Sunday, 10 November 2024: And you thought my ride TO Honduras was bad?!

I woke up early on Sunday morning remembering it was November 10, my mother’s 120th birthday.  What a different world she was born into on November 10, 1904, in rural northwestern Ohio.  My grandmother was working in her garden on the family farm in Henry County when she went into labor.  The midwife was sent for and Mother was born on the dining room table!

So here I was 120 years later waiting to be picked up by a van at a hotel in Copán, Honduras.  I think Mother would be pleased to know of my many travels (she died in 1981).  The furthest she even traveled was to the Panama Canal Zone where she was teaching school in 1941 when she met my Bostonian father (a sergeant in the US Army Air Force) a couple months before Pearl Harbor.

The same driver that got us through the border the day before picked me up at 6:20 AM, 20 minutes late.  There were a handful of other passengers.  We arrived at the border in about 10 minutes to find a huge queue (100+ people) at Honduran immigration.  However, the driver directed us to a second window where there were only a couple people ahead of us.  Obviously, someone had paid to get us quick service.  I was both grateful and feeling guilty and sorry for the mostly Central Americans in the other line which was moving very slowly.  We got both our Honduran exit stamps and Guatemalan entry stamps in about 15 minutes. 

It was the usual crazy fast ride but at least this driver showed skill and knowledge of the route as he rounded the corners at speeds close to the upper edge of safety.  At 7:45, we arrived at the same restaurant where we had changed vans the day before.  No shooting pool this time – I was hungry and wolfed down an order of waffles and fruit.  I asked for caffeinated tea.  All they had was herbal, so the waitress brought me a cup of herbal tea, a cup of black coffee, and an empty cup and told me to mix the two.  I’ll try anything once – the mixture was, shall we say, unusual and marginally palatable, but doubt I’ll develop a taste for it. 

I sat at breakfast with a 60ish German fellow who told me about his recent travels, mostly by chicken buses, all over the Petén region of northern Guatemala, including the Tikal Mayan ruins.  I’ve noticed over the years that these Germans are a hearty bunch.  They travel everywhere and often not by the most comfortable means.  Of course, it certainly helps that the typical German worker gets about 30 days paid leave per year including vacation days and public holidays.  My German companion advised me that Eastern Europe is far less crowded with tourists than France, Germany, Switzerland, etc.  He spoke highly of the mountain hiking opportunities in countries like Bulgaria particularly in September.

Oh shit!  The driver taking us from the restaurant back to Antigua was the same dufus who brought us there the day before.  I envisioned a six-hour shit show back to Antigua even though it was a Sunday and traffic, at least in the morning, might be lighter.  No way was I going to sit up front with this driver again and I opted for a seat way in the back.

At 8:40, we were off after a quick fuel stop.  Fifty minutes later we arrived at the intersection with CA-9 in Rio Hondo.  This time, the driver didn’t take some out-of-the-way detour, and it only took us two minutes to make the left turn on to the highway. 

A half hour west of Rio Hondo after passing Teculután, traffic in our west-bound lane was starting to build up.  Suddenly, our driver hit the brakes hard and brought us to a skidding and screeching halt on the right shoulder.  From my back seat, I couldn’t see what had happened, but it was evident that he had been tailgating as he had been doing the day before.  When the driver in front of us hit his brakes because of the traffic slowdown, our driver had to quickly swerve to avoid rear-ending him.  Our suicidal driver got the stalled van restarted and back on the highway with no scratches, but holy crap, what did I do to deserve this guy?

From there on, we made fairly good time in moderate traffic.  I noticed another annoying aspect of this guy’s driving.  He kept accelerating and decelerating every second or two for no reason – no smooth ride in this van even when we’re not in traffic.  East of Guatemala City (Guate), we stopped for fuel and food.  I ordered take-out – a small and unappetizing cheese and tomato sauce pizza (there were no other vegetarian choices).  

