The Road to San Salvador

Today, a gray Tuesday near the end of October, I am finally leaving Guatemala, making my first southern progress in two months. Though to be orientationally correct, following the Pan-Americana the road goes mostly from west to east, along with the shape of Central America. Riding a mostly empty, decidedly not-chicken Ticabus from Guatemala City to San Salvador.

I am browsing through a 2009 guidebook on Nicaragua, preparing for the first new country of this journey, still a couple weeks off, but mostly looking out the window. First at the endless urban and suburban stretches of concrete city, then countryside. Rolling hills, mountains and valleys of southeastern Guatemala roll past in every possible shade of green. I am on my way to visit my Mom, who has lived with her husband John in San Salvador for almost six years. This is still trodden ground: I have ridden this route several times with her on my way to and from Antigua.

After leaving Xela, I spent three nights at Lago de Atitlan in the “Global Party Village” which San Pedro de Laguna has become, and can’t say I enjoyed it too much. Perhaps I am a bit too old for the Global Party scene. It was my first time staying in a dorm in quite a while, and it was a rude awakening, pun intended. Younger, less present, less friendly party people, coming in late at night from the bars and leaving very early in the morning to go on guided tours of volcanoes and the like. Before they’d leave on their pre-dawn sallies, they would snooze their alarms a few times, go through their bags searching around for things, zipping and unzipping and opening up plastic bags.

When they were around they were mostly looking at their phones with headphones on or talking about which tours to do, which overnight buses to take to get to which hostels. I realized that I was square in the middle of the gringo trail, and I didn’t like it. It’s very much a business, maximizing the efficiency of travel, packing in as much as possible to the itinerary. Right across the lake in San Marcos, people seem to go there to be there; in San Pedro it felt like people were just checking off boxes.

It was also hard in San Pedro to do what I most wanted to do at Lake Atitlan: swim. Most of the places with water access aren’t clean; at my hostel there was a dock but an enormous mass of thick aquatic grasses that looked like it would ensnare a swimmer. On my second day I found a spot, but only by cutting through someone’s yard, ignoring numerous propriedad privada signs, almost an hour of scrambling through jungly peninsula, then clambering down rocks. It was lovely to finally submerse myself in the waters, sit there and absorb all the blue of water and sky, watch Maya fisherman pass in their little boats.

Everything seemed to be something of a struggle: my luck seemed to be going wrong. A short but not exclusive list included stepping in dog shit Friday night trying to hang a clothesline, then getting it on my hands, and thus the rope; playing poker at a bar Saturday afternoon and after winning the very first hand on pocket aces, losing every single hand I played; going to a restaurant for Sunday brunch and first getting into an argument with a peanut-seller who was offended by my low-ball negotiating and refusal to pay tourist rates after two months in the country, then when he left me, dumping a whole shaker of salt on my eggs when the top was left loose. Hoping to improve my luck and energy, Sunday afternoon I took the boat across the lake to San Marcos to meet Monica, my friend from TEFL in Antigua, who had been volunteering at a hostel in the village of Santa Cruz, farther east along the lake.

We met on the boat dock, and it was so good to see someone I knew. On these journeys where you are constantly meeting and saying goodbye to people, there is something grounding about a familiar and friendly face. Our first task was wandering around the village to locate and surprise our friend Tayannah. We let ourselves in and then crept quietly through the expansive grounds of Los Piramides meditation center, where she was doing a yoga retreat, but didn’t find a single soul. We tried various cafes we thought she might like, all to no avail. I suggested we go to the nature reserve park for a hike and swim, told her about my string of bad luck, and my plan to burn something at one of the Mayan altars. “Fair,” she said, as is her way. At a little new age specialty shop I bought some copal, the traditional Mayan incense, and some charcoal to burn it with. Monica bought a bag of jocotes from a woman on the street, these red and green fruits the size of small eggs. It was my first time eating them, something like a sour mango, and we headed for the woods.

Monica and I hiked up to the top of the hill in a hot tropical sun, and talked in the shade for a long time. She had escaped an attempted mugging recently while hiking around the lake, and told me the whole story. A man had just said disculpe to her on the path, then asked her for money. When she declined, he grabbed her by the wrist and starting taking off her watch, but she pepper-sprayed him in the eyes and ran away. He had messed with the wrong gringa. I told her about being robbed at gun-point in New Orleans, and the lengthy trial process afterwards. She described some sort of epic long-form poem that she was piecing together, about lost love and traveling. It made me wish I still wrote poetry.

We emerged into the sun, sat around the altar and burned the copal for awhile. A musky and sweet smoke, maybe a little like frankincense. We were repeatedly visited by a lizard with a brilliant blue tail, who seemed very interested in the proceedings. Perhaps we had summoned him with our ceremony. We walked back down the hill to the rocks along the shore and swam in the lovely healing blue waters. The combination of good company and smoke and water left me feeling better about the world. Back in the village we split a sandwich at a cafe and when we walked down to the boat dock, there were two boats there waiting for us, bound to our respective lakeside destinations, and we parted ways.

