Visa Rigmarole II

Travel is strong medicine. I think, in a large way, I felt the travel aspect of going to Guatemala was largely in the past when I departed for Guatemala City yesterday morning. To some extent I felt I had lived that out when I was first arriving in June and also last month from when Lori arrived to when she and Beth departed. So when advice finally moved me in the direction of the Guatemala City visa option, I decided to take it.

Phase one of said Guatemala City trip went decidedly haywire. At about 7:30 am, five-sixths of the way into the three-hour bus ride from Santa Cruz to Guate, my bus ran across an obstacle. About thirty kilometers Northwest of Chimaltenango, mid-morning traffic on the Pan-American Highway ground go to a halt. After a brief cell phone conversation, the driver informed us he was turning around and going back to Santa Cruz. "Well, I'm not," I thought to myself.

Hopping off the bus, nearly without my bag (kindly passengers fished it out for me when, outside the bus, I noticed I didn't have it), I began to hike up alongside about a half-mile of gridlock traffic. After a little while hiking, I came upon what was causing all the backup. In the middle of the road, a bonfire was burning, hewn tightly with men with bandannas over their faces holding what looked like police-issue billy clubs. Perhaps one or two hundred people milled about on the road alongside it as well on a crossing bridged erected at the bus stop for Patzicía.

I put my head down and tried to look clean and discrete as I made my way through the crowd to the other side of the obstruction. "Que está pasando?", I asked of an onlooker ("What is going on?"). "Es una manifestación," he responded. A demonstration. A banner facing down the road toward Guatemala City read something about Tecpan not allowing something. I would have tried to read it better, but I would have had to ask some people to move from in front of it, and I reasoned that that was probably not a good idea. Besides, I was in a hurry and I kind of felt like a walking symbol of the discontent being expressed by the people on the roadway.

On the other side, the police were slowly arriving. As I neared them along the road, I noticed I was the only person venturing within perhaps five yards of them. While well-equipped and acting civil, they were clearly outnumbered and unready to confront the demonstrators. I didn't want to hang around for whatever was to come next.