Viajero: The Tales of a Traveler

By Paul Eich

My book is about my travels to different parts of the world and my helping the people of Honduras after Hurricane Mitch several years ago. I have driven alone to every state of North American continent – from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, to Puerto Cortes, Honduras, and from Labrador to Guatemala. I was the first American to ever receive a special

• Language: English
• Publisher: TOPLINK PUBLISHING, LLC
• Release date: Dec 21, 2018
• ISBN: 9781970066845

Paul Eich

I am Paul Edward Eich, who was born on a farm four miles west of Sheldon, Iowa, and was educated in the small country school of Dale No.8, two miles north of Matlock, Iowa. It was in this small school where I was so influenced by the tales of Jocko, Jerry, and Jojo that I became a dreamer and a traveler! In fact, the name Viajero in Spanish means "traveler." All my travels, I was a champion of education, smuggling tons of school supplies across the border into Mexico. After Hurricane Mitch devastated Honduras, I made two trips to Honduras with supplied for schools, driving through Mexico's most bandit-ridden highways and through the thirty-year war still raging in Guatemala at that time. I liked to brag that I was a professional smuggler, but I never smuggled guns, drugs, or people. There were always clothes, blankets, and school supplied. On one occasion, while visiting with my beloved stepson Alberto Perez, I mentioned that education unlocked the world, whereas Alberto quickly added that the lack of it sold tacos in the streets! I often wonder, if I had such little formal education and accomplished so much, what would I have accomplished if I had a good education? Now my last years will be spent about fifteen miles from that old country school, and on occasions, I would drive by it at times, even stopping and reminiscing on the steps of the entryway! Yes, it is still standing, long abandoned, and very near collapse - I guess it's like I am. I hope you enjoy reading of my travels as much as I enjoyed writing them. And keep in mind what I have engraved of my tombstone: "God does not permit money in heaven, and it will only burn in hell. Give what you can to help the poor while you're still live!"

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Viajero

The Tales of a Traveler

Paul Eich

Copyright © 2018 by Paul Eich.

Paperback: 978-1-970066-83-8

eBook: 978-1-970066-84-5

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

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Contents

Dedication

Chapter 1:    The Making of a Traveler: The War Years

Chapter 2:    Land of my Ancestors

Chapter 3:    South of the Border Down Mexico Way!

Chapter 4:    London to Athens by Eurorail

Chapter 5:    To British Honduras by Car Now Called Belize

Chapter 6:    In Pursuit of the Light Brigade!

Chapter 7:    Back to Belize

Chapter 8:    On the Road to Honduras

Chapter 9:    Triumph and Tragedy

Chapter 10:  The End of the Rainbow! And a New Challenge!

Chapter 11:  The End of a Traveler (Out of the Fat and into the Fire!)

Dedication

I wish to dedicate this book to my beloved stepson Alberto Perez of Toluca, Mexico; to Sandra Isela Cruz Hernandez and Suanne Hernandez Oliveras, my stepdaughters in Zitacuaro, Michoacán, Mexico; and to my many, many friends in all of Mexico, Belize, and Honduras as well as in other parts of the world I visited and made fri ends!

A man’s richness is measured by his friends, and fortunately, I am the richest man that ever lived!

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MA-PA-and their 11 kids. I’m the little boy in the front row.

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This is me when I first learned about Joco, Jerry, Jojo.

Chapter 1

The Making of a Traveler: The War Years

I don’t remember how old I was when the desire to travel first attacked me; perhaps I was born with the desire, a natural-born traveler. In any event, my first remembrance of wanting to see a foreign land was when I was in the first grade in Dale No. 8 by Matlock, Iowa. In my first-grade arithmetic book (in those days, it was called arithmetic instead of mathematics), there was a story about three monkeys in South America. They were named Jocko the oldest, then Jerry the younger one, and then the baby Jojo.

They lived happily among the tall coconut trees that grew on the beach somewhere in South America. I remember them scurrying among the trees and scaring the lovely scarlet macaws into flight. I had to learn how to count the trees, the macaws, the monkeys, and the bananas. I was learning arithmetic, but I was learning more about travel and other lands than I did arithmetic.

I remember so vividly, even to this day, when a short, stocky man with a mustache captured Jojo and put him in a cage; he was going to sell him in the market far away. From that little story, my fate was sealed! I promised myself I would see South America one day!

Somehow or another, Jocko and Jerry rescued Jojo from the cage, and they all escaped into the jungle where they lived happily ever after, and I went on to the difficult task of growing up in the late 1930s and ’40s.

