Day Zero: Guatemala

The day before we left, I'd decided to go down to my barber (I have a barber!)(well, not anymore...) and get my shaggy locks taken back a little bit to make it an easier go while on the road. My hair was cut farther than I wanted, but it'll grow back, so I wasn't that upset, but it was shorter than maybe I wanted it to be for first impressions with local Central Americans, but it was too late.

We, instead of taking the subway, took a direct(ish) shuttle to LAX, and then spent about 90 minutes in line waiting to check in for the flight. This caused me to say some things that themselves weren't rude, but the way in which I said them could be considered rude. One of the employees directing the line's foot traffic to the podiums told me that "the system's not working". I assumed he meant the computers, and that's why the line was so slow. That didn't stop me from saying loudly, "<span style="font-style:italic;">Obviously</span> the system isn't working," and then later after he told me that "this shouldn't take this long" I, again loudly, said, "Oh <span style="font-style:italic;">really</span>? How <span style="font-style:italic;">interesting</span>...it shouldn't take this long...you <span style="font-style:italic;">don't</span> say."

By now it was both amusing Corrie and embarrassing her, so I quit it. We've had problems with airplanes and airports before (Denver and Memphis), and I was just trying to play it cool.

The plane took off after midnight, giving us a strange Day Zero. After landing and losing two hours to the time change, it was almost 7 am.

Exiting the airport in Guatemala City a person with our skin tone is accosted by a slew of cabbies and shuttle drivers, all wanting to take us to some place called Antigua. "The Caribbean? Little far from here," I remember saying to Corrie. After she pointed to an address to a cabbie and we jumped into the car, she explained, "That's what I thought too, but there's a popular tourist city that all the white tourists who come to Guatemala go to."

That wasn't us, for sure (at least not yet). We were driven through Guatemala City's morning rush hour traffic to a bus station, where we purchased tickets to a tiny town, Rio Hondo. Check out beautiful Guatemala City:

The place we were trying to stay turned out to not be in Rio Hondo, but in Santa Cruz, 8 km before Rio Hondo. We were to stay at the hotel that Corrie had stayed at during her Habitat for Humanity trips in the hopes that we'd be able to find someone whocould take us to the settlements. Corrie knew where Huite, the tiny village, was, but not exactly where the Habitat community existed, a few km in some direction out of Huite.

Nobody spoke English when we were there, and it was kind of an adventure just getting to the hotel. The bus wouldn't stop when we saw the hotel, before Rio Hondo, so we had to go all the way and then backtrack on a autobus, our first autobus trip of the week. These are the most reliable and affordable way to get around this region, I imagine.

We'd left LA just after midnight, and by 1 the next afternoon we were finally at a bed-stop. We relaxed after learning that the planned trip to Huite would be off, and planned our early morning exit and resumption of the trip on towards Copan Ruinas in Honduras.