Through the Gates of Guatemala

"It is a good thing to experience everything oneself... Now I know it not only with my intellect, but with my ears, with my heart, with my stomach."

 Herman Hesse Siddhartha

I drifted down through Oaxaca like the dust that sifted through the cactus spines on the hunched brown hills. In a ghostly Mixteco town far from any highway, I sat on a mound of earth containing unknown ruins and listened to slattern notes on the trumpet blown by a teen in the deserted concha. The sun-- drugging, dripping, dazing sun-- was finally showing its full tropical force. The torturous Oaxaca roads carried me over and around the mountains and down into La Ventosa where the arms of windmills beat the wet ocean air in the night.

There was no place to stay in the town, but the officers at a migration checkpoint let me camp on their front patio.  Through a crack in the blinds of the office I saw a sort of scoreboard on the wall with the numbers of immigrants from various Central American countries they had nabbed:  Gualemala 5, El Salvador 7, Honduras 3...  The chief of the station was a 6' 6" Mexican of huge girth from Monterrey, and boomed at me in bad English when I showed up.  I nervously enjoyed the irony that I, an illegal in Mexico, was encamped by invitation in the lion's den.

Next came San Cristobal in Chiapas, a town of deadlocked Argentinians and super left-leaning Spainiards mixed with the descendants of Mayans wandering the isles of the supermarket in what looked like the skin of a slaughtered bear. It all seemed at a distance.  I had been moving so long that even when I stopped I still had a feeling of motion, as if all the objects in the world were floating in a river, always floating away. It was there my plan was born to begin walking.  I would try to walk across Guatemala.

While up until now all my travel had been focused toward the south, starting in Guatemala the continent swings east-west for a spell.  I would now always face the rising sun.  The most narrow place east-west is in the jungle lowlands of the Peten, terrain I had no interest in passing through.  Nearly twice as wide are the highlands farther south which reach to Guatemala City before tapering down to the agricultural lands of El Salvador.  This was my route.  I knew that 23 different languages are spoken in Guatemala and also that the people of the rural highlands areas are extremely poor and sometimes don´t even speak Spanish.  Apart from that I had no idea what to expect.

I prepared for a few days... scrupulously consulting maps, buying food, trying to lighten my pack.  I struggled to hoist my pack into the gear rack of the bus to Guatemala; it probably weighed sixty pounds.  I knew I would have to get rid of a lot of stuff on the way.

The bus was spacious, cool, and quiet as we descended the slow incline out of the piny Chiapas highlands into the flat wet plain of the borderland.  Hard on the border loomed abrupt ridges wrapped in mist with gashes spitting out rivers from hidden lands. I walked into these wild gates across the border and into the jungle of vendors and money changers in La Mesilla.  My plan was to take a bus a few miles down the Panamerican Highway to where I could start my walk on a dirt rode.  Everyone looked at me like I was crazy when I told them the tiny village I wanted to go to.

"What do you want to go there for?"

"Well, from there I´m going to walk to Conception Huista."

"But what do you want to go there for?"

"Well, from there I´m going to walk to... I just want to explore that´s all.  You know, get to know what´s here."

"Look, there´s a bus that goes from here to Lago Atitlan.  You´ll meet all kinds of gringos there.  Or you could go straight to the capital.  They have very beautiful malls and shopping centers there."

This would not be my last conversation like this.  I was going against the Gringo Flow, not behaving as I was supposed to.  But finally I talked to a woman selling tamales that got excited when I told her I wanted to go to Hixouc but need help finding a ride.  "Hixouc!  Oh look, that van up there will leave you off at the intersection where the road goes up to Hixouc!"

A great hunk of rusting gray and spluttering metal was already swaying away from its stop.  A goat was standing on top of it, tethered to the rack, and would crash hard onto its side with every slightest bump.  I sprinted up the road yelling and the van put on its brakes.  The goat did a faceplant into the roof.  I came around the van to the side with the sliding doors to see about 40 people and about 80 eyes, all fixed on me from inside this 16 passenger van.  I was hustled inside, crouched double and facing everyone, with the gear shift in a precarious position between my legs.

Everyone stared dumbly at me.  I stared dumbly back.  The fare collector decided that the springs would snap with one more person and so hopped into the bursting entryway, holding on by one finger and one toe. The van began to roll.

"So.  How´s everyone doing?"  It was getting plain awkward just crouched there in front of everyone, like they had all come to see a play and I, the lead actor, was just sitting on the stage doing nothing.

Their faces all lit up when they heard me speak Spanish.  I began asking questions about Guatemalan Spanish, to see what the differences were from Mexico.  They asked me about my journey.  They listened open-mouthed to my explanation of what skiing is.  The driver offered me a job as a fare collector.  I considered, then looked at our fare collector waving like a piece of survey tape in the wind, and politely declined.

We pulled into the turn-off where vans collect and the road leaves for Hixouc and everyone was calling out goodbyes to me and wishing me good luck.  I was in a deep gorge and the roads seemed to climb away forever to cloud-obscured mountaintops.  I hauled on my pack.  My knees almost buckled.  I had to get rid of stuff now.

"Hey!" I called to the van driver who was hanging out near his vehicle.  "You want some stuff?"

Beginning of the road. 

Soon my pack was considerably lighter and there was a crowd of about 30 goggling van drivers and fare collectors around me, some of them wearing Whitworth Pirate track clothing and others wearing Blue Sky raft guide apparel.  It was getting late and so I said goodbye to them and turned to the road.

I was almost immediately in the midst of coffee fincas, the red waxy berries hanging thick from all the branches, appetizing as cherries but quite bitter in reality.  Whole villages turned out to stare at me as a passed, first with startled fear in their eyes which soon melted to a smile after I greeted them and talked to them for a little bit.  The road was steep and my pack was still quite heavy and what looked like a short straight line to Huixoc was a mass of switch-backing and contouring.  I got to Huixoc, but couldn´t actually tell where the town is-- it was just a collection of fincas like the ones I had been passing through.  Darkness would come soon.  I had no idea where I would spend the night.

I gained the ridge and as the light died I looked down over a verdant and folded land, with coffee farms reaching up impossibly steep ridges to the summits and the lights of tiny towns beginning to gleam in every dell.  A motor-cycle with two silhouettes whizzed by and then braked and stopped.  When I caught up they greeted me and made conversation.  They invited me to come spend the night with their families just a little further on down the road at their finca.  And that´s how I ended up at Doña Gilberta´s, working the coffee harvest.