The next day I took a boat to Panajachel and a chicken bus to Antigua, where I found that town looking her best, perfect golden light illustrating all the poignantly cracking plaster and brilliant colors, towering Volcan Agua filling up the southern horizon. I spent the night at the hostel next door to the Casa Matilda, where I’d lived for a month, the hostel whose sounds of merry-making I’d listened to so many nights while trying to study and sleep. I guess I was ready to see how the other half lived. Made my rounds that afternoon and evening in Antigua: Cafe Santa Clara for a croissant to eat in my favorite plaza, Cafe No Se for a beer, Dyslexia bookstore to trade my Guatemala guidebook for a Nicaragua, Maximo Nivel, my school, to pick up the textbooks I’d left there.

I found that I had come to peace with Antigua. While it is without a doubt quite touristy and not at all typical of Guatemala, it is certainly lovely. After another month in the country, I now understood something of what it means to people in that country. It’s a historical treasure, an emblem of some kind of Spanish colonial golden age that maybe never was. Ana Maria, my Spanish teacher in Xela, simply loves Antigua, and I realize how proud Guatemalan people are of their old capital.

Went out to dinner with another of my TEFL classmates, Emily, the tall blonde missionary, and her Honduran boyfriend Luis. She was still teaching at our school, and for her not much had changed in the month since our class ended; she had already made a real life down there and was part of the community. They were sweet, but it felt like our worlds were diverging, that we already had much less in common, more like someone I knew a long time ago.

That night at the hostel I felt out of place, much older than most of the guests, showing up at a party I wasn’t invited to. I found one good person, one atypical traveler to talk to: a guy named Tommy who had ridden a bicycle all the way from Colorado, on his way to Patagonia. Now that is a real southern migration. He tinkered with his bike while we drank a couple beers and mostly talked about Mexico and how different it is from what people in the states think. I had my fourth bad night of sleep in a row sleeping in dorms: people getting up and down from bunks, mosquitoes, a cat in the room, people chasing the cat, alarms, people getting up before dawn to do what they do.

The next morning I packed my bags and walked over to Dona Luisa’s for an excellent plate of huevos rancheros, which in Guatemala means fried eggs covered with a tomato-onion sauce, completing my brief Antigua tour with my favorite breakfast spot. Walked across town in a light rain to the bus yard, and on the way in, a policeman asked where I was going, then hailed a passing chicken bus. What service! The barker sprinted down, and took my heavy pack up to the roof. I climbed on and took the last available seat, next to an old lady near the front.

We drove an hour through hills and thick forest until we emerged before a wide valley with buildings as far as the eye could see. Half an hour later they let me off on the side of busy Calzada Roosevelt,where I hailed a taxi, talked him down from 50 quetzales to 40, which didn’t matter in the end as he didn’t have the correct change. That old “I don’t have enough change” trick which never ends up in your favor. But off we went in his little white mini-taxi. We talked along the fifteen minute ride — I didn’t understand everything he said, but most of it — about corruption in the government and crime and bad traffic. Big city Central American life. He still thought Guatemala City was the best place to live in the country. Why, I asked? They have the best futbol team.

Got to the Ticabus station, a real proper bus station like I hadn’t seen since Mexico, and paid the equivalent of $42 for a ticket on the two o’clock bus. This was a lot of money for these parts, but what I was paying for was mostly the luxury of a passage across the border, rather than getting dropped off in some no-man’s land and navigating it yourself, like I did on my way into Guatemala.

At the bus station, watching futbol on the TV out of the corner of my eye, I was thinking about how often I watch bits and moments of these games at restaurants and bars, and I have not once ever seen a goal scored. I think it’s like a baseball game; if you persist through the vast majority of the game in which the drama is building and not much happens, you will eventually be rewarded with a punctuation, some kind of dramatic conclusion. But if you just watch baseball for a few minutes, you’re probably not going to see a home run.

I was thinking about this when I noticed on the other side of the station this diminutive jet-black-haired girl in a long flowing skirt. She was standing and talking to a couple of backpacker girls on the other side of the station, who were sitting at a table eating plates of chicken and rice. She had this way of holding her body like she was about to start dancing, this way of looking like she was about to break out into a big smile. While I was trying to figure out what exactly it was that made her so entrancing, I heard the announcer break out into that call of “Gooooooooooooooooollll!!” Another goal missed.

It was dusk and we have been riding three hours when we cross a raging river that marks the entrance into a broad valley. The bus stopped at the bottom, a little building next to a canyon with a little river called the Rio Paz at the bottom, where women were washing clothing far below. The name was appropriate: the whole place was quite peaceful, one of the more picturesque borders I’d seen.

