DAY 2... SAN CRISTÓBAL INTO GUATEMALA

waiting at the pier at Panachajel

DAY 2

The wake up call is someone banging brutally on my door. It’s 6:30 am and I pop out of bed happy to be able now to deal in flesh with the mysterious bus to Guatemala and the travel agency that really didn’t want to make a reservation. Departure time is 8:00 am. Well, and then later they said 7:30, so really I don’t know what time it actually will be, the departure. So, I am out on the rain-soaked streets easily by 7:00 dragging my big suitcase along the cobblestone street and trying hard to be patient with the surrealistic street numbers.

When I find the travel agency the woman sitting officiously behind the desk says she doesn’t work there. I get ready to ask her what the hell she is doing sitting behind the desk and before I can she says she works for another business that uses the space and that the guys, the chavos,who run Tierra Mayas usually get there about 8am. So much for the 7:30 departure. At 8:20 a chubby chavo shows up. And, yes, he’s Antonio and, yes, he has my reservation. That’s better than the hotel last night, I think. He peers into the reservation book, leafs one page this way and then back. I wait for him to tell me that I am the only passenger and for that reason they would not be able to make the trip today with just one passenger and that if I check back tomorrow maybe there will be more people who want to go to Guatemala.

But instead he takes my money and leads me around the corner where there are 2 Toyota diesel mini busses idling and at least 25 backpackers with, yes, backpacks, big ones, waiting to go to Guatemala. I fantasize being stuck in the back row of seats with no air, getting car sick and concentrating on keeping the orifice closed and instead barge my way into the second row of seats, close to an open window with a good view out the front. Here I think I can survive. Long-haired Japanese guys on either side of me. And it all the odor of back-packing. But that’s ok. It’s great these kids are out seeing the world.

And I must look like an escapee from the old folk’s home.

My fellow passengers are all 20 somethings, a sort of UN like collection of kids. There are, of course, my two Japanese fellow inhabitants of the second row. Then a huge, stunning dutch couple in unbelievable shape. Except that the guy has horrible knock knees in his bremuda shorts. Ruins the whole thing, poor guy. Now I understand what the permanent frown lines in his girlfriend’s face are all about. And then there are the British girls with their annoying little accents that sound more appropriate to some fine lady’s afternoon tea than this trip.

Baggage is strapped to the top and covered with a tarp against the likely rain and we head south for Guatemala. My intestines feel better, less devils horns. Maybe the medicine is working. The passenger group falls amazingly silent. I look around. They are all asleep. It’s just me and the driver. It’s another Mayan driver. This one is big, wide, powerful, only missing an amazing headpiece and a lost kingdom.

The low morning sun shines through impossibly long-needled pine forests. Cliffs of grey and white stone glisten wet. The road rises and pines give way to fir trees. They reach towards each other from opposite sides of the road and we pass through a tunnel of dark green limbs as if exiting an unexpected embrace. The tin roofs of the tiny houses catch the reflection of the grey sky and become momentarily a multitude of strange perfectly rectangular little ponds dotting the wet green countryside. Mayan families walk along the intensely green fields on the side of the road. The women are in traditional huipiles and heavy woven, black furry wraparound skirts longer in front that in back. In the silence of the car I drink in these sights, love the shape of this landscape to my bone marrow, feel the colors and wander the sandy paths that lead to a hidden houses, only rising smoke from chimneys visible.

And these big kids are asleep. And they will go home and tell everyone all about the trip from Chiapas to Guatemala. Or will they say that they don’t remember, were mostly asleep?

Suddenly we are descending the mountains. The air becomes hot and heavy. Huge mango groves crowd the road. I ask the driver how far to the border of Guatemala. He points ahead. And ahead of us rise a range of violently beautiful mountains, jagged, deep green and blue velvet with heads lost in deep storm clouds. My heart leaps at this sight, and what I feel is no less than something like an ecstasy of coming adventure. And now I know. I am so, so happy that I made this trip. These sights, this physical experience of new places is like food to me. What part of me was so prone to second thoughts, reservations and doubts about this trip and why?

