Across the country

Jeff and Soily stayed with us for almost an hour at the Linea Durado bus station, in Guatemala City's Zone 1, the historic downtown area where Ellen and Jane noticed hotels they've stayed in which the U.S. government now tells their own employees to stay away from because of security concerns. We checked some of our luggage and went through airport-style metal detectors on the way onto the bus. Getting out of Guatemala City was an adventure, because we got caught in traffic - including driving into a one-lane street that appeared to be one way the other way - and so we backed up back down the street. On the bus an odd sight greeted us: a two-hour movie on the life of Jesus IN ENGLISH with no subtitles. Raul (Lowell) (pictured below) and I watched some of the movie. Some of the terrain (it was supposed to be the Middle East of course) and characters depicted looked like they could be in the parts of Guatemala we were driving through.



Ellen tried calling her friends and our contacts around Guatemala on a cell phone left over from earlier days in Guatemala. Much more so than on our first trip, we've stayed in touch with people by cell phone. Raul and others have used his cell phone - same one he uses in Louisville - to call people at home.



Half way through the trip we crossed what must be the Central American version of the continental divide, very arid and reasonably tall mountains.



After a couple of hours plus we stopped at a different rest stop than we did two years ago and all had lunch. I only had rice as I was feeling especially queasy. (This was a fancy express bus on the country's main east-west highway, but it was bumpy and curvy and the buses all spend a lot of time passing slower vehicles on a two-lane road which couldn't help but sometimes make passengers like us nervous. Also, the air conditi0ning which barely worked when we left Guatemala City, the driver warned us accurately, would not work much at all once we got in the mountains and then the humid lowlands. Soon we had the windows open, but it was quite warm - not that different from in one of the vans in 2007 when Stephanie felt ill.)







After another half an hour we made the turn away from Puerto Barrios, towards Rio Dulce, which put us - I estimated - within half an hour of getting off the bus.

-- Perry