Hitchhiking in Rio Dulce, Guatemala (Jul 2007)

It’s hotter here than it was in the mountains. I’ve been laid up in San Pedro de Laguna for the past week, slowly recovering from bus crash injuries, and have only now emerged from my mountain fastness. I’m better, but I’m not all the way better, as the enormous livid bruise that covers my entire left thigh from hip to knee will testify. Debi’s here now though, I picked her up in Guatemala City yesterday and we’re headed north to Tikal.

Of course, this being Guatemala, the way to go north is to go almost due east first, and thus here we are breaking our journey in Rio Dulce. There’s supposed to be a cool waterfall here, and a boat trip up the river to Livingston that we can squeeze in before the next long haul bus. Our hostel is accessible by boat only, through narrow waterways overhung with mangroves, and our room is in a treehouse with a thatched roof. Already Debi has had to leap to my aid multiple times, as well-meaning bus drivers or the like try to guide me into a boat or hand me my backpack. I can say “Yo soy herida!,” but usually not fast enough, and Debi has been running interference.

We consult over a late seafood lunch, and determine that the boat trip is best saved for the following morning. We’ll go out to the waterfall this afternoon, water sounds like a fantastic idea in this oppressive, tropical heat. My book tells me that it’s a simple matter, there’s a bus from right here in town that goes right there. After lunch and a stroll around town, “Donde esta el station de bus?” It’s probably not correct but it’s close enough that people figure out what we’re looking for, and we’re directed to a dusty street corner to wait. “Cuando… tiempo… jusq’ua crap that’s French…” Ok, so we can’t figure out how long before the bus shows up but we know it will be here, and one or two other people seem to be waiting as well so that’s a good sign.

The bus pulls up just a few minutes later and we congratulate ourselves on having such perfect timing, while we are simultaneously eying the battered, garishly painted school bus with trepidation. Especially me, my history with buses in this country is not good and the “chicken buses,” as they’re known, are by far the worst. It is, however, the only bus going where we want to go, so we climb on; at least we’re here first and we’ll have seats, because as this bus fills up people will end up crammed into the center aisle or sitting on top.

We’re sitting in this mostly empty bus, the metal chassis concentrating the swampy heat of mid-afternoon even more than before. We are sweating in this still air, and it is about all we are doing because sweating this much takes a lot of energy. We are going to be sweating for a while, as the bus slowly fills up. A teenage girl sits across from us, with a no-shit real live chicken tucked beneath her arm. Debi and I share a look and smother our giggles, “You weren’t kidding when you said it was a chicken bus were you?”

Sweating, and already we are running low on water and we haven’t even started moving yet. We keep thinking about getting off the bus and going to resupply, but who knows when this thing will finally roar to life and how much warning we’ll have so we decide to sit tight, our faces turned up to the cracked plastic windows trying to catch any bit of breeze that may be wandering around on the streets out there. There’s not one, but we still try.

Finally! Half an hour later and we’re on the move. The road is paved for a while but that peters out quickly, and now we are jostling over rocks and rutted dirt tracks with encroaching weeds. We’re out of water, but there must be somewhere to buy water when we get there. There better be.

The air is moving a little more now with the bus’s motion, but we’re not going fast enough over this crappy road to get anything resembling a breeze going. We are the only two gringos on the bus, and we are attracting a lot of sideways looks and stolen glances. We also, of course, don’t know how far down this road we need to go, or how we’ll know when we get to where we’re going. Guidebook didn’t tell us that. Eventually, Debi is nominated to go forward and try to talk to the driver on the grounds that she is not sporting a giant bruise on her leg and is therefore better equipped to push through the crowded aisle as the bus rumbles and stutters over the stones and muddy puddles.

She comes back a few minutes later, the bus driver has assured her that he will tell us when we get to Finca el Paraiso. She also has a beer, apparently some guy up at the front of the bus has a cooler and is selling cervezas. No agua, though, but the moisture feels good anyway. We are basted to the dirty vinyl seats in a soup of sweat and we are still a ways away, as we’ve just learned.

Two hours after the bus wheezed to life and rolled out of Rio Dulce, I am almost in a daze, forehead leaned against the dirt-streaked window, too hot to think, and I see a small outpost, a roadside café looks like, and a sign about… wait, that’s it! “Alto!” I scream, starting up from my seat and then wincing, that was the wrong way to move and my left thigh is going to make sure I know about it, but the driver stops at least. If I hadn’t seen it we would’ve been on that bus all the way over to the next town, with no way to get back.

We clamber down the steps and stagger over to the café place, agua at last, and guzzle a liter each almost instantly. It’s mid-afternoon now, we’ve only got a few more hours of daylight, and we ask the guy staffing the café when the bus goes back in the other direction.

The last bus back to Rio Dulce will pass by in about 30 minutes.

“No. No. We have not even been up to the waterfall yet, I am not getting back on a bus in 30 minutes, I do not care.” Debi, quite reasonably, asks how we are going to get back. “There has to be a way, we will hitchhike if we have to, let’s go find that waterfall.” She doesn’t want to get back on a bus either after two hours in a slow-moving oven, so she shrugs and off we go up the trail.

A quick walk and then, has there ever been a more beautiful sight than a waterfall of crisp, clear water cascading into a deep pool on a sultry summer day in tropical climes?

We didn’t think so either. Debi checked her rush for the water to make sure that I could navigate the slippery river rocks successfully, and then we stripped down to our bathing suits and waded in. There are some other people here, looks like a tour group, and we greet each other in the water, they marveling at my enormous bruise. This waterfall, Finca el Paraiso, is a peculiar natural phenomenon; the pool below is cold river water welling up, but the cascade is from a thermal spring. We are swimming with our legs stretched down into cool depths, with sauna-warm water steaming around our heads and shoulders.

Of course, we still don’t know how we’re getting out of here.

I climb out of the water reluctantly, and sidle over to chat with the tour folks a little more. “How did you guys get here, anyway?” Trying to be a casual question. Ah, their guide had chartered a boat and they had come up the channel and then walked over across the road, one of the advantages of traveling with a group being that in exchange for overpaying you are spared hellish rides in a tin-can chicken bus. Their boat’s captain approaches me, asking if we are interested in riding back, he has room in his boat and he’ll charge us less than he’s charging the other people if we don’t tell them, this is gravy for everyone and if he had any idea how fucking stranded we are out here there wouldn’t be any deals cut, but one of the advantages of traveling without the group protection is that you can do whatever you want at any time, including hitch a ride back in a boat full of strangers.

As we leave with our new acquaintances, walking down the dirt road to the river access point, I strike up a conversation with one of the solo guys. He’s young, about our age, mid-twenties or so, and also from New York. He is sheepish about being with a group of retirees and families with young-ish children, “Well, I didn’t have anyone to travel with and I’d never been down here before, and I just thought it would be better to have some structure, but now that I’m here…” Now that he’s here, he sees how easy it is to travel independently through Central America with only a guidebook for company.

We skim down the river for an hour, wind in our faces, until we reach the main dock in Rio Dulce and catch yet another boat over to our hostel, Debi helping me with every step up and down in and out of the boats.