For the first time in several wearying days, we are ensconced, somewhat, in a decent hostel. More than decent; this place has a large central courtyard, hanging pot-plants, free internet access and coffee, a deep little pool, and a long promenade of gleaming, slowly turning brass fans depending from varnished roof-beams. More than a alight contrast can be drawn with the dreary cell in which we snatched a few miserable hours of sleep, book-ended with long uncomfortable drives by bus. Three fat cockroaches lay revealed upon the floor when the light was switched on; too sluggish (can a cockroach be sluggish?) to scuttle for the shadows. Initially, I thought that they were dead, crushed or sprayed by a maid too lazy to remove the fat, crunchy corpses. But no, they were alive. Too disgusting to crush, I seized each by a serrated leg with the aid of some toilet tissue and dropped them into the bowl of the toilet, where the cold water seemed to revive them to twitching, churning life. Nothing but repeated stamping can kill a ‘roach; everybody knows that. So I sent them, alive and furious, spinning down the s-bend. They really do look like dates. I must fix some dates up with long antennae and legs next Halloween, to be conspicuously munched on in public. Hell; anytime would do.

Five hours’ rest. This was in the capital city of Honduras, a place seen but dimly after dark and quit in the small hours. So no; not really seen at all. I am doubtful whether I shall now be able to say that I saw anything of either Guatemala or Honduras. I can say one thing: though these nations, like my own, are so small that, in PJ O’Rourke’s memorable phrase; ‘you can’t swing a cat without putting it through customs’, there is definitely a perceptible alteration as you pass through each border control. The people become darker and heavier; slimmer and lighter; earthier or more rarefied; more or less sensual. After Belize, Guatemala arrived in a cloud of stinging yellow dust thrown up by grossly overcrowded collectivos filled with the smell of sweat and the sound of Hispanic pop-music. There were over 6000 murders (not counting road accidents and so forth; proper MURDERS) in Guatemala in 2006. Over 300 have been slaughtered since the beginning of this year. That’s what? Fifteen every day? Frightening stuff; the sort of thing you refrain from telling your parents until you are back around the family dinner table. Of course, this whole region is swimming in blood. The banana trees, elephant-eared, wave glibly green in the strong yellow sunlight. But the blood is there; lakes of it, encrusted into a dried strata of pain under the dust; like a long vanished sea. Just like Cambodia; the ultimate refutation of ghosts. Why should England be plagued by specters and not these places? If there were any truth in the supernatural, you wouldn’t be able to sleep here at night for the screams and moans of the angry, nameless dead.

It’s so nice to be comfortable and secluded for a little while. Peter does rush on so; he never stops. Then I get petulant and frayed and start saying things that I instantly regret. It doesn’t help that my skin is playing up something horrible. Not only do I still have a slight rash of little spots, symptom of ongoing stress, on my torso, but sun burn brings out a far more intense rash of hard little red nodules on my arms and neck. I’m taking anti-histamines for them and they are drying out to red pin pricks but it makes me self conscious; I feel ugly and deeply unlucky; singled out to be a sort of minor leper. Surrounded by all these other travelers, to whom I might like to feel equal, superior even, I feel silly; the type of boy who has to wear a sun-hat while the others play soccer; a sort of cripple or white rabbit. Bed-ridden Colin in The Secret Garden. And, by the time I get over the fucking thing; it’s time to go home.

The other travelers are a funny bunch; enviable and contemptible; often for the same reasons. This never changes; you can take the kid out of consumer culture but you can’t take the mall and the high-school out of their hearts. The popularity contest goes on, long after the school-bell rings. People unconsciously scan and edit their conversation for frequencies that stray too far outside the accepted range. They posture banally. At the moment, the fashion seems to be for a variety of shallow profundity; the illusion of depth. The depth, you see, cannot alienate anybody by making them feel ignorant or lacking depth themselves. Everyone as to be equally deep. This has been going on since the ‘Me-generation’ first emerged, I suppose. All those hippies sitting about, staring at each other an admiration; ‘Mirror, mirror on the wall.’ Even this is a bland observation; indifferently phrased. The generation gap is another problem; a creation of consumer culture in itself; the first great market division; between youth and the parent. The older people who want to retain a bit of ‘cred’ are reduced to risible posturing; the ‘cantankerous old sod’ who "...can tell you a thing or two..." about whatever. Australian men, who are most jealous of their masculine vigor, are wrong the worst offenders of this kind. Whiskery, beer-sodden old Bruces with a raft of whorehouse recommendations and hilarious stories about VD.

