La Proxima Frontera
or Goodbye, Mexico — Bienvenidos a Guatemala
I sit at the wobbly desk in my fourth-floor room at the Hotel Bagod in San Marcos, Guatemala, a room and an establishment that a few weeks ago I would have found unacceptable, but for which at this moment I am grateful. Everything is old and semi-broken, not so much quaint, more rusty and mildewed. There are questionable people wandering the halls, the comforter on the bed is worn and fraying, up here in the mountains it is cold at night but there is no heat, and wifi is out of the question. I did ask at the front desk where the young men were playing cards, and they laughed, “No, señor, no wifi aqui”. But it is a bed with a door that locks and a place to sit and collect my thoughts, to figure out how I got from there to here.
Woke up at dawn in a cabana at La Luna Hostel on Boca del Cielo in Chiapas, and it was beautiful there under the palms. Took a morning swim in the warm blue Pacifico and Zahra and I had some breakfast in the palapa restaurant, and we were happy we had come there but it was mixed with the knowledge that we both had a long way to travel that day, to the point that we might well not make it to our destinations.
So we packed our bags and paid our bill with the hostel and they very kindly provided us a free lancha trip across the lagoon. We had to wait around the docks for a little while for a colectivo back to Tonala. I had convinced her that while there was no direct bus all the way to Puerto Escondido (not until 3 in the morning) there were buses to Arriaga, the next city to the west, and from there, surely there would be a bus to Tehuantepec, and so forth, she could just hop from city to city. She seemed apprehensive about the prospect but also resolute that she would make it.
The colectivo came and we watched the dry tropical scenery pass by, sunburnt green cow fields and palms and swamps, didn’t talk much. We had hung out for the better part of a week, and now would go in opposite directions. What is there to say? I told her to find me when she passed through Antigua in a few weeks. And then we were in Tonala at the bus station and there was a bus going west right then and there was no time for goodbyes and she got on a bus and I hoped that my advice would serve her well.
My bus to Tapachula wasn’t leaving for an hour, so I walked around the corner to a little restaurant with tables on the sidewalk and had a quesadilla de camarones and aguacate and it was delicious, and a tepache to wash it down, some kind of a slightly fermented agua fresca made with pineapple skins. This is one of the things I love about Mexico. You can travel here for a long time, and then at some little restaurant, they ask if you want a tepache, and it turns out there are more kinds of ancient homemade delicious beverages in this country. It was cloudy and tangy and sweet. The owner sat down and talked to me about Mexico and the states. He splits his time between Tonala, which seemed like a very out of the way place, and San Antonio, where he also has a restaurant. He likes San Antonio, and I told him so did I, that I had been there on my journey, told him that I’d come all this way by bus. He seemed unimpressed- said he does that trip twice a year. It had taken me twenty days while he does it in two and a half.
The ADO platinum-class bus, which would be the nicest mode of travel I’d take for many months, went so smoothly I barely even noticed, with air conditioning and comfy seats, movies playing on screens set every few rows. It got me to Tapachula in far southeastern Chiapas at 4:30 in the afternoon, and the book got fairly vague at this point about how to cross into Guatemala. The easiest solution was to catch a bus for Guatemala City, but at the bus counter they said they don’t go there, and sent me to an office across the street, where they said there were no buses until the morning. So the easy solution was out, and I had a choice to make. The last buses for Xela, my destination for the day, left the border at 6 which logically I should be able to make, given that we were only 25 or so kilometers to the border. I could either head that way, into the vagueness, the madness of the Frontera, and risk getting stuck in borderland, at night, where no one wants to be, or accept that I failed to make it across the border today, and stay here in Tapachula. I decided to take the chance and go.
Walked up the street to where a family with kids and bags were waiting at the corner. These are the people to ask- fellow travelers, and local ones, no less. There were two border towns nearby: Ciudad Hidalgo, where the book recommended I go, and Talisman, which was closer. I asked if they were going to Guatemala, and where- they said yes, and a name I didn’t recognize. Told them I was going to Xela, and asked which border crossing they recommended, and they emphatically favored Talisman. They then proceeded to get into a combi — basically an old Toyota van with extra seats packed in that are super cheap and in which they pack as many people as can possibly fit — and then one or two or three more people after that — for Hidalgo. Despite this mixed message, I took their advice and hailed a speeding combi with people hanging out the door with “Talisman” on the windshield, and sat on my pack on the floor beside people’s legs.
