Travel

Getting to La Esmerelda was an experience only overshadowed by the return trip... We left Guatemala City at 4:30am and traveled by microbus to Dolores (in the southeast of the Peten near Belize). In Dolores, we boarded the community truck.

Okay... picture a big truck with wooden sides about 4.5 feet high and a metal bar in the shape of a triangle in the middle of the back widthwise. Now add the suitcases and donations of 7 Americans and those 7 Americans. To that add additional people and their belonging at every stop we made... People of all ages and belonging ranging from chickens, to fresh food, to machettes, to pepper, to seed... Until you can´t move more than an inch without touching about 6 people who are standing around you. For 2.5 hours we traveled together (people got off and on along the way) to La Esmerelda on dirt roads at times not much wider than the truck. We had to be aware so that we were not hit by low tress branches. I was right behind the center bar and worried at times that one of our bumps would send me into the bar and my teeth out of my mouth. We even crossed a few small streams... until we were warmly greeted in by Lutheran Church in La Esmerelda.

Now fast forward 5 days... picture the truck again, only this time at 4am in a downpour with a tarp over the back of the truck that is low enough that even I cannot stand up straight. Oh... and add even more people (I counted about 60 by the time we stopped letting on more people). When the tarp was on for the first hour, it was as dark as any cave that I have been in and the air was very stale with so many breathing it. We had to stop several times to spread some material on the road to toughen up the mud so that we could make it though, and once to let a very old lady get out of the cab aided by the driver to have a bathroom break. I saw one boy holding onto a machete handle that was sticking out of the back of a man´s jeans and another woman who managed to breast feed her child in the close quarters while we were traveling. It was hard to see the tree branches coming so I just rested my head on the top of the wood sides once we finally took the top off and managed to fall asleep... I couldn´t´t move my legs at all because we were so packed in. But we all made it safetly to our destination in Dolores where my group boarded the microbus and headed for Tikal.