I wound up taking a first-class bus to Quetzaltenango, a very nice Pullman bus with air conditioning, music, and even an in-flight movie. I´m not sure what the movie was, but it was highly amusing. It mostly involved two guys running around the jungle, getting caught in all sorts of outlandish traps, fighting some rather outlandish-looking Maya-like natives armed with torches, whips, some weird sort of jungle karate, and, um, stuff. Oh, and howler monkeys, who would invariably show up and harass the guys as soon as they wound up in the latest trap (dangling head down from a snare, etc.). It was very amusing, probably even funnier without the dialogue.
I am intrigued by the music they play on first-class buses here. It is almost exactly the same as what gets played on buses in Thailand and Vietnam. There´s a couple of local ballads mixed with eight or nine American pop songs that seem to be universal. There´s “I Want it That Way”, some over-mixed piece from Cher, La Bamba, and this dance remix that goes “Be my lover, won´t you be my lover?” over and over. I´m wondering if there isn´t some CD out there titled “Top Travel Hits of the Third World” or something. About the only thing that´s missing is Gloria Gaynor´s “I Will Survive”, which gets played about every twenty minutes in Thailand. (I´m sorry that one didn´t make the cut, because it´s my favorite of the numbers on offer.)
I´m also happy to say that bus drivers here are much safer than they are in India, which is to say that if your bus driver happens to be passing an 18-wheeler around a blind curve in the fog, he will at least slow down and honk his horn a bit. (I didn´t waste too much of my time on it; after my experience in India, I find it´s much healthier just to accept that you´re going to die in a fiery crash, and not concern yourself about it further.)
I had phoned up a travel agency in advance, by the simple advent of calling the phone number in the guidebook, discovering that the number was wrong/outdated, then looking them up on the Internet and calling the number posted there. Of course, as soon as I got in touch with them I discovered that they were no longer a travel agency but a language school. (Hey, these things happen.)
But the guy who answered the phone spoke fluent English, and said the magic words: come on down and we´ll see what we can do to help, so I got their name and address and hopped on a bus to Quetzaltenango.
After the bus arrived, I got off and was immediately accosted by a couple of taxi drivers. I handed the slip of paper with their name and address on it to the taxi driver, who had no idea where they were and drove around the city for awhile trying to figure out where they were (I´m not sure he could read the address, actually, even though I wrote it down in Spanish). Eventually we got there, he spouted something incomprehensible in Spanish at me, and eventually we worked out that he wanted to charge me 75 quetzales ($11) for the trip, which is complete highway robbery. However, I didn´t argue–it wasn´t going to do any good (I couldn´t speak enough Spanish to argue with him!) and it wasn´t a huge amount of money on the grand scale. It´s good to have a sense of perspective on these things, otherwise you´ll just be miserable when traveling.
Anyway, I went into Inepas, where the guy I´d talked to (the native English speaker) wasn´t in, but someone else helpfully explained that they weren´t a travel agency. Eventually, after some further discussion, they referred me to a guide who ran a tour agency a couple doors down. I talked to the guy, who turned out to have only a little English and very little understanding of textiles (I had to take out one of my textile books and point at the photo to explain that I was interested in weaving), but he offered to do a half-day guide around a local market for 100 quetzales (about $15), which I thought about and finally signed up for. It wasn´t so much that I desperately wanted him as a tour guide, but I needed someone–anyone–who could get me to a hotel and take me around a bit, and this guy at least spoke minimal English, and was friendly, so what the hell. So I´m going off at 8:30am tomorrow.
He took me to a good hotel and negotiated a much better rate for me (this is one of the reasons you want to hire a local guide), I checked in, and went looking around the block or so where my hotel was.
After a bit of exploration, it seems pretty clear that there is only one outfit in town that offers guides who speak English, and they do it as part of a package tour that includes a private car and runs $100/day (!). Unfortunately for me, they do a fixed-price package, so if I were going with three other people, it would be a reasonable $25/day; but I{m not.
I´m highly concerned about the complete lack of English-speaking guides (even with pidgin English). I had been expecting more English speakers, and it´s going to be hard going without any Spanish. So I spent half an hour in a language school talking to the class coordinator (who is a native English speaker), and it looks like I´ll be doing a crash course in survival Spanish over the next few days. They do five hours of teaching in the morning followed by cultural activities, so it might not be a bad way to see something of the local area, either.
Oh, and they offer homestays with Mayan families, which I think I definitely want to do. The catch here is that the Mayan families generally don´t even speak Spanish (Mam is the local Mayan dialect), so there´s really not much possible in the way of cultural interaction. Still, it would be really interesting to stay there and see what it´s like.
So tomorrow, I´m going to the market with this guy (I´m not even sure what city it´s in–every city has its weekly market, and I couldn´t make out the name of the city) and then after that I´ll be going to the language school, trying to call up this guy named Carlos Molina who runs some kind of Mayan textile conservation group and might possibly speak English, and going back to the expensive tour agency to chaffer over what kind of tour they can give me. I{m seriously tempted to ask for both Lucas, who speaks both Spanish and Mam and knows a LOT about the local villages, and Henry, who speaks both English and Spanish, for a day in the Mayan villages. Yeah, it´ll be expensive, but it seems about the only way to have a meaningful cultural conversation with a Mayan weaver–and it won´t be the first time I´ve had to use two translators to talk to someone. Unfortunately, if you want to get really off the beaten track, you usually wind up paying. But I´ll look around town tomorrow–it´s nearly dark now, and Guatemala is NOT the kind of place where you wander around unescorted after dark, especially if you´re a clueless tourist still hazy from four hours on a bus.
Tien
