Lately God and The Baby Jesus have been upset with Mateo Del Norte. He doesn't know why that is, but it certainly seems to be so. He must have done something bad in the last little while and is reaping the whirlwind. Or maybe it's just bad luck. He had really good luck for a while there, so why not a downturn? Or, to use the words of our wonderful and oh-so capable president, "It isn't a recession...it's a slowdown." (What is the dollar at now? $1.60 with the Euro? Good goin' douchebag...) So maybe that's it, maybe Mateo is in a good luck 'slowdown'. Or maybe it's just the way things go. Whatever it is, the last few weeks have been filled with a lot of gnarliness of various kinds. I'm not going to go into that much of it, because it sucks to listen to people whine, but intertwined with the rest of the story, I think it makes for some good humor. (Better in retrospect, like so many things...)
So a couple days before leaving on my secret mission (it will be understood why this is, for the moment, secret.), which you will read about soon, once I get the blog written, (it will appear before this entry chronologically) I started feeling funny and realized I was coming down with something funky. I ran around looking for preventative stuff in San Jose, but despite the American Occupation, there is not yet any sign of Echinacea, an Airborne-type thing, or any good asian tea. So I took some vitamin C but that didn't help fend off the bug for long. On the morning that I left for the secret mission my nostrils felt like someone had lit sparklers inside of them, and my throat was raw. Dammit. Not fun to travel like that. Never-the-less, I sucked it up and enjoyed the secret mission. By the time I was back in Costa Rica, my cold was in full effect and I was a walking ball of mucus. Sounds gross right? It was. But, the thing that made me feel better about it, or less guilty about spreading my germs, was the fact that all of Central America is sick right now...then and now! Everyone is sniffling and coughing.
I got back to San Jose to a rainstorm at about one in the afternoon. The airport bus I was on took the longest route possible back to the city. I made it to the hostel to get my bag and then killed some time until my bus left at 3:00 AM in the morning! Not a good time of day. In the evening, I snuck back into the hostel and I tried to crash in the basement but the Sri Lanki guy who works there caught me and gave me hell. No sleep at all. Getting ready to leave the hostel I met this French girl who would become my travel homie. Veronique was her name and she was taking the same busride. So at 2:00 AM we cabbed to the station and waited to get on the bus. This busride was to be a doozy. A twenty two hour ride up to San Salvador. I slept for a little while in the night, and I must admit that the ride was pretty smooth. We watched another load of sorta bad movies, and they served us some not too terrible food. In Honduras the police stopped us and more or less took apart the bus. They boarded with screwdrivers and other tools and took the bathroom apart. Literally, piece by piece. Looking for drugs. It took almost two hours, which put us back two hours on the schedule, which put us two hours longer on the bus. That sucked, even though it was interesting to see the dismantling of a bus. Luckily we had no drugs...Honduras didn't seem like a great place to go to prison.
The plan was to arrive in San Salvador, sleep for a few hours, and then continue on another 7 hours to Guatemala City. They assured us rooms to sleep in in a hotel, but, of course, when we arrived at said hotel, there was one room left for me and Veronique and this Argentinian dude we had buddied up with. We had to share beds there beneath the roar of the box fan rocking to keep us from sweltering. It all didn't matter much because we had less than four hours to sleep. Back on the bus before the sun came up and then onwards to Guatemala.
We got there and my cold was raging from lack of sleep. My first plan there was to get some sleep. I made it to the hostel and did just that. My idea for the following few days was to go to Antigua, the cultural and historical center of Guatemalan Colonialism. Well, I woke up that morning, with the first of the next two parts of the trifecta of misery alive in my body...fever. Man, did that hurt. I am actually pretty sure that I had dengue fever which they call 'break bone fever'. My whole body ached. You know the kind of fever where your armhair hurts? I was sweating and yet completely cold. I got on the bus and rode up to Antigua and after not too long looking around, I crashed into my concave hostel bed and slept 16 hours! That was good, but when I woke up that day, I had the third part of the trilogy; the stomach gnar. Gastrointestinal disaster. So now the cold was still in effect, affecting my nose and I had this raging cough which made the headache from the fever feel worse than I could imagine...my bones and muscles still ached and I was still sweating cold, but know I had sharp pains in my stomach and intestines and I couldn't eat much without a lot of penitence.
That day I took some pills which helped a bit and I looked around some more. I like Antigua, it is a bit like Cusco or Bogota or Quito, with old walls and stone streets and mountains all around. That said, I think it was my least favorite of the four. It is very touristy and gringofied. That was good in my case, because there were things there I could use against my sicknesses that would not have been present otherwise, but on a cultural level, it is compromised. It is still a nice place, don't get me wrong, but it has been seriously 'discovered' if that makes sense. After a couple days there, I headed back to Guatemala City, which is truly a juggernaut of Central American Metropolises. Set down in a valley, the sprawl of the city is massive, and the pollution is almost unfathomable. The air-quality here on a bad day makes Los Angeles look like the pure heights of the Rocky Mountains.
Guatemala has a history and reputation of violence that is varied and disturbing. All travelers know to take care when walking wilderness trails in Guatemala, and when crossing borders with the neighboring countries. But most Guatemalans will tell you that the most dangerous places are in the capital itself. There are streets in the best areas there where a gringo could be robbed just for walking by. You don't wear jewelry of any sort, you don't carry your passport or your credit cards, and you certainly don't carry much cash around. There is a line from a song about Guatemala, written by a band I used to like called LSD. "They shoot the children...down in Guatemala City." That line was in my head as we neared the place and I was interested to see what I felt about it when I got there. After a number of days there, I can say that it would be no surprise at all to hear of that happening. Children being dispatched for a variety of reasons by a variety of people. And certainly during the dark days of the supposed 'integration' of the Mayan indigenous people, this would have happened regularly. It is a violent place among violent places.
That said, the Guatemalans that I met were all very nice and liked to chat about things, of all sorts. My hosts at the hostel I stayed at in the capital where really good people. It's that way pretty much all the time. Everywhere has nice people and some assholes. Violent countries, peaceful countries, big countries, little countries, all are comprised of people; and people, the world around, are pretty much the same despite their differences. Good, bad and everything in between. Lots of shades of gray...
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