The Vulture

I'm in Luang Prabang having dinner alone. That's the usual routine. People often think that's odd. I think it's odd that people think so.

It's dusk and I'm gazing across the colonnaded patio out the open timber shutter doors to the street from my small table in an old villa-cum-restaurant. The dark wooden furniture is lit with coloured-paper lampshades hanging from the ceiling and the steamy air is chilled with some downtempo electronica. Locals and tourists stroll up and down. A tuk-tuk has just pulled up.

Anyway, I'm just slowly eating my pesto linguine and I always use this quiet time for some writing, so let me tell you about some kayaking I did in Vang Vieng.

I was working my way up here, to Luang Prabang, which, by the way, is a charming town—French colonial buildings and Buddhist temples set between two rivers, the Mekong and the Nam Khan, in the lush inland of Laos. It's ten or twelve hours by road to get here from the capital, Vientiane.

I caught a minitruck—the snub-nosed local "chicken buses" of Laos, trays fitted out with roofed cages and side benches—as far as Vang Vieng. A frame at the rear of the truck's tray was crated high with boxes of fruits for transportation somewhere. It was the real local experience. A lady climbed aboard with bags of something bloody, perhaps fish or offal, and tucked them under the benches unrefrigerated in the thirty degree heat. A young boy, fascinated with me, tugged gently at my arm hair and pulled my board shorts back from my knee to see if the same pale-coloured skin continued up my leg.

After several hours of dusty roads, I.... Eventually, I...

Sorry... this guy leaning on his tuk-tuk parked across the road is staring at me. It's distracting.

Anyway, at Vang Vieng I was met by Meng, a guide I had arranged to take me kayaking on the Nam Lik river. Sadly, the once crystal river waters turned muddy brown three years ago when the single-party communist government built a new hydroelectric dam upstream to sell power to Thailand. Worse, we were to pass another dam under construction which will soon end completely all whitewater kayaking on this verdant and bouldered stretch of the river.

There were two sets of rapids ahead of us, classes two and one. Rapids are classed one through six, with one being tame and six impassable. I have rafted white water several times but have never taken a kayak through it... and this one... this kayak, I mean....

This tuk-tuk driver just waved at me. I just lifted my head and looked out the door absently, and he's right in my line of sight, staring at me fixedly. Now he has smiled and given me a half wave like I was looking up at him. Jeez. Maybe he's just being friendly.

Okay, I've smiled politely and have dropped my gaze. Back to my story.

We hit that first set of rapids, the class two, and capsized instantly. This was an ocean kayak. It was too narrow; it should be broader and sit lower for white water, and when we edged a whirlpool we tipped.

Meng kept a hold on the craft, but I was pulled into the rapids. "Feet up!" he called to me.

You have to keep your legs up when swept into white water to clear underwater hazards. Lean back into your life vest and go downriver feet first. I knew this and did so, but I have never been a strong swimmer and my breathing got panicky when a rapid dumped me. I inhaled water and came back up spluttering, heart racing, hyperventilating.

Control your breathing. It's the first rule of being in the water, and the first that went out the window, followed by the feet-up technique. On land I fancy myself a minor survivalist. In the water I am an embarrassing disaster and my own biggest threat. Flailing, I turned around and looked for Meng.

What the fuck? I have one line of sight out the door and this tuk-tuk driver is in it, watching me. Isn't staring impolite in Laos? Now I'm keenly aware of him, and every time I look up I have to avoid looking at him, which is to look at the wall or a pillar. This is giving me the shits.

Okay. On the other side of the rapids Meng pulled me panting and coughing back onto the kayak. "Relax, relax!" he counselled me. It's a funny thing with hyperventilation. You lose your common sense. I can so easily see how people drown.

We paddled on, and the second set of rapids, the class one, loomed. Class one is defined as requiring "little or no skill to navigate". I've rafted class four rapids fearlessly before but now I'm spooked like a cat about to have a bath. I'd never been thrown in the water before. Or kayaked rapids. On a sea kayak! As we were drawn in I looked wide-eyed for some calm water between the whirlpools to run. I couldn't see any. We hit the white water. I braced!

We drifted through, and the kayak rocked a little bit.

I'm losing it. Sorry, this tuk-tuk driver is ruining both my dinner and my concentration. I'm paying the bill and packing up.

I'm leaving the restaurant, and he's approaching me!

"Hello, sir. Do you want a...?" I can't distinguish what he says. I'm already pissed off at him. It's common for an idle driver to ask if you need a tuk-tuk, but not for one to stalk you.

