When Amanda and I started planning our trip in January, she suggested to me that we rent a car. Now, please enjoy the story:

On the morning of April 6 we left Semuc Champey for the last leg of the trip: Livingston. So far, travel conditions had been kind to us. We hadn’t gotten stuck in the rain with all our bags, bitten by chuchos (street dogs), though we did get in a tuc-tuc accident…. that was more surprising than dramatic, but apart from that we had comfortable buses. But when we arrived to el pueblo Lanquín at 8am, standing on the back of a crowded pick-up in the midst of my still-morning haze, we extracted ourselves from the back of the pick-up, claimed our bags and waited. We asked our friend who imitates gringo accents where our bus was. His response: “The bus is not yet here.” Sounded funny but wasn’t wrong. When the bus arrived, no one else seemed to be asking for it. Folks were either headed to Tikal (where we had already been) or Antigua (where we weren’t going, yet). And when I heard the sound of the sliding door, so familiar it hurts, I knew that the trip to Livingston was going to be less than luxurious, lamentablemente. 

We did not ride in a nice bus, or a somewhat nice bus. We rode in a normal bus, a micro. It’s a passenger van, so it’s not a bus at all. But something made it a little easier, and that was exactly one thing: this was the last time I would ever ride a microbus. Ever. Sure, I might ride one when I come to visit someday but that will be in a different chapter perfectly devoid of transit experiences in Guatemala. But in this chapter, the walk-to-work-in-traje,trip-on-the-sidewalk-cry-and-eat-my-ice-cream-in-public chapter, The Chapter of First Person Foreign, this would be the FINAL MICROBUS RIDE. 

Amanda and I found seats and, try as I did to rest my head against the glass window in the most comfortable position, there was no way not to bang my head against it every time I fell asleep and woke up to a jolt. It’s a part of the luxury experience of seats with low-backs on microbuses. At least we both had window seats or there would be nowhere to put our heads other than straight up. And we bumped along, on an unpaved, rocky road (not the ice cream, anyone who knows a rocky road would NEVER name something as wonderful as ice cream after it) in the heat that was only getting hotter in our non-air conditioned microbus.

And I tried not to think much but to try to sleep and listen to podcasts. But the humble houses we were passing wrapped in the thick heat were much sadder to look at. This is the Guatemala volunteers aren’t allowed to live in because we are limited to houses made of concrete block. This a Guatemala more rural and more ‘undeveloped’ than I knew. And this is probably what many imagined my Peace Corps experience was. Hot, isolated, poor. But I passed it by on a tourist bus, not knowing it save a few glances. 

When we stopped at a sad pitstop in the heat, we did NOT order the food (the tourists were more daring than us) but we did get junk food from the store. I waited in line for the only bathroom. I drank a Coke, my go-to, and left the glass bottle as we boarded the van. We finally pulled ourselves onto a paved road. You could feel the relief on the bus as we stopped being jostled, like a breath of fresh air or your head hitting a soft pillow. But it didn’t last that long. We were back on bumps until we finally reached another paved road that took us to Río Dulce.

In Río Dulce we were so hot that we immediately found a restaurant with air-conditioning and wifi. We connected, I ordered food, and told the waiter that we were in a hurry. And sure enough, the last boat was leaving at 2:30. We had arrived at 1:45. We had our bags and our heat-induced exhaustion along with sticker shock at the boat that would charge Q125 per person for an hour and a half ride. I couldn’t talk him down, try as I might, “Era una voluntaria..” No matter. They think I have money and that’s all that matters. A Guatemalan would pay at least half that. But I don’t look, nor am I, Guatemalan. I have to remind myself of this when I get frustrated with tourist prices meant for people who get paid in foreign currency (though I do not). But there it is. 

We paid, got on the boat and Amanda and I kept our eyes on our bags that threatened to burst open (mine) or fall off (Amanda’s). We got tossed up and down but the ride was pleasant enough. When the bus cap’n stopped at a place that wasn’t Livingston, he announced we would pause here and could go into the hot springs. We all sat and sort-of looked at him, confused. We thought we were going to Livingston and didn’t know about this pit stop. Plus- hot springs? We were slippery from sweat. So he said: “Keep going?” And we came to a passive consensus that yes, let’s keep going. Heat zaps the passion out of anyone. And when we arrived to Livingston, we had to walk 10 minutes to our hostel and ignore the people who continued to offer us taxi rides. By the time we made it to our spot, Amanda got into bed and didn’t budge for 24 hours. She got the sickness, and we both knew it would catch up with her. 

I felt so bad for her, and I was relieved that one of us only got sick in Livingston and not a place I was more excited to see (Tikal or Semuc). Livingston was a coastal town we’d both heard so much about, but when we got there, it looked like another fighting pueblo. It was not paradise. 