During the 30 minute ride that alternated frenetic speeding with sudden violent stops to pick up or let out passengers, the skies which had been threatening let loose with an absolute downpour of a tropical deluge. We got to Talisman, and just getting out of the van and under a tin roof at a taco stand I was soaked. Someone put me in a pedicab covered by a tarp flopping in the storm, and the driver pedaled me to the border, which thankfully has a giant roof over the migration area.
Borders in the developing world are always crazy chaotic places, and this was no exception. The border from Texas into Tamaulipas had been strangely quiet. Here there was the usual: lots of people hanging around, selling things, trying to change money, help with papers, offering rides. I went in and got my passport stamped, and came back out and looked out at the uncovered bridge to Guatemala, with a river of water falling from the sky, and decided I would wait to make the crossing. Standing there with the same disposition to wait was a man named Angel, a Salvadoran American who lives in LA, proudly wearing a blue Dodgers cap, and said he was an artist, and was on his way to El Salvador to decorate the grave of a friend who had died. He was traveling all the way by bus, said it would take five days all told.
While we were standing there talking, two young boys, maybe eight or nine years old, who had been offering to clean the windows of cars on their way to pass through the border control (unsurprisingly with little success in the middle of a rainstorm) broke out into a fistfight right in the driving lane in front of us. A real fight that was shockingly brutal, in a way that boys aren’t supposed to fight, one boy holding the other down against the median, straddling his chest while punching him repeatedly in the face, then the other twisting out of his grasp and choking the first. The puncher now slipped out and ran towards Guatemala, but the choker caught him again and wrestled him to the pavement in front of a car.
All of us standing there, the Salvadoran man and an older woman and a soldier with a big gun and a man waiting to change money all just watching and shaking our heads in a mix of horror and absurd humor and not doing anything. It was the first violence of any kind that I’d seen in three weeks in Mexico, and there was something very disturbing about it. Clearly the equilibrium of the world was slightly out of order. It seemed like a good time to change my money with the man there, my last 27 pesos for 10 quetzales. One of the boys seemed to have claimed his territory and the other, his shirt ripped open, walked away downcast towards the bridge.
It was still raining hard, but not quite so viciously, and I didn’t want to stand there anymore, so I decided to go for it. I walked out of Mexico across a little bridge above a canyon with roaring white water below. In Guatemala they stamped my passport without asking the usual questions, and gave me 90 days to travel. I walked out of the office between backed up traffic trying to get across the bridge and hundreds of wet people waiting with sad eyes, to the beginning of the first street in El Carmen, Guatemala, which did not look like a nice place, ramshackle corrugated tin buildings and cement and trash on the ground.
Everyone seemed to want to get somewhere else; crowds of people waiting for taxis huddled under awnings or tarps to avoid the still precipitous rain, others on their way to Mexico. It was a little after six, and several people confirmed that the last bus had left. There was a steady stream of offers for transport and hotels and money changes and candy and tamales, and I, like everyone else who wasn’t selling something, just wanted to get out of there. Though the hotel just to my right, marked Economico, with a rooftop terrace that surely offered a great view of immigration control and the sad waiting people and the swollen river, did possess a certain perverse appeal, I knew this was no place to spend the night.
Which left taxis. I got into a shared taxi for somewhere called Malcatan that I remembered seeing in the book, that a man with a glass eye directing people into taxis assured me was better than here, sitting in the backseat of an old Nissan Sentra along with three ladies of advanced age and generous waist and hips, and as we drove away from the border and through the steep and narrow streets of El Carmen, navigating between people still walking down, slow-moving tuk-tuks and combis, I realized that two things had happened to me since I’d been traveling.
My concept of personal space has been drastically diminished, and I’ve come to accept extensive bodily contact with strangers. It helps that no one else seems to care. The ladies on either side of me were unperturbed, and in some strange and foreign way, it was actually kind of comfortable to just let go.