In school, I continued to study and learn about the many things in life. But one cold December day, a great tragedy struck my peaceful country; we were attacked by the Japanese. Before that, I never knew where Japan was or anything about the Japanese people. I faintly remember being very frightened even though the war was many thousands of miles away.

My school, like many others in America, had scrap drives to gather scrap iron to make war materiel. Ms. Glessenor even asked me to go after school at night and gather milk weed pods for the armed forces; they needed them to make life preservers for downed airmen and crews of ships sunk at sea. Every night after school, I was very eager to gather the precious pods and gave Ms. Glessenor many bags of them. I very proudly did my share to help defeat the Japanese.

At that time, we called them Japs, and I remember when our neighbor boy left for the marines; I asked him to kill a Jap for me. There is no need in hiding the facts: the Japanese, the Germans, and the Italians were our enemy, and we all hated and feared them for what was happening in the world. Now fifty years later, they all are our friends and allies. Time, trust, and opportunity erase hatred, thank God! (Author’s note: I am NOT afraid to use the word God and will use it at every opportunity when need be in this book when I refer to our great Creator. A special note to the nonbelievers: It is far better to believe in God and be wrong than to not believe in God and be wrong! Now back to my travels.)

It was the war years, and I remember them well. I had a pen pal in the US Navy named Harry Walt, and of all places, he was stationed in South America! I read all I could about the war in the Pacific because most of it was fought amongst palm trees and jungles. I was a jungle man—errrr, boy—and a traveler, bananas and coconuts were my favorite fruit, and I remember my father would bring home a coconut for him and I since none of the rest of my family cared for it. He would have me hold it while he took a hand saw and sawed it open. Then we would share the sweet milk and eat the delicious coconut.

I never figured out why he always sawed them open, and I even caught myself doing the same thing many years later until I accidently dropped one on the concrete and it broke open! From then on, I drained the milk into a glass and took a hammer and broke it open. They are still one of my favorite foods.

In northwest Iowa, there was a very small salamander native to the area; rarely is a person fortunate to spot one. But whenever I saw a small salamander, to me, it was a very large alligator, and my mind went directly to an alligator-infested river near the Amazon. Daydreams would well up into my mind as fast as I could imagine things. It was long after I became an adult that I learned the difference between an alligator and a crocodile. For those readers who may not have noticed, an alligator has a short wide round snout while the crocodile has a long, slim pointed snout. Both are equally dangerous.

But not to this young traveler. Many times, I dove into the turbulent Amazon River to rescue some lovely young lady from the jaws of an alligator or to push a small child to safety while I wrestled a hungry alligator away from his meal. As for the salamander, he may have looked at me like I was a bit loco and scurried away.

After more than sixty years, I still remember my very first trip of any distance. It was a whole thirty miles to a place called Silver Lake, Iowa. My father took the family fishing. I must have been about seven years old then. The lake was small, but to me, it was a large ocean where on the other side lay South America. Maybe Jocko, Jerry, and Jojo was watching me across the lake.

Well, I never got across that lake that day, and I haven’t gotten to South America yet! But I will one day. I know Jocko, Jerry, and Jojo will not be there when I arrive, but then again, who knows? Dreams are funny things, and in one’s dreams, anything can happen!

Throughout the years, I have had many wondrous dreams. I made most of them come true; the rest will also. But then again, when I run out of dreams, if I ever do, it would be time to bury me! I have been to many places in my lifetime, some real and some only in dreams. In this book, I will tell you about those that are real.

I have named this book Viajero, which means traveler in Spanish; I have always referred to myself as a traveler, not a tourist! And often I am asked, what is the difference? Without hesitation, I reply, A tourist looks at folders and goes where a tour guide tells him, whereas a traveler will look at maps and go where his dreams tell him. To be a traveler, you have to be a dreamer!

Another big difference is that a tourist will look at the natives over the tip of his nose whereas a traveler will look the native in the eye. I have spent far more time sitting on the dirt floor of a very humble home drinking coffee and visiting with the local people than I have in some fancy high-rise hotel sipping cocktails and visiting with other tourists! I often chuckle when someone tells me about their trip to Cancun or to Paris. They always add, I’ve seen Mexico or I’ve seen France. Poor souls, they don’t realize they had seen nothing!

There were other fishing trips to Silver Lake and Spirit Lake, but not as exciting as that first trip. I became a dreamer, a traveler, and explorer that first trip, something I still am to this day. I remember the first state line I crossed. It was at Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, and as I watched that great Mississippi River below the bridge we crossed, I could not believe I was really in another state with new people and new sights. It was a trip of over five hundred miles one way, and to a little farm kid in the early 1940s, it was to the other side of the world.

