Total number of days: 24
Number of countries visited: 1
Number of countries expected to visit: 3
Number of different beds slept on: 9

Number of times hitchhiked: 4
Percentage of hitchhikes I had to pay for: 25%
Number of offers to spend the night at someone’s house: 2
Number of times accepted: 1

Ratio of meals from street food to restaurants to self-prepared foods: 6:1:1
Best street food: churrasquito with chorizo, beans, cabbage and tortillas in Cobán.
Cost of said meal: $2
Worst street food: pork tacos in Panajachel, Atitlán (it was still pretty good).
Number of beers consumed: 13
Best Guatemalan beer: tie – Gallo and Moza
Best rum sampled: Zacapa 23 years
Number of nights I got stupid drunk: 1

Odds of getting a horrible tropical disease as inferred by the dire warnings of my paranoid, fear-mongering quack of a “doctor”: 3:1
Horrible tropical diseased contracted: 0
People I met who contracted said diseases: 0
Cases of food poisoning: 0
Number of types of medication taken: 3 (malaria pills, analgesic, allergy pills)
Number of times I felt in any kind of danger: 1 (falling off a motorcycle)

Number of intense 2-3-day friendships made: 11
Number of natural wonders witnessed: 5
Number of injuries suffered: 4
Ratio of time spent talking in Spanish to English: 1:3
Chances, in percentage, that I’ll visit this part of the world again: 100

A chicken bus in Quetzaltenango

Three things happened when I stopped being a pussy and started taking the chicken buses instead of tourist shuttles between cities:

1. I connected with the locals.
2. I saved 70% on transport.
3. I faithfully resumed crossing myself years after giving up on Catholicism.

For the CA-uninitiated, chicken buses are the people’s transport. They are essentially decommissioned and artfully repainted U.S. schoolbuses that were deemed unsafe for American children but just fine for Guatemalan families. I’m still not sure if Guatemalans are on average short people due to genes, nutrition, or from jack-knifing their legs in seats originally meant for kids.

Thousands of these rumbling beasts belch about the country. Because of their age, they are as sonorous as they are colourful. When the bus hits a rough patch of road, it doesn’t shake so much as convulses violently. The rattle of metal and glass sounds like short machine gun skirmishes.

But what really makes travelling in them an adventure is the way the drivers negotiate cliffside roads with no guard rails. It doesn’t matter if he can’t see the incoming traffic past a curve, if there’s a slow truck ahead, the driver will gun it. Also, the fact that there’s a 100-metre drop only a feet away from the road’s edge seems inconsequential to them.

Either Guatemalan bus drivers are unaware of the dangers of overtaking on a blind turn, or they are too aware of it, and have surrendered any illusion of safety to the merciless whims of the Universe. Life is inherently unfair, they think (maybe). Death is as perfidious as it is indiscriminate, so might as well just try to get to our destination quickly.

Click here for pictures of Guatemala

Yep, nothing will renew your faith in a Divine Protector like a Guatemalan bus driver playing chicken on a narrow cliffside road. In fact, this is the reason I believe they are called chicken buses, NOT due to poultry-carrying passengers, of which I have seen nil. When there is an oncoming bus that emerges after the curve, the standard practice is to greet each other by blinking high beams. Then it’s a battle of nerves over who flinches first.

And as you’re sitting there, internally debating whether regular church attendance serves as a kind of spiritual insurance policy, the centripetal force of a chicken bus on a high-speed turn throws you onto the lap of your seat neighbour, which incidentally is a great way to start a conversation.

That is, when the driver isn’t blasting accordion-heavy ranchero music with vocals so effusive you can’t tell if the singer is heartbroken or having a bullet removed.

Oh, and a fourth thing happened when I started taking the chicken buses: I ate a lot more fresh fruit. That’s because at every road stop, a veritable market boards the bus on the front and saunters down the aisle, offering chiles rellenos, cakes, ice cream, drinks, nuts, candy, and fresh mangoes, pineapples and papayas, conveniently sliced in baggies.

Then they hop out the emergency exit on the back, a half-metre drop that was meant for exactly that, emergencies, but here was co-opted as just another way out.

By almost any measure, ziplining down a mountain looks like a perfectly safe activity. You’re strapped by two harnesses, one for the legs and another for the shoulders, all held together by a beefy carabiner. You wear a hardhat and two thick canvas gloves, one of which has a hard pad for braking: as you approach the end of the line, you press the glove down on the cable, slowing the descent.