"What?"

"Do you want a lady?"

"What?"

"Do you need a tuk-tuk or... maybe you want a lady?"

I shift from pissed off to furious. Now I know why he was watching me. I was sitting at dinner alone.

"Do you know what a vulture is?" I ask him.

He is taken aback. "What?"

"Do you know what a vulture is?"

"Yes? Uh...."

He is looking confused. In a clear and indiscreet voice in the street I say to him: "You sit here staring at me for half an hour while I have my dinner, and then you come over and ask me if I want a lady. Now, do you know what a vulture is?"

He's looking away flustered and laughing softly in embarrassment.

I just walked off.

Swindlers and the universal formula

I am a jaded traveller.

I have been approached by more touts, swindlers and con artists in countries around the world than I can recollect, sometimes avoiding treachery, sometimes being taken in, and I have learned to recognise them. They will try to steer the conversation, but if you pre-empt the answers they want then you control the encounter. After some practise, you can even have fun with it.

There is a formula.

1: They approach you.

You're always a target, as there's no avoiding looking like a tourist.

In Beijing, I needed to get to the Canon service centre to fix a jammed zoom lens. The building happened to be located in a touristy area with numerous high-rise hotels. A tubby Pekingese man standing on the side of the footpath like a bird plucking insects around a light addressed me as I walked past him: "Hello!"

2: They engage you.

A typical opening involves complementing or commenting on something you're wearing.

For me, it is always my distinctive hat. In Mérida, Mexico, one guy immediately recognised it as Aussie. "Hey," he called, arresting himself mid-stride from crossing the street. "You are from Australia, sí? Sydney? Melbourne?"

I took off my hat in Istanbul's Grand Bazaar. One merchant pointed at my hiking runners, which are hopelessly stained from years of wilderness trekking, and called out in sudden eye-bulging admiration, "Nice shoes!"

My Pekingese friend's opening was: "You look like a cowboy."

3: They always ask you where you are from.

And be it Australia, Brazil or Singapore, the good ones will find something common to talk about.

Once, three months after a certain unpopular Australian prime minister was ousted by party machinations, an Ethiopian taxi driver asked me: "Is Julia still in power?" I laughed so loud at his adroit grasp of foreign domestic politics that I didn't mind him charging me double the usual rate.

The stupid and unimaginative ones, like my new Chinese friend, will say: "Ah, Australia! Kangaroos! Koalas!" attempting to conjure a camaraderie of trust by reciting a charm of the bleeding familiar.

"Earthworms! Ants!" I said to him.

He looked perplexed.

4: They are inordinately friendly.

Anybody might be friendly, but swindlers will offer help when you haven't asked for it.

A gypsy man standing near the entrance to the alcázar, the Moorish palace in Seville, approached me when I was loitering, looking for camera angles. To him I looked uncertain, which, to a swindler, is like blood in the water to a shark.

"That is the alcázar," he said, gesturing with a sweeping hand. "This is the entrance. Come, I will tell you a bit about it." It's a common ploy; they give you some generic history as they walk with you and then ask to be paid for their services as a tour guide.

In Beijing I had a piece of paper with the address of the Canon repair building written on it in Chinese by the hotel receptionist. He told me to ask someone on the street which building it is. I showed it to my new Pekingese friend. "Why, it's this one right here!" he said, pointing to the next building. "But why? There's nothing in there." I told him I needed to repair my camera. He almost jumped with glee. "I will come with you and help you!"

5: They will try to latch onto you.

In Istanbul, the carpet sellers always ask: "What are you looking for?" with an immediately ready response of: "Oh, I will take you there! Come on!" and stepping away quickly so you are instinctively compelled to keep up with them. The Turks are particularly good at this business and are hard to repel without some eventual element of arsehole-ness coming into it, either on your part or theirs.

I told the tubby Pekingese that it wasn't necessary for him to accompany me.

"But they don't speak English!" he protested (an untruth, but he was desperate not to lose a fish he thought he had caught).

"Maybe not, but they understand a broken camera."

6: They reveal their agenda.

If, like Bruce Lee fighting back Han's men, you manage to deflect all of these advances, you are ready for the reveal.

In Istanbul: "In Turkey it is our tradition to offer a cup of tea. I have a shop just over here, very close. I invite you for some tea." (It is a carpet shop. Prepare for some pressure selling trapped in the spider's lair.)

