How to…get in to, around and out of Guatemala

Getting in
Guatemalan immigration is so relaxed that we had to ask for an entry stamp at the Cuauhtemoc/La Mesilla border crossing from Mexico. There was no fee and we just strolled right through. Most tourists don’t need a visa to enter Guatemala and will be given a ninety day tourist stamp on arrival.

We were on a shuttle bus from San Cristobal de las Casas, Mexico, that dropped us off at the border and transferred us to another bus on the other side where we continued to Panajachel, Lake Atitlan.

Getting around
Shuttle buses are the tourist speciality in Guatemala. The travel agencies know the places that tourists want to go and provide direct buses between them. All the towns we went to (Panajachel, San Pedro del Atitlan, Antigua, Coban, El Remate) had plenty of tourist agencies where you hand over your quetzals and get collected and delivered door to door. The service isn’t quite as efficient as the price would suggest; we found that adding two extra hours onto the quoted journey time was nearer the truth - mañana is a popular word and attitude in Guatemala. The tourist shuttles are easy, but are nowhere near as cheap nor as atmospheric as Guatemala’s famous chicken buses.

Chicken buses are brightly repainted American school buses - old, rickety and polluting - but cheap as chips. Good for short distances, but notoriously painful over long distances - bucket seats, no suspension and black fumes belching in through the windows. They are also considered unsafe by some (including the British Foreign Office who don’t allow their staff to travel on them) as robberies and murders are a possibility. Indeed, the tabloid papers are full of daily reports of bus drivers shot dead in Guatemala City - often because they drove through the wrong zone or didn’t pay their dues to the gang lords. You can take your chances and many people we met had travelled across the whole country on chicken buses without incidence. Anyway, isn’t a tourist bus richer pickings?

Chicken buses are being phased out and already in some parts of the country the only option is between a public minibus or a tourist minibus. Most travel agencies will fix you up with a shuttle bus (minibus) or you can go to the local bus terminal and talk to the drivers until you find the right minibus to your destination - the timetables seem to change regularly.

Large first class coaches plough selected routes. We travelled with Monja Blanca from Guatemala City to Coban on a bus resembling Dukes Travel in the eighties. Not the swish first class bus of Mexican standards but fit for travel. We were joined by a colourful bunch of Guatemalans, some in indigenous huipiles and stripy skirts, many in cowboy hats and one lady with some chickens and vegetables wrapped up in a bundle. Do chickens on a bus make it a chicken bus?

We were fortunate and travelled across Guatemala safely, as did all the other travellers we met.

Getting out
We took a shuttle bus from El Remate to Belize City passing through the Melchor de Menchos border crossing - the only land crossing between Guatemala and Belize. We were stamped out of Guatemala and asked to pay a twenty quetzals fee (£1.80). This is, apparently, a municipal fee to fix the muddy, potholed road that, apparently, “the tourist chew up”. When I challenged the charge, having been told that there should be no fee entering or leaving Guatemala, we were told that it was “nothing illegal” although, conveniently, the chap in charge of producing receipts was having a day off. The road really did need fixing though.

The entry to Belize was easy and efficient. British citizens get a one-month tourist stamp on arrival. We were then questioned by customs in indecipherable pidgin English as to whether we were carrying any fruit, vegetables or alcohol - negative - and suddenly queen Elizabeth II was looking up at us from the banknotes. Adios Guatemala!

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How to…volunteer in Guatemala

Let’s face it, travellers are masters of time; no alarm calls, no deadlines, no chores. When the biggest task of the day is deciding which restaurant to eat in perhaps it’s time to seek out something else to do instead.

After seven months of travelling I was feeling the urge to get off my bus-sore bum and do something useful; to get a deeper understanding of the country I was visiting and, hopefully, be of some help as part of the deal. Guatemala is full of opportunities to get involved with the local community, not in the ´pay three thousand pounds and you can help’ way, but where there are minimal, or no, admin overheads and you just have to give your time.

There are a number of websites that list some of these volunteer opportunities in Guatemala and most spanish language schools have links with local projects:
http://www.idealist.org/
http://www.voluneerpeten.com/
http://www.casa-guatemala.org/
http://www.arcasguatemala.com/
www.volunteerabroad.

I was fortunate to get hooked up with Los Patojos (http://www.lospatojos.org/) through my language school.

“This is my revolution," declared Juan Pablo Romero Fuentes, the Director of Los Patojos, as he proudly gazed over the brightly painted yard full of children running, laughing and generally creating havoc.

This young revolutionary has transformed his house in Jocotenango, on the outskirts of Antigua, into a school for los patojos (meaning ´the little ones´) from less privileged households.

