Antigua and Two Days at Mono Loco

On March 12, we returned to Antigua. I’d love to tell you about all of the cultural things I did in Antigua, but I really spent most of my two days there drinking.

We left San Jorge La Laguna around 6:30 in the morning for a four-hour trek back on the chicken buses to Antigua. Once again, the buses were packed with people and once the trip was over, we were glad for the experience, but also glad for the experience to end. An English friend and I had one main goal, to get back to Antigua in time to catch the FA Cup match between Manchester United and Arsenal. We managed to get back just in time, drop our bags off at our hotel, and have a quick walk back to Mono Loco to catch the match.

We started drinking beer and I had more of the best hot wings that I’ve had in Central America. After the Manchester United/Arsenal match, I noticed that Carolina was playing Clemson in the semifinals of the ACC Tournament, so we had to stay around for that match and continue drinking. Then there were more sports and more beer and we ended up getting back to the hotel around 6:00 pm. We decided to separate for about forty-five minutes and then meet up for dinner. We ended up meeting up with a few more people and after a few more drinks, we actually turned out to have an early evening.

The next day was our final day in the second-leg of my four-leg journey. Some people were leaving the group while others were joining it. We were supposed to meet at 2:30 for a farewell lunch but fate interfered. And by fate, I mean one-liter bottles of Dorada Ice.

I got up pretty early and decided to walk around Antigua and take pictures of the pretty little town beside the volcanoes. I had been up and doing this for about 45 minutes when I finally went to the main church in Antigua to take photos. Lo and behold, who should I run into except my English friend who was sitting on a bench outside of the church. It was only about thirty minutes before the ACC Tournament final between North Carolina and Duke, so we went back to Mono Loco. We split a vegetarian burrito (that I think ended up making both of us sick) and more liters of beer. We hung out for about four hours and then went back to the hotel to meet up with the departing group for the farewell lunch. Between buying souvenirs and taking photos, though, we ended up being late and missing the lunch. Once we realized this, we just went back to Mono Loco for more beer.

We returned to the hotel just in time for the 6:00 meeting with the members of the third-leg of the tour. By this time, however, my English friend had had a few more beers than she should have. On our way to the meeting, she was pointing at people and saying “Jesuscristo” for some bizarre reason. Just before the meeting, she passed out in my lap, leaving me to introduce her to everybody as we went around the room introducing ourselves. It was pretty funny and I’m sure she made a truly unique first impression on the new folks.

We ended up going to the welcome dinner, but I had no appetite and ended up just having a few drinks. Later in the evening, I had to carry my English friend home. On the way, she hit a curb and almost face-planted on the sidewalk. Fortunately, she ended up with just a minor scratch on her knee. After taking her home, I went out for a little while longer, but it was destined to be another early night since we were hopping on an early-morning bus to Copan, Honduras. I’ll pick it up there in the next entry.

Chicken Busing Out of Antigua

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.