Guatemala: Day 1

The first full day. And all I can say that it’s already felt like a week. Haha, and of course, “all I can say,” isn’t remotely true. There are pages upon pages I could write about what I already experienced while here.

Instead, I’ll recount only the latter half of the day. We went to drop off some of my cousins to their mother’s family’s village, Joya Onda.

It seemed a simple mission: drive the hour-long drive to drop them off with their mom, then come straight back. This is where the fact I’m in Guatemala comes into play.

First off, about nine of us piled into a utility sports vehicle that runs on diesel. After tussling our way in and out of traffic (people here are insanely frightful drivers), in which we passed dozens of small neighborhoods, all with homes teetering precariously on steep hillsides, we finally reached the small aldea, or, small village, that leads up to the even smaller rural village of Joya Onda.

The road itself was quite a voyage. Coming from Texas, it’s always nerve-wrecking to drive on steep mountainsides with life-threatening curves, where one wrong maneuver sends you sliding endlessly down the slope—most likely not survivable.

When we finally reached Miscos, the town in which we took a separate entirely-dirt-road off the main road, we were already ill at ease from the overabundant twist and turns.

About half an hour after starting our way up, the car battling against large stones and loose gravel to gain every inch upward, my aunt finally stops and demands no one in particular:

“Are we sure it’s this way?”

Everyone seemed to have a different response. “Definitely, keep going!” “This is not it.” “I don’t recognize anything at night…” “We need to turn back.”

We went on a few minutes further, when we realized there were no lights or houses, or any signs of civilization anymore. Just the dark forest and us. We turned onto another small dirt road, where we happened upon some rural farmers, broccoli in hand. One thing I love about farm folk is how simple it is to know about anyone. We asked simply for the Alvizures family, and they told us it was a few miles back.

So we backtrack. Taking what we were sure was the right road, we start all over the awful bumpy tread up. There we are, chattering away excitedly, when my aunt stops again for a second time and asks, “Are we sure this is the right way?” Another round of a discordant array of answers resulted in us all getting out of the car and starting to run in the pitch dark up the slope, because the point we were at was almost too dangerous for the car to make it up.

We finally reached a bend which one of my cousins recognized enough to deem the right road. So we run back to my aunt’s car only to realize it’s completely stuck in a muddy patch of road, filled with loose gravel. Some of the most resourceful boys found some larger stones and managed to get the car going up the slope again. When we finally reached our other aunt’s house (most of us running), we arrived huffy and puffy. After being introduced to about a thousand people whom I had apparently met at some point in my life (“You’re Carlos’ daughter! I remember when you were just a baby!”), we sat down for a dinner.

Sometime on our two-hour voyage there, the gracious Alvizures family had decided to cook us a full-course meal at 9 p.m. So we all sat down to eat a delicious meal of steak, salad and rice, all which though seemingly simplistic to the average American, were cooked in true Guatemalan fashion.

Glancing around the table of around 20 as we ate, I realized I didn’t know the latter half. Asking my aunt Thelma as discreetly as I could as we ate, she informed me that the latter half were all priests.

The most remarkable part of this was not that we were sitting at 9 p.m. with a group of priests and extended family enjoying a delicious meal high up in a remote village in some mountains, but that the priests were serving shots all around. Priests. Somehow it didn’t click. By the time we left, they were all insisting that the bottle of bone-a-fied whiskey was not out yet. However, having a long road back to the city, we gave our partings and left.

It would’ve been a nice ride back, ending immediately in a good night’s slumber. I say would’ve because as we were almost to the village of Miscos, further on down the mountain, my aunt stopped the car with an exclamatory “Ala gran mucha!” A colloquial term equivalent to “Oh my goodness, y’all,” I looked out of the front windshield, only to be met with the sight of an enormous commercial truck blocking the lanes.

After asking the truck’s driver what was going on, he simply responded, “Oh. I’m stuck.”

“Any chance you’ll be out soon?”

“No.”

“Are there any other roads leading out?”

“No. I’ve seen cars pass here though.”

“Ok…”

Luckily, a nearby stranger watching the situation came up to us and assured us that others had passed before and that he would help us get through. So on we went!

There seemed to be enough space for a small four-passenger car between the truck and the wall adjacent to it. We were in a sports utility vehicle. There was a small ditch and tons of enormous rocks, causing the car to rock onto one side from the extreme slant. With the help of the stranger, we went on. We passed near the truck so closely, that my cousin Ely had to pull in the side mirror so it wouldn’t scrape it. We also slid once or twice on the loose gravel, causing the car to surge toward the truck. How we made it past without a scratch is beyond me. At some point, I was also fearful of a stray horse that came to stand a little past the truck, blocking the road further on. But we made it through in the end.

On the way back we stopped and chatted with another aunt of mine, then finally arrived at our main house in La Florida around midnight, where we were so thankful to finally sleep. And that was our main adventure the first day.