Alright, I may be cheating here, but I figured out I can use accent marks as apostrophes so we´re back in business. Apparently apostrophes are´nt very important in typing in Spanish.
Now, as promised, here is the epic tale of how Meghan and I got to Tikal and back in under 65 hours.
I had no plans to go to Tikal whenever I woke up Monday morning. In fact, I was actually planning to go get certified to Scuba dive starting on Wednesday. But due to some nasty rumors of nastier things lurking in the lake (cyanobacteria, trash, man-eating algae, etc.) I cancelled those plans. I was sort of bummed and didn´t really know what I was going to do with my week since Salud y Paz was going to be doing businessy stuff on Thursday and Friday. The kind of businessy stuff I really couldn´t help with and was told would be for the most part, pretty boring. Then when I got to the clinic Monday morning, I was talking to Meghan, another short term volunteer with SyP, and she said that she and a few friends were leaving for Tikal on Tuesday afternoon and that I was more than welcome to come. I agreed almost immediately.
As a little bit of a background why going to Tikal is such a big deal, this is my 5th time I´ve been to Guatemala. Every single time, I´ve been, I´ve had someone tell me that I MUST go to Tikal. However, Tikal is in pretty much the opposite corner of the country from where I am.
On the pretty map above, I´m in Panajachel (right next to the little blue dot in the middle of the country). Tikal is the black dot appropriately labeled in the northeastern corner of the map. For those of you handy with a map, you´re probably all like ´´what´s the big deal, its only maybe 200 miles away, quit being a little girl, hop a bus and go.´´ What this map doesn´t show is that from my black dot in Pana to the red star that is Guatemala City, its a 3 hour chicken bus ride, despite being only 40 miles on the map. Mountains sort of make driving suck. From Guatemala City, its another 9 hours on a First Class Bus to Flores, and then an hour and a half or so from Flores to Tikal, via a bus slightly smaller than a 15 passenger van. Hopefully that all makes sense for you now. In case you´re bad at math, thats like 13.5 hours one way, or 27 hours round trip, not including all the sitting, waiting, and wishing you do for your busses to come.
So 5 pm Tuesday rolls around, and Meghan and I grab our bags and hop on the first chicken bus from Los Encuentros to Guatemala City. Juan Toj, one of the head honchos at SyP recommended that we go to a mall called Miraflores while we wait for it to get closer to 9:30 when our bus leaves (Guatemala City redefines sketchy at night). Meghan and I are both down for a mall visit, but we have no idea where it is or where we should get off our chicken bus to get there. So we start riding through Guatemala City and we sort of feel lost, finally we decide to just get off and hop a cab to the mall. The bus driver pulls off from the first stop we were trying to get off at, so we just stand up and take the next one. We hop off and start looking around, and as luck would have it, we are standing in front of the 3 story Miraflores mall. We celebrated our good luck and then went and got some dinner and crepes (nutella and banana with vanilla ice cream, in case you were wondering.)
8:30 rolls around and we grab a cab to the Linea Dorada station. In my experience with Greyhound busses in the US, they pick the sketchiest of the sketchy parts of town to put the bus stations in, and the same holds true in Guatemala. I picked up on this feeling somewhere in between passing the women of questionable occupations and when the taxi driver quickly reached behind the passenger seat to lock my door. We asked him if where we were was a bad side of town, and he said there were worse, but there were a lot of drugs, prostitutes, and crime that moved through that side of town.
We finally get to the Linea Dorada station grab our tickets for the 10 pm bus to Flores, and wait for our bus to board. Ironically, we run in to a few people we know from Pana, who are taking an earlier bus to Flores as well. As it turns out, travelling in Guatemala means you bump in to a lot of people you've met over and over. They'll come back in to our story a little later.
The Linea Dorada busses turn out to be a lot nicer than we anticipated. Plenty of leg room, comfy seats that recline to almost 45 degrees and ice cold air conditioning, a far cry from the hot, cramped, vinyl-covered metal seats of a chicken bus. The bus isn't full either, so we each have 2 seats to ourselves, BONUS! We each pop a dramamine and drift off to sleep.
I'm going to pull a Harry Potter 7 and break this post up in to 2 parts because my fingers hurt, so you're going to have to wait in suspense for what happens next and hear just how awesome it is to visit Tikal.
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