations – the Aztec, the Inca, and the earliest of them all, the Maya.
What led them on this insatiable quest, we will probably never know. Surely it wasn’t just the need for new grazing, or chasing wildlife to eat – after all, in those days there were endless supplies of food and little competition for it. Whatever it was that drove these brown-skinned Asiatics to populate the Americas, they did it with a skill and fortitude that is often overlooked by the history books.
After I met Alberto in his studio, he took me under his wing as photography mentor for a while. We’d go out to abandoned railway stockyards and capture images of beautiful texture: rusty nails and deep-grained wooden sleepers. We’d go out to the Mayan ruins at Mayapan and Acanceh and photograph the rough-hewn limestone blocks. At Tekit we explored the ancient graveyards, where dusk brought a range of colours that I previously thought impossible to combine. ‘Follow the light,’ he insisted. I learned about white balance and slow shutter-speeds. Back in his studio, he taught me how to edit, sharpen and saturate, ‘but not too much,’ he’d say. ‘The first thing to remember as a photographer is that it must be real.’
I liked Alberto. He was honest, genuine and generous. He was a lot of fun, too. At thirty-six, he was a few years older than me, but had an almost child-like enthusiasm for life. Nothing seemed to worry him, and adventure was at the very core of his soul.
‘What are you doing when you get back home?’ he asked me one day.
‘I think I’ll go to Africa,’ I said, explaining that a friend of mine had asked me to procure an ambulance for a hospital in Malawi. I’d suggested that rather than importing one in a shipping container and wasting a whole lot of money, she allow me to fundraise, buy one in the UK, and drive it 10,000 miles overland to its destination. ‘As long as it still works at the end,’ said Ruthie. ‘Of course,’ I’d promised.
‘You’re driving to Malawi?’ Alberto’s eyes were wide open now. ‘Shit, I don’t even know where that is.’ He shook his head. ‘Can I come?’ he continued.
‘Sure,’ I said, and gave it no more thought.
Five months later, after 4,000 miles of driving across Europe and the Middle East, I was sitting in a café in downtown Damascus with two makeshift ambulances parked outside. Guess who burst through the door.
‘Eyy, Levi!’ There he was, the mad devil. ‘You never thought I’d show up, did you?’
Turns out that Alberto, the fashion-and-fruit photographer from Mérida, Mexico, who’d never really travelled very much, was now in Syria. He was about to drive through eight countries and the length of Africa with me.
‘Actually, I had a hunch you might,’ I told him. He grinned.
‘Now, where can we get tacos in this town?’ he said, only half-joking.
But that’s a digression; a story I won’t go into now. I mention it because it was on that particular adventure that Alberto first came up with the idea of a Central American journey.
‘Imagine it, Lev, a road trip – we’d start in Mérida at my house and go all the way to South America. Jungles, beaches, parrots, pyramids and hot girls,’ he winked. ‘No Sharia law there,’ he continued. ‘No suicide bombs, no nasty deserts, good food and best of all – great beer and cockt
ails. It’s my dream trip. Don’t forget about it, Lev.’
I didn’t forget about it. I’d told him that one day I would go back to Central America and we’d do the trip together.
Six years later, having spent six months trekking through the wild foothills of the Himalayas a year previously, not to mention nine months traipsing the length of the River Nile, I thought that a four-month walk following the spine of Central America would pose no particular problem. The house was almost finished and summer had arrived. I could do with a break from London, anyway, I thought.
So there I was, standing in the garden at Hampton Court, amid the dust, dodgy wallpaper and Grasshopper’s Fart paint. I called Alberto. We hadn’t spoken properly since saying goodbye over half a decade ago in Malawi – possibly something to do with the fact that by going on that journey he had pretty much bankrupted himself, plus I heard he’d got married. But I wanted to keep my promise, and it seemed as good a time as any.
The number rang through and a familiar voice answered.
‘Eyy, Levi.’ It was him alright, and he didn’t sound too angry.
‘Alberto, you remember that trip we talked about doing one day? The Central American trip.’
‘Of course.’
‘Well, how about this summer, in six weeks’ time?’
The line went quiet for a few seconds. I remembered back to the aftermath of the Africa trip. He’d sent me an email a few weeks later explaining that the two-month expedition had cost him his entire business. The photography studio was gone and he’d had to sell half his cameras and, damn it, been forced to get a real job. I’d not heard from him since.
