EVEN THOUGH ROMAN had studied Spanish through high school and taken the immersive month-long course in Mexico at sixteen, he struggled with rural Mexicans’ thick accents. Still, his command of the language improved as he went:

My spanish is good enough now that I can order a banano liquado [a fruit drink] at a cafe, be told there are no bananas, ask if I get bananas they’ll make one, leave the cafe, realize I dont know where to buy bananas, ask a nearby shop owner where I can buy bananas, get directions, buy the bananas, return to the cafe, and negotiate a lower price for my liquado.

Roman seemed surprised in his ability to navigate and remember places and people, skills he had not noticed in himself before: it’s kind of funny, ’cause I’ve spent so much time following you around, Dad, with your innate sense of direction . . . that it’s really just been a failure to pay attention.

He described tricks he had learned. He made it a point to walk through a town to get a feel for its layout in his muscles and bones and to watch for street signs, mileage markers, and landmarks when on public transport—a challenge for passengers who don’t need the kind of engagement that drivers do. With Latin American cities and towns mostly aligned north-south, Roman learned to triangulate his position using nearby mountains or tall buildings as cardinal landmarks. He found that locals willingly offered directions but mysteriously resisted using street names: I have no idea why they don’t just say 22 and 6 instead of “go left, one block, then right, four more blocks, and across from that thing.” I was encouraged that he was discovering how to travel and honored that he shared his discoveries with me.

Because Alaska’s wilderness rarely has marked or maintained footpaths, Roman and I had usually followed trails made by moose, bear, and caribou. To find and follow their routes takes a sixth sense developed through experience. Just like following game trails, Roman wrote, people trails and streets have a similar intuitiveness. He found when climbing volcanos that the widest trail was usually the right one to the summit. It was good to see that all those miles he had dogged behind me in Alaska were helping him elsewhere, too.

While Roman found physically negotiating the towns and countryside simple enough, there was a darker side to navigating Latin America, too. Almost every gringo he spoke to who had lived in Latin America was forced to leave after a year or two, due to local hostility or pervasive corruption. One woman, who had lived twelve months in Belize, told him he would be safest if he hired guides for explorations. But while guided tours were safe, even cheap, he wrote, they weren’t as fun as solving his own geographic puzzles. To climb Orizaba, the tallest mountain in Mexico, he researched online for a week, then headed up alone while trailing some locals who carried ropes and ice axes. He wrote that in the Sierra Madre:

Finding the butterflies was super fun, as I had no idea where they were. I reasoned that the butterflies were up high, so I navigated towards the highest mountain along a myriad of forest paths. Going up, I figured that the biggest path with the most horse crap would be the tourist path. And it worked perfectly.

I wasn’t surprised Roman eschewed guides. After twenty-five years of travel with him, I could count on one hand the number of times we’d used them—a night walk in Australia looking for tree kangaroos; scuba diving; on a wildlife-watching tour from an eco-lodge in Borneo; in Bhutan where all foreigners must be guided.

Following Orizaba, Roman climbed more volcanoes, including Tacaná, a 13,800-foot mountain that straddles the Mexico-Guatemala border. Because alpinism had been both so addictive and dangerous for me, I had purposefully resisted introducing it to him. But climbing volcanos is, in essence, uphill hiking at high altitude without the objective hazards of falling rock, ice, or snow—or the subjective ones of falling off a cornice or into a crevasse.

A French traveler had recommended Tacaná and suggested Roman hire a guide to do it, probably because land mines from previous conflicts were rumored to booby-trap its slopes. Roman ignored his advice. Instead he asked a hotel desk clerk about the route while near the base of the volcano in Mexico, bought water, chips, cookies, and chocolate, then caught a colectivo (the cheap minivan used by locals as transport all over Latin America) at dawn that took him to the end of the road. There he followed the obvious trail leading up.

As on nearly all of Central America’s mountains, campesinos farm Tacaná’s slopes, where they grow potatoes and beans and graze cattle and goats. Near villages, the trail braided out confusingly and he asked the friendly villagers where to go. Their Spanish directions led him over the border into a clean, Guatemalan village. Next, he followed goat trails marked by little cloven hoofprints. He climbed higher into the clouds, where, with limited visibility, he scrambled over boulders and wandered through tall pines filled with birdsong. Unlike rural Mexico, there was no trash, and little sign of humans. “It was nice to feel alone for a little while and the white-out clouds obscured the myriad villages below,” he wrote. “The air was fresh, too, above the perennial smog that hangs over Latin America.”

By the time he reached the summit cone, a thunderstorm hastened the arrival of night. His headlamp beam bounced uselessly against the mist, so he picked his way down in the fog and darkness without it, unsure where he’d arrive—Mexico or Guatemala—at bottom. With farmers in bed at sundown, there was no one around to ask for directions.

Luckily, I’ve followed Roman Dial around the wilderness all my life, so my instincts led me to the right place. I missed the last colectivo, but caught a crowded taxi. Driving was terrifying, since the same problem with my headlamp was 100-fold with the headlights. Three of us hung out the windows in the rain and clouds shouting “Derecha! Derecha!! Izquerda!” to keep from going over a cliff.

The next day he bought a pound of local Chiapas coffee for 50 pesos—about $2.50—loaded it in his pack and left Mexico for good. He entered Guatemala with his clothes smelling like the fresh grounds: “Amazing,” he wrote. Guatemala, Roman surmised, was “a legitimate Third World country,” recalling how Indonesia, rural Malaysia, and Bhutan had felt, sounded, and smelled. Stories of robbery and murder, he said in an email, gave Guatemala an edgy feel.

Roman soon set out to tackle the highest mountain between Mexico’s Orizaba and Colombia’s Andes: Guatemala’s 13,845-foot Tajumulco. To increase the challenge—and hence the reward—he decided to skip even the Internet and guidebooks. He wouldn’t ask any Frenchies, he emailed, but just ask locals, as a good way to sharpen his language skills. His plan was to navigate the rural confusion of dirt roads, trails, and farmlands with just his wits and his Spanish. It would be a different sort of hard and risky, he said. And more like true exploration, I thought.

Chapter 15

Guatemala

With friends, San Pedro La Laguna, Guatemala, March 2014.

Courtesy of the author

After his almost three months of traveling alone and translating for others, Roman’s conversational Spanish edged toward proficient. Knowing only that the closest town to Tajumulco was San Marcos, he befriended an old cowboy campesino who showed him where to catch the bus. In San Marcos, he asked for directions from a group of middle-aged women. With his mother’s cheekbones and heart-melting smile, he had good luck with this demographic. “Plus,” he said, “they had great directions.”

Roman found his smile went a long way in Guatemala, especially with the Maya. The Maya reminded him of the Malays in Borneo. They were short-statured, friendly, and smiley, with no outward aggression—except the Maya seemed more willing to thieve than the Malays. Thieves or not, it was clear from his emails during his seven months of travel that he preferred Guatemala over all the other countries he visited.

Near Tajumulco, he jumped in a cab with five locals. Dropped off at a hotel, he went to the desk where three “tittering little girls” and a teenage boy checked him in. Roman tried to pry information from them about the climb, but couldn’t understand their directions. Then the children’s charismatic father appeared and in “tourist” Spanish gave “spectacular directions” (which I made him repeat about a dozen times).