In Havana: "I know the best place to eat! I take you there!" (Havana has an extraordinary number of "best" places. These guys get a kickback for soliciting customers. On arrival they'll often ask you, if you'll buy them a drink for taking you there: "One mojito for me?")

In Beijing: "I am an art student. We have an exhibition at a gallery over here, and today is the last day. Come have a look. Just a few minutes."

I was blunt with my tubby Pekingese friend. "I'm not interested in art. I am here to get my camera fixed. Thanks for your help."

I was later approached by two art students in the same area who delivered all of the same lines. The following day in the Forbidden City I was helped by yet another art student. I subsequently saw a notice at a hostel that the "art student" scam is a common one, with warnings not to buy into it.

The Trans-Mongolian Express to Beijing

It takes more than 33 hours to get from Ulaanbaatar to Beijing on the Trans-Mongolian Express, and the food is lousy.

The set menu in the dining car—where the barman smokes beneath the non-smoking sign—costs US$25 for salad, soup, a main and dessert. The salad is shredded carrot in a radioactively garlicky sauce topped with a triangle of processed cheese. The soup is cream-of-something. And the main is a few small slices of beef in gravy with three sides: rice with corn in it, a kind of ratatouille (my polite interpretation of indistinguishable vegetables in an unknown sauce), and sauerkraut that tastes like feet. Dessert is a packaged chocolate roll-up cake, served to me as the last in the plastic tray of six. I don't care to eat it, so the waiter does.

I have a "hard-sleeper" berth, a second-class, four-bunk cabin, which I share with a pleasant young Norwegian couple. There are TVs in each bunk, but I dare not turn on the single channel of what will invariably be a looped screening of the Russian circus, replete with fat old women dressed in tutus performing tired magic tricks involving scarves and wands and pigeons. Mercifully, when curiosity gets the better of me and I turn it on, it doesn't work.

I chat to a fellow Aussie in the next cabin. He's been on the train since Moscow, doing the full Trans-Siberian. It had been three days so far. He's happy staring out the window at the endless plains of the Gobi desert because through Russia it had been endless silver birch.

At the border of Mongolia and China we spend four-and-a-half hours between Mongolian immigration, Chinese immigration, and changing the trucks on the Mongolian train to fit the Chinese rail gauge. Once we finally get under way again it is 1am. I kill a solid eight hours to the gentle rocking of the train. When I wake up I'm still here, so I kill off another two.

I love train travel, and I enjoy the overnight sleepers, but honestly, I don't understand the romance of the Trans-Mongolian (and less so the Trans-Siberian). It's long and boring. I can only recommend to bring several books, your own pot noodles, and consider a flight instead.

So it is a relief, in the mid-afternoon of the second day, to finally reach Beijing. The Norwegians' hotel is apparently close to mine so we agree to share a taxi, but we first need to withdraw some Chinese yuan as we have only Mongolian tugrik. After twenty minutes of hunting for ATMs and failing to find any that will accept our Visa cards, we finally turn to a tourism office for help (as did everyone else on the train, it turns out) and are directed to the Construction Bank.

Yuan in pocket, we look for a taxi. There is no shortage, but not one will take us. They are parked at the taxi rank or pull up without fares but wave us away when we approach. We can't figure it. Just one driver is willing, but only through extortion: "Three people, three luggage... one hundred yuan." We scoff and walk away. My new friends have been advised by their hotel that it shouldn't cost more than twenty.

A fellow traveller from the train who speaks fluent Mandarin is having the same difficulty. "It's impossible," she says to us. "No one will take you!"

Such is the strange situation with Beijing taxis. Yet pedicabs and tuk-tuks will hound you. But they can't take luggage, so we opt for the subway (which, as it turns out, is excellent—easy, efficient and cheap) and part ways at Andingmen station to our respective digs in the hútòng district north of the Forbidden City.

The young lady at my hotel reception is pleasant and welcoming, as most Pekingese are, but difficult to understand with that heavy Beijing accent of R's and "sh" sounds.

"Your room has Black Forest," she says.

"Pardon me?"

"Your room has Black Forest."

It does? Will I be sharing it with wolves and sleeping in a gingerbread bed? Or do I get midnight snacks of cake?

"My room has what?" I ask.

"Black Forest. Black Forest. Morning dinner."

"Oh, breakfast!" I laugh as the penny drops. "That will be lovely."

As long as there's no Trans-Mongolian sauerkraut.

Mongolian toilette

Home comforts on the Mongolian steppe are hard to come by. The toilet, a necessity, is a hole dug in the ground. Bathing, however, is a luxury; you do it if you can.