I ate dinner downstairs and came back to see what I could get for Amanda. She couldn’t eat, didn’t feel well enough. The next day I made several short jaunts from the hotel to the pharmacy, to look around a bit and “Do Livingston.” But all I found was overpriced coconut bread and the same sidewalk shops you can find all over Guatemala with expensive traje típico mixed in with wares made in China. The heat made the predictability and dissappointment more unbearable. 

In the morning I woke to Amanda coming in the door, sweaty, and I said: “Did you go running?” and she said: “No I went downstairs…” and that is when I knew that the sickness continued. She looked like she had run a marathon. And that is always because Amanda runs marathons, but she was sick.

I took the morning to catch up on all of my writing: leaving Santa Clara, COS, and the volcano hike from Hades itself. I had lived a lot of life in the last week and hadn’t had time to write it. Writing it makes it complete. I put on my beach clothes and found the attention on the street disheartening. I thought that a beach town with tourist traffic and 12 hours distance from the pueblo would be used to a little skin. But I should have expected nothing less, a woman walking alone looking for a pharmacy in beach clothes can’t be left alone. I was beginning to worry about our return to Antigua: would we be on another microbus?? And would Amanda be able to travel? GI issues in this country are NO JOKE and they can last for a long time… I figured she would be good to go by tomorrow, but I wasn’t totally confident either. 

By the end of the afternoon, I had spent too much time inside and missed the chance for any beach excursions. So on “my last night in Livingston” I went to Playa Capitania to watch a lone sunset. But the beach was so lackluster that I left before the sun did anything at all. I found a restaurant on the water and ordered ceviche at a place called BugaMama. I didn’t heed the gentleman who kept asking me where I was going every time I walked by, every pharmacy trip and grocery trip and coconut bread run. Every spot felt equally like a tourist trap but this restaurant, BugaMama, had a professional development program attached to it according to the pictures at the entrance. But after I sat down I regretted it.

At the table to my right a man and his friend were so drunk. The drunker of the two was there with his wife and children, but they sat at a separate table from the two men. When he wanted he would call over his nena (maybe she was 8) and he would ask her to bring the baby over. After she brought the baby over, he would hold it and look at it. No one was phased or bothered that a drunk man was holding a helpless baby, that he could do whatever he wanted because he was a man. It was all a bit too much for me. And of course the waiter didn’t say anything, the drunk maladroit was buying food and alcohol. Who cares if he mistreats his wife and holds his baby as he slurs his words and orders the whole world around? 

When they left I felt the tension disappear but no one else acted like they noticed, not the waiter, or the couple at the next table. I tried to be present. I journaled as I ate the ceviche, hoping it wouldn’t make me sick. The famous dish in Livingston is tapado, a soup with coconut milk and seafood. But I thought about Amanda laid up and I didn’t want to be in her position. And when I got back to the hotel Amanda was still in bed. But she seemed in higher spirits than the day before so I saw a green light for next day’s travel.

By the time we left Livingston the next morning (at 6:00), I was ready to leave the heat behind. Amanda seemed so much better and I was unimpressed with the whole place. Granted, there are beautiful beaches you can take trips to see but none of them were in Livingston you had to take boat rides to somewhere else. So I was disenchanted and sweaty and tired at the end of a 10-day trip. We paid Q35 to go to Puerto Barrios by boat, avoiding the expensive boat ride through Río Dulce, and when we got to PB we had to walk four blocks to the bus terminal. I thought I could do it without a taxi but halfway through mud was kicking up on my calves and my laundry bag suitcase was heavy in my arms, I called a taxi because I didn’t care anymore. We bought our tickets to Guatemala City and got great seats with a view, much better than the microbus. We drove 5 hours with one thirty minute pit-stop at an unusual truck stop with fast service and many food options. I wasn’t used to such.

The bus had wifi, that was a first ever for me and Guatemala. The buses in Europe had wifi that didn’t always work, but it was always offered. However this was a decision to CONNECT and see what messages I did, and didn’t, have. But I took the plunge, even though it was a slow connection, and made mental preparations for my last days in the country of Guatemala, without Amanda. Which made me sad. We chitchatted she and I, more seriously about our experience here and the men we loved and struggled to leave, and the overall way the experience changed us. Amanda had a unique vantage point because she had returned from service already. She remembered what those first days back were like and recounted them to me.

It all sounded weird: Myself in the USA, in a car, with my family, swiping credit cards and turning on the AC and flushing toilet paper in the toilet like it wasn’t some big event. Like it wasn’t a visit, like it wasn’t a break. Like it was life again. Indefinite.

But I could only guess at how I would feel, and what I would want and what I would miss when I got back to the States and how I was going to get through this final goodbye with the gentleman caller. Scheduled for April 11th as we had not seen each other since the break-up to talk, and to say goodbye. That was on my mind with every passing hour that we drove back to Guatemala City. Isn’t love the lightest and heartbreak the heaviest experiences of life, wrapped up together like death and resurrection? ‘Cuz, as I have said before, there wasn’t/isn’t enough going on in my heart and soul: kitchen sink and disposal and dishwasher and poorly-timed menstruation so I can spin all the plates while wearing a Duchess cup (that’s the off-brand Diva cup, which I highly recommend).