There are eight ziplining cables in the Reserva Natural de Atitlán, just outside Panajachel. You hike up with two guides. One goes first to make sure you land safely on the other side. Large signs clearly proclaim: “These cables and carabiners can support 12,000 lbs.! US and EU certified!” All very reassuring.

All equipped and ready to zip.

Yet, they still make you sign a document saying you understand that ziplining carries certain risks. Ah, the timeless art of covering your ass.

It’s an incredible feeling, soaring between mountain peaks, the lush canopy rushing beneath you with the breathtaking Lake Atitlán as a background.

This is how you arrive if things go as planned.

But it’s the low tourist season. Which probably means they slack a bit on the maintenance. Which means some of the trees in the line’s path aren’t fully trimmed.

Going down the fifth cable, my right foot caught a large branch, which caused my body to pivot violently to the right. My hands were obediently resting on the pulley mechanism from which I was hanging, and so my forearm jammed into the steel rope zipping by at a high speed.

I felt an intense burn, which you’d expect from such a contact. I thought for sure the cable skinned a strip off my arm, which would leave a red and white mark. When I got unhooked from the cable, I saw that it had carved a hole into my forearm, about the size and shape of an eye. It was deep enough that if you stuck a finger inside it, it would conceal most of your fingernail. It looked like one of those little scoops for making melon balls had done its thing.

This is how you arrive if things don’t go as planned.

It didn’t bleed much. I figured the cable had pretty much burned most blood vessels shut. There was also very little pain. The nerves in that area were probably smeared along the length of the cable. I was surprised by how white it looked inside. I didn’t know raw flesh was that … pale.

What I did feel was intense dizziness. I had to do the remaining three cables strapped to one of the guides.

Raquel and Luis Roberto, a lovely couple doing the tour with me, drove me to the hospital in nearby Sololá, where they warmly and quickly took me in, starting with an X-ray to check for fractures. It was the best attention I ever received in any hospital, anywhere.

As he sewed me up, the doctor asked me where I was from. I said Brazil. With the most serious face, he started to chant my archrivals’ football cheer: Ar-gen-tina! Ar-gen-tina! In my best possible Spanish, I told him he’d better watch it, or he’d be the one needing stitches. Good times.

The stitches came off after eight days.

Friendly doctor sewed me up just right.

A budget shower in Lago Atitlán

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If you ever want to have a near-death experience, I suggest taking a shower in a $3-a-night Guatemalan hotel.

Showers here are heated not by water boilers, but by an electric heater in the shower head itself.

I’m familiar with these, since they are common in the humbler parts of Brazil where I grew up. But normally the wires are well concealed, and no live copper is exposed.

For $3 a night, you don’t get that luxury.

One of the shared showers in my hotel in San Pedro La Laguna, a town bordering the majestic Lake Atitlán, is low. So low that if I stood on the balls of my feet my head would touch it. It’s also made entirely of metal.

And so it happened, as I was showering and going through the mechanical motions of soaping up my underarms, that my elbow touched the metal shower head.

At first it felt like I had touched a vibrating object, like an electric back massager. But it wasn’t a mechanical vibration I felt; it was a full-body buzz that kept me paralyzed in my position. Wait a minute, I thought. This isn’t a vibration…. This is … electricity! I’m being … shocked! And I’m completely wet!

My first thoughts went back to high school chemistry class: pure distilled water doesn’t conduct electricity. I remembered the experiment where you stick a live wire in a beaker of distilled water and lower a lightbulb inside. Nothing happens. But dissolve some salt in it and the sodium and chlorine ions relay the electrons from wire to bulb, bringing it to life. At that point I wondered just how pure the shower water was.

At the same time, I was thinking: What a silly way to die. They’ll find me naked with the water running in this cheap hotel in San Pedro. How embarrassing. Oh well. I think I lived a good life so far. My parents would probably be proud.

This is the shower that actually zapped me.

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This all lasted no longer than two seconds. My body must have activated an automated emergency muscular shutdown, because no sooner did I feel that initial vibration than I found myself on the orange-painted cement floor of the bathroom, wondering what the hell just happened. I looked up and saw the shower, raining down the water just as normal.

A few seconds passed and I got up and finished my shower, making sure to avoid getting close to the shower head.

Some religions teach that you are only fit to contact the divine after cleansing yourself — your feet, your head, or everything. A purified body symbolizes a purified heart, expunged of base earthly pollutions.

