I left San Cristobal de las Casas early in the morning, in order to get as far into Guatemala as possible, with the hopes of eventually making my way to La Libertad, El Salvador. In typical Russ fashion, I had absolutely no plan and no map, just the thought of heading for warmer places. With surfing.
I knew the bus I needed to catch from San Cristobal was to the border town of Cuauhtemoc. From there, I crossed the border on foot with a Swedish guy named Cristof, and we found a chicken bus to Huehuetennango (or WaWawawaHueHue, as the chicken bus drivers call it). At this point, Cristof headed for Antigua, and I was on my own to make it… well, somewhere…
Without a map, I kind of assumed that the border to El Salvador was to the south-west (I was wrong), and when I asked people where I needed to go to get to the border of El Salvador, they all kind of looked at me strangely, and one said I could go to Xela, and get there from there. So I jumped onto a bus bound for Xela (Quetzaltenango if you’re looking for it on a map), but as the bus was pulling out of the chicken bus station, I saw another bus that said La Libertad on it. I quickly asked the mayan girl beside me if that was La Libertad in El Salvador, and she said, yes, so I jumped off that bus, and grabbed the La Libertad bus. What good fortune! One more bus, and I’d be there!
Well, reflecting back, I realize that El Salvador simply means “The Savior” in Spanish, and since they’re super religious down here, when I asked the young Mayan girl about the bus going to El Salvador, she probably thought it was some religious comment I was making about the people on the bus going to visit “The Savior”, and of course, they’d all be up for a visit with Jesus himself.
After more than an hour on the bus, trying to reassure myself by asking the girl beside me in my sketchy spanish, things like “Are you sure this bus is going to El Salvador?”, and “Do we have to stop at the border to get our passports stamped?” and “La Libertad is on the coast, right?”, I was becoming more and more and more certain that I was on the wrong bus, even though she kept saying, “yes, yes, yes…” Maybe my tip-off was that we were on the SAME road that I had just driven down from the Mexican border to HueHue. I kept thinking that maybe we would take a left turn somewhere and magically be at the border to El Salvador. We didn’t.
I finally figured out that the La Libertad we were heading to was some tiny little dirt road town in the middle of nowhere, Guatemala. In hindsight, this is pretty obvious, but anyways, I got off of the bus and caught the next bus BACK to Huehue, so in all, I spent about five hours on a chicken bus, and got absolutely nowhere. I spent the night in a crappy hotel, and jumped on yet another chicken bus in the morning to Antigua, which is familiar turf, since I’ve been here before. I’ll stay a couple of days to give my tired body a chance to recover from bumpy, winding roads, and then head for the surf.
It’s tricky to get to the right place sometimes, since the bus drivers will all tell you that you can get to where you are going by taking their bus. They make no money if they tell you to take someone else’s bus, so it only makes sense, right? And of course they’re not lying – you can get to where you’re going by taking their bus, it just takes 5 hours longer than taking the direct bus.