When roads started to look familiar just outside Guatemala City, we transferred from a two-story bus to a city bus without warning or explanation, and our bags were transported separately which made Amanda worry that they were going to disappear. I was too tired to worry about my laundry bag luggage tied together with string. If someone stole it, they were probably doing me a favor. I sat in a plastic chair at the terminal and waited while Amanda helicoptered for our bags. Or maybe she was tired of being prostrate after 2 days. I couldn’t resist snapping this picture from my seated position because I am a nice friend.

When the bags arrived, we paid for our ticket to Antigua at the counter of Litegua and got on yet another bus. Somehow, after two buses, we still hadn’t arrived. It started to rain and Amanda said she was going to go for a run and I started to cry. You know, because that made sense. The driver was peppy and traffic was thick. After an hour and some change of random classic American hits, like Disco Fever, we got dropped at Matiox Hostel (Maltiox cheri Ajaw, thanks be to God) and we checked into our fancy PRIVATE ROOM. Fancy because it was PRIVATE not because it was fancy. But I was so happy. I suggested that we sleep on opposite sides as before to represent the passage of time. This is the room where we started on March 29, before the overnight volcano, before I rang the bell, before I called the gentleman caller, before I hosted my host family in Santa Lucía, before I finished Peace Corps, before I went on tour around Guatemala for better and for worse to find myself back in this hostel with the trench-coat-wearing receptionist who pronounces Acatenango with a hard ‘a’ and makes me grit my teeth: ‘Ack-a-ten-ain-go. Ooof.

I was not the same. I was at the other end of this strange and wonderful rainbow of a trip that Amanda and I painted together with our leftover colors from service like the two unicorns we are. Amanda left for a run and I ran some errands around town. I can’t remember: some last minute shopping and a necessary ice cream run. I walked through the same busy streets on the same precarious cobblestones I’ve been walking the last two and a half years but I was so happy it was Antigua and not Livingston. Mostly, I was anxious for my despedida tomorrow. Of all the despedidas, this was the most important because the stakes were high: my heart. All of the grief I felt before this trip came in for a landing between my shoulder blades in the traffic of Guatemala City and stayed until April 11th, where we inched along in traffic until we didn’t.

That night Amanda and I had a despedida dinner (she was so sweet to invite me!) and we went to Saberico. I ordered the curry burger and it was. so. good. The atmosphere was romantic and beautiful and, well, it was perfect for our friendship and celebrating our time. Amanda even gave me palabras before we ate, congratulated me on my accomplishment of finishing service, and was being, well, a friend to me in the most awkward transition of my life so far. Amanda, I love you. Thank you for your company.

The next morning I could feel the sadness like a weight when I got out of bed. Amanda was leaving. She went to the gym and that is good because it gave me time to get coffee and put my dehydrated soul in order, stack it up like legos. I decided to accompany her to the airport. I didn’t want to sit in the hostel while she was still in the country. But before, we walked to Café Union for my favorite Antigua breakfast, smoothie in a bowl! Then we waited more than a half hour for the bus who ended up sending a private driver. We inched along in traffic, worse than usual if you can even say that about Guatemala City (because what is worse and what is usual? It’s always monumentally slow). When we got close to the airport (a mile away) the driver turned up the radio and I heard the words I didn’t want to hear “bloqueos” and “aeropuerto.” We couldn’t drive into the airport. Before you know it, we were stopped and dropping Amanda off at the corner to walk a kilometer with her bag on her back and an upset stomach. We came into this country walking into confusion and a cloud of doubt and we would go out the same way, now wouldn’t we?

The driver picked up a guy for the drive back to Antigua, a real chatty Kathy. He reeked of cigarettes and overflowed with stories and weird facts about his travels through Asia, his spoiled cousin, being an only child and his did never working. I chimed in at times, and other times I just let him jetmouth. I had too many other things on my mind as we inched along in return traffic from the city. I was relieved when I got to the hostel and handed the driver Q100 (brought him down from 150). When I made it back inside I was happy to see that trench coat receptionist wasn’t there.

There was a book at the hostel computer, seemingly left for me: The Sun and Her Flowers by Rupi Kaur. I knew then what I had to do. I sat in the park with a giant ice cream milkshake and read the poems where I found solace. Even when a bird pooped on my head, I sat and kept reading. It may have just been pee, after all. And I let the poetry cut me open, examine my parts and sew me up so I could get up and walk and bring all the parts of me that remained. And the bird waste on my head.

I checked into my new hostel, Adra, and made myself busy. Tomorrow was a big question mark.