A lack of reading is pervasive. Hostels like this have their book exchanges; a glass case loaded with the kind of tripe that any plump bank-teller brings with her to the beach at Malaga. In India and elsewhere, ‘classics’ do pop up regularly; particularly books that are considered ‘relevant’ to the environment, i.e. Midnight’s Children, The God of Small Things, A Suitable Boy, An Area of Darkness. But nobody wants to discuss them. They are not really reading at all; they do not, it seems, have the facility of weaving the stuff that they read into the fabric of their thought. They don’t recycle it, break it up and examine it, accepting this strand as beautiful or true, this as ugly or false. They just consume books. If you ask them to recommend one; they just burp up a title from the ‘India Required Reading List’ and say something about it being ‘amazing; their faces reflecting anything but amazement. There doesn’t seem to be a reading list here in Central America. Further south, you can’t move for people burping on about how amazing is 1000 Years of Solitude, but here they seem to be at a loss. Annoyingly, they seem much better at exercising their linguistic skills than me; I am a shy language learner. Being initially bad at a new language requires something like a talent for rudeness or vulgarity. It’s coarse to butcher someone’s language in public. I have trouble with it. I must be like one of my own Japanese students in this regard; head down; pencil moving; terrified of the next question from teacher. The other travelers just shout at the locals, in much the same way as they flaunt their (admittedly attractively-honed) bodies about in the latest back-packer styles and spout their cod-‘philosophies of being’ in bars. Some of them are so engrossed in being that you cannot imagine them adapting to life on Earth at all. I wonder, truly wonder, whether they are faking it, or at least immersed in a self-delusion so perfect that they can just shrug it off like a carnival costume as soon as then set foot back in Europe or America. It’s quite a get-up, whatever it is. Again and again, one meets the German, French, American or British boy; his head a mountain of blond dreadlocks, his body a mass of fluttering draperies and beads; his eyes filled with skylight and his gleaming, orthodondically-straightened teeth set in a perpetual half-smile, walking in a fog of Nirvana through the streets of some miserable or dangerous place. Untouchable. Nothing bothers him. Nothing is permitted to. What does he do when he gets home? He and his girlfriend; what do they talk about? Maybe they have mastered the art of Tantric conversation; they say nothing at all, or just repeat the same word over and over again at each other. They are difficult to get along with, but not frightening.

Not like the Jessies.

Jessies, as I have christened them, are American youths who have been brought up to win. They are often scarily good-looking, though I recognize them so quickly now that I wonder what I ever saw in them before. Because they have at their hearts, well, nothing. They are hard, glossy, confident, privileged, and vain. They don’t conform; they set the standards of conformity for others. When you turn on US television, they are the faces that smile back at you from all the prime-time shows. They are bigger in real life; bigger and colder and more intimidating. They scare the living shit out of me. We met a pair of them in Flores, hunting for operational cash-machines. Two big, solid frat-brothers in jams, flip-flops and caps. Bursting out of their clothes. They are never at rest; they seem at all times to be at the centre of a playing field, under the eyes of a thousand expectant peers, waiting for that first play. They move their bulk expectantly from one foot to the other. They don’t make eye contact; they appear to be scanning the horizon for what they want. Their hands are held in front of them, one fist punching the flat of the other. There is an air of steroids and cocaine about them. Everything they do seems filled with repressed rage. They roll their shoulders back incessantly. They make amazing contact-sportsmen, soldiers, market-traders, lawyers. I think that they have very little conscience. Conscience is weakness. They do not shed tears for anything. They win.

As I said; they terrify me. I used to envy them; now they look like some sort of genetically-engineered supermen; bred to be without doubt. Arty fags like me like to think that one day the whole glacial façade will crack; the colossus crashing and groaning into the dust. But maybe they never will. These might be the rich Donald Trumps and Jim Welches who live to be 105 and die wheezing complacently in private clinics. Where the weak are good, they are strong; there is no point pondering their shortcomings and vacancies; they will never even think of them. Enough of them.

Back to Guatemala. On the way out of the country, we saw a corpse lying in the road. It was small with the smallness of the poor and with the smallness of corpses. It must be a surprise to pick up a dead body; they look so light. He lay supine, his right leg lay crossed across the other his arms stretched out before him; his face in the asphalt. He looked a bit like the Hanged Man of the tarot: Le Pendu. Probably just a road accident. Who gets executed in the middle of the highway? I didn’t see any pools of blood; we passed him at speed; it was remarkable that the image impressed itself so completely on my retinas. Of course; many murders are committed in the road; highway robbery is one of the most pernicious forms of crime. Only yesterday, a passenger on a bus opened fire on a gang of four robbers, killing two of them outright. Nobody else was hurt, physically at least. Impressive when you think about it; the vigilante must have been a confident marksman. Mad as hell and not going to take it anymore. The Hondurans, like the people of Belize, have more Afro-Caribbean (i.e. Black) in them than the populations of Salvador, Guatemala or Nicaragua. It’s worth noting, particularly to those racists who equate black skin with a violent, erratic disposition, that the black folks of both Honduras and Belize regard their neighbours as over-wrought and violent. Particularly Salvadorians; the most European of all (many have, not only fair skin, but green eyes, blue eyes and blond hair). But that racist would just retort: "Spics are as bad as blacks," anyway. It must be comforting to be an asshole; you can take refuge in any stupidity. Yet it remains that Guatemala is violent.

