Everything that happens here is a good story, so I have to be careful, or I would spend all day typing notes on Facebook. This story is worth a few minutes of my time though…
Ashley and I took a cheap shuttle from San Pedro to Antigua yesterday. We could have grabbed a chicken bus from Panajachel, but Ashley did some serious shopping over the past few days, and had a lot of bags with her, so the shuttle seemed like a good option.
The “mini-buses” here are just minivans with more seats in them. A van that would hold 7 in North America, holds 12 here. By the time we got 12 of us in the “bus”, and all our packs tied onto the roof, the little van was struggling not to bottom out on every single speed bump – and there are lots of speed bumps here.
From San Pedro, the road switchbacks steeply up the surrounding mountains to a high plateau, where it levels off and heads toward Guatemala City. When our struggling little van rounded one of the switchbacks, there was a giant truck lodged across the road, and stalled because it couldn’t make the corner. At least it managed to stop before hurling itself on the road below. We were obviously going to be there for a while, since there were about a half a dozen Guatemaltecans under the truck working frantically to get it started, which was about the last place I would want to be since if the truck started to roll on the steep hill, they would be squashed like bugs.
Everyone piled out of our van for a stretch, and the people in the chicken busses ahead of us did the same. To our amusement, they were all from North Carolina, on a missionary excursion to Central America, and they thought it was a great idea to make a GIANT prayer circle, and pray for God to move the truck. Ha ha!
We were making jokes, like “if there really was a god, this truck would have gotten stuck AFTER the chicken buses had passed”, and “maybe they should have prayed harder before they started their trip today”.
Anyways, I shot this great photo of a Guatemalan woman while we were stopped, so it was kind of worth the wait.
The truck finally moved, which took getting it started, and then people literally pulling the wheels to make it turn sharper, then pushing it backwards up the hill, with the help of a seriously underpowered motor, and repeating the process until it completed the corner on the pavement.
When the traffic started flowing, it wasn’t us that was moving. Our little van wouldn’t move up the steep hill loaded with all twelve of us and our packs, so we all had to pile out, and walk up to the top of the hill while our driver drove the empty van to the top to wait for us. The chicken buses didn’t seem to have a problem climbing up, so perhaps the chicken bus was a better option that day.
Semi truck with long trailer trying to make a switchback turn
