Some Happy Campers Get Kranky by Tasha Sudan Maybe we should have known when the floor of our hotelroom trembled ominously beneath us the day we arrived in Antigua, Guatemala, that this was not destined to be a smooth trip. But, as naive and fully-inoculated travelers with excellent footwear, we weren’t going to let a little earthquake faze us. Even with four huge volcanoes dominating the Antigua skyline, we put our apprehension aside. After all, the inflight movie hadn’t spooked us a bit. That was Los Angeles, right? Antigua had already had it’s volcano heydays. We hoped. We joked about the tremor with the owners of our hotel, who were oddly at ease with the rumblings of old Fuego. It had been many years since the last time Antigua had been swamped by hot lava, they said. They were building an unprecedented 4th floor on top of the hotel, they said, making it just about the highest building in Antigua. No need to worry, they said, es ok. Buenos noches. Nevertheless, we decided against the tour up the active volcano. The photos at the tourguides office showed happy campers with their heads all grey from the ash of the volcano. Along each side of the path nothing moved, nothing grew. Complete desolation. Not a lot of photo opportunities there, unless the thing actually blew. In which case I guess your camera would be the first thing to melt. That is after your incredibly expensive and supposedly indestructible gautex jacket. So, we figured, what else can we go see without endangering our lives, lungs and apparel? We decided on Lake Atitlan, described by proud Guatemalans as one of the wonders of the world. To get there was an easy choice of either a cramped chicken bus with bald tyres that cost 50c each but took 2 days to go 50 kilometers, or a smooth little minivan that charged $50 for an hour long trip which was bound to be crammed full of American tourists. We settled on the minivan (guess we aren’t so adventurous after all) and bought a ticket for the next day.   That evening we read in the paper that there had been a huge oil spill in the lake, and despite the assurances of our minivan driver ‘no es malo, solemente un poco..’, we decided not to go. What’s the point of a great lake if it’s full of dead fish belly up on the surface of the water? We went to lunch instead, in a little cafe recommended by our trusty Lonely Planet guidebook. What the guidebook didn’t tell us is that enterprising robbers have taken to the habit of spiking the sugarbowls in some of the cafes on the main square, and in other places frequented by gullible travelers, with a drug that then enables them to follow you back to your hotel (if you make it that far) and whilst you are incapacitated strip you of your valuables. Fortunately for me, my partner is the kind of chemical dustbin that enabled him to remain conscious enough to get us back to our hotel and jam a chair against the door. Noone hacked through it with a machete, so I guess perhaps we were the inadvertent victims of somebody else’s bad luck. We emerged a couple of days later and stood shakily in the courtyard smoking cigarettes. The owner of the hotel had a cryptic conversation with my partner while I tried to remember where I was and what I was doing there. "Su y su esposa, mucho tranquilo." he said, smiling. I couldn’t tell whether he meant happy, or boring, or maybe both (which perhaps would best describe most marriages). Unfortunately (or rather, fortunately) I didn’t know how to say "I’ve been drugged and unconscious for the last two days and feel like shit and you’re calling me tranquil?" in Spanish. Soon after this my partner started to sneeze a lot. At first we assumed it was some flowering plant somewhere, but noticed that it was much worse in the hotel room, particularly after the bathroom had been cleaned. Finally, by forcing him to sniff the shower tiles, we discovered that he was allergic to the cleaning agent (probably made from first world toxic waste) that the maid used - so much so that he was now finding it hard to breathe. Now why don’t you ever think of these little possibilities when you’re packing your bags back home? We had ointment for snakebite, clean syringes, anti-malarials, tools for amputation, gasmasks, you name it - but no anti-histamines. And the Mexican chemists, with their draws full of single little pills from 1969, always with that extra ingredient you don’t recognize that can cause frothing at the mouth or brain hemorrhages, were just a little too real for us.   So we hunted the length and breadth of Antigua, in search of a hotel that used Ajax. Alas, it appeared that Toxic Waste cleaning agent was the only cleaning agent they used in the whole city. My partner resorted to sleeping with his head out the window, only to be awakened all through the night by the inexplicable bangs of fireworks. In most other countries they would have sounded cool. In Guatemala they sounded like gunshots. So, ok, Guatemala was a disaster. Enough bland food and clapped out buses with names like moviestars. Let’s go to Mexico. Mariachi, mescal, little aperitifs made out of fried grasshoppers.... what could be cooler? The chain-smoking lady at the travel agent booked us tickets on a circuitous route that meant we could see Tikal on our way out, stop over at another great archeological destination just inside the Mexican border, Palenque, and then end up in Oaxaca. Planes all the way. No