Travel Journal:

Peevees' Big Adventure - From Tikal to Antigua


From Tikal to Antigua
 
The bus ride to Flores is uneventful, other than the crowding. Bob Marley is blasting "Stir it Up" on the radio. There is some flirting going on between two young female backpackers. Lisa notices this. Hmmm...

We arrive in Flores, which is a small and quaint town on an island in some big lake. We can't even name the lake. Are we serious travel writers or what? Once again, we are given an opportunity to support Latin American entrepreneurialism by paying twice as much for a bus ride to Antigua as the going rate. This time, we are smarter. Goodbye, Griswolds. We're now the Tikal Trumps and these shisters are FIRED! The most exciting thing about this town is they have a LAUNDROMAT! No more dog breath! But these machines are not certified to handle bio-hazards, and Lisa is afraid to take her still-wet socks and shoes off until we get to a shower.

We decide to take a night bus, so we can get to Antigua in the morning. Surprisingly, there is no shower on the bus! So, the shoes have another night to revolutionize bio-chemistry. The bus has some more surprises for us. For example, the music that is blared out of the sound system is like a soundtrack from an old silent movie or Tom and Jerry episode.
For some reason, it scares Alan. He deals. It was some kind of repetitive marimba stuff that just went round and round and round. And never went away.

About five minutes into our ride we notice the traffic is really super-heavy and moving slow. Like rush hour in LA, but it's 10 PM on a Thursday night in a small town. Weird. The bus pulls over into a gas station and sits there. The woman next to us explains what the stewardess had told the passengers: there was an explosion somewhere in town, and the driver needed to wait to decide whether we'd have to return to the bus station or complete the trip. So we wait...

After a half-hour, the bus starts rolling again. We get to the main road. Left means "no dice", right means "roll on". Right it is. Yay!

We learned the next day that there had been a bomb detonated at the fuel depot used by the local police. We still don't know who was responsible. Pretty weird.

We arrived the following morning, very early, in Guatemala City. One look around the neighborhood near the bus station and we agreed to get out of there as fast as possible. In fact, there was nothing in any of what we saw in Guatemala City to make us wish to return for a visit.

We found a taxi who would take us to the "chicken bus" to Antigua. He explains that the chicken bus would take about 3 hours, and so we negotiate a reasonable fare for him to drive us straight on to Antigua. He says he can do it in an hour. He actually got us there in less than 45 minutes, by doing some pretty fancy footwork. It was a bit scary, but worth it.

Next stop: Antigua, our new home city for a while!
 
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