And so, it was in a $3-a-night hotel in Guatemala that this procedure was slightly abbreviated and I almost met my Creator while cleansing myself. That my hotel is called Paraiso and that it’s near enough an evangelical church to make the priest’s nightly wailings to the Lord clearly audible made it all very a propos.

The old saying goes: “cleanliness is next to godliness.” In some parts of our fair planet, this is frighteningly literal.

Santiaguito erupting right on schedule.

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The four-hour hike up Volcán Santa Maria starts at 1 am sharp. They tell you to bring a flashlight, but for much of the trail you don’t need it. The full moon exposes every rock, root and crevice.

Climbing a mountain at night is intensely film noir. The lush vegetation and earth tones are reduced to shapes and shadows, like in a dark black-and-white movie. It’s freezing at this altitude, but you keep peeling layer after layer as you work up a sweat.

This full-moon hike is led once a month by Quetzaltrekkers, a wonderful all-volunteer team in hilly Quetzaltenango — Xela for those in the know — who give all proceeds to charity. They are mostly American kids who haven’t yet found their calling and figured that three months of working 10-hour days, seven days a week for no pay might point them in the right direction.

For 150 quetzales (about US$20) they give you all the equipment you need (sleeping bag and pad, coat, gloves, toque) and a sandwich. If you’re ever in Xela, please support them.

The daringness of hiking in the dead of night really put a spring in my step. Roberto A. R. Rocha, tamer of mountains, fearless adventurer, undaunted by the absence of sunlight or by the merciless cold of night.

That lasted for about an hour.

The excited chatter of climbers gave way to heavy breathing. You first stopped to rest after 200 paces or so, which soon dropped to 50. Twenty. Ten. After three hours my legs felt like Jello held together by chicken wire. Every stepping stone seemed like an insurmountable chasm. My backpack’s straps started slicing into my shouders, and any knots I had in my back muscles became hot shards of glass that poked deeper every time I moved my neck.

An occasional surprise would give me that extra push, like when I stopped to look at the little parade of adorable stereotypes trudging up the trail: the English guy smiling politely. The German guy with the headlamp, flashlight, hiking pole, and backpack full of gizmos and straps. The Scottish guy wearing just a fleece jacket and shorts. The French guy issuing edicts on how things should be done around here. The Swedish girls going bork bork bork bork. (Sorry. Couldn’t resist).

But little could keep me from cursing the moment I decided to go on this stupid hike in the first goddamn place. What the fuck I am doing going up a mountain at 4 am? I didn’t leave Montreal for more of this bitch-ass cold.

Climbers getting some rest after reaching the summit.

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Then you clear the last line of trees. Only rock and bush left, and what looks like the mountain leveling off above. And when I glanced behind, I saw Xela and its neighbours from 2,500 metres above, all their thousands of lights, as though a ton of tiny shimmering marbles were spilled between the mountains. And yes, those are clouds hovering between the peaks below. It’s a sight that would cow into silence the biggest blabbermouth.

A wave of energy swept over me, as if a hidden backup power tank roared to life. I heard shouts of celebration above and sprung to join them.

It was still pitch black. Still an hour to sunrise. Freezing climbers at the top huddled inside their sleeping bags but no one dared sleep. Our eyes were transfixed at the thousands of lights below, each one representing 10 people, each person its own little universe of joys, agonies and dramas. And then it happened — that moment so exalted by poets and philosophers, an internal collision of psychic extremes wherein you feel at once like an insignificant speck of dust and a priceless member of the living.

The horizon turned a faint pink. A few metres away a pair of Slovenians started a fire, drawing climbers like moths. I passed around a flask of aguardiente. It came back almost empty. Then the top arch of a deep orange ball emerged, restoring the colours of everything, the far-off mountains, the valleys, the towns, the rocks and bushes at our feet. Everything was bathed in a nurturing hue of yellow. What was menacing and dark became hopeful. On the other side of the sky the full moon still shone, and in between was the deepest indigo sky. Space. The universe.

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I sat beside Anna, a lovely Swedish girl, to share body warmth and enjoy hot instant coffee. Sheer exhaustion battled with the rapture of the moment. We could only communicate in one-sentence clichés:

“This is amazing.”
“Nature is beautiful.”
“It’s good to be alive.”

Just south of us, Santiaguito Volcano rumbled and belched a thick plume of sulphur and ash, as it does reliably every hour. Anna is a fellow journalist in Gothenburg. A welling of tears made her eyes sparkle and quiver above her rosy freckles. She opened her mouth as if to say something, but nothing came out. She appeared to be choosing her words carefully. Then she said something that will probably take me a long time to realize what was going through her mind:

“There’s just one deadline in life.”

