Hola again good friends,
To begin where I left off, I was constipated for approximately a week and off to see the Mayan ruins at Tikal. It was a ten hour bus ride from 8 pm to 6 am. The woman sitting next to me was more than portly, and she fell asleep, smashing me into the window. The bus driver raced the other vehicles down the narrow roads, which kept me awake for fear that we would crash. I did not sleep. I tagged along with some med students from Stanford University who liked me because I out-argued a student from Berkley about linguistics. They were also interested in the type of parasite I had contracted. We found a hotel for the day. They were going to stay til Sunday, I was going to leave that night. We all went to get tickets for the tour, but I felt a gut-wrenching pain again. I was overloaded. They went while I stayed back, laying in bed. I was tired, but I still couldn't sleep because of the pain. When they all got back later that afternoon, I was enticed by the pictures they showed me. I had to go.
They switched their tickets to leave that night, and I switched mine to leave the next day. In the process I made friends with the travel agent. He had a phrase similar to what my host mother told the week earlier when I had the parasites. "No existen tiempos malos, sólo difíciles."(There's no such thing as a bad time, just a difficult one.). I booked a sunrise tour, spending the most of my money on the tour, a fish, and a licuado. To do the sunrise tour, you had to first give your hotel. I did not have one. It was National Soldier's Day, and every hotel was booked. We went to nine places before finally returning to the hotel where I stayed earlier. I was happy. They had a room. My thought process was, "I already paid 35 quetzales for half a day. I should just have to pay 35 more." The gentleman behind the desk smiled at me. "One hundred quetzales," he said.
I had exactly one hundred quetzales. My friends went back to Antigua. I was there by myself, unable to sleep knowing that the bus would come at 3:30 am. I went out to the street to wait. The bus arrived at 4:30 or so. I was nervous out there in the middle of the night. It was a relief to be on the bus and on my way. I remember the bus driver put on Jennifer Lopez music, and then the bus broke down. I couldn't stop laughing.
It was almost 5:30 and we were racing to beat dawn. We scaled the tallest temple to watch the sun peak over through the misty canopy of the Petén rain forest. The whole jungle awoke simultaneously from silence to a sinfonía selvática with a chorus of 382 species of birds and howler monkeys erupting through the air. I was revitalized after eight days of constipation and two days without sleep. I hiked through the jungle and climbed the temples like I was Indiana Jones. Just no boulders. After several hours of activity, it was time to back to Flores, where the bus station was. Then I found that I had no bus ticket and no money to buy a new one.
I went back to the travel agent, and explained the situation to him. He was happy to help. He spent one hour calling people up until he found me a bus ticket. Free of charge. You never know how a friendly conversation with a stranger can come back to help you. I then had to walk a few kilometers to the bus station. In the process, my constipation was finally resolved. It zapped me though. I got to the bus station to learn that it would not open for several more hours, which left me hanging out in the street, looking like a shaggy, homeless gringo.
A man approached me. I thought he was going to rob me. He asked me what I was doing. I explained to him that I came to see the ruins, why I was in Guatemala, about my two adopted brothers from Guatemala, and he gave me his hand and picked me up. We went over to a circle of bus and taxi drivers where we joked around in Spanish. The man who approached me asked me if I was tired. I told him emphatically, "Yes."
He opened the bus stations doors to let me in to sleep. I was safe and resting. It was a crazy adventure, but it reinforced what my host mother Carla Rosales taught me in the midst of a serious problem: no existen tiempos malos, sólo difíciles. God is in control of everything. Trust in Him in your time of crisis, and He will guide you to safety.
Que Dios te bendiga,
Seth
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