Starting with just three pupils the school is now bursting at the seams with over one hundred children. Many of the pupils found their own way to this school, its reputation spreading through the children’s gossip. They come because they want to learn and because their parents lack the will or the money to send them to public school. Although school is free in Guatemala, many children don’t attend because their families cannot afford the books and pens or because their family needs them to work. The streets of Guatemala are full of children selling chewing gum, fruit and offering shoe shines. I even met an eight year old running an Internet cafe. To give children the opportunity to go to school as well as work, some of the public schools run in the afternoon. Los Patojos is also open for education in the afternoons only. The children stream in from 2pm and run around for half an hour before being served a nutritious lunch followed by a tooth brushing session. Lessons follow and when the work is done there is more play time.

There is as much, if not more, emphasis on social interaction and fun as there is on lessons. The school aims to build the self-esteem and abilities of the children, teaching them to believe in themselves and make the most of their lives. If there’s a lack of love in the home, it is given in double doses in the school. It’s a wonderful project. I am not qualified to teach but I could make the lives of the teachers easier. For a couple of afternoons I helped make musical instruments out of drinks cans and beans for the children to decorate, and prepared exercise books. Easy stuff, but it frees up the teacher’s time to concentrate on more important things. And everyone gets involved in the rough and tumble of playtime at the end of the day.

The Patojos website proclaims, "We are powerful because we are children,” and witnessing the energy in this school, I believe it. So if you ever find yourself in a dilemma unable to decide between going to a cafe to read or mooching around a museum and fancy doing something different, get in touch with Juan Pedro (Jpromerofuentes@gmail.com), or one of the many other volunteer organisations listed above, and go and help out.

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Back to school

“How did you get by without speaking the language?”. People frequently asked us this as we’ve travelled around the world.


It has certainly been challenge to navigate our way through many strange and often impenetrable languages; our eyes bewildered by strange square Cyrillic lettering, beautiful abstract kanji and psychedelic, swirly Thai, our ears twisted by harsh, gutteral Mandarin, soft, whispered Japanese and the long drawl of the American South West.

Yet somehow we managed. Though eating out in a Chinese restaurant often felt like Russian roulette, and coaxing answers in English out of a shy Japanese guesthouse owner, anxious not to loose face by ‘embarrassing themselves’ was like trying to avoid wearing slippers, we managed.

Once we left Asia behind and reached the shores of the Americas I thought it would get easier. It didn’t.

Indeed, for me at least, it was when we reached the new linguistic realm of Latin America that the language barrier, and the associated frustrations of not speaking or understanding the local language, has been at its greatest.

It wasn’t that I didn’t understand the language more than anywhere else that we’d been, rather it was that, for the first time, I was far behind, in linguistic terms, my fair travelling companion.

With a year in Ecuador under her belt, Lara speaks good Spanish, or rather Latin American. She can hold a conversation, decipher a bus timetable, read a menu.

I, on the other hand cannot. Rather I mumble away in dreadful Spanglish, gleaned from films, television and a fortnight’s glance at my little Spanish phrasebook during our trip across the Pacific.

I couldn’t stand it. I was reduced to the role of a mute bystander on the edge of every conversation, grinning sheepishly in this most machismo of worlds as Lara would happily rabbit on with waiters and bus drivers, hostel owners and even friends.

I’m sure she didn’t appreciate it either, having to shoulder the burden of full-time spokesperson, constantly having to translate for me.

After a month of this, verbally stumbling across Mexico I’d had enough. I decided was time to take things into my own hands. I had to take the plunge into a pool of new vocab, pronouns and verbs.


It was time to go back to school.

Antigua, the grand old former capital of colonial-era Guatemala, is the perfect place to learn Spanish.

It’s a beautiful location, where old cobbled streets are lined with low houses painted sky blue, peach and mustard yellow, their hues faded by the scorching sunshine.

There’s a grand old square bordered by a ruined old Cathedral (a victim of the many earthquakes that have struck the city), decaying old monasteries, and crumbling old churches dedicated to a whole host of saints.

Above the city loomed three massive volcanoes, brooding and very much active, which we could walk up, padding through paths of volcanic dust and gingerly stepping across the sharp fields of recently solidified lava.

Volcanoes and ruins aside the town also offers a huge range of language schools where, for a rock bottom price, gringos can cram in a week or two’s intensive Spanish lessons.

Many choose to do this before pressing further south, heading for other Latin American countries where they can put their newly-learned lingo to use, from San Salvador to Santiago.

