Monterrico Beach

There is something about…

Traveling on a bus so old that the roar of its engine is deafening and the scrap remains of its seats need to be held together with packaging tape; the windows being down and the hot air whipping my hair off my dust and sweat-matted face; rumbling along dirt roads so bumpy I’m out of my seat more than I’m in it; speeding past fields that gleam under that blazing sun….

There’s something about that situation that just invigorates me. In these moments, I literally cannot keep a smile off my face and I am purely and completely content.

Such was the scene I found myself in this weekend when I decided to go down south to Monterrico beach (on the Pacific Ocean) with two other students from my language school – one guy from London, one girl from Germany, and both of whom I’d only met one day prior. One thing I absolutely love about traveling is that I meet so many people from all over the world and all with such interesting stories; you make friends instantly with total strangers, and everyone is game to organize a spontaneous trip.

As it works in most third world countries, there are usually two ways to get to a tourist-y place. One way is to pay an exorbitant fee for an air-conditioned vehicle that will grant you your own seat and give you a fairly comfortable ride in a reasonable amount of time to your destination. The second way is to pay about half that price to take all day to get to where you’re going while riding with all the other locals in a vehicle that is likely to break down on the way and give you a sore body either from the fact that you’re sitting on a metal spring that has torn through the disintegrating seat or from the fact that you’re sharing a what would normally be one seat with another person, an infant, and an animal of sorts.

Guess which way I prefer?

The thing is, in my opinion, it’s truly much more interesting and fun to take a trip on which you’re uncomfortable and have no idea what will happen on the way. In Guatemala, the best way to allow for this opportunity is to take the camionetas, which are old American school buses painted psychadellic colors (they literally look like hippie buses) and more commonly referred to as “chicken buses” – Don’t ask me why. Chicken buses roar along the streets of Guatemala, releasing an outrageous amount of exhaust, blasting music and screeching to a stop to pick up the passengers on the side of the road who they manage not to hit and who then cram into the bus either sitting 3-4 to a seat (if they’re lucky) or otherwise standing squashed in the aisle while the bus driver’s second in command miraculously finds room to squeeze through to collect fares.

Having missed the 5:30AM bus that would take us directly to Monterrico, Oliver and Sanne and I managed to find a bus that was just headed in the right direction. From there, we hopped (or squeezed is the better way to put it) from bus to bus in the major cities until, after a total of 4 camionetas, we made it to our destination by late afternoon. We found a hostel right on the beach for the equivalent of only 5 dollars a person for the night. We quickly changed into our swimsuits for a quick dip into the warm Pacific before sunset. While we were out there, there was a period of commotion when some locals discovered a dead, three-foot long sea tortoise that had washed up on shore; the whole scene drew a huge crowd as they dug a hole to bury it in the black [volcanic ash] sand for which Monterrico is famous. The poor thing...

After a cheap seafood dinner and some relaxation time in the hostel’s hammocks along the beach, we called it an early night to wake up in time for our scheduled 5 AM mangroves tour. After brushing my teeth in the public bathrooms, I came back to our room to find Sanne, who had been trying to tuck in her mosquito net, holding up her mattress with one hand extended as far away from her as possible. There was a scorpion in her bed. Oliver was equally freaked out, so Yours Truly (who happens to be experienced in this specific type of murder, thanks to my days in Togo during its dry season) picked up my shower sandal and stomped it to death (it took several stomps). I was so glad it hadn’t stung Sanne!

The night was quite warm, but I slept soundly with the exception of waking up in the middle of the night to the sound of thunder from the violent storm going on outside and water dripping on my face from the rain coming through the hole in the roof above me. I just pulled the sheet over my head and went back to sleep, waking up again at 5 feeling rested. Sanne and Oliver, however, had barely slept because they’d suffered too much from the heat. I honestly didn’t think it had been bad at all… but I guess it just goes to show how used to it I’ve become from my Africa days. We were glad we even had a place to stay because we later found out that, with the large number of Easter season Guatemalan tourists, there weren’t enough hotels to room everybody, so people slept on the beach – until they were chased off by the storm.

Quite honestly, I wasn’t expecting much from the mangroves tour; I had done a similar thing in Ghana, where the tour guide sold it to us promising us views of wild animals – and then all we ended up seeing was birds. I suppose the tour would have been interesting if I was a bird watcher, but otherwise it was nothing more than a peaceful ride in a gondola – if you could forget that you were paying double the cost of your hostel for the tour. Still, the tour guide was very nice, and I was much happier to overpay him than I was to overpay the Ghanaian tour guides, who had dropped my friend’s camera case in the water, nearly overturned us, and then asked us why we didn’t tip more.

I spent the early morning writing letters and postcards in one of the hammocks next to another hammock-dweller from Germany who told me his whole life was a vacation – a guy about my age who had blond dredlocks that went down to his lower back, was wearing Aladdin-like pants, and who smoked an entire pack of cigarettes in the time we were both there before proceeding to do yoga sun salutations on the beach.

We spent the latter part of the morning and early afternoon swimming and lying on the beach before we caught the camioneta headed back to Antigua. I really enjoyed the ride home (for the reasons listed above)… I think it was actually my favorite part of the whole trip. Being reminded of similar journeys in Togo, I felt right at home and perfectly content.