We rise through these new foreplay-to-real-Guatemalan mountains. The road hangs high above huge rivers casacding muddily over house size boulders. High above, the clouds open revealingfor a few seconds the regimented rows of coffee fields on precipitous slopes. I keep taking off my sun glasses to be sure I am seeing the colors correctly. Yes, yes, it is really green beyond belief. No, it is more blue. Wain, maybe both blue and green. Whatever it is, the colors pour over you like a magic herbal bath moving a 60 mph.

We top a rise in the road and without warning the road is crowded from every side with vendors selling clothes. These are not beautiful native things, but the cheapest of the cheap from somewhere in China or wherever they make cheap clothes in gaudy colors. The rain is almost constant and the vendors protect themselves with the ubiquitous plastic tarps in even gaudier colors. The immediate impression is delightful with so much color against the blue/green world surrounding us. There is hardly room between the vendors for the mini buses to get through. We have arrived at Messilla, the border town from Mexico to Guatemala, and as we move into the town the scene turns from pretty to surrealistic, into some Mexican/Guatemalan Hieronymus Bosch version of hell and damnation and the poor people that are caught in its giant maw.

Now, as one would expect in any good Bosch painting, things get weird. We are told that we have to get out of the mini busses as we enter a muddy parking lot up a steep street. And once out in the mud we find our luggage being unloaded from the top of the bus. We are told that we have to walk to Guatemalan customs and immigration with our luggage. Dragging a rolling bag in mud is actually worse than dragging it over cobblestones. You might want to try it sometime. In this manner we eventually arrive at the main street of Messilla and line up to go through immigration. Customs never happens. Outside on the street, all around us swirl an unimaginable crowd of vendors, women all in Mayan dress, children in anything, men hanging out, guys offering to change money to Guatemalan Quetzales. I have to laugh at one rate I was offered for dollars and send the guy packing, but then think that I had better do it because who knows what lies ahead. Then he refuses to take anything less than 50 dollar bills and the laugh is on me. Have you ever been turned down by a money changer? Humility learned in a place of thieves and robbers and beautiful Mayan women.

As we wait for something to happen, different Toyota mini busses pull up in front of us (diesel super charged and that’s important). Our drivers know these drivers. And very soon we are being loaded into the new busses according to destination. The deal is: the Mexican busses only go to the border and the Guatemalans take over from there. I grab the absolute best seat, front seat with great view, a window to roll down and the driver to talk to. I mean the rest of them will probably sleep until the curves jiggle them around so much that they crack heads with each other? The driver tells me that people come from all over both countries to buy clothes cheap at Messilla. Sorry, but for me there is something here that reminds me of vultures devouring the hardly recognizable last remains of the sick beast of bad capitalism. Very end of the world and I am glad to move on.

So finally we enter Guatemala. Every woman along the road wears the traditional dress and as we move from town to town along the road the dress changes. Here everything is deep burgundy embroidered in more burgundy, red and deepest of blues, and there everything is in all colors imaginable. In contrast to much of Mexico, the huipiles (tops, blouses) are worn tucked into the wrap-around skirt and the whole thing held together by a beautiful embroidered cloth belt woven in many colors. It is beautiful. “People,” I want to shout out the car window, “don’t go to Messilla and buy that stuff!”

There are big busses here, but they are the fantastically painted school bus types and they are amazing with decorations and colors and roaring up the mountains, with mufflers blaring and packed with people in the aisles and seats. They greet us with fog horn sounding honking as they zip past us. In a pick up ahead of us a man is asleep in the back. He is lying on a load of big bags, overflowing from the back of the truck, one inch from falling onto the highway. He blissfully drapes one leg over the loading gate and sleeps the sleep of the innocent, perhaps.

We burst from deep forests, water falls and that magical green/blue world into the highest spot on the Pan American Highway. And around us the majestic tops of active volcanoes rise into the clouds. And suddenly I feel like I know what ‘America’ is and what it isn’t: not shopping malls and endless super highways, but continents of huge promise, indescribable beauty, a new place, a place of great cultures and amazing blue/green beauty, a place to start over when the old world got tired. And I wonder if we ever really understood all of that or if we only saw it as a new place to exploit. But it is beautiful and there is still some kind of new power here, and this América does not cease existing at the Texas border. It may truly begin there. And I am proud to be this kind of American.