We’re both studying at one of these language schools. Lara is ‘just brushing up on’ the pretorect and other difficult and impressive-sounding advanced things; I’m just hoping I can order a bus ticket by the end of the week.

I reckon I stand a fighting chance. After all, we couldn’t be studying in an environment more conducive to learning.

Our school is set in a pleasant courtyard, around which pupils and teachers sit in the open air.

It’s fresh and invigorating, albeit at this this altitude we face the stark choice of either shivering in the shade or sweltering in the sun.

Lessons are one-on-one teaching, four hours a day, which makes for intensive but highly productive learning.

Despite this the atmosphere remains highly relaxed and the courtyard echoes to peals of laughter amongst the strangled words.

Learning a new language can be very rewarding and it’s made all the more enjoyable when you get to mix with so many people, old and young, from across the world, all here to learn themselves and somehow, in the process find out about other countries and cultures.

And alongside the international pleasantries there’s some serious business to be done. I rolled up my sleeves and got stuck in, taking a nosedive straight into a new language.

My teacher is a lovely chap called Raphael, a charming retired farmer with a gentle manner and an infectious laugh. He’s no Mr Bronson, Grange Hill’s tyrannical French teacher, that's for sure. Rather he’s an immensely laid-back fellow, encouraging and - most crucially for me - patient.

On the first day we sat down to work and he spread out his teaching materials, tattered old books, held together with yellowing sellotape.

Straight away he was off, gabbling away in Spanish and scribbling indecipherable words on scraps of paper.

I was bemused at first and, as an absolute beginner, terribly lost, clumsy and awkward like a baby bird.

It was a shock to be back at school. After ten years lying somewhat dormant my part of the brain which is meant to absorb and learn things like new languages is rather dusty and unused. It took quite some effort to shake it back to life and coax it into absorbing a rather daunting-looking foreign language.

It was also intense; and after four hours of hard study I’m left reeling, my brain frying, my memory overloaded with verbs and definite articles.

I’m confused by conjugations and assaulted with adjectives, irked by infinitives and perplexed by pronouns.

Then there’s the pronounciation - all that seems to come out of my cakehole is a bizarre form of mangled Spanglish.

I have to relearn how to speak. I’m trying desperately to reprogramme my Anglo-Saxon genes so that I can replace my long English vowels and sharp BBC pronunciation with the ability to speak in one long, fast rolling sentences and to roll my ‘r’s like a rattling motorbike exhaust.

Raphael gave me a couple of tonguetwisters to get this process going - fiendishly difficult ones that reduced me to slathering, jibbering fool.

Try this one for instance:

Rapido corren los carros cargados de ferrocarril

See?

At first it seemed hopeless. How on earth, I thought, I am going to pick this up in five days? Is it really worth putting myself through this linguistic pain?

Lara can speak the lingo, and besides is it really worth it in a country where a sizeable proportion of people don’t even speak Spanish (the various indigenous peoples, descendents of the Maya, speaking 28 different languages and dialects of their own)? Surely I should be delving into the mysteries of K’iche, Kaqchikel or Mam.

Gradually things improved. A surprising amount of the words were familiar (thanks to everything from the Roman conquest of Britain to the films of Quentin Tarantino) and besides this was conversational Spanish I was after, not Don Quixote.

Now we jibber jabber along quite happily. It helped that, like many Guatemalans, Raphael speaks far slower and clearer then a Spaniard.

He’s a great one for gossip and greatly enjoys the tales I have to tale him of our homestay in a crumbling old casa in one of the nearby streets. It’s owned by an old lady with small darting eyes which nervously follow you round the room.

Raphael grinned when he recognised her name, and laughed out loud when I recounted to him our experiences of her food, or rather the extra ingredients she unwittingly added to each meal.

We seemed to take it in turns to be served a bug of some sort: spiders in our orange juice, flies on our pasta, even a couple of maggots in a chicken fillet (or was it fish?), our hostess provided them all.

Lara and I bravely ploughed on through the courses, determined to stay the course. Our fellow housemate, a game young Aussie fellow, did his best but, after numerous occasions it got too much - our hostess simply couldn’t understand why he eschewed her sena and started to eat out.

Back at school, as we sit under the avocado tree, learning verb endings, a large boom rolled out across the town.

Everyone looked up to see smoke rising from one of the 3000m beasties. A common occurrence, apparently, and one that doesn't seem to concern the locals at all.

It was enough to distract me though and my mind started wandering away from verb stems and pondering the fate of Pompeii.

Maybe I needed Mr Bronson after all.

You boy! Fewins! Pay attention in class!



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