Roy (Lloyd) Jones

Day 68 – Saturday 26th November 2005

Much of the morning was spent having my first experience on a chicken bus. After catching an overnight bus from Flores to Guatemala City, the bus arrived at 5am. This was quite a bad time to arrive in the city as it is renouned for being a very bad place to out on your own after dark. Add to that I had all my stuff on my back I was an obvious target.

Luckily I hailed a taxi pretty quickly and went to the departure point for the next leg of my journey. I was going to the city of Quetzaltenango, otherwise known as Xela (pronounced shay-la). The bus system is not centred around a main terminal in Guatemala City, the buses leave from the offices of the individual bus operators. Hence the need for a taxi.

I found my bus – a simpson style old American school bus – and got on ready for the 4hr journey. When we left the city the bus was virtually empty, however as we gor further and further into the outskirts, the bus began to fill up rapidly. Eventually the bus had about 50 too many people on it and everyone was crammed in like chickens in a battery. Every inch of space was taken by either a person, luggage or an animal of some description. Luckily I had a window seat so was crammed against the side, rather than having some random dudes’ arse in my face.

Despite the discomfort and the very frequent stops to let people on or off it was an interesting experience. Add to that the sunrise and the views of the countryside, and it became one of the more memorable rides of the trip so far.

I arrived in Xela at the 2nd class bus terminal and was immediately bombarded with the frantic pace. Coupled with the loud, toxic fumed buses was a market with any and every kind junk you could possibly want, or not want. After getting out of the immediate vicinity as quickly as possible, I made my way to my chosen hostel and checked in. Having been on an overnight bus and a chicken bus for most of the morning I didn’t want to excert myself too much more, so I had a casual wander around the town. It wasn’t a town with exceptional architecture, it seemed more a market town so I went to a market I had passed through in a collectivo on my way from bus station to hotel. The market was the Mercado de Democracia and it was pretty much as mad as the market at the bus station.

Although I went to the market, I wasn’t really in the market to purchase anything, I just wanted to see what the atmosphere was like. After soaking up as much of it as I could, the overnight bus began to catch up with me. Thus I spent the remainder of the day practising my Spanish and not much more.

Xela is one of the main places to learn Spanish in Guatemala, and having wandered around the city it seemed as though there was a school on every street corner. Although most of the people studying were trying to speak to each other in Spanish, I sensed it was quite a laboured effort, as at any time the conversation could slip back into English. It made me appreicate more that I’d made the correct decision to study in a place where there were so few other English speakers.