As we got off the bus, a group of money-changers came up offering dollars (what they use in El Salvador) for our quetzales, all with calculators in hand. I wasn’t expecting to get a good exchange rate here at the border, but the numbers they were putting in were producing really strange results. The exchange rate is roughly seven q to a dollar, but my 350q was turning into 25 dollars. I pulled out my phone and put in the same numbers, got $50, and saw that their calculators were pre-programmed to give the wrong math. This was an impressive technological development they’d made. I showed them the correct math, and they shrugged and started negotiating, and I got them up to $40. Still a crappy rate, but about what you’d expect.

We got our passports stamped and back on the bus, then crossed the border to the Salvadoran side, where an immigrations officer and a man in a military uniform with a patch that said anti-narcotico checked our passports and asked a few questions in Spanish: “where are you staying? what is the reason for your visit? how long will you be in El Salvador?” and I had acceptable answers, we were cleared to go and it was dusk. Just up the hill we stopped for ten minutes at a pupusa stand on the side of the road.

Crossing the road I passed the cute girl from the station on her way back to the bus, and I asked her if she’d gotten pupusas. She said she had and asked how I knew Spanish and how I knew pupusas and I stumbled through a long answer. We stood there awkwardly smiling at each other and she left and I bought three frijole and queso pupusas for a dollar, and when I got back on the bus and walked past her, she smiled at me again.

Soon it was too dark to read, and as per usual the reading lights didn’t work, even on a nice bus like this, and I didn’t want to watch the bad, dubbed-into-Spanish science fiction movie. What I really wanted to do was talk to this girl who was sitting three rows ahead of me. A half hour later I was looking over the seats out at the road ahead when she happened to look back. She said “how are you?” and I said, “I’m bored” and she said “you can come sit by me” and this was a small miracle.

Her name was Jenny and she was even cuter up close, smiling a lot with her eyes sparkling, and we talked all the way to San Salvador. She is a student of languages, speaks English and French (in addition to her native Spanish), some Japanese and she said she knows everything about grammar. Everything. Enough that she could make up her own language that only she could understand. Told me how she used to write her journals in code so her Dad couldn’t read them — a code based off the word murcielago — bat. How she used to have recurring dreams about a house on fire and an old man pushing a cart with gleaming eyes in the dark. Our conversation was like a mountain river, flowing fast, splashing over any obstacle in its way, and the things she said were were like movies projected in brilliant color when before I was just sitting in a dark room.

We talked about languages and grammar and dreams and traveling, which she said she had become addicted to, and was going to France in a couple weeks. She had just finished university and quit her job at a call center, and had been in Guatemala City getting her visa in order. She told me about working at the call center for some US credit card company, how they work, how you can get special treatment just by being nice to the workers. Really she was just delightful to talk to and charming and it didn’t matter that we couldn’t see each other or that we were stuck sitting in traffic at an accident for a long while.

At some point she was telling me good things to do in San Salvador, and said that Paseo El Carmen was a good place to go out with friends. I said “but I don’t have any friends in San Salvador” and after a pause she said “well, then I’ll take you. Tomorrow is a good day to go.” Another small miracle. And so it was that I had a date with the lovely Ms. Jenny Beatriz.

At the Hotel Meson de Maria in a fancy section of the city where the bus let us off, my Mom and Jose, her taxi driver friend, were there waiting. I hugged my Mom who as always looked so happy to see me, and shook Jose’s hand, and introduced Jenny to them. We said goodbye and I went to hug her and she went to kiss me on the cheek and she ended up kissing me on the neck and we laughed and I said “see you tomorrow?” and she said yes.

I got into Jose’s taxi and we rode a short distance to my Mom’s house, which felt completely surreal, a real house, my mother’s house, the first house I’d been in since Andrew and Allison’s in New Orleans three months before. My Mom heated up some pasta in a white sauce with real actual grated parmesan cheese. It was fantastic and I sat there with my Mom and her husband John in their comfortable living room and talked for awhile about all kinds of things. I asked John “how are you feeling?”, attempting to broach the subject of his recently diagnosed prostate cancer, but he didn’t bite. “Alright,” he said. I told them about meeting Jenny and my mom the romantic was excited but he said “what is she, a hooker?”. He’s got that kind of sense of humor.

Then they went to bed and I watched the Golden State Warriors’ first game of the season, where they lost to the Rockets by a point after Draymond Green hurt his knee and Steph Curry missed a couple of late shots and Kevin Durant’s game-winning shot left his finger a fraction of a second too late and didn’t count. And then I went to sleep in a famously comfortable bed (by my recent standards) and slept on and off until the morning had almost turned to afternoon.