Second, I have come to be far more trusting of however I am advised in the course of these multi step travel days. I maintain a healthy sense of skepticism, but as long as it doesn’t seem like I’m being pressured into buying something at an obscene rate, I know that there are endless little details that the book either can’t explain or has got wrong, and I won’t figure out on my own. So a man tells me to get into a cab for a place I’ve never heard of, and I know I need to go somewhere, so I go along. And it is almost always fine. Maybe not ideal in every instance, but there is a certain flow to this kind of travel, and resisting too much will see you left behind.
It was about thirty minutes uphill to Malcatan. Guatemala was immediately strikingly green, verdant and lush. The plants are happy here. Malcatan is not a place with much going on, a little plaza with a church, and the driver just assumed I was going to the bus station, and took me there. I got out and it was still pouring rain, looking like it could keep up all night. The bus station in Malcatan is little more than a shed on the side of a parking lot, but enough to keep the rain off. I found out from the man there whose shirt said “Inspector” that there were no buses for Xela from there, either, but that I could still get to San Marcos, on the way. Great. There was a chicken bus right there ready to go for the very reasonable price of 10 quetzales ($1.50) but I opened my wallet to discover that I only had 5. Would they accept dollars, of which I had an emergency store just for this reason? No. A combination of quetzals and a few peso coins I had left? Certainly not. Was there an ATM nearby? Closed on Sunday. It did not appear that I was going any further this day.
All that was left to do was walk down to the Centro a few blocks back, and hope there was a hotel that would accept a credit card or at least let me pay in the morning when the bank opened, but I didn’t want to get soaked in the process, so I waited there with the Inspector and a couple other men, and the bus left. I wished I hadn’t left Mexico. A little while after, the next chicken bus pulled up, and I was admiring its fine decorative finish and detail when suddenly previously unconnected synapses fired, and I realized, wait a second, I did in fact have more quetzales. My neice Maya had given me some on the night I left Virginia.
I am continuously impressed by her presence of mind and consideration for other people. I always mean to give my excess foreign moneys to someone who’s going to that country, but I never remember to do it, and they end up in a box somewhere. But Maya actually managed to do it, to put those pieces of paper in the hand of someone who could put them to good use. I dug into my pack- where did I hide those away- and yes, some 36 quetzales, more than enough to get me on the bus and on to the next place. I told the inspector, who shook his head at the strange gringo who didn’t have enough money but now suddenly did, and got on the last bus out of Malcatan.
The road to San Marcos was beautiful, lush tropical forest in the twilight, so many mountains upon mountains cut by deep river valleys, a few little hamlets and villages with people sitting under their awnings. The woman sitting behind me on the bus said she’d show me a hotel, not to worry, and two hours later it was dark and the rain had stopped and we were in the busy town of San Marcos, a place I’d never heard of before this evening, much less considered as a place to visit. I followed her through several blocks and sure enough, she took me to a hotel, which wanted several hundred more quetzales than I wanted to pay.
Asked some men in the plaza for a cheap hotel, and they sent me through the still-going market stands which seemed strange. But behind the market I found the Hotel Bagod, which gave me this dilapidated room, which in my still-damp clothes seemed like a haven of peace, for 56 Q, or eight dollars. I considered and decided against the dusty shower, got changed, hung up wet things around the room, and went out in search of hot food and drink.
People were all out for their Sunday evening stroll around the plaza, which was a little run down but not a bad place, and there were a dozen food carts, all competing verbally for my business. More people said Buenas Noches to me in an hour than had done so in a week in Mexico, and young women smiled at me and children played soccer in front of the church. At the same time there was an underlying sense of danger in the street. A lot of demented, shifty-looking people about and a teenager punched another in the face in front of a hot dog stand and where the street seller “amigos” in Mexico would just talk, here several men grabbed me by the shoulder and tried to stop me. This was the first place on my travels that I actually felt relatively unsafe, though at the same time genuinely welcomed by the people. A strange mixture. Goodbye, Mexico, Bienvenidos a Guatemala.
I decided on a Torta Mexicana, which is a thing you’ll find throughout Central America, but none of them do any justice to a real Mexican torta. This one was a mess of chorizo and hot dog and onion and tomato chopped up and grilled together, topped with quesillo and mayonnaise and ketchup and I devoured it like I hadn’t eaten in days.
