Coban

August 1, 2010
This past weekend, I took Friday off from the clinic and traveled to Coban to meet up with a few of the CASAS students. I left San Pedro at 6am, and took a wildly careening chicken bus to the capital. Then at 1:30 or so, Joseph and I took a city bus to Zone 1 to get a bus ticket to Coban. We knew that the bus left at 2, so we were practically running through Zone 1 to get to the station, which we didn’t actually know the location of. But we got there with 2 minutes to spare, so it was all good. When we got to Coban, we walked through the town’s mall, searching for the blonde hair that was Patrick, Scott, and Roxanne. After finding them, we called Rob Cayhill, whom we had met on Free Travel, who gave us the name of the town that we were to meet our host for the night. After asking two or three taxi drivers about the destination and receiving only blank stares, we eventually had to have Rob come and get us and drive us to the town. He talked about the cloud forests and related issues for the duration of the trip. That guy has an absolute passion for the cloud forest and its preservation and the people that deal with it. It was great.
Once we reached the town, we took a pickup truck (standard mode of transportation) to another little village. It was dark and we were standing in the bed of a pickup with a welded-on cage and going uphill and crashing over potholes. It was an experience, for sure. When we finally got to the next town, the boys stayed with one family while Roxanne and I walked for another 20 minutes or so, downhill, on a slippery clay trail, with a flashlight and a cell phone light to guide us. We were staying with an indigenous Kekchi family in a tiny little village in a valley surrounded by mountains. It was very beautiful, but we didn’t know that until morning because at that point, it was completely and utterly dark. The family that we stayed with had 2 young sons, 12 and 8, and a grandmother. The father and the boys spoke Spanish, but the women did not. They also had two turkeys that had shouting matches and a rooster that was very concerned that someone should sleep late, and crowed about every 10 minutes, starting at 12am. We went to bed at about 9pm, and soon discovered that the beds had no mattresses, and were basically rattan mats covering a bare bedframe, with a few blankets thrown on top. And there were fleas. I slept about an hour that night, I think. I’m not complaining (too much, anyway), because that’s how people live, and I feel like I shouldn’t whine about a different way of life. It was a great experience. For one night.
The next morning, we woke up (if we had ever gone to sleep) at 5:45 to eat breakfast and then head into the cloud forest. Our 12 year old host brother took us to a spot where we met up with our guide, the boys and also Karen, an Italian girl who was staying with the same family. We hiked for about an hour and a half to get to the actual cloud forest. Once we were in, we took a trail that wound through the forest, up and down the side of the mountain. Our main purpose was to try to see the resplendent quetzals that are reasonably common in that area. Evidently though, the quetzals didn’t get the office memo that there was to be a meeting. We could hear them scurrying down the hallways ahead of us, slamming doors, peeping furtively through keyholes and door cracks, and we occasionally caught glimpses of their shadows flitting ahead of us as they ran for cover. Roxanne saw a flash of green that was a tail feather, and we all heard their calls, but that was about it. I knew that they wouldn’t be scattered around like clowns at a rich kid’s birthday party, but I guess I thought that I’d be able to see one really well and take a great picture of it. We hiked out of the village (2km STRAIGHT uphill, 4km downhill) and then hung out in the city for awhile. Roxanne, Patrick, and Scott work in a Mennonite school called Bezaleel that is a 20 minute bus ride, 20 minute walk out of Coban, so we spent some time there getting stared at by the students. The majority of the students live there, only returning home twice over the course of the school year. Patrick helps teach English and Roxanne and Scott help with P.E., math, and music.
That night we met the Cayhills again at a Cuban restaurant for supper. They work with an NGO program that does things with cloud forest ecotourism, and have been in Guatemala for something like 9 or 10 years. The parents speak more or less fluent Kekchi, and since their kids go to the public school in Coban, they are completely fluent in three languages. They also know just about everybody in town, I’m absolutely convinced. And everything about Guatemala – we’ve plied them for information more times than I can count on the two occasions that we’ve met, and they always have an answer. They’re so cool. I have too many positive role models in my life, is that bad?
Joseph and I shared a room at a Coban hostel that night ($6/night, even my parents can’t beat that rate!) and then hopped on a bus to Guatemala. During the trip, we watched “Brother Bear,” which is arguably the worst Disney film ever, and then, inexplicably, a Beatles photo montage set to Hispanic music. I have no idea. We got off at the right stop in Zone 1, and then hopped on a city bus to the main highway in the city. Except that the bus turned off of the main highway and went somewhere else. We kept riding, hoping that it would turn back or something… but it didn’t. We ended up in Zone 19 of the city, which is COMPLETELY unfamiliar territory – we’d never been there, never heard of any of the landmarks, never seen any of the bus numbers, and had no idea what was going on. Thankfully, the lady sitting next to me was really nice, and told us what the deal was. So we got ourselves straightened out, and next thing we knew, we were saying goodbye to each other while I hopped on a bus for San Pedro.
But it doesn’t end there, no, of course not! I asked my bus driver if he was going to San Pedro and he said yes, so I didn’t worry. Then the bus stopped, and he was like, “Ok, you people going to Sand Pedro, get off!” And I did, and it was definitely NOT San Pedro. It was nowhere. And the guy-who-shouts on the bus was like, “Yeah, go across the road and take a microbus, bye!” and hopped on the bus and left. Turns out I had taken the wrong bus, and ended up in roughly the right area, but still had 2 hours of traveling by microbus, pickup truck, and tuk-tuk before I ended up where I needed to be. And as soon as I arrived, the bus that I SHOULD’VE taken showed up in the city square. Damn.
It was an adventure, and it was great to see some of my CASAS friends again, as well as hear how they’re doing, visit their service sites, and also see more of the landscape and people of Guatemala.