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The grey sand at Monterrico slopes dramatically between the town and the sea, so that when you walk along the surf, all you see above the sandbank are the straw rooves of the hotels, scores of them, as far as the eye can see.

Yet, it remains a highly undeveloped coastal town, blissfully free of all-inclusive fortresses and perma-parasols in neat little rows, a quick weekend getaway for folks in Guatemala City and broke-ass backpackers. These beachside hotels, with names like Eco Beach Place and El Marlin, are simple little things, where hammocks outnumber showers and toilets combined.

Mine was called Johnny’s Place, a miniaturized, stripped-down, discount bin knock-off of a resort. If resorts were like movies, this one would go straight to video. Plastic beer-branded chairs surround a pool that barely fits four. The well-staffed kitchen-bar plays slow bolero and bossa nova covers of Bob Marley.

It’s a favourite among European girls, middle-aged gay guys, and the locals who come to ogle either, with a few private bungalows, some shared huts and a nine-bed dorm for 45 quetzales (about US$5.50) a night. And during the weekend, it’s the de-facto meeting point of Monterrico, since the town itself is still struggling to figure out the whole tourism thing. Which is at once endearing and utterly heartbreaking.

It’s got one paved, restaurant-lined street that leads to the beach. On the final 70 metres, there’s an attempt at a boardwalk, a stone walkway with one guy selling seashell necklaces. The rest of the town is a wretched, dusty dump, where dirty-faced boys try to knock cashew fruits from trees with empty beer bottles, and every other crusty-furred mongrel walks with a limp.

Rafts that bring cars to Monterrico, an island between sea and swamp.

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Which is why most visitors hang around Johnny’s. Which isn’t entirely a bad thing, since it’s where you’ll meet the town’s most interesting strangers, like the affable Kiwi girl doing Alaska to Argentina on a motorbike (read her blog), or the couple upping the ante and going from Washington State to Argentina on bicycles.

There’s only one person you won’t find at Johnny’s, and that’s Mike: “Folks here” — he pronounces it hir — “call me Miguel or Don Gringo.”

You can’t miss him: paunch like a wrecking ball, a blonde walrus moustache, and a baby parrot perched on his straw hat. “Keepsum frum crappin’ on ma shirt. Heh.”

Don Gringo, aka Mike.

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This retiree from Colorado bought a house three months ago, and regularly brings back second-hand clothes and used laptops, which he uses to teach the kids English and how to use computers. He recently helped a deaf, dumb, cross-eyed and bow-legged girl have her eyes corrected and get a hearing aid. Now he’s looking for a speech therapist to help her talk and some good crutches.

“Her father had pretty much wrote ‘er off. Jus’ kept’er sitting on a corner by hirself.”

And Don Gringo Miguel is adamant about bringing some business acumen to these parts. As an experiment for his favourite main-street restaurant, where you’re most likely to find him, he got some candles for the tables. Night-time business doubled in a week, he said. Then he convinced them to carry white wine, and now it’s regularly packed with Europeans, while the joint across the street can hardly get two tables filled.

“It’s a reason to git up ev’ry mornin’.”

When the weekend’s over, Monterrico becomes a ghost town, but you might be visited by some boys while wading in the sea, like I was. They showed me that if you submerge your head and stay still, you can hear the whines and groans of distant whales. Then they challenged me to body-surf a wave to the sand. That I did. So they made it a race: first person to the sand gets a Coke. Two of them, no older than 10, tied for first.

After they got their Cokes, they promptly vanished out of sight.

Click here more more pictures of Guatemala.

You first lay your eyes on her, her unspoiled cobblestone curves, her plump plazas, the pastel blush of her houses, all seemingly unsullied by men. Then it hits you: is that a McDonald’s? A goddam Subway? Fuck me.

Serves me right for nursing illusions. This is, after all, the #1 destination for UK backpackers, according to some gringo publication. And a town where throngs of kids come to learn Spanish by day and forget it all at Reilly’s Irish pub at night.

Yes, many a men have been inside her before. On the other hand, you understand why she knows how to show you such a good time.

Antigua is a Cartesian grid of dollhouses, if dollhouses were made in the Spanish Baroque style. It’s a little too clean. The brightly-painted homes, cracked and peeled just enough to be endearing, are a little too elegant on the inside, housing posh restaurants with candle-lit tables.

