Western Guatemalan Highlands: The Middle

Lower loop to Tak’alik. Upper tracks to Zacaleu.

As part of my Guatemalan adventure, I marked a number of Maya sites on my map and cleared my weekends to dive for smaller cultural gems. Agonizingly slow and clumsy chicken bus rides have squeezed, contained, and confined a majority of the travelers that I’ve met to follow the most commonly trodden footpath through Guatemala: GC to Antigua to Lago Atitlan to Xela. Some shoot northeast from Antigua and loop up to Semuc Champey and Tikal, but you’re adding 20+ hours to your round-trip journey. Bus it, there’s no other way. And I’m not thumbing my nose at them; I was swimming in the same fishbowl just a few years ago. No vale la pena. It wasn’t worth the effort to go in any other direction.

On the road bus pickup points, I’m not sure what the proper name for them is, are something to be seen. It reminds me of a combination of a frantic airport terminal drop off/pickup strip with a noisy farmer’s market all while trying to change a tire on the side of a very busy interstate. And black smoke. There’s a lot of very rough, noxious, black smoke. If you’ve ever changed a tire on the side of an interstate you know the great sense of urgency related to it. You’re standing on the side of the highway, cars whizzing by,  and all you want, more than anything else, is to be on your way as soon as possible. It’s dangerous. You can feel it with every car and truck flying by. The road vibrates and the wind blasts with every vehicle roaring by. It’s no place for a human to be outside of their cage. I feel no different about the bus stop: get there and get gone. But, you can’t, you have to wait your turn. With my limited Spanish I remember navigating my way to the semblance of a well overrun bus stop loaded with local women waving bags of sliced fruit, tamales and other indiscernible goods in at my face. Personal space? What personal space? No, gracias. Low-flying overstuffed mini-busses come and go with force, each co-piloted by a young boy hanging out the side sliding-door, waving people in, telling the pilot when to take off. These busses don’t stop, they swoop in, glide along and take off. It’s your job to discern exactly which one you need to dive into in order to get you to the next landing station to repeat to the next landing station and so on.

The cycle roars on endlessly, at least from what I can tell, as I downshifted and blasted past the dozens of people frozen at the bus stop on their way of town. Wow, am I glad I don’t have to stand around and wait for a bus like those people I think to myself. And I say think not thought, because it’s repeating, ongoing, like clockwork. There are always crowds of people there, statues shrouded in diesel smoke belched by converted ex-pat school busses and mini-busses, waiting patiently for their turn while women and children laboriously weave through the crowd shilling whatever they can.

It was Saturday morning and I was headed north to Parque Arqueologico Zacaleu. I left the chaos of the city behind and headed towards some new place on my map. The road north was fairly unremarkable. I donned the spaceman suit and got on with it. Unlike the last mini-jaunt south, I decided to bring along my panniers this time with my spare inner tubes, extra tools and some other goods to give my bags shape. I’ve constantly been on the fence about leaving the bike unattended with soft luggage. My Honduran sensibilities always tell me to err on the side of caution, as most things that are not nailed down get lifted in Central America. I also didn’t want to run the risk of some joker cutting a pannier open, not because of the loss of the contents inside, but the fact that a big cut could render the bag completely irreparable and useless. Nevertheless, I have been strapping on the bags and waiting for whatever might come next. I liken the process to trial and error, testing to see if someone will come along and vandalize my luggage, and I suppose the discovery of the error comes at a great cost, but there is no definitive way to know what will happen when you’re traveling. Sometimes you just need to go down the road and see what might happen.

To the north.

This seems to be a nice road to discover.

On my way to Huehuetenango.

Another cookie break. Necessary.

One of many strips for this upcoming election.

On the fringe of Huehuetenango, just a few hours north of Quetzaltengo I found Parque Arqueologico Zacaleu. It had been thoroughly excavated in the ’40s and seems to be holding up well to the sands of time. This one was quite a bit more fun to climb than Tak’alik Ab’aj.

I climbed the big one in the picture above. It was the main temple for ceremonial sacrifices in the community. The 5th tier from the bottom has a large altar jutting out overlooking the courtyard. I stood upon it and looked around. That same eerie feeling of standing in the Colosseum in Rome came flooding back. What could have happened here?

Later, I looped home on the Pan-American Highway for a change of pace. It’s a 30,000 mile stretch of slab in various states of disrepair that spans all of the Americas, from Alaska to the southern tip of Argentina. It holds a Guinness Book World Record for being the longest road in the world, connecting North, Central and South, save for 60 miles of nearly impassible jungle linking Panama and Colombia called the Darien Gap. Some crazy overlanders have braved the Gap, but it’s so thickly plagued with guerrilla fighters, swamp, lethal crawly things and malaria that most people avoid it altogether and take a ferry around it.

I buzzed along on my 450 and thought about this road from an adventurer’s standpoint. This road can take you places, if you let it. I expected it to be a bit smoother.