We stopped at Flores, the city nearest to the Mayan ruins at Tikal, after we crossed the border from Belize. There was some sort of crash just before we arrived but it was kept very hush-hush for obvious reasons. Some people said that there was just a currency shortage brought on by a delay in the manufacture and delivery of new bills; the money we did eventually get was indeed, very soft and almost unrecognizable as currency; more like thin brown layers of chamois. We stayed in Flores long enough to take a 5am collectivo to Tikal, where we wandered about for the entire day. Oddly enough, the king who founded Tikal and oversaw its rise to dominance was named Jaguar’s Paw, which was the name given to the hero of Mel Gibson’s stirringly gruesome Apocalypto, a film we saw in Manhattan just a few weeks ago. Before we went to Brazil, we watched Fitzcarraldo, another movie of inflated, almost delusional vision by Werner Hertzog, starring the ever-deranged Klaus Kinski. That film was about a cruel ordeal constructed around a vision of aesthetic purity and doomed to failure; Gibson’s is simply a cruel ordeal. You can’t deny that it has guts and momentum. The guts however are literal and the momentum is maintained by a director who pursues the story, his hero and the audience with the same scourge that he used on the unfortunate Jesus in his earlier work. ‘Run for your god-damn lives!’ he howls, and the audience flees, with spears and arrows biting the dust at their heels. But this is not a review. Apocalypto lifted liberally and freely from what we know about the Aztecs, mixing it with a dose of Mayan mystery. The reconstructions of working temples of human sacrifice, whirling out of control, are masterful, brutal, and engrossing. His vision of a society in the last throes of horrific decadence, ruled by a disgusting elite of cynical princes and priests, is surprisingly resonant. Mel’s blood-lust seems to become more, rather than less, rational as time passes.

But there is no reason to think that the temples at Tikal were drenched ‘from the crown to the toe/ top full of direst cruelty’. And Gibson’s Jaguar Paw was a brave forester, not a monarch. Tikal was just awesome; dug out of the soft grey jungle soil and strangling vines, the stepped pyramids themselves are soft; built of stone that crumbles to the touch, like feta cheese. There is some debate about the wisdom of uncovering them at all; are they being excavated for research, or simply the delectation of tourists? Many of them are still left untouched; the resources simply don’t exist to dig them up. The ones that are fully exhumed are almost perfect. Some have been fitted with rickety wooden staircases that remove the need to actually climb the monuments whilst allowing tourists a few from the top. Others can be scaled outright. At the top of the rickety staircase example, Peter are I were photographing raucous green parrots when there panted onto the scene a fat North American man who had no sooner mopped his fleshy brow and regained his hard-won breath before he began, with that curiously national trick of ‘taking up the thread of a conversation already underway’ to tell us all about himself. His whole biography spilled out of him; his back problems, his heart conditions and the various medications he took for both; his late bereavements (at least one parent and a Schnauzer dog; he seemed more cut up about the dog, to be honest,) his career as a pastor (I should have guessed: he had too much bonhomie even for your average Mid-Westerner), the moral state of Washington D.C. (poor) and the relative merits of Idaho (excellent), his missions, his good works, the unfortunate children of Haiti and Guatemala, the worth beyond all worldly wealth of a child’s smile upon receiving his first pair of new shoes. He seemed to be an entirely admirable person, large hearted and emotional, crass and loud-mouthed, jolly, obese, hyperactive and soon to die. And he never pushed Jesus on us once (the Lord came up but once, and only in the normal way of things). I believe that he was a celibate homosexual; he seemed the sort to seek out the company of younger men and the sort to delight older women with his puckish good humour. But it’s a cruel world we live in. His stout jolliness; his small hands and the spectacles (whose lenses seemed to press wetly against the corneas of his eyes) appeared suspicious in themselves. The cherub-faced pedophile has become a demon of the time. Any pastor who looks like Mr. Pickwick is a suspect; though child-molesters can be 28 and leanly muscular. We ran into him again a day or two later in a pharmacy in Flores, enquiring after pain medication for his back (something strong, to be taken by one already on a bunch of other pills). Peter helped him out again.

What can you say about Tikal? Look at the pictures. The one pyramid that we could scale properly exerted a vertiginous horror on me before, during, and after the climb. It possessed the unusual quality of looking even higher and more daunting from the base than from the summit. Anticipation perhaps. One wrong step and you’d be smashed to pieces by a successions of edged blows like a frenzied axe-attack. You’d be mincemeat by the time you reached the foot of those cruel steps; mincemeat in a split and leaking bag of skin. However, we got up and down again un-minced, and we basked in the cool air at the top. The main structure has been closed since two people stumbled and fell the pulverized deaths. There is a related story about a couple who made love on top of one somewhere (they are mixed up confusingly in my mind; now I have this image of a pair of lovers furiously copulating and then bouncing gruesomely down the hundred stone steps. The old combination; love and death. But that never happened. But I bet it did.