But far be it for me to talk it down. It’s undeniably enchanting. Strolling down its warm-coloured streets offers hours of distraction to the lazy philosopher: do the tourists come because the colours are so vivid or are the colors so vivid because the tourists come? And then you turn a corner and stumble on a magnificent church, or the eerie ruins of a former one, and they will arrest your breath for a portentous few seconds. And reading a book in Parque Central, a leafy memorial to bygone glories, is a rare pleasure with no peer.

And then there’s the market. Christalmighty, how do you begin to describe it? It’s an endless covered maze of poorly-lit stalls, hundreds of them, selling anything from fruits to Mayan textiles to cell phone accessories to pirated DVDs. You feel like you’re navigating a claustrophobic cave with plastic and corrugated metal stalactites. I dare anyone to find the same stall twice without a compass and two days’ water.

And then night comes.The streets empty save for a few bars blasting Top 40 tunes, which, in this mountain town hugged by ancient volcanoes, an oasis of serenity in a mad world, is as fitting as a coke-frenzied gangster crashing a Zen meditation circle screaming, “Ram yo’ boooooooty!”

More photos here: http://picasaweb.google.com/robroc1/GuatemalaWeek1

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They offer you a horse before you set off on the 2.8-kilometre, 1.5-hour hike up Volcano Pacaya. Most people decline, but the horses go up anyway.

“Taxi? Taxi?” the horsemen offer periodically, as if secretly mocking us: “Foolhardy humans! You think your pretty, well-maintained nature sidewalks prepared you for this?

Some folks always cave.

The climb isn’t all that hard. It starts with a steep dusty climb, which becomes volcanic dirt, which becomes black Martian rocks. And after transversing the most barren, scraggly terrain, you see it: lava. Real goddam lava.

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It’s no flowing river, just some glowing lumps tumbling downhill. But still. Lava. That is to say, molten rock. That is to say, magma. That is to say, the center of the planet. Lava is the ejaculate of the Earth, an energy-filled gush which, given enough time, becomes more Earth. It’s the origin of just about anything you can touch.

Freshly-cooled lava, the blastocyst of soil, is light for its size. It has a slight metallic sheen, like it was quickly spray-painted silver and gold. It feels that way too, lightly sticky to the touch. And it’s sharp. I put one rock in my bag and it fucked up my camera screen.

This all makes it incredibly unstable to walk on, prone to shift beneath you at any time.

“Dale! Dale,” the guides started yelling with a measure of urgency. “Vamonos amigos, ahora!” Above us a swath of rocks crumbled away, exposing a ridge of bright orange. That, too, began to crumble down, towards us. “Vamos ahora! Es muy peligroso!”

Naturally, none of us moved, but instead reached for our cameras. The eruption was a good 150 metres away, and though we were in its general path, the lava gave up halfway down. The guides realized they could only move us so far.

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The show lasted 10 minutes.

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Of course, the good lava comes as we leave.

The bored-looking man at the entrance of the taco joint in Guatemala City was holding a rosary while clutching the barrel of a 12-gauge pump-action shotgun. He was chatting with an equally bored mariachi trumpeter from the taco joint across the street. It’s Wednesday, a slow night in Zona 10, the neighbourhood for the city´s rich and for tourists who think the straw-roofed souvenir huts in all-inclusives are indigenous villages.

Why I picked this neighbourhood I don´t know. First-time backpacker jitters, I suppose. It reminds me of posh districts of São Paulo, like Vila Madalena and Jardins, where sleek restaurants with nice signs and expensive furniture line badly-paved streets with shitty street lamps. Neighbourhoods whose order of garish ostentation is precisely inverse to the proportion of the population that can afford it.

It’s where I paid a 300% markup for forgettable tacos and just as much for a hostel bed.

Social service: time of solidarity.

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There was little keeping me for more than one morning in Guatemala City, this smoke-choked, exploded burrito of a city. In fact, it’s a scale model of São Paulo dubbed into Spanish. You see the same cars, same vegetation, same blocky pastel condos, same scraggly peripheral neighbourhoods.

But you could do worse than get lost for a few hours in Zona 1, a rumbling, sputtering ant hill where street merchants jockey for space among crumbling vestiges of colonialism. For those hours, absorbing the city’s unsubtle energy and eyeing the pretty Mayan girls making tortillas is worth the occasional mouthful of exhaust.

Click here for more photos of Guatemala City.