Some days ago, after several in the saddle passed unwashed, I was craving being clean so found some privacy at camp where a little branch of a stream diverted behind some bushes. I stripped, scrambling a ferocious squadron of starving mosquitoes as my warm flesh announced an end to the colony's famine.

To outfox them I jumped into the water. I nearly spring out again like a pogo stick. It was frigid! I was only thigh-deep, but was ready to abandon hygiene and leap back into my warm and stinking clothes if I gave myself a moment to think.

I acted fast. I thrust my head under the surface, splashed my armpits and arse, and hopped onto the bank to soap. Before my mind had time to scream "I'm not getting back in there!" I plunged back in to rinse. My lungs popped full with a shocked gasp. I dunked my head, splashed my nethers, and bounced out again to don my mosquito overcoat. Looking up I noticed on the opposite bank an unmelted berm of snow. It is summer!

The Mongols must think Westerners have a strange fascination with weather, which is notoriously changeable in Mongolia, in the same way as they are obsessed with time, which Mongols give little consideration—a journey takes as long as it takes. Each morning we ask Dondov, the lead wrangler, if it will rain. At first he seems puzzled at our stupidity and answers in the vein of, "yes, it rains." Now I think he answers yes or no arbitrarily, which is as good a forecast on the steppe as you will get: it will either rain or it won't, and half the time he is right.

Today he isn't.

At nine we set off ahead of dark clouds, but sliding like a locomotive up the mountain pass they catch us by noon. The daylight dims. Suddenly we are being pelted with hail and freezing sleet.

Caught off guard on a brief break from the saddle, several of us remount. Annie kicks her horse into a tall thicket for shelter and disappears. I try to follow, but the thicket spooks my horse and he halts in front of it. I'm at a loss, feeling as a learner driver must when first confronted with a stick transmission on a hill. Isn't there something I should do, here?

I look around, water streaming off my hat, and see everyone at a standstill. Susan and Ercihan are warm and dry in their oilskins. I have on a thin windbreaker. It is keeping the wet out but insulates like a plastic bag, which is practically what it is. Paul is smart. He watches what the Mongols do, and follows suit: dismount, crouch under a bush, and entertain yourself watching the sodden idiot sitting on his horse out in the wet and cold.

It passes, and we trudge on through cold drizzle. My jeans and shoes are soaked and my fingers are like ice. That bastard Paul is wearing gloves. I think he's done this before. I plot to kill him and steal his gloves, but the group is too small and someone is bound to ask, "Where did Paul go? And why are you wearing his gloves?" In any case, my plan is moot by the time the climbing temperature on our descent of the mountain thaws my fingers to be sufficiently murderous.

We ride along a river on the valley floor and ascend again. As we mount a crest and the sun comes out, a row of charming blue-roofed huts on stilts appear out of nowhere, perched on the mountainside.

"It's a spa resort built by the Soviets," Jenya tells us. "One week a year, workers from farming collectives could relax here for free. There are hot springs."

Springs!

We dismount and, as the wranglers tie up the horses, we build a fire to dry off. Our support crew had arrived before us and prepared a lunch of sandwiches, which we scarf down with cups of tea before laying on the hillside in the sun, reading, chatting and dozing.

At last we summon the energy to find the springs. At the end of a winding trail through hillside scrub and over ice-surfaced patches of snow is a simple wooden construction—three connected huts built over top of a broad course of water spouting out of the mountain. The hot water flows into enamel tubs inside. I strip and ease my sore horse-riding muscles in.

Springs in summer. It is heaven.

Mongolian horses

As Jenya the Mongol was thrown from the horse, tumbling onto his back into the river, I caught an embarrassed smirk on his face. Just this morning this descendent of Genghis Khan's people had warned us: "Mongolian horses are half wild."

It is just our second day on horseback. Yesterday we didn't make any distance but just took a short ride, local to our cedar glen campsite by the wide river, to get acquainted with the horses. There are a few important differences between this stout, short-legged breed and domesticated hot-bloods like Arabs and Thoroughbreds. Never approach the horse from its right side. Control it by neck-reining. Don't jump when dismounting or you'll startle it (at 13 hands you can step off)! Stirrups tend to be ridden short and a rawhide lead is always attached to the bridle, even while riding, which should be held in the non-reining hand (the idea is that if you come off the horse the lead will trail so the horse can be caught, as it will make for the hills). It is like riding a semi-mustang. To ride Mongolian horses is to challenge yourself as a rider.