There were many rivers after that. I crossed and recrossed the Mississippi and the Missouri, washed my hands in the Shenandoah, walked the banks of the Erie Canal, and picnicked on the banks of the Yukon. I fished the Sinaloa in Mexico and photographed the Columbia, the Rouge, and the Ohio. I watched the Colorado in its mad dash through the Grand Canyon. I piloted a cruise ship on the Rhine River in Germany (a guest of the captain), danced on the banks of the Blue Danube, and marveled at the Dnieper in the Ukraine. I visited in Spanish and drank tequila by the Rio Grande and nearly drowned in the Otter (by Matlock, Iowa). I even recited the Pledge of Allegiance on the Potomac, and to be sure, I looked over the Jordan. But the one great river of my dreams has so far eluded me although I could hear it calling to me, the mighty Amazon! One day, one day, I keep dreaming!

I’ve seen mountains and mountain ranges large and small. Mount Fujiyama in Japan, the Matterhorn in Switzerland, Mount Rainer, Mount Hood, Mount McKinley, Mount St. Helens, Mount Popocatepetl and Mount Paricutin in Mexico. I’ve been through the Alps, the Canadian Rockies, the Grand Teton, the Alleghenies, the Great Smoky Mountains, the Blue Ridge, the Rockies, the Sierra Nevada, and the Cascades. I crossed the Brooks Range north of the Arctic Circle and drove through the Sierra Madre south of the Tropic of Cancer. I never cease to wonder at God’s magnificent creations.

In 1943, when I was a young boy on the farm, I remember reading in the newspapers about a farmer in central Mexico who had gone to his field to hoe the corn and he noticed a small hole in the ground with smoke coming from it. Every day, it got a little larger, and a cindercone formed around it. It was the beginning of Mount Paricutin. Day after day, it continued to grow until it became a very large mountain covering several square miles and two villages.

Fifty years later as I was driving through central Mexico, I was thinking about that event and quite by chance found that I was only a few miles from that volcano! To be sure, I drove to the nearest village by the volcano, Here, I rented a horse and guide and rode horseback down into the canyon to visit a small church with only its steeple and back wall standing; the center of the church was filled with lava. A strange thing happened while I sat on the lava in the church thinking back to the days this was happening. Suddenly, it dawned on me that it was fifty years ago as a child that I was last on horseback, the same time this mountain was erupting! For a traveler, the thrills never cease!

I am a traveler, and at the moment I am writing this, I am sitting in a parking lot of a very inexpensive ($10) a night motel in Mazatlan, Mexico. The motel was very clean and comfortable, and I am eating what I call a typical traveler’s breakfast—in this case, warmed-over menudo (a Mexican stew made with hominy and beef tripe) from last night—and waiting for the coffee to perk. Down the street a few blocks are the expensive hotels for the tourists, some costing $1,000 a night.

What a waste of money! The tourists there could hardly wait to fly home and tell their friends they had seen Mexico. Maybe they even told their friends they had seen some poor slob from America eating breakfast in a motel parking lot. He-he! What little they know and what little they had really seen.

I was never a rich man and never made a lot of money, so I wore cubic zirconias in my watchband and camp a lot or stay in small inexpensive motels. The money I save I could use to buy gasoline for my vehicle or a plane ticket to a foreign land.

Only once in my life did I ever book a tour in advance, and I was the only one on that tour. It will be told in another chapter in this book. When I want to travel somewhere, I buy a round-trip plane ticket; and in the case of Europe, I would also buy a Eurorail pass. Anything else is taken care of as the time arrives. Next to the Mexican motels, the Eurorail pass is the best bargain in the traveler’s world. In the case of North America, I just drive to where I want to go.

Next to travel I love history, and to be sure, history and geography were my two best subjects in school. The only thing in mathematics that ever interested me was, of course, Jocko, Jerry, and Jojo. So in my many travels, history was a must!

Historical places and historical people’s grave sites were a must-see for me, and many miles I drove out of the way to see some grave or battlefield. I made it a point to visit and salute every American presidential grave site. I visited the graves of the famous and the infamous; Jesse James; John D. Rockefeller; Billy the Kid and the man who killed him; Pat Garretson; Wild Bill Hickoc and Calamity Jane; Christa McAuliffe; Daniel Boone; Aaron Burr; Benjamin Franklin; Doc Holliday; the Clantons; the Daltons; Chief Joseph; Red Cloud; James Cook; George Custer; Will Rogers; Admiral Bull Halsey and Chester Nimitz; general of the army Douglas MacArthur; John Paul Jones; James Thomas Brudenell, the seventh Earl of Cardigan (he led the Charge of the Light Brigade); Admiral Pavel Nakhimov (his forces defended against the Charge of the Light Brigade); Robert E. Lee; J. E. B. Stuart; Lord Alfred Tennyson; Dr. Livingstone of African fame; Michelangelo; Galileo; Robert Kennedy, those buried at wounded knee and those buried on the battleship Arizona in Pearl Harbor.