At 11:50 AM, we reached the northeastern suburbs of Guate.  A few minutes later, we were west-bound on the busy, 4-lane east-west highway through the Metro Norte district of the city with traffic moving at about 40-50 mph.  Our brilliant driver suddenly hit the brakes bringing us almost to a stop in the left lane.  A truck right behind us gave us a loud blast on his horn as he barely avoided rear-ending us (and here I had thought I was being smart by riding in the rear seat.)  Our driver had found an opening in the center guard rail divider and executed a dangerous U-turn into the east bound lanes with east bound traffic having to stop for us.  By now, I was swearing out loud in English from my seat in the back (“What the hell is this crazy shit doing?!!!, etc.)  I soon figured out what he was doing.  He drove a mile or two east, took an exit ramp off the highway, turned left on to a street, crossed the bridge over the highway, and then turned left on to the west bound entrance ramp.  Just after getting back on to the highway, he exited right into a metro bus stop, and halted.  One of our passengers, a Guatemalan or Honduran woman, grabbed her pack and got off.  Apparently, she had asked the driver to drop her off at this bus stop and when he missed the turn or forgot about it, he made an insane U-turn rather than drive another mile or so to the next exit where he could have turned around safely.  In my notes, I wrote, “Please, if we’re going to crash, just kill me instantly.  I don’t want no friggin’ pain and suffering like I experienced in my August 1990 crash in Niger (West Africa).”  I have 3 fused vertebrae in my neck from that little fiasco. 

A few minutes later, the west-bound traffic was slowing to a creep (by now, Sunday morning mass and Protestant services were over), so our driver left the highway and headed left (south) into the streets of the city.  “Let’s see how this turns out,” I thought to myself.  I watched his route on the Google Maps app on my cell.  He kept making left, then right turns to avoid traffic but despite his efforts, we kept spending a few minutes here and there in stalled traffic.  He slowly made his way to the Anillo Perífico (peripheral ring highway) where the traffic was moving.  This 4-lane road led us to the Pan American Highway, a freeway where once again we were crawling along.  My notes follow our slow progress from there:

12:35 PM      Now traffic is moving again as we head toward the pass.

12:50 PM      We’ve hit another bottleneck as we slowly climb to the pass.

1:10 PM        We exit the Pan-Am at San Lucas Sacatepequez on to Highway 10.  Traffic is finally moving again as we head downhill from the high point.

1:20 PM        We reach Antigua which took us nearly an hour to go the 20 miles from the west side of Guate.

The driver lets passengers off at a couple hotels, and I’m the last one left.  I ask that he drop me off at the corner ½ block from where I’m staying on a one-way street.  I just want out of this van – NOW.  But no, he has to do it his way and drives an extra block so he can drive north on my street.  But now he wants to let me off a block away because he claims there is no parking in front of my address.  By now, I’m about to lose it with this fuckhead:  “¡Señor, hay aparcamiento enfrente de mi dirección!”  (Sir, there IS parking in front of my address!)  So, he pulls up to my destination where there is plenty of parking.  I grab my bag and tell him a quick “adios”.  He says nothing, and I can tell he doesn’t like me – well, pal, the feeling is most mutual, I think to myself as a I run into Violeta’s place, safe and sound at last!

A couple days later I dropped by the travel agency I’ve been using in order to book a short trip for the following weekend.  I told Elizabeth, the Guatemalan travel agent who had booked my other trips, about my experiences with this driver.  I had to learn some new vocabulary to tell her the story (a “U-turn” is a “giro en U” in Spanish).  “This hombre loco is going to get someone killed,” I warned her.  She thanked me but I have my doubts that she would complain to the owner of the van – this is Central America, after all!  Most Guatemalans are too polite to confront someone about a problem like this.

One of the regular readers of this blog, Joe who lives in Centennial, Colorado, recently asked me, “Do you ever rent cars to drive yourself on your foreign adventures?”  There are three reasons why I usually don’t:  1) The cost – why rent a car for myself when there is a much cheaper option that theoretically should be safe and comfortable?  2) The stress of driving in a developing country (and the risk of my getting into a crash) where the traffic norms are much different and rules we take for granted are ignored, and 3) I’m concerned about my carbon footprint and the environmental impact of driving a car by myself when I could ride with a group.  I have considered another option which at least eliminates reason #2:  hiring a private driver with a car.  Yes, it’s wasteful and costly but it provides much more flexibility and the ability to say, “Could you please pull off here for a minute so I can get a photo?”  Actually, the school arranged for me to have a private driver pick me up at the airport in Guatemala City when I arrived and take me back there when I left.  The cost was reasonable, the drivers were safe, and it was stress-free even in bad traffic.