Better Tarde Than Nunca

*sorry about the lack of updates lately. internet has been scarce.*

When we last left off you were experimenting with household chemical products and Calen and I were at a bus station/car wash just inside the border of Guatemala fending off prehistoric arachnids with cloth and oil torches while trying to urinate in medeival torture chamber baños. It was very Indiana Jonesesque.

After the battle was over and we had escaped the wrath of Kali-ma (while Mexico is largely Jewish, Guatemala is primarily Hindu) there was nothing to do but wait. With a 9 hour bus ride on the horizon, and Calen's talents for evacuating the contents of his stomach during those sorts of trips, we decided to eat. Only Calen, in anticipation of the bus ride had taken half of a Dramamine. He took only half because last time he took all of one, it was as if he had been put under general anesthesia. So half. But 3 minutes after he took it, and just as we decided to procure sustenance and beverages, he began to feel groggy again. I never recalled a side effect of Dramamine being "dead to this worldification." Perplexed, I examined the individual pills very closely. And right there in plain English, was a little imprint of the words "recuerdame ahorita" which, translated from the Spanish means "forget-me-now." Naturally, I took 6 and then headed up the hill to find some food.

I arrived at a small establishment with about 7 tables and a bar. 4 of the tables were occupied by 4 people each. And the people appeared to have been occupied by at least 10 Coronas each. Only Corona. The waitresses/cerveza wenches did not appear to be in the habit of clearing empties. Or maybe it is customary in Guatemala to have an objective count of how many beers one has consumed so they know what to tell the police when no one pulls them over anyway.

Needless to say, being sober, multicolored, and not Hindu, I stood out in this place. I received some sideways looks, but nothing to alert my spider sense. That could have been because my spider sense had been depleted by our battles with the tarantulasaurs, though. I tried to place an order, but the dB level of the (somehow) internet jukebox made this an other than smooth operation. Eventually, through our combined efforts, the CW and I agreed that I would have whatever she had said that I pretended to hear. About this time, I noticed the only large guy in the bar moving in my direction. He got way too close to me and i braced myself for impact. He said a bit drunkenly "Como estás, how are you feeling?" Still braced for impact, I answered "I'm fine, how are you." Then we had a nice conversation about how he lived for 22 years in Union city, his father still lives in LA and, in his words that I "had picked a wonderful time to be in a wonderful country." Then we shook hands and parted as friends. The end.

I went back to the bus station with the food that turned out to bethe standard fare of steak, tortillas, beans, and rice and Calen had fully embraced his coma. The bus arrived. We departed. I made sure they would wake us up at our stop. Then i went to sleep. About 4 hours into our 3 hour journey, I woke up. Assuming, as was often the case, that the bus was just running a bit behind, i waited until the 5th hour to go and ask the driver when we would be arriving. A bit irritated, he told me he had decided that we didnt speak enough Spanish to get off the bus at Los Encuentros because it was too dangerous. I told him that the 12 year old at the bus office had assured us it was safe. I told him this in perfect Spanish. But he said he was taking us to Guatemala City where they recently passed a law that only one person can ride on a motorbike at a time in order to curtail the frequent occurence of the passenger on the bike shooting bus drivers and then robbing everyone on the bus. He said he did this, so that we would be safe. I thanked him for his concern, in perfect Spanish, and then went back to my seat to take a nighttime siesta which I think they generally refer to as just sleeping.

In Guatemala City we had to buy another bus ticket to get back to Los Encuentros. We were only robbed 14 times while in line at the bus station, which from what I've heard about the Guat, means we had a relatively uneventful visit. We got on the bus back to the place we were to have already been, and made the trip.

Arriving in Los Encuentros, we could see several hotels within 100 meters of the official bus drop off point which just so happened to be in the middle of the highway. Since it was day time and we had no need of lodging, we turned 180 degrees to behold the chicken bus terminal, which was also in the middle of the highway. The story of the chicken bus has been well accounted, but its worth telling again for those who may be unaware.

