I Am A Tourist
Guatemala answers a question
I’m past the age when I happily clung to the hard edge of a broken bus seat that rattled and bumped its way from Mumbai to Goa and delivered me with a bruised butt and an overflowing heart. These days I like an upholstered seat, a bit of mild air conditioning, not too cold, and regular rest stops. Like Cohen the Barbarian, I have come to appreciate soft toilet paper.
But long bus rides are still the best way to meet people you’d never run into. Where else would someone like me run into a bunch of US veterans who’ve settled in Guatemala for their retirement? They now spend their mornings sitting on park benches with their Semper Fi caps and shooting the breeze, and in the afternoons they organize charity drives for kinds in surrounding villages, one village per week: school supplies, clothes, medicine, whatever is needed.
Their Guatemalan wives, thirty and forty years younger, treat them like favourite pets. Only an axe grinder would read either exploitation or gold digging into their clear-eyed arrangements. They do the best they can while they wait for the next pension check and death.
I met them on the bus from Santa Ana to Guatemala, when lack of online information had me nearly resigned to taking an Uber from Ciudad Guatemala to Antigua. They were going the same way, so they gave me a lift, advice which I immediately ignored (don’t eat street food, go to Wendy’s), and a voucher for the local coffee shop.
Antigua is one of those museum towns that preserve their colonial appearance while catering to hordes of modern tourists, most of them Guatemalans, though some gringos add lumps to the mix. It greeted me with a party, the Fiesta de barriletes gigantes, with a display of enormous circular kites, music that you can dance to even when sober, great street food (sorry Bill, no Wendy’s for me) and general fun.
While the streets are cobbled in a way that makes full suspension a must for anyone riding a bike, moderate temperatures make it just possible to go running, and my hospedaje even has hot water for the shower, something that is a bit of a rarity around here.
And that about sums it up. Pleasant, easy, filled with welcoming people, very little in the way of challenges or hardships, exactly what a tourist needs.
A tourist. Not a traveller, one of those resilient, unpredictable characters who embrace the unknown and appear and vanish with no warning or explanation, never quite knowing where they will go next.
Guatemala answered that question: I am a tourist. I don’t even enjoy cold showers very much.