Really heavy rain hits. There are avalanches everywhere. Sometimes we take detours around them and sometimes we drive through the mud. It looks like the mountains are dissolving. The driver has a head set stuck into his ears and is constantly on the phone with what must be an amazingly large circle of friends. I listen to these conversations trying to figure out who he really must be and decide I like him. He laughs in a totally infectious way to things someone tells him on his ear plugs. Honestly, I am a little nervous about the constant phoning on these roads, but then I think he must know what he is doing and, anyway, God help us if he doesn’t. Suddenly, the infectious laugh disappears. Something serious has happened. He turns to me and tells me that we can’t get to San Pedro La Laguna, my desitination, because an avalanche has caused the one road to be closed. He asks me if I would mind taking a boat across the lake from the city of Panajachel. Sounds sort of dreamy to me even though it’s getting dark and we are no where close to Panajachel. He assures me that we will be there before the last boat leaves and promises to take me to the dock.

Panajachel is a busy place. I think it must be the sort of commercial hub for all the towns around Lago Atitlán, lots of Guatemalan textiles being sold on the streets in the growing twilight. At the dock we are met by some guy who insists on helping with my big bag which is fine with me. After the driver leaves he tells me I will have to wait more than an hour for the boat to San Pedro, but that if I want to take a boat myself, I could leave immediately. I ask how much. He says 220 Quetzales. I am almost too tired to try to figure that out, but imagine it is something like 200 Mexican Pesos or 20 dollars. I ask him how much the regular boat is and hear that it is 25 Quetzales and decide that the price is worth the wait for the regular boat. In the light of day that feels like a really stupid, cheap decision on my part. But that’s what I did. 220 Quetzales seemed like a fortune to me.

And so I wait on the edge of this huge lake as the light of day slowly dwindles to darkness. The water, sheltered by volcanoes and mountains surrounding the lake, reflects the graying light of the sky. There are no bright colors of the Mexican sunset from the terrace at Casa Curtidores, just blues and greens and silver. The others waiting for the boat are only silhouettes against the silver sky and water. It’s a slow movement of a Mahler symphony and all the mystery of a Venetian night. We wait and hardly anyone talks, just the crystalline sounds of the Mayan women in their secret languages.

The boat is full when we leave. Luckily, we have a roof over our heads since the rain begins again full blast. I have lugged my huge suitcase to the front of the boat. Rain pours in from the opening at the front and then we hit a wave and get doused. The men sitting around me grab a sky blue plastic tarp and we hold it up in front of us for the duration of the trip. In one moment the waving blue tarp, lit as it is from the front by the boats lights and covering our heads becomes moving water and we are under it but not drowning. This rather hallucinatory state continues for almost the entire 40 minute journey across until I remember that I forgot to ask specifically if this is the boat to San Pedro. If I end up in some other little town along the lake after today…. yikes. But there is little to do but hang on to the blue tarp and plunge ahead hopefully above the water.

The boat can’t land at the usual dock because the lake is so high. So we maneuver ourselves onto a small private dock. I ask a guy next to me if this is San Pedro. You know, very casually, as if there were many stops for the boat, like a city bus in Chicago. He says yes! Thank God and I am serious. I lug my huge suitcase and everything else along a muddy path and half dissolved brick steps and someone’s terrace to get to the actual gate from the lake to the town and then up a steep, steep ascent slick with the rain.

At the corner there is an internet café and I send a quick message that I am safe and wait for Rubén, the director of my Spanish school, who is supposed to meet me here and take me to the apartment I am renting.

We hop into one of the tuk-tuks waiting and head off down the narrow, rainy street. I need an umbrella. Ramón informs me that he is going to put me up for one night in a room at the school since getting to my apartment would be difficult at night and in the rain. Oh, yikes, what next? I thought the apartment was at the school. But, listen, I am flexible. The room at the school is fine until I discover, after I am alone, that the walls are wet from the rains and the mattress is massively moldy as is the pillow. I ask for protection from mold and fall asleep in the rain until sometime in the middle of the night there is banging at my door and then someone who has a key forces it open and shines a flashlight in my face and shouts: “The electricity has failed? We need candles!”