Border Crossings

At 8:30 in the morning, Jenni and Asaf waved to me from the dock as I made a final trip across the river to Rio Dulce. Gary-the-Hotel-Owner told me it would take four-and-a-half hours to get to Copí¡n Ruinas in Honduras. It was about twice that.

In Rio Dulce there were no armed guards monitoring our entry to the bus this time. We didn’t even have to buy a ticket till we were on our way. Every so often we’d pull over to admit a new passenger who was waiting by the roadside.

The highways are modest, of course: a narrow lane in each direction, winding and bumpy. We accelerated and braked, accelerated and braked, as the driver navigated sharp turns, potholes and slow vehicles. Reading was out of the question. All I could do was think.

One thing I thought about were new titles for blog entries. This posting alone had several possibilities: Two Hundred Quetzales Per Foot was one. I’ll explain later. I love making up titles for things.

Mom had suggested I spend some travel time imagining how to arrange the furniture she’s shipping. There’s a “mahogany drop-leaf dining table, scarred pine table, Austrian cupboard, cannonball bed, iron foot-scraper, Victrola, bottle full of buckshot, long gun…”

Then I got to thinking about crime in this part of the world. People are often robbed and sometimes murdered on chicken buses, which is why I don’t ride them. I wondered: how does it happen? Do the robbers throw up a roadblock and demand that buses stop? No, that wouldn’t work, because the driver could charge right through them.

We slowed down to pick up another passenger. As the bus sped up, the guy walked past me toward the back.

And then it hit me: Duh. The robbers board the bus as passengers. Surreptitiously I started tucking a little more money in a few more places, including in each of my John Deere socks. Two Hundred Quetzales Per Foot. But none of the Guatemalan passengers looked worried. They tend to be fatalistic here, an essential attitude when coping with daily threats.

I started thinking about what I would say to a robber. No tengo mucho dinero seemed a bit canned. I tried to figure out how to say, Please give me back my passport. You can have my camera but I want the memory card, but I couldn’t get it to flow. In the end I decided I would speak in English, even though that’s not very polite.

When I got back from my trip (for I did live, and no one robbed us), Molly sent an e-mail: I spent one night in Patagonia, when I couldn’t sleep, composing a Spanish speech to your Guatemalan kidnappers, just in case you got kidnapped.

In Guatemala, there’s no separation of church and bus. The driver, like most people here, was deeply religious, if the sign he’d put up behind him was any indication. In swirling script it said,  Jehoba es mi pastor. Nada me faltar. Except the letters were worn off so it said Nada me Tiltap. Lesser people than me might have read that as The Lord is my shepherd. Nothing is my fault.

An hour or two before we reached the Honduran border, an indigenous family got on. The grandmother clutched a tiny baby. The mother, dressed in traditional clothes but with a blanket around her shoulders and a cloth over her head, sat next to her. I smiled at them, but they were not happy. My Spanish isn’t good enough to know what they said, but either the baby or the mother or both were sick, and they couldn’t afford medicine. The baby boy was two days old: a perfect, fragile thing with black hair. I don’t know if they were headed to the hospital or coming back. I can’t imagine being on a crowded bus, bouncing and careening, sun glaring in the window, with a new baby. Add to that the worry about the baby’s health and the powerlessness to do something about it. I reached over and gave them the equivalent of about $6, which is all I could do then.

At the border, moneychangers swarmed, flipping through three-inch wads of bills. Their rates were terrible, but I had to buy enough lempiras to get to town. I picked up my luggage, walked to a building where Guatemala released me, walked across the border to where Honduras welcomed me and walked up a hill for a colectivo. The family was behind me. The new mother, obviously in pain and sick, bent over to crawl to a vacant seat in the back. Once inside, we waited in brutal heat for about half an hour for the van to fill up.

Once on our way, it took only about twenty minutes to reach the town of Copí¡n Ruinas. The family got out and started walking across the treacherous cobblestone to somewhere and I never saw them again.

I’d heard that Honduran people aren’t nearly as warm and friendly as Guatemalans. I doubt that’s true, but it certainly was my first impression. I found Hotel ViaVia and checked in. The young woman wanted payment in advance. I didn’t have enough lempiras yet, and didn’t remember if I’d authorized my bank card for Honduras. I dug out quetzales, but she wouldn’t take the coins. And so on. My room was a tiny box with two mortuary slabs of beds. Just outside was a small but noisy tourist bar. Next door was a disco with Very Big Speakers. At Ginna’s bedtime they started some kind of movie with roaring monsters, gunshots and the grunts of people being punched in the stomach. I’m not staying here tomorrow.