Highway Robbery

Leaving Antigua was a terrible f@#*ing idea.

The morning starts innocently enough, I wake up. I take a shower. I pack my bag. This is where the trouble starts, but I won’t know this until the next morning.

The Reginadawn Villa is quite secure. So secure, in fact, that there is one key to the outer doors, and when anyone staying there needs to enter or exit the premises, they must go to the back of the hotel or ring the doorbell and ask the innkeep to come and unlock the other gates for them so they may enter/exit. Every time. Day or Night.

Shouldering my pack, I walk to the back of the hotel one last time and find the owner and exit the building one last time. Goodbye, hot showers. Hello, noisy street. With nifty motorcycle parking sign.

La Esquina, the lovely restaurant around the corner with free wi-fi is closed. It is only just past 8 on Sunday morning, so I suppose most tourists are still nursing a hangover or sipping coffee. In parquet central is a travel agency that is affliated with Lonely Planet and, based on a conversation I had yesterday with a pair of tourists, they offer trips to El Salvador on Sunday and Monday. They are closed too. I assume that a more breakfast oriented place will be open already and head up to Bagel Barn, a cool little Einstein’s wanna-be just west of Parque Central. They’re open and also have free wi-fi. It’s noisy, and the noise is really getting to me today for some reason. I put in my headphones to try and drown it out.
A little breakfast goes a long way with me. I prefer breakfast to any other meal of the day. A sandwich named “God Save the Queen” and some ill-prepared coffee go down pretty quickly and I’m heading back to Parque Central to see if the agency is open. No, again. Knocking on the door reveals that someone is there, but they only LIVE there, they don’t work there. Rather dejected I sit down on the curb to think about what to do next.

“Que necesita, amigo?”

I should be more wary when people call me friend. Appearing at my side is a young boy, perhaps ten years of age.

“A donde va?”

I tell him, I’m trying to get to El Salvador. He tells me that the unmarked door several doors up is a travel agency that should be opening in 5 minutes. They can take me to El Salvador for $25 USD, which is pretty damn expensive. I say, “No thanks. Just direct me to the regular bus station.” The kid starts playing with his phone and walks off after telling me to hold on for one minute. Now a man walks up to start talking to me. Assuming he wants my money only makes me correct. He is a taxi driver and offers to drive me to Guatemala City, Unholy Hell Pit that it is, for only $30. I tell him, thanks but no thanks; I already have a better deal, but am thinking of taking the regular bus. His face gets a little pinched and he looks at my big backpack.

“Es muy inseguridad.”

He continues on this vein, telling me it is dangerous and unduly slow until the kid comes back. They begin arguing over the kid telling me the price for a shuttle. Apparently, the taxi driver thinks he should have been able to get my money. After a few minutes, the kid tells him to get lost, and rightly so. The kid then picks up the phone to call the girl from the travel agency and get her ass down to the shop, since they don’t actually open until 11 a.m., contrary to what he told me previously.

Lesson learned here: almost anyone in Guatemala will tell you ANYTHING if it makes them money; even just a little money. Like the little kid who called me a pinchi American son of a bitch because I refused to give him a dollar just because he was begging for it. Seriously… if the dude with no legs and only one hand laying in the middle of the sidewalk is not enough to elicit cash from me, a little rat with 4 perfectly good extremities begging has little effect on me.

Lesson number two today: Central America is full of fat women. Yes, Americans have a reputation for being fat, but most folks generally attribute that only to US citizens. This is not so. Case in point, the fattie who works for the travel agency who arrives via taxi to sell me a shuttle ticket.

I’m wondering who has gone off more half-cocked here. Me, for assuming I could just wake up and find transportation to another country, or the travel agent, who apparently doesn’t have a key to the office, doesn’t know when it opens, doesn’t know if anyone else is coming, and apparently doesn’t know after numerous phone calls, what company or who if anyone will be driving the shuttle if there actually is one today. I do have to applaud her ethics though, as she does not actually try to get money from me until AFTER she confirms that there is a shuttle and I will fit. This is actually pretty damn good customer service for Central America. I have about three more hours to kill until I leave Antigua. Luckily, the Bagel Barn is right around the corner. The kid, Christian, has been chilling out the whole time just waiting for some propios from me. I give him a couple quetzales and take off.

