DAY 1... SAN MIGUEL TO SAN CRISTÓBAL DE LAS CASA

GUATEMALA
and
SAN PEDRO LA LAGUNA

DAY 1

I have to admit that I love being up above everything. And that’s where my little room is overlooking Laguna Atitlán, overlooking fields of corn, and the house plant variety of corn plant but 30 feet tall and little patches of coffee plants and then blue and green mountains, volcanoes sheltering the lake in their laps. And this little town of San Pedro La Laguna nestled here as it is with its strange network of hardly any streets at all, but little walk ways jogging here to the left, there to the right moving to the shape of the lake like a child cozying into its mother’s body.

I was determined to make this trip. It had been the major item on my list of things I have to do to reconstruct my life after David was seduced away with a job of a lifetime in Austin. The list read: take an intensive Spanish course in an isolated place where people don’t speak English; become fluent. And so I chose Guatemala because it looked like the schools were good; everything seemed amazingly cheap; no classes, all private instruction, and Guatemala had never been part of my travel plans and a little adventure wouldn’t hurt anyone. And I was feeling a little glum about being in this big house alone. And on and on, but the whole time I secretly had a strange sense of foreboding. Don’t really know what that was about. Ok, it seemed strange to travel alone and then too I will admit that I wondered about making a trip like this alone, doing it ‘at this age’. And I really hate that last one. I hate the feeling of thinking that something terminal could happen ‘at this age’. You know, that you would be in some strange intersection in an unknown country getting carried away on some stretcher helpless. Dead would be better than helpless. Not a fun thought, and still these strange ideas kept going through my head. But don’t count on me to be somebody who backs down. Even at the last minute.

It’s going to be a complicated trip. Bus to Mexico City. Flying from Mexico City to Tuxtla Gutiérrez in Chiapas, late at night taxi an hour and half to San Cristóbal de las Casas. And then early the next morning some kind of a bus from San Cristóbal into Guatemala and San Pedro La Laguna. The chanciest part of the trip is the so-called bus from San Cristóbal to Guatemala. I have the feeling it’s not a bus but a van and I hope I don’t get stuck in Chiapas. Well, it’s chancy and the whole thing is complicated but cheap!

And the minute I get situated on the bus to Mexico City more or less stabbing pains hit me in the lower abdomen. The stretcher-in-a-strange-country vision haunts me. It’s a little like there is a devil in your gut and he is trying to break out by piercing your intestines with his little, sharp horns. And those little horns are making lots of gas and that’s not nice on a bus. I am, therefore, trying intently to keep my lower orifice tightly shut. I remember these feelings from having had amoebas or some god-awful bacterial infection and am hanging on for the ride. It’s not at all how I want to feel for these three weeks of working towards finally being able to really speak Spanish.

Luckily, you can buy great drugs in Mexico without a doctor’s prescription and that’s exactly what I do at the airport. And swallow the big pill without water and rush to stand in an endless line to check a huge suitcase still squeezing the orifice closed. My bag is underweight. It’s a miracle. Orifice is squeezing efficiently.

At the Tuxtla airport I get a taxi and sit in front…figure that’s much more equalitarian. I swear the driver is pure Mayan. That face. He’s a little guy, but that face is in a thousand carved steles. And Mr Mayan driver is driving a Volkswagen! And he’s a damn good driver. And when he puts on his glasses he looks like a nice office Mayan and that really freaks me out. Tuxtla is tropical, hot and humid and raining. By the time we roar up and over the mountain to San Cristóbal de las Casa it is frigid, still raining, but cold. After the trip there last summer the place seems familiar to me, even homey. Still I am lost and drag my huge bag up and down the street in the rain looking for the hotel, not caring now at all about the orifice. It’s almost midnight. The place is deserted. Surrealistic street numbers make things worse: here #24 and next to it (same side of the street) is #15 and up the street where I expect higher numbers is #21. I stop in the rain. Want to have a smoke so badly that I can hardly breathe. Ask people. No one knows anything about addresses or hotels. And then I find the hotel by accident. I am so glad I made a reservation but find out to my horror and chagrin that no one wrote anything down about me and my fancy reservation…………”no problem, Señor, of course we have rooms.” And they do. It’s like a little pink painted cave off the main patio with one tiny window, but a shower that blasts your skin off and it’s hot. The pillow feels like they have bundled up old socks and stuck them inside of an old pillow case.

Am trying to go to sleep but instead of sleeping I go over and over in my head how totally disorganized the company ‘Tierra Maya’ had seemed. Tierra Maya is the travel agency that does the so-called bus trip from San Cristóbal into Guatemala. I did talk to them. The guy’s name was Antonio. He seemed a little reluctant to make the reservations, but I had insisted. Then he assured me everything would be all right. This was obviously the weak point in the planning for the trip, but it was way cheaper than flying all the way. Last night I had asked the guys at the desk of the hotel what they thought about that Tierra Maya and they looked at me vaguely. I lay there imagining that if they screwed up, I would take a regular bus. The next day I found out there were no regular busses into Guatemala.

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