A man and a fridge

Mike has been on about this solar powered fridge idea for quite a while now - a few years at least. Friends around him have always listened with interest and expressed excitement about the idea, but even after he made a market research trip to Kenya last year, maybe none of us ever thought it would actually happen - that he'd actually have the balls to go ahead and do it.... Well he's got the balls, and he's doing it.

Mike's a product design graduate from the now prestigious Aston University. He designed a community sized solar powered fridge as part of his degree course with the altruistic if not ambitious aim of saving all the poor people in the world. The idea is that poor remote communities in tropical countries don't have money, electricity, or air conditioned milk trucks, but they do have cows and lots of sun. So give them a big solar powered fridge and they can store lots of milk, for longer, allowing them to sell more at markets and at a higher quality and drink more themselves. The fridge unit can also have other stuff plugged into it, utilising all of the energy available from the solar panels.

The Remote Community Refrigerator prototype

The only remaining problem was making the business model work. Poor remote communities don't have several thousand dollars to invest in a solar powered fridge, let alone the foresight to appreciate the concept of 'investment'. So not being a billionaire philanthropist, Mike had a few gaps in the figures.

Mike is now settled in Siguatepeque, a mountain town in Honduras, where he's trying to get his Remote Community Refrigerator (RCR) business off the ground. The latest break through has come from the main milk distributor for Honduras - Sula. They collect milk via pickup trucks from small independent farmers around the country, and then process and distribute it through a number of regional processing plants before sending it out to the shops. The problem they have is that by the time their pickups arrive at the farms to collect the milk, its already been sitting there in the sun for a good few hours, as a result, they end up selling low quality milk (milk is given some kind of quality grading apparently). So they are looking for an appropriate solution to allow them to process and deliver better milk.

Mike has got all the details worked out to build the fridges in Honduras; importing components from Canada, Italy, Spain and sourcing the timber from a locally sustainable (of course) supplier. The prototype has already been built in the UK, and is currently being tested and tweaked. The only thing left to do is rent out a workshop, place the component orders, buy a pickup truck to deliver the thing, oh and persuade the Honduran milk company they want to buy the fridges.

Oh and Mike is now engaged to his Brasilian girlfriend Solange, with the wedding in Brasil in January! Congratulations. And me invited as the best man.

Mike working out the finer points of his fridge design with Sol

Watch www.native-ambition.com in the future for news on Mike's quest.

Into Honduras

Things don't seem to change much between countries here in Central America; Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras - the history might be different, the politics varies, and in some places the climate can be different, and the currencies have different names. But the culture, or more specifically, the mestizo culture (the main group of mixed Indians-Hispanics) is pretty much the same.

So heading over the border from El Salvador provided us with no great surprises. The first week was spent in the central highlands, first visiting two unspectacular mountain towns, despite their quite optimistic names; Gracias and La Esperanza ("the hope"). The only thing of real note in Gracias was a charity running a program educating local kids with an aim to lead environmental and community projects in their local area - to help preserve the environment, educate those in the surrounding communities and develop eco-tourism opportunities. I can't find a web link to the charity, but here's a link to another charity doing some related work in the area, addressing the huge problem of deforestation.

La Esperanza provided us with the chance to visit some hot springs. Natural hot springs are fairly common around these parts, so its not a huge novelty, but if there are some in the area, and you have a spare afternoon, its better than a kick in the teeth. The interesting event at these hot springs was that what appeared to be a local remote community were on a day trip to the hot springs. It became apparent they had never seen a westerner before, let alone two of the them, half naked sitting in a pool of water, who occasionally did this weird thing with their arms and legs which made them float and move across water. We definitely felt like zoo exhibits for the afternoon, as our audience just stared wide-eyed at us, following us between the different bathing pools at the springs.

The next leg of our journey was to take us to see a man about a fridge....

The Saviour

All we really knew about El Salvador before we entered was that there used to be a civil war, a fairly nasty one at that, its a little richer that its neighbours, and very few tourists bother to go there.

Within a few bus rides of entering the country we had big smiles on our faces; the avocados and mangoes were dirt cheap, the people were so friendly - bemused and inquisitive about us, and reggaeton was on the stereo everywhere.