Three hours is plenty of time to chill out and talk to the ex-pats, exchange students, and turistas filtering through the café. I make some phone calls, take the time to filter through some photographs and upload a bunch more along with some videos. Most of the older posts on the travelogue should have some form of visual stimulation now.

There are a number of girls in their early twenties who are more than willing to recount their torrid stories of their drunken Saturday night and tell me all about the volunteer and exchange programs they are here on. The company VGI USA seems to come up a bit in conversation. (You’re welcome, Jo.)

Eventually, I need to start wrapping it up and head over to the travel agency to catch the 12:30 shuttle. By this time, the Ruta Maya travel agency is open, what little good that does me. The shuttle is driven, as is common, by two people, much like the stage coaches of old. A driver, a young man in a black stylized t-shirt and new ball cap, and an older gentleman riding shotgun in a white collared shirt sporting a moustache.

There is already a guy sitting a couple rows back, though he says nothing to me for the entire ride. The streets of Antigua are largely cobblestone, as my toe has already discovered, and it makes for an interesting ride. Twisting through the grid-like streets, we grab three more ambiguously asian women from a hotel and we are heading out of the city on our way to Guate, short for Guatemala City.

The ladies and I start chatting as they are all quite fluent in English. Occasionally they speak between themselves in something that sounds like Japanese. The lady sitting next to me, Sookie, reminds me a lot of my mom; similar build, and haircut. Interestingly enough, they are subscribers to the same religious beliefs. They are not Japanese as I first assumed, but Korean. It seems, the languages are quite similar.

All the ladies are fans of the fresh fruit in Central America. So much so they have taken up packing their own knives to cut it up as they travel. This was of great interest to the Security at Guatemala City Airport. The ladies have flown to Honduras and Guatemala in the last few weeks and on one particular trip through the airport, they were packing so many knives, they were pulled aside and searched and all their weapons confiscated. Apparently, Knife wielding Korean Mormon women are the real problem in Guatemala; not the murder and robbery.

I am happy to help them convey to the driver that they need to get to the airport first before he drops me off at the bus station, as they know little to no Spanish despite their fluency otherwise. Soon we are trading names, emails, etc. One of the ladies, Nam-Hee Kong (no relation), is a professor of English in Seoul and invites me to come visit and help out with her classes and perhaps learn some Korean. This is truly why I love to travel, because the very act of traveling opens more borders and opportunities than one could ever hope by simply sitting at home and planning. Looks like I’ll be going to Korea at some point.

The elder of the trio, Soon Ja, has an amazing knowledge of the world, she has traveled everywhere and I immediately begin picking her brain for new destinations and the inside line on Italy; a place in which she is well versed. Arriving at the airport, the ladies make a hasty escape as they are running a bit late, and the gentleman in the back, who has been listening to all our conversations and never saying a word, wishes me a good journey as he leaves.

The Guatemala City bus station is not a place you ever need to go. Seriously. Unless you truly want to be able to have an answer for the question:

‘When was the last time you push-started a bus?’

The building and the bus are filled with crow-like chatter and music that sets my teeth on edge. Noise, noise, noise. I am the only foreigner on the bus other than two blonde girls that could be from anywhere in Europe. After several unsuccessful attempts to get our bus on the road, we pull away in a grinding of gears and a cloud of smoke. I opted to take the somewhat luxury bus instead of the chicken bus experience and I have to say I’m not convinced it was the right choice. Though in a city where there are actually stores that specialize in bullet proofing your car maybe it was a good call. After three hours of smelling the urine and offal wafting up from the cramped bathroom at the back of the bus, it does get a little hard to make that argument.