I remember at Clay Allison’s grave site in west Texas. It said, He never killed a man that didn’t need it! In Bellevue, Iowa, on the tombstone on my great-grandfather (on my mother’s side of the family), his epitaph read,

Look and see as you pass by As you are now, so once was I As I am now, so must you be Prepare to die and follow me!

Yes, there is a lot of truth in that epitaph!

In Venice, Italy, I visited the tomb of the apostle Saint Mark, one of Jesus’s chosen followers. It was also in Venice where the actual body of Saint Lucia, who was executed in about the year 345 because she refused to marry, was preserved in a glass tomb. She wanted to remain a virgin for Christ. But the most important tomb or grave site that I visited even though I knew it was empty was the tomb of Jesus Christ, Son of Jehovah, our God. I toured his birthplace in Bethlehem and where he died and was buried fifteen miles away in Jerusalem.

Also in northwest Mexico, I visited the grave where the corpse of Padre Kino was exposed and protected by glass; he was one of the brave few who brought Christianity to the conquered Mexican Indians.

There were some grave sites I found while searching for others, for instance, Christa McAuliffe’s grave site, which I found while searching for a presidential grave, the same with Aaron Burr.

When I travel anywhere in North America, I just drive the route I want to take, usually camping in my pickup truck, sometimes eating in a restaurant, mostly cooking and snacking along the road in some lovely deserted place. There are very few people in the world if any at all that has been to as many places on the North American continent as I have.

I have driven alone to every state on the North American continent, all thirteen Canadian provinces, forty-nine American states (Hawaii is not on the North American continent although I have been there), and the thirty-one Mexican states. I would estimate that 90 percent of those states I have driven to on numerous occasions. I also drove to the little country of Belize (British Honduras) about eight times, to Guatemala three times, and to lovely Honduras twice.

On this trip, I am doing a lot of writing; and at the moment, I am sitting in my beach chair in the shade of a palm tree about one hundred feet from the sea, enjoying a lovely cool breeze coming from the ocean. I gaze across the Caribbean Sea and wonder where Jocko, Jerry, and Jojo are. A young couple is sitting in the sand near the water’s edge facing the sea. They are wrapped in each other’s arms and are completely oblivious of the world around them. To me, that is a wonderful sight; someone really caring is the one thing I missed out on all my life.

Again, I think back to my youth and to my first airplane ride. I will never forget that experience either! The local airport at Sheldon, Iowa, was located three miles east of Sheldon, and my brother Adam who had recently returned from the Great War in Europe had a contract to mow the hay on the airfield. Adam took me along to help, and while I was there, the airport manager asked me if I would cut the weeds along the edge of the airport hangars.

Almost all day I worked cutting the weeds and watched in fascination as an airplane would take off or land. When I finished, the manager asked me what he owed me for cutting the weeds, and I struggled to get the courage to ask for an airplane ride. But of course! was his reply. He buckled me into the small plane and taxied down the runway. It was the most exciting thing that ever happened to me up to that time when we soared off into the wild blue yonder! Such a wonderful man to bring such a thrill to a little boy of about twelve years of age!

A few years later was the one time I was permitted to accompany my mother to Kansas to visit her mother. Always before, my younger brother and sister got to go with her. This time, I begged and pleaded with her to take me along. I was then fifteen years old, and I wanted to go out west Dalton country! It was excitement of the highest degree for me.

We went by bus to Kansas, and when we got to Grandma’s house, I wasted no time in exploring this new land. I walked for miles to see all I could see. And I listened to my grandmother telling me of the cattle drives she went on with her brother. Her brother was a very wealthy man and often went to Oklahoma or Texas to buy cattle and drove them to Kansas to sell. Grandmother and Grandfather would go along, and Grandmother would do the cooking for the crew while Grandfather helped herd the cattle north.

You can imagine the excitement well up in me when my mother and grandmother told me that my great-uncle Frank Weinshenk was indeed a friend of the real Dalton Gang and that at times they would sleep in his big barn in Willowdale, Kansas. I never doubted their stories for a moment.