At camp I tried to feed my horse an apple, an otherwise universal equine delicacy, but he wouldn't touch it. Mongolian horses eat nought but grass and don't understand hand-feeding. The entire year they live outdoors, through the harsh -40°C winter, finding their own food. They are hardy animals with miles of stamina. During World War II, three thousand were pressed into pulling Soviet cannon when the winter temperatures were so low that diesel coagulated in the engines. Most of them died at Leningrad. Six made it to Berlin.

All we are demanding of our nameless beasts today is to pull us out of the river, the second of numerous streams to cross where the horses are sometimes belly-deep with our knees acutely bent to keep our feet dry. Most manage effortlessly but Jenya's horse has found itself in a hole. As it thrashes he decides it's safer to bail, and over he goes, clothes and pride thoroughly damped.

"You guys go on," he says, standing sheepishly in mid-stream. "I'll catch up with the support truck to get some dry clothes." In mid-June the temperatures here are in just the low twenties and the water is cold. Jenya hauls his sodden legs out of the water, remounts and, with a smile, rides off.

We continue on without a translator, but it proves not to be a problem. Ercihan, the master Turkish horseman in our group, manages effortless communication with Dondov, the Mongol lead wrangler, despite no common language. Perhaps they both speak equine.

Horses and yaks dot the spectacularly wide glacial valley. Flanked by foothills of cedar forests which rise to mountains still sporting patches of snow in summer, it stretches like a golf course for titans. Underfoot are carpets of white, orange and blue wildflowers. Overhead eagles screech and from the trees cuckoos sound off like broken clocks.

Suddenly we hit some sand and my horse drops to his knees. Any horse likes to roll in sand to scratch its back. I suspect my saddle was rubbing him, but he was about to roll on me. To visualise a horse rolling with your foot in the stirrup, imagine trapping a chicken bone under a rolling pin. Now picture this naïvely oblivious amateur seconds from disaster thinking his horse has a flat tyre.

"Kick it!" Ercihan screams from behind me. "Kick it kick it kick it!"

I kick it.

The horse pops back up onto his feet, the calamity neatly avoided. "Be careful," Ercihan warns me. "Watch your horse in sand." He grins.

Rivers too, I think. These things are half wild.

Asleep in Hong Kong

Getting to Mongolia was somewhat circuitous. Hunnu Air, one of two Mongolian Airlines that fly international routes, reaches Ulaanbaatar from Hong Kong, and the cheapest way to get to Hong Kong from Sydney is via Singapore on the Singapore Airlines-owned budget carrier Scoot. This does entail a seven-hour stopover, though. The night before leaving on a trip I inevitably don't get a full night's sleep, what with last-minute packing and planning, so by the time I made it to Hong Kong I was a zombie with nine hours sleep in the last 48.

I touched down at 6am and my hotel room wouldn't be ready until two, so I went for a walk through Kowloon. It was, perhaps unsurprisingly, like a massive Chinatown. Air conditioning units stuck out the windows of sooty buildings with peeling paint. Neon signs in cages were cantilevered across the road, looking grimy and desperate in the daytime. Clatters of signs confounded the eye—Blue Girl premium beer, parking signs, direction-of-traffic arrows, "McBarron Book Company Medical Books" plastered across a second-storey window, and dozens more announcing indecipherable things in faded Chinese characters.

Hong Kong smelled to me like Kuala Lumpur: steamy, with a fragrance of Thai mint (what the Malaysians call dawan kersum) and Chinese wet-markets.

I sat on a stone bench in a small, roadside public garden in the grounds of Tin Hau Temple to rest. Decorative stone bridges crossed a narrow pond of fish. Trees that looked to pre-date the temple provided shade with their leafy parasols. Others sat here, too. Some talked with others, some read, but most just sat, almost meditative. I was so tired I was having waking dreams; the moment I closed my eyes my mind drifted down some bizarre path. It surprised me that even with the roar of accelerating buses and the staccato of a nearby jackhammer that we all found some peace there.

At the nearby Mido Cafe I ordered milk tea and a pineapple bun. There's nothing delicate about this style of tea: served in a cup (never in a pot), it is strong and cloyed with condensed milk. I like it.

I liked the Mido. A corner cafe up a flight of stairs, it dates from 1950 and has never been refurbished, only patched. The walls bore two completely different styles of tiles, the pillars a third, and two more distinct patterns graced the floor and ceiling. Every stick of furniture looked original—from the round, laminated plywood tables, each with a single stainless steel column bladed with four feet-fins like an Exocet missile ready to launch through the ceiling, to the laminated wooden booths. I ordered toast and another milk tea and whiled the hours here until I could stumble back to the hotel and climb into a bed.

