The Tuk-Tuk and its teenaged driver took me through the border town whose name I never bothered to ask for. I paid him a dollar twenty five knowing full well that it was probably a dollar too much and before I even set foot in the station, a man grabbed my backpack and tossed it to a younger man standing on top, hastily lashing down the various sacks and bags and suitcases along the fuselage of a discarded American school bus, painted with great care in dark green stripes and patterns. When I walked onto the bus, which was in the process of accelerating as I reached the driver, the first thing I saw was that every seat was taken. Not only was every seat taken, but all of these seats designed for two children were taken by at least three adults, sometimes additional children and babies and puppies crawled along laps as well.
I elected to stand, and for few seconds the wind whipped through the open windows. The windows that immediately brought back so many memories from childhood. Memories of tiny little fingers struggling with the two metal clasps to open or close the half windows. You know the ones, you had to grab both sides simultaneously and press them toward the middle, and no matter how hard you tried the window would only go up or down one notch when you wanted it to go all the way. I stared at the windows before my eyes caught a baby gulping down slugs of coca cola in front of me, and then another from a bottle of orange soda across the aisle. If there was an instruction manual on rearing an obese child, giving your baby soda would be on the first page. It’s hard to judge anyone riding on a chicken bus though, knowing full well that formula for one baby probably costs more than a meal for an entire family.
My breeze from the windows ceased soon after as the already full bus kept picking up more and more people. Loaded as it was I don’t think the bus made it much over about twenty miles an hour, yet there we were, stopping every few blocks to pick up more Guatemalans. They came in from the back door and the front. There were over twenty people standing in the aisle with at least three in every seat. There was a horde in front of me and some farmer, with a bag full of vegetables and a machete digging one of his knuckles into my ass. I don’t know how long this went on, this endless filling and pressing. When I got on my first chicken bus I was tired and frustrated, and then there was only a growing, gnawing rage. It built and built, slowly consuming all other thoughts.
Finally just as I was running out of curses the waves broke and receded, for whatever reason the flow of people started going the other way. Space opened up and the air tasted a little less like body odor and despair. I got a seat and a few minutes later gave it up to a mother and her baby. The bar had been set pretty low and I was happy to stand without some machete wielding farmer digging into me from behind. Not much later I got a seat again and finally had a chance to look at the countryside the bus was passing by.
It was a lush, unbroken chain of green mountains on both sides. On the right a steep gorge cradled a meandering river, over which crossed a series of rickety, hundred yard long rope-plank bridges, like something out of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Farmers had built these across the chasm in order to get onto the mountains that showed the beginnings of terraced fields. Ambition crashed directly the unyielding, steeply pitched slopes.
Getting to watch what happened as the bus slowed down and accelerated it was easy to appreciate the mesmerizing dexterity and mental alacrity of the money handler. He remembered all the stops of five dozen passengers and also what bag each individual had tossed onto the top of the bus. As the bus slowed he climbed out the back and onto the roof, grabbing the necessary bag and tossing it down so efficiently that no stop ever lasted more than 10 seconds and even then it was more of a deceleration, the bus rarely came to a complete stop.
The rhythm and dance of the chicken bus, probably not fit for any stage, but worthy of note. After hours and hours of buses and taxis the chicken bus brought me back into a place where I could appreciate a new experience for what it was. It reminded me that travel is often a fog of paralyzing frustration and boredom that clears occasionally for breathtaking moments of clarity and insight. That travel entails diving into the sweat and dirt and smells, the endless delays and confusion, to get that final guarantee of a beauty that is untempered, unsanitized, undisneyized, and genuine. It’s the kind of experience that allows we privileged, silver platter types to pretend we are trevelers, and stand on our pedestal somewhere above the tourists. It’s the difficulty of the journey that makes the destination inspiring – or isn’t that what all of our holy books tell us?
But this train of thought was briefly interrupted by a boy collapsing. He’d appeared at one of the stops to sell little bags of peanuts to passengers on the bus and a few minutes later, several people were looking over, keeled over face first into the aisle. The money collector now counted among his duties, resuscitating the boy. They sat him up in the seat and splashed water on him. His closed eyes didn’t slowly open, but burst wide open and stayed that way for a few minutes, and the only thing I could think of was that he was having a seizure. A few minutes later he looked a little bit normal and I realized that myself, the money collector, and the recovering boy were the only ones left on the bus.
We pulled into some kind of volunteer fire and ambulance company and a series of men who seemed like paramedics came on the bus, asked the boy some questions, shined a light in his eyes and checked his pulse before taking him inside with them. He shambled and looked around wide eyed like someone intensely drugged and then the bus turned around, barreling toward the receding light in the east.
