One of the most prescient images I have seen to date relating to this trip was whilst I was in the capital of Costa Rica, San Jose, at dusk. Like seemingly every town or city I have seen in Latin America, San Jose appeared to be over flowing with an impossible quantity of people.
After about 30 minutes of wandering I came across a very large city square, another fixture throughout Latin America. Suddenly above the roar of traffic and humanity came the high pitch calls of thousands of starlings as they flocked into the square, wheeled and darted, and made for the numerous large trees which were obviously their nightly roost.
I was struck by the similarities between these birds and the sheer mass of humanity I was seeing in every urban setting - all walking, running, driving with and around each other without contact yet with a seemingly unified flow like the birds'.
This theme has reoccured for me twice so far:
The first, was whilst I was riding along a quiet country stretch of road in Honduras and nearing the Nicaraguan border (shudder) when I found myself on a stretch of road between trees in bloom, and for 1/2 mile the area right above the road was filled with 1,000 swallows criss crossing and swooping amongst each other to devour insects coming off the trees. I was terrified I was going to hit them, but as I passed through their flock at 50 mph they absorbed me into their routine! For the next 1/2 mile I was the only 'swallow' going in a straight line, whilst the rest passed within feet and sometimes even inches of me at every angle without interruption to each other!
My second, more human, flock experience was when I was coming into the large Columbian city of Bucaramanga, from the mountain road, where apart from being too many trucks, traffic had been ok. As I came into the city, the main road I was on dissolved into the city roads as usual for here, and suddenly I found myself surrounded by hundreds of motorbikes, all swooping through the 4 - wheel traffic like the starlings I had seen in San Jose. I joined the flock, and en masse we split lanes, wedged between buses, trucks and taxis, harassed pedestrians by riding on the very edges of the road and bullied traffic lights into turning green - all the while with our reving engines and squeaking brakes mimicking those starlings as they came through the square. Then, as I reached the other edge of the city the flock dissipated, and I was flying solo once more.