Horse riding on the Mongolian steppe

The last time I attempted a ride like this was the first time I'd been on a horse. Three years ago on a two-week ride through Cappadocia, Turkey, we rode alternate days and rested in between. On this ride—two weeks in Mongolia, and my second time on a horse—we are riding every day.

Horse riding uses muscles in your legs which you don't seem to use for any other purpose. You have to clamp onto the horse with your inner thighs, turning your toes out and your heels down.

I am in a small group of five riders—two friends I met on the Turkey ride, Susan and Ercihan, and two friends of theirs, Paul and Ann. We also have along a fluent translator, Jenya, who has a background in field anthropology.

From Ulaanbaatar we fly by Fokker 400 to Uliastai in the western province of Zavkhan, where we board a Russian-made furgon—a four-wheel drive van with a quilted interior that looks like a grey bread tin on wheels. The reason for the padded ceiling is soon apparent as we lurch over dusty tracks through vast, vast expanses of grassland, rolling as though on a gale-whipped ocean of scrub, for five hours.

This is nomad land. Dotted here and there like white pinheads stuck in a sprawling map are the traditional Mongolian gers—round tents like little big tops housing families, spilling wafts of smoke from the wood-fired stove's central stack. We pass their herds of goats, of sheep, and of course hundreds and hundreds of horses. But dominating all of this is the land. I have never seen anything so big.

Two hundred kilometres south of the Siberian border we move through the little towns of Telmen and Tosontsengel before meeting up with the ride crew—two wranglers, two kitchen staff and two drivers of support vehicles—and the horses. For the next two weeks it will be day-on-end riding for a hundred kilometres south.

And days on end of sore legs.

The language of the Mayan jungle

The horse seems all right, but a smear of blood runs from her cheek down her neck.
A soft-spoken, slight man of 43 with brown skin and a farmer's wiry musculature straps my backpack to the horse with the help of his 13-year-old son Ignacio. He explains that overnight, as we hung in our hammocks, the horse had been bitten by a vampire bat.

My guide doesn’t speak any English, only Spanish and Q'eqchi', one of the two dozen extant Maya languages in this region. And though this meant we trekked thirty kilometres on foot through the jungle to the archaeological site of El Zotz and I didn't get the detail I was hoping for (it turned out he was no expert anyway), it did give me the perfect opportunity to practise my Spanish. Despite my impressive ignorance of the language, we actually carried out a long conversation. He is a rancher with ten horses and eight children. We spoke about our families, about his horses, and about the life of las Mayas. About the food in Guatemala, the food in Australia. The plants in the jungle. The implications for the US-Russia relationship since the resumption of the presidency of Vladimir Putin.

I am constantly amazed by it. Conversing in another language is like having a superpower, as though I am able to penetrate another dimension of reality which other mortals can not.

In simple Spanish, he explained to me the use of the many plants in the Mayan biosphere. Often called "nature's larder", my guide refers to the jungle as "la tienda de Maya"—the Mayan shop. There was food everywhere. We picked up small orange fruits the size of grapes, fallen from high in the trees, called ramon. Most of it is a stone; you peel the surrounding rind like the skin of a citrus and eat that. It tasted like apricot. Another fruit called zapote, related to the mangosteen of southeast Asia, had a consistency similar to kiwifruit and tasted like pear. We plucked leaves of pimiento to make tea. There was also sassafrass, used to make root beer, but that's a bit more complicated. There was Mayan garlic (unrelated to garlic); a clutch of tentacles growing on a tree trunk called Mayan spaghetti that looked like a green octopus (unrelated to octopus); and Mayan chewing gum, chicle, which was sap harvested from the slashed bark of a tree.

When we reached the temples of El Zotz, we trekked up a long, steep rise and scrambled up the side of a narrow hill. This was the first temple—an unrestored mound, as they all are, of centuries of jungle debris with shaped stones peeking through the composted leaf litter. We sat and caught our breath at the peak, above the treetops, and as we surveyed the vast carpet of green canopy a spider monkey leapt across the chasm before us, arms aloft, and latched onto a liana vine.

