Today was another one of those really interesting days. Driving in Central America is a lot more stressful than I imagined. I thought that the most stressful part of traveling would be talking Spanish and dealing with car problems. But the road conditions and the weather here has been fairly bad.
Unlike Mexico where mountain roads are well kept, Guatemala tends to have some pretty crappy mountain roads. The lanes are definitely a foot or two narrower, and the ones I’ve been on has no shoulder. In fact, the outside white line indicates the difference between life and death sometimes.
The border crossing today was the most bizarre and chaotic one I’ve ever had. I turned in my tourist card and my vehicle permit out at the Mexican border. They took my sticker off the windshield and matched the stamp off the sticker and the vehicle permit receipt. Having been one piece of paper at one point, the stamps came together which verified the authenticity of them. I entered a no-man’s land for a couple miles, and came to the real Guatemala border. This is when the chaos started. The roads were blocked off, so we went around in a square. The streets were overflowing with shops and so only one lane heading into Mexico was open. The first stop made us get out of our cars to fumigate the insides. They didn’t spray the trunk. That cost some money. Then we got our ‘tourist card’ in form of a stamp on our passports. We then got a vehicle permit for 45 days of driving, and paid for that as well.
All in all, all the stops were about 10 meters of each other and very convenient. It took no more than 30 minutes to cross the border and the last stop, the vehicle permit, even talked to us in English. I don’t know how any car that’s larger than a minivan could make it through that border. The shops are so close, and the people walk mere inches away from your car. It was a very different experience, something I will never forget. It seemed as though an entire culture of people so intent on thriving in their own world while offering a piece of their culture to the more economically savy northern neighbors decided to concentrate their entire population within a small stretch of land.
But because of all the moutainous roads leading to and after the border, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend going through this stop. That’s when the problems began. Guatemala seems to be intent on improving some 30 miles of highway at the CA1 through the mountains. It’s a very high highway at around 7500-9000 feet on average, and most of the ones that haven’t been improved yet are crap.
It was a combination of really bad timing. They happened to be improving the roads at one of the highest peaks of the moutains during this rainy season. The muds were really starting to come down the mountains and they closed off both traffic lanes. We waited in the rain, watching them work, having to sometimes shift our cars left and right because the tractors wanted to move the mud from one side or the other. We finally made our first tope purchase with 2 Domino’s pizza slices for 15 Quez each. That was our lunch. I pissed outside on the mountains. We saw cars build up behind us, all waiting. After some 15, 20 minutes, the stretch that we could see behind and below us, about a mile or so, was piled with cars, a cacophony of honking for the traffic to move along. I put on some Amy Winehouse and started writing on my journal, and the combination of the chaos that ensued outside coupled with calming raindrops on the roof almost put me at ease. We finally moved, after about an hour or 2 of waiting.
And we kept climbing. We even hit 9800 feet, and said to ourselves, hell, might as well hit 10000 feet. We never did. But the rain started really pouring. And with the road project still unfinished, we would sometimes have to drive on the opposing traffic’s lane or on the shoulder to avoid numerous potholes. Roads were narrow as hell, and at one point, we came across a mudslide that was so bad, my car barely went 5 miles an hour on about 5% incline with my pedal to the ground.
It started raining, and it started raining really, really hard. I haven’t seen that kind of rain in a while, and at some 9800 feet above sea level, it was almost scary. It was nice because the car wasn’t acting funny and was actually doing very well. I had Fiona in the passenger seat, which helped. And the fact that it was only about 2:30, 3 PM in the afternoon really helped. I wasn’t tired, the car was doing fine, and it was just the process of being extra-super-careful while driving that led to a stressful afternoon.
It rained on the way down to Panajachel in Lake Atitlan, but I could see why people would love to come here. It’s really beatiful and I could see a lot of potential here. At Solora, I hit a parked pick up truck and a parked bus at about 5 mph with my front bumper while trying to squeeze in between the two to get through the only road that would get me to Panajachel. All the cars are fine, and I made it with maybe 2 inches of space on either side. I hope the skies really clear up tomorrow. I think this place really has some potential.