As the years passed and Mother and Grandmother passed away, I had a chance to go to Willowdale and so I stopped there for a visit. I learned a lot about Great-Uncle Frank then. Quite by coincidence, the little village church had celebrated their one-hundredth anniversary the year before and had a lovely history book printed. I bought a copy and sat down to read. I read it from cover to cover that day! Mother and Grandmother told me every story that was in that book, the Daltons and all!

To a fifteen-year-old beginning traveler, I was astounded by what I had seen and heard on that first trip to Kansas. It was the thrill of a lifetime! I bought a large pendant of Kansas and sewed it onto the back of my jacket; I wanted the whole world to know I had been to Kansas!

June 10, 1950, I was sworn into the United States Navy at the tender age of seventeen. I wanted to do some real traveling. How did that saying go? Join the navy and see the world through a port hole? Well, I wanted to see all I could whether it was through a porthole or not.

This was a few years after the Second World War ended so it was peacetime and I had no fear of going to war. Sixteen days later on June 26, North Korea invaded South Korea and we were at war.

I was sent from the cold cornfields of Iowa to sunny Southern California for my boot camp training. I and the other recruits boarded the train in Des Moines, Iowa, and headed west. Here I would cross several state lines and into new territory, but I had no idea what state it was or where we crossed. I remember the train stopping in Tucumcari, New Mexico, for coal and water, and then it was westward ho again. The adobe buildings of New Mexico thrilled me as we watched them pass by. It was four days on the train, and we were happy to finally disembark in the sunshine of sunny California.

I still remember the recruiting officer telling me to take a warm sweater or jacket along. He was crazy! Sunny Southern California? San Diego in June? He had to be crazy! The night I arrived in sunny California, I sat under a palm tree freezing while I and the guys I was with waited for a bus to take us to camp.

That night, I learned that recruiters were not crazy. During my boot camp training, I and a couple of my buddies crossed the border into Tijuana, Mexico. It was my first international border! Although Tijuana was not the best of Mexican cities in those days, it too was a thrill beyond belief to a young traveler.

I lost my heart that day in Mexico, which was fifty-one years ago, and I have been searching for it ever since. As a matter of fact, as I am typing this final manuscript, I am sitting in my home in the mountains of Central Mexico. I have retired here. But Mexico will be another chapter by itself, in fact, probably several chapters.

I finished my boot training and was sent aboard the USS Blue (DD-744), a lovely destroyer in the San Diego naval ship yards. From September 1950 to January 1951, we worked putting her back into commission and ready for sea. In mid-January, we headed for the Korean War.

Our first stop was for four days in the territory of Hawaii. A raw recruit’s pay was not much, so I walked from Pearl Harbor to Waikiki Beach and back. I was going to see Hawaii and not from a porthole. On this walk, I remember seeing my first coconut tree with a coconut lying on the ground nearby, another thrill to this viajero! The coconut was lying in a drainage ditch, and I wanted to climb down and retrieve it, which would have been easy to do. But I did not know if it was legal to do, so I just looked and dreamed and left it lying there.

I had heard a lot about Waikiki Beach and was very eager to swim in this part of paradise, so when I arrived, I quickly changed into my bathing suit and headed for the water! Three steps into the beautiful deep turquoise water I stopped! It was either sharp volcanic lava or coral; I never did find out. My feet hurt very much, but I was still determined to swim. I kept walking over the sharp rocks the best I could for what seemed like a half mile before I finally found water deep enough to swim in. After a while, I tired of swimming and had to wade the same sharp rock or coral back to dry land. No more Waikiki Beach, I promised myself!

We left Pearl Harbor, and as we did so, our ship lowered its flag to half-staff as we passed the USS Arizona, the great American battleship lying on the bottom with most of her crew still on board, a victim of the sneak attack of December 7, 1941, by the Japanese almost ten years earlier.

Several days later, we entered Tokyo Bay and docked in Yokasuka, Japan. As we entered Tokyo Bay, I gazed in awe at the newness around me. It was only a few years after the big war ended, and there were still several remnants of that war. There were a couple of old warships sticking out of the water, and they were being cut up for scrap. High cliffs had caves dug into them for war preparations. I never really asked about them; there was too much else to see.

When our ship docked in Yokosuka, Japan, I was in another country, even another continent—ASIA!

On my first liberty, I walked the streets of Yokosuka, marveled at the stores, the homes, and the people. They were always polite, kind, and courteous. The homes were made of wood and paper, and I remember visiting several homes. There was very little furniture. I remember the people sitting on the floor and eating their meals from small tables like our coffee tables of today. The floors were covered with straw mats, and their beds were a lush pile of thick blankets. There was no such thing as television, and they cooked over a small charcoal clay pot. One was required to take off his shoes before entering a home. It was their custom, and wherever I