CHICKEN RUN

When she heard that I was going to Guatemala for two weeks, Sylvie decided to pop down for a visit. We decided on Antigua.

So, on Friday afternoon, I packed my bags and bade my light-fingered (is that the adjective for THIEF?) host mum goodbye, and jumped on a chicken bus.

The brightly painted, smoke belching vehicles are so named for the fact that people bring chickens on them. Who would have guessed?

It was the most amazing ride of my life. It's the general size of a school bus, but Guatemalans sit three-to-a-seat for the journey - in this case five hours. I put my most essential items at my feet and plonked myself down next to two sturdy gentlemen. The downside of this was that there was only enough room on the edge of the seat for one of my two bum cheeks. So, for the next three hours, I applied myself to a major balancing feat. Every now and then I'd try to claw myself a couple of extra centimetres, but neither of them were budging.

It's hard to balance, because you have to hold onto something, but the aisles are packed with people standing, so it's a matter of finding a bit of space on a seat-top and then riding the twists and turns. Kind of like surfing, but not as fun.
Then a young man in an orange T-shirt got on and pressed himself up against me. Having experienced 'erection assault' on a bus in Ecuador once before, I was having none of this and spent quite a while glaring at him and twisting away from his pressing frame. Finally I discovered that neither he nor his penis had any interest in me, so just let it ride. Eventually I had one arm around my two neighbours, holding the seat behind, and one stretched across the non-erection-assualter pressed up against the guy on the other side of the aisle, holding his seat as well.

Once you've given up on the idea of personal space, it's quite liberating. I had hours and hours to watch the people around me. There was noone non-indigenous in sight. The mother behind me was letting her gorgeous, spitty little 2-year-old mini-man blow rasperries on the window. This is where LatAmericans get their immune systems from I guess.

Then a really fat old lady who was about 2 foot tall, got on the bus. She had one of the worst mouths of teeth I've seen - well, most of them were gone, and the remaining ones were dark brown. On her head she was carrying a bundle the size of her body, and as we careered around mountainsides I watched her balance it with three fingers of one hand, while the removed her fare from the folds of her clothing with the other hand.

Eventually, I felt so cramped and guilty that I offered her my seat and discovered that it's actually more comfortable standing up. So I spend the rest of the trip being gawked at by everyone wondering how a giant can have such long arms.

There was a mother wearing full indigenous dress, and very impractical green heels. She had two boys who could have been twins except that one was obviously two years older than the other one, so that would have been a weird pregnancy and we probably would have heard about it in the Guiness Book of Records.

Her boys were so cute, one was feeling a bit sick so she put some water in the top of a bottle lid, and poured it on his head. And then his brother rubbed it into his scalp. They both had big round heads and skinny little bodies with thin brown arms. They were the most beautiful things I have ever seen. Eventually she and one son got seats a few rows apart, so she pulled the second one up onto her lap and then patted her leg. The first son gave up his relatively comfortable space to clamber up onto her second leg and he and his brother fell asleep with all their little brown limbs entangled.

The bus stopped three times for roadwork, about 20mins each time. With all the windows shut, things get a bit warm and close, but people just chat happily between themselves and eventually the bus takes off again.

By the end, when people start ejecting themselves from the crush they have to negotiate themselves down the middle aisle, which parts like the Red Sea. Well, most of the aisle, apart from the backpack containing my laptop which didn't budge. You'd see people step down, feel something under their body weight and then step over it. My laptop may never be the same again.

The exhaust is carefully positioned in the exact place that when you finally spill out the front door, you get bathed in a farewell sea of black smoke. Every singe person, but you're so happy to be uncrumpling yourself that you don't really notice.

Then I jumped on another chicken bus and finally reached Antigua, where a friendly little chap told me about military service in Haiti while we walked to the centre. The hotel took a bit of finding, but eventually Sylv and I found ourselves sitting in a totally gringo cafe eating hamburgers and talking to a Norweigan firetwirler called Martin (gorgeous) and an evangelical Christian whose wife had spent a year in Guatemala to adopt their daughter, and somehow managed not to learn any Spanish in that time. But it was, apparently, God's will for them to have that baby.

Then we headed back to a comfortable room, where the beds had mattresses instead of foam, and the doors locked, and slept soundly.

Next day we visited what is quite possibly the most boring tourist attraction in the world. A convent, that belonged to an order of nuns with a name strikingly similar to 'capacino'. It was full of workmen, who just ogled us and made rude comments. And a guard who came into the room we were looking at, talked about the weather, and then tried to kiss us, and these slightly lack-lustre scupltures: