Floribama Riders

James and Sandy on Volcan Pacaya

[Written 3 October 2008
San Pedro de la Laguna, Guatemala]

Here's a quick synopsis to get you caught up with my Guatemala trip.

Tuesday, 31 September - 6 AM flight, arriving in Guatemala City at 11:30. Taxi ride to Antigua. Picked up motorcycle from CATours, got a room at the Black Cat hostel, attended a lecture on youth gangs in Guatemala.

Wednesday, 1 October - Rode the bike to a nearby town, Santa Maria de Jesus, with an Austrian nurse named Karin on the back. In the afternoon, I felt a bit overwhelmed. It's tough to just take a plane into Central America, hop on a bike and expect everything to be as easy as it was on a six-month trip through the region. I took it easy and hung around the hostel, talking with other travelers from Israel, the Netherlands and the U.S. Arranged to tour Volcan Pacaya with a group at 6 AM the next day.

Thursday, 2 October - Had a great hike up the volcano. Yes, molten lava is impressive, especially when you're standing close enough to roast marshmallows and melt your shoes, but the highlight of my day was getting to know James and Sandy, quite probably the most in-love couple I have ever met. Apologies to the couples on this list, but this couple from New Zealand has been traveling together for a year-and-a-half. They stay in budget hotels and carry so little with them that Sandy said, "It's been six months since I've worn shoes." They had to buy long pants and shoes for the volcano hike. He's 24, and she's 25, and they've been together since high school. James is a scruffy little guy with bright red hair and a beard, and I don't have time right now to think of words that can describe how pretty Sandy was.

I had a long day planned yesterday because I felt I had not been doing enough, so I resolved to ride the motorcycle to my next destination in the afternoon. It's the rainy season here, so it's wet from the afternoon into the evening, but I only planned to ride to San Pedro de la Laguna, a small town on the shores of Lake Atitlan, which was supposed to be three hours away.

I left Antigua around 2 PM in the rain, destined for San Pedro de la Laguna. Instead of three hours, I rode for seven and still did not get to my destination. It was wet, and I kept missing the turn for San Pedro. I rode over a mountain where work crews were performing maintenance with tractors and other large machinery. Whenever they worked, they stopped traffic for an hour in both directions.

The first time over the mountain, they let me pass because I was on a motorcycle. The construction leader at the head of the line of cars was laughing at me, saying, "Tranquillo, tranquillo," because I jumped to the front of the line and kept asking if I could squeeze through. Eventually, he let me go, but he told me to go "despacio, con precaucion."

A backhoe perched halfway up the mountain scraped off sections of mud and rock and let them slide to the road below. I got to ride between large earth-movers as they scraped the mud back to the side of the road.

Then I drove for an hour through the mountains in the rain, following a pickup truck whose driver really knew what he was doing. Then I stopped and asked for directions, and I realized I had passed the turn-off point. So I returned back to the construction area. The second time over the mountain, it was getting dark, and I didn't feel like dodging full-size Tonka trucks. I sat by the side of the road next to the other cars. Suddenly, one guy started yelling, "La moto, la moto!" There was a mudslide where part of the mountain started sliding toward me. It didn't look too serious, so I stayed there, but then the women in the car next to me jumped out and ran to safety, so I moved.

After that, I only remember lots of mud and cars racing past me in the night. I passed the very slow trucks, but by that time I was very tired and wet, so I got passed a lot. It took me about an hour just to find a hotel. I had to stop and ask five times because it was dark, and it was hard to tell what was a hotel and what was a large house. My dinner was half a bag of granola because I was too tired and wet to walk 500 meters to a restaurant. Actually, I was too tired to make myself presentable to people in another language.

This morning I woke early and rode to San Pedro de la Laguna. This involved an obscure turn-off from the main highway, followed by mountain switchbacks, followed by an obscure turn-off in each of the four mountain towns through which I passed. I would have never made it this far in the dark or the rain. I needed people to be out in the streets so I could ask for directions. I'm starting to think that maybe a GPS is not such a bad idea. I wonder, would I still get to ask for directions?