I can tell I am entering the third week of travel. I am unsettled. I don’t feel at ease, everyone around me seems like an alien. I was English, I want my own motorcycle, I want my own bed. The same things happened about my third week in Japan and continued to the fourth week, when I got over it and really started to integrate. All I have to do is power through the next couple weeks. This knowledge does not really make the next hours any more enjoyable.

Everyone is talking. There is lousy music piping into the bus overhead. After a while, someone puts of a Spanish version of the movie ‘Shooter’ over the bus’ entertainment system and it is just scrambling my brain. At first I listen to my Spanish lessons, but give up on that after I realize I haven’t been listening to what they are actually saying. I switch over to watching movies. Maybe this is what took my head out of the game.

Disclaimer: my natural inclination is to pad this scenario to make me look like less of an idiot. I am going to fight this and try to be as clear and accurate in what happened so as to help anyone else in this situation see it clearly and get the heck out of there. Please refrain from reinforcing what I already know: I am an idiot.

We pull up at the Guatemalan border crossing and everyone disembarks. I’m focusing on putting away my ipod and worrying if my big back is going to be ok with me not staring at it for a few minutes. All the zippers are locked, and it is a
bit heavy to run away with, weighing in at over 20 kilos, so I think it will be alright.

Before I am even off the bus my was is being blocked by three moneychangers waving their filthy hands and filthy lucre in my face. I have to physically push them out of my way to disembark. I hate this part of the trip. Once I get off, I realize I have no idea what line to get in or what doors to go in, so I just sort of stand there looking stupid for a moment.
I think that was my mistake.

Lesson learned: when in doubt head straight for the nearest guy in a uniform.

Unfortunately for me, Guatemala has no one outside their little air conditioned office. Now I am literally surrounded by about 9 moneychangers trying to shove their hands in my face. I’m keeping a hand on my wallet and a hand on my passport and telling them to get the hell away from me. Then a face appears that I recognize. The shuttle driver in the black t-shirt and hat. He immediately starts blasting me in Spanish along with everyone else.

I tell him to get lost as well, then he holds up a small slip of paper with the Immigration stamp on it and tries to hand it to me. At first I just stare at it blankly, then I ask him if this is for me to get out of Guatemala. (Let me interject that this is not uneard of. Cuba stamps a visa paper, not your passport. When entering England, they staple a piece of paper in your passport as well.) He replies in the affirmative, then I begin to doubt and he motions me towards what I think are some other doors as if I am to come into the office so they can validate it. However, we do not enter the doors, we have simply moved farther away from the other doors with a line of Guatemalans out of it. Honestly, all of them look similar from the back, and I can’t see the two blonde girls from the bus in that line, so I’m not sure if that’s where I am supposed to be.

The moneychangers are all talking very loudly at me and the shuttle driver tries to take my passport from me. Grabbing it back it becomes a yelling match, he insisting that I need to pay $20 for the stamp to leave, and me insisting that he find someone to speak to me in English. He even produces some rather official looking identification as a means of verifying that this is the correct procedure. I start to walk away at several points over the next minute or so but am continually surrounded and under fire from so many Guatemalans I am having a hard time concentrating. The shuttle drive keeps trying to press the paper into my passport and eventually I just take the paper from him. The money changer hands a $20 bill to the shuttle driver and indicates that he has paid for me and all I need to do is give him the equivalent in Quetzales and any additional I have and he will give me change. I start to pull out my Quetzales and count them out and I have about $30 equivalent in Q. I hand it to the changer and look around for the shuttle driver, but he is nowhere to be found. When I turn around, neither is the money changer who just took the money out of my hands. Within seconds, the crowd of men around me disperses and I am left there looking stupid.

I climb back on to the bus and the blond girls are there again. Walking down the aisle of the bus, I am uneasy and look at the paper again, it says 2002. Sh!t. I ask the blondes to see their stamps, and there they are, right in their passports. 2010.

