Chiquimula, Guatemala - The Magic Eye

I just happened to wake up a few minutes before the alarm went off at 3:30 a.m. It was pouring in a way that it just doesn’t rain in New York and we wondered if the ferry to Puerto Barrios would even be running in such weather. Michael said it probably wouldn’t be, but that was just because he was too tired to get out of bed. We packed up anyway, and when we went down to brush our teeth, the woman on shift at the desk, who had probably gotten up just to let us out, said the ferry would definitely be running.

The Israeli couple in the next room was also planning to catch the ferry and also wondered if it would be running, so Michael went to tell them it was indeed, but when they said we should go together, Michael noted their stuff strewn al over the floor and said we’d be going immediately.

We left the hotel at 4:30 a.m. for the five-minute walk down to the dock. It did not seem like 4:30 a.m. It was dark, but there was a steady stream of people heading down there with us, and several cars on the street. The Lonely Planet said to get there early as seats go fast, and they were not wrong. With twenty minutes to spare, we managed to secure two slots of space on a shelf that had probably not been intended for human seating, but which was almost entirely full of people. We felt completely riduculous for having wondered if the ferry would be running or not - of course it would. It´s just rain.

People who came after us had to make do with spaces on the floor, and some people even stood. The Israelis had packed impressively fast, and arrived only a few minutes after we did, but he was still stuck with the floor, though she managed to squeeze in on a bench. Small children stood between their mothers’ knees and slept leaning on them. None of it would have been so bad if it hadn’t been raining. There were opaque gray plastic tarps pulled down over the open sides of the ferry, so the view was nil and the smell of gasoline was strong. A hippie gringo couple, she barefoot with long light-brown dreads, and he tall with lanky, dark, shoulder-length hair shared a Walkman and put their arms around each other and hid their faces. All the Garifuna ladies had their hair covered.Everyone was half asleep.

I chewed a gritty, orange-bile flavored Dramamine. I had planned not to because I didn’t want to sleep all day, but when the boat first started moving it chugged and swayed in a really bad way, and I didn’t feel like adding yet another notch to my vomit bag. A man came around and collected the fare, Q10 each.

A little Garifuna girl across from me, her hair in big dress-up  twists, threw up into the rushing black water as her grandfather held the rain curtain up for her. The back of the ferry was open to the air, and I could see nothing through it but blackness. After a while we must have hit deeper water or a wider channel and the ride became smoother. I fell asleep with my head in my hands and my elbows on my knees.

An hour and a half passed a lot faster then I thought it would. It felt like about twenty minutes later when I looked up to find passengers standing up and collecting their bags. The square at the back of the boat was pale periwinkle. Puerto Barrios. It was drizzling desultorily and I stood dazed on the dock while Michael shot the big Chiquita boat anchored offshore.

Puerto Barrios… I had been there before, the last time, and forgot it, but I recognized it immediately. There were small eateries under the roof of the dock, with benches to seat four or six each, depending on the size of the customer. We had coffee and pan dulce with the Israeli couple and a Honduran guy, who then walked us over to the bus station.

The girls at the station were as useless as they had been last time and I wondered if they were the same ones. There were no busses to Chiquimula, they told us. We’d have to transfer at Rio Hondo. They did not tell us that there was a bus stop across the street, and in fact the bus was boarding right at that moment, going directly to Chiquimula. I guess they’re just really loyal to the Litegua bus line.

We figured the situation  out on our own, crossed the street and got on the bus. The fare was Q35 each. We were really watching our Quetzales, trying to make it across the border with what we had left.

The bus was nasty. It was not a chicken bus, more like a Greyhound, but ancient and grubby and mismatched and torn up. Its poor condition was only made worse by the the steady rain that drew all the mustiness from the seats and made everything feel damp and sticky. I kept my book and my iPod with me, but I needn’t have bothered, as I fell asleep almost immediately. There must really be something to that Dramamine, but I can’t say for sure since I’ve never taken it when I haven’t gotten up really, really early.

We rode for about four hours. I had the aisle seat, so I woke up at every stop, to duck out of the way of overzealous entries and exits. At one stop Michael told me we had one more stop to go, less than 20 kilometers. Great. But then the driver came on and asked who was going to Chiquimula and said something else, we didn’t know what. Everyone looked surprised and confused, but quickly got off the bus. We followed, and found that we were to get on a minibus.

If this happens to you, don’t try to be polite, it will get you nowhere. I was standing directly in front of the door, and six people pushed past me, literally squeezed between me and the door as I was trying to put my foot up onto the step. The minibus seemed full to me, but apparently it wasn’t.

Even before I left home, I could easily imagine three people to a two-person seat under special circumstances like this one. But this bus filling was beyond belief.  Everyone else saw seats that we just couldn’t see. It was like looking at a Magic Eye poster before we got the trick – for us everything was just a meaningless swirl, but they saw seats. We were standing hunched over in the small area just inside the doorway thinking, “that’s it, the bus is full,” but they were still piling on.

People pushed Michael and he asked in exasperation, “Donde?!” but they just pushed past him and sat down in spaces that we hadn’t realized were spaces. In the end, over forty people fit onto that twenty-five person minibus. (To be fair, some of them were children.) And everyone seemed relatively comfortable, everyone but us. Three young guys were standing in the stairwell, looking cool as could be, letting the wind blow through their hair.

Michael and I were the only other people standing, and the only ones contorted. Michael, at 6’2” was worst off, with his head bent almost entirely to the side and trying to keep the heavy camera bag hanging from his neck from hitting the old lady sitting under us. I was standing on one foot, leaning back and trying to keep my shirt from riding up too much. Poking me in the butt was a woven plastic tote bag full of chickens that was resting on a woman’s lap.

A young couple a row behind her were holding this lady’s cardboard box of baby chicks. The airholes had been cut too large, and one of the chicks was halfway out before Michael alerted the woman and she nudged it back in with her elbow. Next to the chicken lady, on his mother’s lap, was a toddler staring at me with enormous eyes. He did not smile back at me. Some lady offered to hold my daypack and jacket; that was nice.

Naturally we were not driving along a straight road, but one of Guatemala’s wonderful winding masterpieces, so the ride involved a lot of holding desperately to the poles on the ceiling to keep from falling on someone. Leaning too far back meant chicken beaks in my butt, and too far forward meant giving the wrong idea to some teenage boy.

We knew it hadn’t been planned this way, but we had no idea what had gone wrong. We had no idea what was going on at all. Once we stopped to let some guy out; he climbed out the window next to his seat. We stopped again, and the old lady beside us got off and took her trampled potted plants with her.

“She should sit there,” we heard, in perfect English. It turned out that one of the guys by the door, the coolest looking one, in a black wifebeater and gold chains, was from San Francisco, just visiting. I got the old lady’s seat and held Michael’s camera bag, so things were a little better.

Finally we were in Chiquimula. And that crowd, the people who had shoved me aside to get on the bus and left me standing by the door, were now shoving past me to get off the bus. I mean for crying out loud, you guys got to sit down, at least let me out. I was afraid the woman behind me would get impatient with my hesitation and start really pushing me, so I had to bite the bullet and do some pushing of my own to get down the stairs.

Chiquimula! Not that I cared. I was just happy to be off the damn minibus. Now all we had to do was figure out how to get to the Honduras border and hope that Honduras would allow us in. At least it was early; after all that traveling, it was not even noon. We had Q47 left.

HOURS ON THE FERRY: 12.5

HOURS ON THE BUS: 124.5

HOURS IN A MINIBUS: 4