The general reactions from local people in previous countries was not always over warm, and conversations were often started as a pretext for begging. It was always clear that many westerners had been there before us, setting bad examples with their ignorance and rudeness, and obviously flashing money around. This wasn't so much the case in El Salvador, especially in the eastern part where we started off. Not a huge amount of tourism had passed before us to give them the impression that we were rude, rich, and easily exploited.

First Encounters.

Our first interesting encounter with the locals was a family on a bus, they were returning from a market where they had been selling grapes. It turns out they were from Guatemala, staying down in El Salvador to sell their produce. Our conversation seemed to be a little more pained than usual, something didn't quite fit - we seemed to be teaching them Spanish words. But then it dawned on us; these were Mayan people, an indigenous group still existing in great numbers in Guatemala. Apparently they have still maintained a lot of their indigenous culture and most importantly their language; Spanish comes a very distance second for them. They were incredibly friendly and warm and seemed delighted and fascinated when we showed them a world map, and I showed them some photos of Cornwall. Though the huge gap in culture and education was highlighted when they asked me if the street in the photo was the Pan American highway.

Alegría

The first few days in El Salvador were spent in a charming little mountain town; Alegría. We stayed in a strange kind of hostel/house - the lady running the place only worked there during the day and went back to her own house in the afternoon. So essentially it was like our own house, with bedrooms, a kitchen, dinning room and back garden. Rest assured we made full use of the kitchen by cooking up a storm of a vegetable and been soup one night, and omelets for breakfast.

Casa Alegre - Our happy house

During out time there, we paid a visit to a local Volcano crater lake - as you do when there is one in the area. The journey there again brought us into contact with the hospitality of the locals, as we hitched a lift in the back of a truck to get there.

The crater lake wasn' t quite as draw droppingly beautiful or spectacular as we had imagined, but interesting none the less. The lake was half empty, with the exposed land being a kind of sulphur mud, providing the now familiar smell of rotten eggs in the air. There was a group of school kids playing football on an area of grass by the side of the lake. We approached them and struck up a conversation with their refereeing school teacher. The children were all from families living on the slopes of the (dormant volcano); all were poor subsistence living communities. The school itself was situated in the crater - how many kids in the world can say they go to school in a volcanic crater?!

The crater lake, Alegría

On our way back out of the crater back to Alegría, we spotted a woman walking up a path off to the right with a huge load balanced on her head, and a small child walking beside her, also carrying bags. In a 'why not, what else have we got to do today' moment, we decided to follow her and see where she was heading (which was apparently into the middle of nowhere).


We caught up with her and her son, and helped them carry their bags - full of food from the local stores. They were on their once weekly 3 hour round trip walking to the local town and back for supplies (and their bags were really heavy). The path we were following led down the outer slopes of the crater which were covered in tall cultivated vegetation such as banana and coffee plants. It turned out that there was a whole community living on the side of the volcano, living in mud huts hidden by the vegetation.

Mud hut house, near Laguna de Alegría

These are the communities that the school in the crater served. This was a whole world that you just couldn't see from just looking a the volcano's slope from afar.

Juayua and Santa Ana

Moving on from Alegría we arrived in another quaint mountain town (again avoiding the horrible heat of the Pacific coast), Juayua - which yes, was difficult to pronounce correctly at first. The attraction of this town was it had a weekly food market, where stalls were set up by people from surrounding towns serving allegedly good food. Note - the average Salvadoran dish is equally as poor as anything else we'd found in Central America. The food in this market was OK, nothing more, apart from a little expensive. Our hostel had a kitchen though, with an oven (!), so we didn't care. Other trips around the area included trips to some wonderfully clear waterfalls, the huge ancient crater lake of Coatapeque, and climbing the youngest volcano in the world; Volcan Izalco.

Me in the crater of Volcan Izalco

All these trips with the exception of Volcan Izalco were tarnished with the ever present abundance of rubbish everywhere and polluted rivers, sadly a theme running throughout Central America so far.

So all in all, we spent maybe 2 weeks in El Salvador, we could have spent more time - there is always more to see, more people to meet. But there are more beautiful countries in the world (Norway for example - damn that passport expiry date!); El Salvador is the most densely populated country in Central America, only 2% of the native forests are left, and a huge part of it is dominated by the dry, ugly pacific heat. Most travellers over look it due to some false rumours that its dangerous because of the past civil war, and its a little more expensive - both are complete rubbish. The people were probably the highlight of the country - oh, and the coconut ice cream on the corner of the plaza in Juayua.