Night falls as my pack is handed from one bounding money collector to another. The last bus of the night filled with an Austrian, a Brit, a Portuguese couple, and an American kid from Kansas, and would take us all to Quetzaltenango, or Xela in the Mayan dialect. We’ll arrive in three hours at a darkened gas station, surrounded by roving packs of stray dogs, and filled with other rechristened American school buses, that the locals out of sheer willpower keep from falling into a pile of spare parts. The six of us will walk for thirty minutes with our packs through the sleeping city, past a light every few blocks like the last embers of campfires holding back the silence of the dark.
When we set down our bags in the hostel the only food left is street food. The last diversion is the liquor store, bright and open behind a strong metal gate. Between the steel bars we exchange our Quetzalas for some bottles of beer and wine. I finish the night off looking at pictures the five had taken during their six day trek through the mountains and volcanoes of central Guatemala. As I drift to sleep in my lackluster room I recall how such a simple task had gone so long.
I woke up in San Jose del Pacifico on Friday morning and went down the hill for my first cooperative, a small van, with the two friends I’d met at the hostel there. In two and a half hours we’d arrived at the Mexican city of Pachutla, where I would wait three and a half hours for a twelve hour overnight bus to the city of San Christobel de las Casas. Since both of my new friends had taken buses directly from Guatemala to this city they assured me it would be easy to get to Guatemala from there.
When I arrived in San Christobel at around seven in the morning, the lady at the ticket counter told me that the only bus company that went into Guatemala opened at 9:30. After waiting two and half more hours the bus company opened and the ticket operator told me that there was only one bus into Guatemala, and it left at 11:00…at night. But he told me in a long, long string of Spanish that I could take four separate cooperativos to the border. It was so simple!
I had already been on the road for over twenty hours, and crestfallen I decided to take a taxi to a nearby hostel and get directions from someone in English. At the hostel they told me to wait for the “boss” to arrive and he would be able to give me adequate counsel on how to breach the Guatemalan border. The boss came after I finished taking my first hot shower in four days, and told me it was actually only two cooperativos I needed. I wrote down the names of the towns I needed to get to and hoisted my bag again. I left after paying for a night, I stayed for about an hour. Two hours later I’m in the city of Comitan and two hours after that I arrive at the city of Quatemoc. At Quatemoc I encounter my first border control issue in about a dozen years of traveling. Apparently the little piece of paper they give you when you arrive in Mexico, the one I assumed was a useless customs for because no importance was placed on it, was vital for leaving Mexico again. After hemming and hawing for an hour and a three hundred peso “fine” I am finally allowed to leave Mexico. A taxi takes me through the last 20 kilometers to the Guatemalan border, and then I arrive at the first chicken bus.
When I wake up, still in Quetzaltenango it is Sunday. I take a taxi back to the gas station where we were greeted by stray dogs the night before. I ask one of the money collectors which bus goes to my destination, Lago Atitlan. In response he takes my bag and throws it on top of the bus. I go inside my next chicken bus, not really having an alternative. Three hours later I’m in a town called Mazatlatenango, and my bag goes on another chicken bus. The new money collector tells me it will be another three hours to Lago Atitlan. Again I don’t have much of a choice, so I get on and get stuffed between another less than perfumed mass of Guatemalan farmers.
Finally I arrive in Lago Atitlan, and my only task left is to get to the small town of San Pedro somewhere near the lake. When I get off the bus and ask them how to get to San Pedro their answers are cheerfully evasive. I ask a few of the local drivers and Tuk-Tuk boys and they tell me it will cost 200 quetzalas to get to San Pedro. It would cost twice what the four chicken buses from the border to here cost me to get to the last few kilometers after hundreds of miles of traveling. They tell me to go to the playa, the beach, where all the foreigners gather, and so I do. After an ungodly number of buses I got to end this little jaunt on a boat ride. For much less cash than the taxi wanted to charge me I sit on an open boat and stare out at Lake Atitlan. An enormous volcano looms above the lake, and its final explosion in whatever geologic epoch had blesses this whole region with extraordinary fecundity. The only colors were the cerulean blue of a clear sky and the verdant greens of the endless plants and grasses. After some walking and directions I found my way to Cooperativa, a beautiful space of green grass and open huts where I would take four hours of one on one Spanish lessons a day for the next three weeks.
I had left San Jose del Pacifico, a mountain town in Chiapas, Mexico at 2:30 in the afternoon on a Friday. I arrived at the school in San Pedro, Guatemala, a lake town in the shadow of a volcano, at 5 PM on Sunday. After 50 hours of torturous unknowns I’d reached my temporary home within a little piece of paradise.