These and howler monkeys are common. Less common are the diurnal pumas and the nocturnal jaguars, but those are famously hard to spot. From the corner of my eye I did spot a grey and red tarantula the size of a hand peering with a cluster of eyes out from the hollow root of a tree. As soon as I stopped he shot timidly inside his little grotto and wouldn't reappear despite all my guide's gentle coaxing: rattling a whip-like stick around inside the hole, followed by beating on the tree trunk with a machete. If only we'd had a shotgun.

By the time we reached camp, we had been walking for ten hours. It's usually 40 degrees Celsius in April, and though the weather was merciful and didn't break 30, the jungle was humid. I was drenched slick with sweat. I longed for a river to splash in, but there are no bodies of water in the Petén. Instead I had to settle for a Wet Wipe shower. And though I wasn't thirsty per se, all I had had to drink the entire trek was warm water. Tepid coffee would have been more refreshing. If a pub magically appeared out of nowhere with enough beer left for just one cold pint, and a man dying of dehydration crawled through the doors, I would have murdered him.

Hammocks are standard sleeping quarters in rural Guatemala. I think I've now got the hang of it, so to speak, and was comfortably asleep in minutes. Then again, my legs were so tired I could have slept on a bed of snakes.

The hammock and mosquito net (a cotton sheet) is also a preventative against vampires. Vampire bats live exclusively on the warm blood of mammals, typically horses and cattle, but they have been known to feed on people. Attracted by heat, the bat lands on the ground nearby and crawls towards its victim—you can picture it writhing like a de-shanked zombie with broken elbows—where it scales the leg, hauling itself up with wing-end claws, and bites the horse's neck. The fangs are sharp as obsidian. The bat actually cuts away the fur so it can make an incision in the flesh and laps up the blood as it pools in the wound.

But the horse appears to have suffered no ill effects from the bite, and under her burden she placidly weathers the return journey with my guide, his son and I leading on foot. We speak much less this time. Perhaps we are tired. Perhaps just my vocabulary is exhausted, and we have nothing left to talk about as we pass the same trees and the same plants.

Eventually we arrive at the little village kitchen where my driver back to Flores is waiting. I thank my guide and tip him a hundred quetzales and his son fifty. We shake hands and I spend the last of my Spanish to bid him adiós.

On the drive back I realise the one thing I forgot to ask my guide was his name.

The Guatemalan jungle: temples, drugs and vampires

My Guatemalan driver spoke English, but his accent was really thick.

"Uh, desculpeme," I answered. "I'm sorry... No entiendo. I didn't understand what you said."

"I jess say to you dees trock ees berry strong!"

He had picked me up at 6am and was driving me in a beaten-up Toyota an hour-and-a-half into what was once forest. The dense Petén jungle of northern Guatemala conceals an area in the Mayan world, which extends from Honduras to southern Mexico, where the ruins are most concentrated. Archaeologists are constantly uncovering new sites.

The smell of smoke followed us as we passed frequent smouldering plots of blackened land. The jungle is also being cleared, in an era of global warming, at one of the fastest rates in the world by illegal settlers who slash and burn the forest to clear it for cattle ranches and palm oil farms. Sometimes ranchers turn looters when, in doing so, they discover sites before the archaeologists.

We pass a military checkpoint, a common sight in these parts. The region has a reputation of being lawless and has become the main battleground of the drug cartels—Los Zetas, the Gulf cartel, the Sinaloa Federation and the Mendoza clan—in a turf war. For several years the fearsome and violent Zetas, special forces soldiers who deserted the Mexican army to act as enforcers of Northern Mexico's Gulf cartel before breaking away to form a cartel of their own, has been trafficking with impunity in these remote jungles, perfect for landing plane loads of cocaine on cleared airstrips. Establishing themselves in the sparsely populated Petén in 2007 barely a decade after the 36-year-long Guatemalan civil war ended, they presented a challenge to the fledgling democracy. In 2010, equipped with assault rifles, grenade launchers and armoured vehicles, Los Zetas encountered a Guatemalan army patrol and battled it to a stalemate. They provoked a state of martial law in 2011 when, near the town of La Libertad—on my route in the following days—they tied up and decapitated over two dozen farm workers who had no connection to the drug trade and scrawled a "you're next" message to the ranch owner on a wall in blood from a severed leg. He was reportedly helping the Gulf cartel. This is the real Breaking Bad down here.

Base camps for active archaeology sites have guards, and the drug gangs see that kind of permanent presence as a threat in detecting their activities. The temple site to which I was heading, El Zotz, is however inactive, though recent excavation of a hill of jungle detritus revealed elaborate stucco masks on the walls of a pyramid, dubbed the Temple of the Night Sun. Zotz means bat in the local language; the site is so called due to the clouds of bats that fill the sky at dusk from caves in the nearby limestone cliff. Vampire bats.