Jumping off the bus I make a beeline to the office and the a uniform. They inform me that, Yes, in fact, I am an idiot and all have a good laugh at the robbery that just happened outside their door. They stamp my passport and inform me that next time I come through I should remember it is free to leave. Thanks. I find it hard to believe that they don’t know this sort of this happens a few feet away. I believe that the people working the border are complicit in these activities, either because of their own prejudices against extranjeros or that they are paid a portion of the money skimmed.

The moustache copilot from the shuttle this morning is the copilot for our bus. I have some choice words with him, though how much he understands is unclear, and head back to my seat. The entrance to El Salvador is less eventful. A man gets on the bus, looks at my passport, writes down my name and leaves. Not even anything as satisfying as a stamp in my passport. What a waste.

Negotiating a place to stay in El Salvador has been nothing short of a nightmare. I was going to stay with a friends family, but that friend simply couldn’t be bothered to get me the information in the month or so since the home stay was offered. Now in the last 6 hours, I’ve been able to get said information, though it was incorrect and I had to get that fixed. Still, answering the phone was simply too much to ask from said friend and I am left to wade into El Salvador, having redirected my travel at the very last second to accommodate this home stay, and am going to Santa Ana, instead of the couchsurfing homestay I had lined up in another city.

One thing that may have been nice to know previously is that Santa Ana, is NOT actually next to Metapan, the two names of cities I was given as navigational coordinates for getting to said home. Getting off the bus in Santa Ana, I look around and realize, this is not a bus station, it is a near empty street; less of a bus stop than San Ignacio had. Then the familiar cry rings out.

“Taxi?”

I’m going to hold the next person down and remove their eye balls with a broken beer bottle the next time someone says that to me.

“NO.”

I turn to a guy standing on the street with some luggage and point out the address I have written down in my notebook. He looks at me with wide eyes and informs me I am at least an hour away by car.

Sh!t. Fine. I ask for directions to the local bus station so I can catch the next chicken bus. I am promptly informed that there is not bus station here. Sh!t, again. $50 for a taxi ride. Ok, fine.

The ride is awful, and the taxi is like something spat out of a mad max film. I’m angry, tired, and hungry. I’ve been on a shuttle or bus for about 7 hours at this point with no food. I’d rather kill someone than speak to them.

When we finally do arrive in Metapan, the taxi driver is kind enough to inform me that he has no idea where the address is and I should get out and take a tuktuk. I look at him squarely and inform him I did not pay $50 for a tuktuk, so he had better figure it out. An hour of complete idiocy later, I finally make him pull over and call the family and ask them to come meet us. The family finally arrives… on foot. Taxi man takes us to their house, and informs me my bill is now $56 for having used his phone and being a general pain in the ass. I hope he goes to jail and is violated by a broomstick for his unscrupulous business practices along with the wonderful moneychanging staff of Central America.

It’s too late to even attempt speaking Spanish so I just speak to the family in English. They don’t seem to care, they just do what every other person in Central America does and speak as rapidly as possible to you unconcerned with whether you understand or not. Indoors, I go throw my bags in what is to be my room, and inform them I am going out for food. Yoselin, the youngest at 17, rolls out with me so I don’t get killed while traversing the Barrio. We wind up at the local pupuseria, not as dirty as it sounds, and order some food.

All things aside, pupusas are delicious. It is some sort of corn torilla with goodies inside. I don’t dare ask where the meat came from, but coupled with beans and cooked up on a hotplate, a couple of these things with some good salsa are enough to make me smile again if just for a moment. El Salvadorans can’t make coffee any better than Guatemalans it appears.

Yoselin was purported to speak a little English. Now, like so many other things, I find this is not true. Ok. I throw out a little bit of Spanish and am met with the usual barrage, though after repeated requests she does slow it down a little bit. I’m so tired I don’t care and we head straight back to the house where I climb into bed with less bugs than I had thought and try to find some sleep amidst the noise from the three hyperactive dogs and 40 something chickens outside in the courtyard.