in my pocket travelings

I decided to travel from California to San Jose, Costa Rica. I sojourned with fickle travel gods. Gods who always made simple travel a grand sojourn.
New Year’s eve, I took the overnight train from Mexicali to Mazatlan, Mexico and woke up in a new country and a new year. In San Miguel de Allende I walked along the railroad tracks hoping to meet the spirit of Neil Cassady who died there one cold angry morning drunk, young and foolish.
With the benevolence of gods I traveled through Mexico and body-surfed on black sand deserted beaches in Guatemala. In the mountains I rode on buses filled with women the size of Hobbits qho stared at me the fair skinned, blue eyed god Quetzalcoatl.
I took an overnight ferry from La Union, El Salvador to Nicaragua, and then the travel gods played with me. The Nicaraguan custom station was a large vacant field with a man sitting at a wooden table with a typewriter surrounded by a mob of people. The travel gods smiled and I quickly got a ride from a couple and they were going to Managua and would take me all the way there. Thank you travel gods. We sped away up through the mountains and I knew Managua was on the other side. When we broke onto the summit of the mountain, below was the city set against the infinite blue of Lake Managua and over the city was a double arching rainbow. I was coming down into the magical city under the rainbow. But it was a cruel mirage of the travel gods.
We drove for miles and miles down through a survival landscape of people living next to the road in small haphazard buildings. A mixture of cinder blocks, plastic sheeting, roofs of wood and tin. Mile after mile. The truck let me off into the desperation.
On a wall of a destroyed building were the words in Spanish “Christmas 1972 Death.” Years before a major earthquake killed thousands and devastated the city of Managua. I walked through blocks and blocks of rubble. Next morning out hitching again, through the heartbreak of Managua once more.