Green Dreams

Macho Eco-Tourism Made Easy

                                                                                                            

     Travelling outside the normal parameters in Central America requires a sense of adventure and a lot of ego. Stephen Benz has a healthy dose of both, as he demonstrates in his travel journal “Green Dreams”, a Lonely Planet publication. The book actually open with him in Peru in the late Eighties, following the political strife there and eventually taking a canoe journey into the Amazon, where he gets a taste of his new career. As an independent journalist with a sense of wanderlust, Benz initially was looking for political hotspots for a paying byline. He discovered that he not only got into that game a little too late, but that he also did not have the nerve for the tension and indiscriminant violence. What he did have was the desire, the ability and enough of the swashbuckling braggadocio to rub elbows with established journalists at all the local ex-pat watering holes. When the talk of a biosphere in Honduras and ecotourism cropped up, Benz showed interest while others balked: after all, green tourism was untested, no body was shooting at each other there, and it was in the Caribbean Mosquitia zone, a godforsaken area, in the collective opinion of the seasoned veterans.

     But Stephen’s curiosity was piqued, so he researched as much as he could of that area (very little) and quickly took the plunge, relying largely on introductions by friends of friends, and soon found himself in the small village of Brus on the Caribbean coast, whose only other gringo citizens were a missionary couple, a retired doctor and at times a pilot. The rest of the people spoke Meskita, a dialect of indigenous, Spanish and English combined. And no one had heard of the biosphere. He had been an exchange student in Costa Rica so his next venture was to San Jose, where he struck paydirt. Ecotourism was catching on here and Benz jumped onboard. Benz does a good job observing the changes he’s seen the country go through since he visited twelve years earlier, musing on the contradiction in terms between ecology and tourism. He is a witty writer with a perceiving eye.

     The journalist’s next stop was Guatemala City, to follow the Ruta Maya northeast into the Yucatan Peninsula. After a stopover in Tikal, he met with several young, educated Mayans who were part of the group dedicated to empowering Mayas and their traditions. It is a powerful section of the book. Oddly, Benz only visits a few of the more popular Mayan ruins: Tikal, Palenque and Copan, preferring to go into Maya hamlets off the beaten path. It was enlightening but I felt it strayed from the concept of seeing how ecotourism was working in the area: there was no tourism in the pueblos he visited. Still, Benz makes a lot of valid observations and the book is certainly worth the read.

     Green Dreams is Stephen’s second book about Central America, his first being “Guatemalan Journey” written after living in that country for two years. He currently teaches in Atlanta and has apparently discovered his softer side, becoming a hiway poet with his new publication, “U.S. 77”.