Life on the Road

Life travelling out here is a bit different to being back in the real world, so here's a short description of what goes on.

Commuting

To get around as economically as possible, and to mix with the locals, travelling is almost exclusively achieved by public bus. The bus network is fairly good in most Latin American countries (no one has a car), there is a regular service through every town. In Venezuela it was even better, there was some kind of public transport running along virtually every road in the country. In Central, public transport only seems to run between towns, not within them and around the local area.

In Central America (excluding Costa Rica of course - which is like the 51st US state), the poor man's buses are the 'chicken buses', which are the old US school buses - the big yellow things which look more like army trucks with bad camouflage, than vehicles for transporting school children. And true to their name, its not unusual to see live chickens being transported, you can expect to see anything from birds in cages, big sacks of flour and rice, piles of wood...

Spiced-up Chicken bus, Nicaragua

The passengers are always entertained with music, usually at an annoyingly and inappropriately high volume. If you are lucky, then its Reggaeton, if you are unlucky then its some cheesy Latin guitar pop (Gustavo Leyton should be shot). And if you are really unlucky, then the driver has taped an old TV to the ceiling at the front, and the passengers are subjected to the music videos of these terrible songs (I don't mean Reggaeton of course).

The buses often double as markets, at every opportunity local sellers get on to try and tempt you with their wonderful products on offer, whether it be the quite useful chilled water in a plastic bag, or the usually poor and tasteless local street food, to any other random selection of items available in the world - gin-seng, foot fungus cream, sex education books, English dictionaries, or of course super glue.

Food

Life can get fairly simple out here, and there's usually one thing dominating your thoughts - food. To keep things as cheap as possible and to try and follow the local cuisine where ever you are, the best way to do this is to stick with the street food and whats available in the markets. The problem with this is the poor quality and taste of local food. If its meat its generally been deep fried, in a frying pan of one week-old oil, slapped on a plate with no sauce, and accompanied by rice, beans, an excuse for salad and vile tasting tortilla-looking things.

A plate of the usual - chicken, rice, beans

Other street food is equally uninviting, pastries or biscuit type things tend to be dry and pretty much inedible. A pastry we keep running into in Central, consists of some kind of disgusting cheese and sugar mix inside - cheese and sugar??

So its not really possible to stay happy and healthy on solely local food. Breakfast now consists of a trip to the local market for fruit - pineapples, mangoes, avocados, melons, oranges, coconuts, bananas, watermelons - whatever is the cheapest and most popular in the current location. In El Salvador avocados suddenly got really cheap for some reason, on the Caribbean, coconuts are fee of course, in Honduras bananas are literally given away, and in Nicaragua pineapples were a good deal.

The great market in León, Nicaragua

The jackpot is to find a hostel with a kitchen so we can prepare our own food, then not only do the meals become cheaper, but also full of taste, vitamins and goodness. Every place we stayed at in El Salvador had a kitchen, one even had an oven!, and coriander, Cinnamon, and fresh cream started to appear in the markets, aah, great memories...

When we haven't found a hostel with a kitchen for guests to use, the next best option is to find a cheap hotel that has its own restaurant included, then we tell the owners we are professional chefs and love to cook, and ask if we can use their kitchen - its worked a couple of times, but not every time.

Choosing the route

The route is kind of made up as I go along, any kind of serious planning and I tend to come out in a rash. There are plenty of travellers on the road out here - much more in Central America than in Venezuela, so often the best information can be gathered by asking them, but also a lot of information on places you can get from guide books and the Internet.

Crime

If you have a high level of common sense, and keep your whits about you, especially in the most risky places such as markets, bus stations, airports and border crossings, then crime isn't a huge problem. I've been robbed 3 times so far - all in Venezuela. The first time was within a few days of arriving, the police for some reason were not happy with my passport and documents, and so felt the need to dissect every part of my rucksack. A few days later I realised I no longer had my head torch - Venezuela police are scum! The second time I had my shorts stolen from the beach whilst I was busy swimming in the sea. The third time must have been at Caracas airport when a customs official or baggage handler took my penknife from my rucksack. All school boy errors that I have now learnt from.