After our quiet time at Rio Dulce, it was time to move on. The next trip started on to Antigua, where we stayed for only one night (we were coming back a few nights later) and then on to a homestay with a Guatemalan family in San Jorge La Laguna.
The trip to Antigua took seven hours, but as I recall (or rather don’t recall), it wasn’t particularly memorable. It included a stop at a restaurant somewhere along the way and, since the restaurant didn’t look particularly good, I moved on to Pollo Campero. Fried chicken always is a good idea.
Ultimately, we got to Antigua. It was already getting late in the day, about 5:30 pm, and we had a little walking tour of the part of the city in which we were staying. The hotel was only a few blocks from the city’s historical center and, thus, the walking tour was pretty brief. I took out some Guatemalan Quitzales and then we moved onto a sports bar, the Mono Loco, for dinner. (Mono Loco will feature prominently in a future post, I’m certain.) I had the best hot wings that I’ve had in Central America and they had a Champions League match on the big screen television.
There’s a girl in my group who is a huge Manchester United fan and we hung around the Mono Loco after everybody left to watch the rest of the match. Not much happened afterwards so we went back to the hotel, finished off the Jerk Chicken from the night before and that was the end of the night. (While we were walking back to the hotel, we were a little lost and we were stopped by somebody who gave us directions to our hotel and warned us that the neighborhood was dangerous. Another girl in the group was assaulted nearby (she was okay), so the warning turned out to be true. Again, that’s another story, though, for another person’s blog.)
The next day was chicken bus day for us in Guatemala. We had about a six-hour trek to San Jorge La Laguna and we took various chicken buses to get to our destination. Chicken buses are privately-owned buses, generally old school buses from the United States and Canada, that are used to transport people in Guatemala from city-to-city. If you remember when you were younger, each of the seats in the school bus could hold up to three children. Well, in Guatemala, the seats hold three adults. Uncomfortably. We were packed into the buses like sardines, with every third person’s ass cheek hanging in the aisle, while the daredevil bus drivers took the hard turns of the Guatemalan mountain roads at speeds that would make Jeff Gordon cringe. This caused the entire ride to be like a roller coaster and meant that you learned to be rather intimate with the people sitting closest to you.
Don’t get me wrong, the chicken bus actually was pretty fun. If nothing else, it is an experience that one definitely should take advantage of while in Guatemala.
After six chicken buses and a stop along the way for some breakfast and some shopping, we arrived in San Jorge La Fortuna.
This seems like a pretty good stopping point, so I’ll pick up San Jorge in another entry.
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