(CONQUISTADOR: Larry August riding a horse on the beaches of El Salvador.)

“Man, you’re going to love Catacamas,” Larry August said over the telephone one afternoon in his familiar gravelly voice.

The New Orleans public relations man was pitching the Honduran town as a potential destination to this long-time travel journalist.

“It’s just like Dodge City in the 1880s,” he said matter of factly, “except instead of guns, everyone here carries a machete.”

(At the time all I knew for certain was that the highway from the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa to Catacamas, a rambunctious cattle town tucked in the Central American country's remote eastern backcountry, had been dubbed “the corridor of death” because of frequent attacks on travelers by robbers.)

Count me in, I said.

Although Larry was in Catacamas to produce a Discovery Channel documentary called “The Cave of the Glowing Skulls,” about an ancient Mayan burial cave near the Talgua River, he thought I might get a good travel story out of the trip. And I knew better than to doubt him. Over the years my travels with Mr. August had included some fairly wild adventures in Central America and the Latin Caribbean that produced stories my editors loved even if they questioned my sanity.

But that’s getting ahead of the story.

‘DO YOU HEAR ANY GUNFIRE – WELL, DO YOU?’

In my nearly 30 years as a journalist, I have never met anyone quite like Larry August. No travel writer has. A former Hollywood public relations legend who had relocated to New Orleans, Larry, in his 60s, was brash and outspoken and fond of the craziness of the road less traveled. As people savvy as the day was long, he smoked More cigarettes and enjoyed fine aged rum, possessed a writer's gift for storytelling and could smell bullsh*t five miles before it appeared on the horizon.

Smart players like him never get caught with their pants down in the back of the oxcart. I can't say the same for myself.

While living in the Big Easy he began cultivating tourism-related clients, including hotels and small airlines, in far-flung spots in Central America – the kind of places few travel journalists visit and even fewer Americans ever read about. As testament to his unconventional PR genius, Larry would lasso together small groups of writers, mostly from major newspapers and syndicated news services, and whisk them away to these eccentric locales. Dyed-in-the-passport travel journalists with a lust for offbeat destinations respected Larry's talent for bringing Mohammed to the mountain, if you will. Likewise, the resulting travel articles that appeared in newspapers nationwide were literally gold to Larry’s clients because editors almost always gave the stories big spreads. Everyone has read about Branson, Missouri; not so much the volcano-rimmed backcountry of El Salvador, or wild Garifuna dancehalls in Honduras within spitting distance of the Mosquito Coast.

No matter the destination, though, I could always count on moments of sheer gonzo weirdness.

One afternoon in El Salvador, for instance, Larry led our small entourage like blind ducklings through the rush-hour downtown streets of capital San Salvador, arms waving at his sides while shouting above the din of traffic in a voice loud enough to be heard by nearby pedestrians: “Do you hear any gunfire – well, do you!? I don’t hear any gunfire. I told you guys the civil war here is over. I would never lie to you.”

In the Dominican Republic, I had the pleasure of demolishing a bottle of Barceló Añejo rum with Larry at a sidewalk table at an Iranian-owned pizzeria on the main beach drag in Santo Domingo on presidential election night, as we watched the entire city morph into a riotous party of celebration punctuated by bullhorns blaring from every overcrowded moped and flatbed truck that passed before our increasingly bleary eyes. During this trip we fended off a boisterous trio of guitar-wielding prostitutes in the Jarabacoa Mountains and, at Larry’s insistence, brought food to impoverished, Haitian immigrant children living amid the unspeakable squalor of one of the Dominican Republic's desolate sugarcane-cutter villages. Another night we danced at an amphitheater-like merengue disco in San Pedro de Macoris with some of the most mercilessly beautiful women I had ever seen this side of my dreams.

Next morning Larry asked if I had enjoyed the freshly pit-roasted pig we ate at the open-air roadside stall in San Juan de la Maguana. Our driver apparently had taken us clear halfway across the opposite side of the island at 2 a.m. into a bad neighborhood just so we could enjoy his favorite local delicacy. Apparently, too, the evening's worth of Cuba libres had left me with little recollection of our late-night repast.

"We're we ever in any danger?" I asked.

"The entire time," he said.

‘BACKS UP AGAINST THE WALL’

It was during a visit to the Caribbean coastal town of Trujillo, Honduras, that a noisy citywide protest by local Garifunas, held during one of the country’s notorious rolling blackouts, forced us to sneak out of an afterhours bar with the help a local bodyguard for American ex-pats, who was brandishing a 9mm Glock. As the cacaphony of shattering shop windows continued to add fear to the fire, I offered our little entourage what I believed to be a reasonable alternative.

“Why don’t we hide under the tables and drink ourselves into a stupor?” I asked.

The bodyguard shook his head. "Stay behind me and do as I tell you," he said, poised at the bar's exit gate with his pistol barrel pointed at the 12 o'clock position.

Per his instructions, we inched our way down the street, “backs up against the wall" in order to disappear into the shadows, until we reached our cars and ultimately sped away into the darkness of the black night back to our hotel. Hell, yeah, it was cocktail time.

Larry was a Mother Hen when it came to safeguarding his charges (in Honduras he always sent his omnipresent bodyguard-translator Luis with us whenever we went out at night), and he knew to keep strictly hands-off when it came to what we journalists wrote. But boy did he ever know how to grease the wheels to help make a good story even better. No more so than the next night when we arrived at the rustic, corrugated tin-roof dancehall in Trujillo to experience first-hand the West African-influenced dances local Garifunas have kept alive for centuries. The band consisted of six men, each strapped to a conga hand-carved from a local avocado tree, plus the melody guy, who blew his notes through a conch shell. Pounding, rhythmic jams ran as long as 45 minutes at a stretch, requiring the utmost stamina on the part of musicians, as singles and couples took turns strutting their best dance steps before the band.

If my eyes and ears hadn’t known better, I might have sworn I had been flung back in time to the early 1700s.

After a few hours and even more beers I found myself strapped to a conga and jamming with what seemed to me at the time both the hottest and coolest band in the world. Imagine the spine-tingling syncopation that filled the dancehall that night with six percussionists each playing a different rhythm. And I was in the thick of things thanks to Larry.

"I bought the band a round of beers -- $7 total," he said later. "You were in like Flynn."

In the ensuing years, Larry and I fell out of touch as our respective lives and careers took different paths. It was while at the airport preparing to board a plane to Spain that I heard the voice-mail his son Scott had left on my cell phone informing me of Larry's untimely passing. Looking back, my favorite – and wildest -- travel stories were always those written in part as a result of his mad-hatter genius. Unfortunately, I never got the chance to tell him why I owed him so much.

Unable to sleep, I thought about Larry during the entire flight to Barcelona.