We entered a small village and my driver dropped me at a wooden shack, seemingly a family home with happy children, welcoming adults, and chickens and a dog roaming the dirt floor. It is the village comedor, or restaurant.

"You have brake-fast hair. I peek you up hair in two dace."

He said my guide to El Zotz would be along shortly, and then he was gone. A warm, smiling lady with a leathery face and a long skirt presented me with a plate of scrambled eggs and tomato, stewed black beans, salty cheese and tortillas, and poured me some sweet coffee, a typical breakfast here. As I tucked in I mused over my half relief, though the driver was a nice guy, that perhaps the new guide would speak clearer English. He arrived soon enough and addressed me with a  gentle, "Meester."

"Buenas dias," I said. I would be spending two days on a trek with him to learn about the jungle and this ancient Mayan site. "Me llamo Wayne. ¿Habla inglés?"

He shook his head. "Español," he said.

Buses: Guatemala

Looking like a giant jungle tree-house with its undulating stone garden courtyard, fully grown trees and steep, ladder-like steps leading to rooms, the Hostel Los Amigos in Flores, Guatemala, is one of the best hostels I've ever stayed in (joining other frontrunners Travellers House in Lisbon, Portugal, and the former HI hostel on Lake Alta in Whistler, Canada, where I stayed in 1994 and which sadly ceased 40 years of operation in 2003). Los Amigos has a restaurant with great food, a bar, a night lounge, and its own travel agency providing minibus connections to the Tikal temple complex, the big drawcard in this part of Guatemala.

A young Irish girl I befriended at the hostel, also travelling solo but right around Central America for nine months (making the Solonaut look like a lightweight), caught the minibus with me to Tikal for the sunset tour. She planned to stay the night, as did I to catch the pyramids at both sunset and sunrise (though I subsequently learned that there is no sunrise in a jungle that has 365 days of morning mist) and, both of us being backpackers, we chose the cheapest accommodation available: hammocks with mosquito nets in the campground for 85 quetzales (A$12).

I had never attempted more than an afternoon doze in a hammock. This one was made of denim and the mosquito net was actually an opaque cotton cloth forming a ceiling and four walls that draped to the concrete slab beneath my suspended arse, upon which I had visions of plummeting flat on my back mid-REM when the hammock rope sprang unwound at 3am. I was worried the full cotton enclosure might be stuffy in the steamy jungle, but on the contrary I was cold in the early hours and had to gather up the denim sides to wrap myself. All night I could hear mobile phone pings and beeps and twirrups until I realised these were the sounds of jungle nightlife. Nokia has been here with a microphone. Howler monkeys, on the other hand, sound decidedly unlike mobile phones and more like a hoarse lion, or a giant hound with whooping cough. Or rather, twenty giant hounds, as they howl in troops. If your mobile phone made a sound like that you'd set off a panicked stampede of fellow commuters. And I'm not sure exactly when howler monkeys sleep, as they make their calls to each other day and night. All in, I still actually managed six hours of sleep, though the knees were a bit sore from being stretched straight.

Los Amigos forgot they had sent us up there by the next day. The tour companies maximise profits, understandably, by sending minibuses up full, several per day. Unfortunately, they failed to send up two empty seats for our scheduled return on the final shuttle at half-noon. We found two others in the same boat, so it sounds like a common occurrence. The shuttle drivers told us we could catch the colectivo, the public service known to backpackers as a chicken bus, back into town.

The colectivo is also a minibus, seating twelve comfortably. A "conductor" rides with the passengers, manning the sliding door, collecting fares and securing any baggage on the roof via a side-mounted ladder. We left Tikal with ten people, and after a couple of roadside pick-ups soon fit twelve. We made another stop a bit further on and picked up one more. Then two more. The conductor made room by opening the side door and standing in the void, hanging on like it was a catamaran. We stopped again and let in another two. The conductor shifted to the ladder and rode outside. Then we let in a family of five. The conductor returned to the open slide door, this time to hold everyone in from falling out. After several more stops I counted thirty-three men, women and children wedged from rear window to windscreen, kids on laps and bodies pressed together standing and sitting. It was so ridiculous we all laughed about it. Guatemalans are pretty relaxed people. The conductor told us their record is forty, with people on the roof.

I complained to Los Amigos and made sure I was reimbursed for the cost of the colectivo—about $4. Hardly seems just.