In the US there is a saying, youth is wasted on the young. I think this is a pretty clear reference to the idea that, as you grow wise enough to appreciate life, your physical body loses its capacity to endure certain parts of it. This is not the case for the Guatemalan chicken bus. The chicken buses are all old school buses from the US, presumably. But when they arrive in Guatemala, the rough equivalent of retiring, they are souped up, emblazoned with flames, shark teeth, and other less than subtle paint jobs, covered with stickers, and given a new driver who has no liability to protect the passengers of the bus like they do in the litigious United States. The buses, having reached old age, are then packed sardine can full, three to a seat with people standing in the aisles, and all the various accoutrement of the Guatemalan public transport patron strapped in various places on the vehicle. This accoutrements can be anything from live chickens, hence the name, to very not alive bundles of sticks. The new driver then takes winding turns and sharp corners through the mountains at breakneck speeds. All the while the passengers, chickens, and sticks are being loaded onto the bus on the fly. The non-people passengers are loaded by a person that I've dubbed monódebus, which when translated from my made up Spanish means "bus monkey." He is called this because while the driver tries to kill us, he is busily climbing all over the bus, often on the exterior, shifting loads, collecting money, and flinging dung at other drivers that fail to observe the unwritten rule of the Guatemalan roads called "The Municipal Code of Get the Fuck Out of My Way." I didnt censor the F word because they dont. So buses have a useful, active role in the sunsets of their lives. This is in stark contrast to the states, where anyone over 35 are generally sedentary, useless, and obsolete drains on society. I know that useless and obselete are basically redundant, but i thought it should be mentioned twice. All they do is sit around talking about the weather and yelling at the kids to get off their lawn. In the modern age however, everything is digital. So even though theyre too old to understand how to work email, they usually have pretty decent wi-fi networks set up in their homes. But they lack the useful sense to secure them with any sort of encryption. Or if they do, the password is usually something easy to remember like "1234" or "sporadicadultonseturinaryincontinence." This is a boon for us whippersnappers as the modern equivalent of treading on an old person's lawn is using their bandwidth. We call it drive-by-wi-fi and virtually all of these blog posts are brought to you by such activity as we cant afford the 12.5 cents per hour it costs to use the internet because we spent too much money on banana crepes and tuna salad croissants. Digression over.

Returning to story. We arrived at Lago Atitlan unscathed, jumped on another chicken bus, literally, as it was moving. That ride was a lot shorter with a lot less poo flung. Then we took a boat across the lake to a place called San Marcos.

San Marcos is a small lakeside village with no ATM and a bit of a forest canopy covering everything. There arent really roads and the main form of travel from place to place was foot. The street dogs were noticeably well fed, and bonus lizards ran rampant through the footpaths. It was paradise. But like all paradises, there was little to do and after a couple of days our addiction to stress won us over and we decided to hit the old dusty trail. The old dusty trail, as it turned out, was Laguna Atitlan. It was far less dusty and more algae-y. But after a 5 minute ride across the lake we were in a village called San Pedro which featured establishments that played good copies of bootleg films, restaraunts that had inventive and delicious sopa d'jour (there's that spanish-french fusion again), and bars where one could play chess to the tune of ear-blasting techno music. We planned on staying a night and then taking the shuttle to Antigua, which despite being in practically the same place as San Marcos, cost half as much. We planned on staying a night. Then we stayed for 10 days. There was a BBQ and we had semi reliable internet access. What do you want?

San Pedro had its fair share of interesting happenings, but the most peculiar was when we saw/nearly stepped on and killed a San Pedro Bonus Street Crab. Street dogs roam the calles of the world in abundance. There's a person selling bread every 50 paces in every city outside of the modern western world. But never have I seen a huge crab stalking the streets of a village located several hundred meters up a rather steep rocky outcropping from the nearest body of water. And we almost hadnt seen it. Because while the crab stalked the streets, a kitten stalked the crab. Having had little time to develop its hunting instincts, the kitten was failing miserably at staying under cover of darkness, even though it was the middle of the night. And our attention was on it, rather than the road we were walking down when we nearly stepped on the wayward crustacean. I let out a shriek like a burly, bearded, flannel wearing lumberjack, despite what may have been reported by the neighbors the following day about hearing a 9 year old girl screaming in the middle of the night. The crab sidled its way to a shadow, the cat doublebacked presumably to outsmart the crab, and we never saw either of them again. However, for the next few days the nightmare lived on in my mind and i have since embraced an irrational fear of coming face to face with another Bonus Street Crab. And if you think I'm being ridiculous, consider the context. It would be like if you went to take a shower and a murderous, sociopathic, arrogant jaguar jumped out of your shampoo bottle. It just didn't make any sense.

We passed the time in San Pedro studying spanish, playing rave chess, and eating way too well for a small village in central America. And then the worst happened. People have been warning us about swine flu and killer drug cartels and pickpockets and hippies and all the other evil things that we might encounter on our trip. We didnt get hit by malaria or a hurricane or even a mild tropical storm. What befell us was something that no one had bothered to warn us about. And really, it is the only true threat to any American traveling abroad. Kiwis. Thats right, we came into contact with a brood of average Household Bonus Street Kiwis. The kind that make all their statements in the form of questions of uncertainty. The kind that say "ay" with a frequency that would make the Household Bonus Street Canadian pull out his hair. The kind that say "water" without an "r" at the end but "wikipedia" with one. The kind that have a fanatic obsession with travel pillows purchased in Italian airports. I would have rather met a crocodile in a bathtub.

If we survive our time with these monkeys descended from a bunch of monkeys descended from a bunch of criminals eating kangaroos and wallabies, I'll write about Antigua, roasting marshmallows over lava, Kiwi contributions to the planet, and a special new type of dog we encountered.

All of this and more IF we're alive and if we can find a dark shadowy place to hide in the middle of an open network wi-fi cloud.