more waiting around for robbery, allergy or worse to strike us down. We were ascending a level on the great scale of tourism. So, gratefully, me and my sniffling partner made our way down into that unique atmosphere of pure carbon-monoxide they call Guatemala City and on to a plane bound for Flores. An hour later we were at the Flores airport, surrounded by a circle of Guatemalan taxi drivers, who were eventually prised from our backpacks by our unplussed tour guide. The only way to really see Tikal is to go on an overnight tour, because the chicken buses from Flores (which is 45 minutes away) drop you billions of miles from the park gate and by the time you get to the actual ruins themselves you’re so tired you can’t bear to climb up a single incredibly tall temple. The drawback with the tour, though, is that you’re stuck up there in the middle of nowhere with a few howler monkeys and a bunch of American tourists, who seem quite happy to pay a month’s wage for a beer that in Flores costs 50c.       Nevertheless, we struggled round the ruins in the intense heat, trailing behind a trio of scantily clad girls (favorites of the slimy guide) who kept walking into the frame of our photos and seemed equally oblivious to imminent heatstroke or aesthetics. Just when we were getting to the really interesting stuff we were herded out of the park by machine gun toting army personnel (who moments ago had been swilling beers and lying shirtless under flame trees and were thus not to be ignored). Apparently the Guatemalan president had arrived and wanted the park all to himself. Oh the endless perks of being the leader of a small Central American country. Back at the hotel my partner succumbed to another particularly violent sneezing fit that lasted the whole night and in the morning, exhausted and paralyzed by the heat, we were driven back to the airport to catch our connecting flight. After a few disconcerting hours in a deserted waiting lounge we figured something was not quite right. We confronted the Air Mexican desk and eventually deciphered the amazingly fast Spanish all Guatemalan’s speak to learn that our flight had never existed. After much tearing out of hair and wringing of hands a guy called Gonzales was summoned to deal with the crazy gringos at the counter and we were told that we would have to fly to Miami to catch our connecting flight in Palenque. But, he said, in very slick English, I have this friend.... A half hour later we were in the back of a minivan bound for some river in the middle of nowhere and some boat that would take us into Mexico, for a ridiculous sum of money that here would probably buy us an airplane. Nevertheless, we were moving, and we had to give it to Gonzales, he was quite a smooth talker. It was the kind of transaction that makes a third world economy go round. The van trip took 5 hours on a road that should really have been called a goat track; by the time we arrived at the river I felt like my teeth had been shaken out of my gums and all my vital organs were now in my throat. We were both covered in dust, we looked even more freaky than normal gringos do, and as we stepped into the boat (having been relieved of another burdensome $100) I was almost crying with relief at the sudden stillness of it all.   Alas, the boat trip, which we had been assured took 2 hours, was in fact only 10 minutes long. We climbed bewildered up the riverbank, and sat in the dirt of someone’s back yard with their chickens until a little Mexican kid took pity on us and sold us a coke. He told us we were in a border town called Corozal, and that a kombi would be coming in 2 hours and would take us the 350km to Palenque for $5. Bueno, we said. Thank Guadeloupe for Mexico! As promised, the kombi, packed with more Mexicans than a Boeing 711, wound it’s way through dense jungle, past innumerable army posts and checkpoints, toward what now seemed as mythical a place as the lost city of gold. Our driver, who looked like he had been driving back and forth between the two towns non-stop since the beginning of time, began to nod off about halfway through the trip, and it took a constant stream of cigarettes and florescent Mexican chewing gum to keep him on the road. The next day we went to the Palenque airport four hours early for our connecting flight, hoping it would be air-conditioned. The heat in Palenque was so intense we felt like our brains had been boilt inside our cerebral fluid and our clothes were as wet as if we had jumped in a river. Alas (why hadn’t we heeded that early warning tremor in Antigua?) that flight too had been a figment of our travel agent’s imagination and we found ourselves on a bus to a town called San Cristobel de Las Casas, en route overland to Oaxaca. Back down the bottom of the tourist scale, passing dead donkeys on the road and rusty pickups teetering on the brink of precipices that dropped thousands of feet to the valley floor below. Once again the army stopped us every 5km or so and asked us where we were from and what language they speak in Australia. The closer we got to San Cristobel, the more army trucks we saw and in vain we tried to wrack our brains for the reasons why San Cristobel and Chiapas State sounded strangely familiar. It wasn’t until we woke up the next day in a San Cristobel posada that we pulled out our guidebook and read that Chiapas state is the home of the Zapatista rebels, and San Cristobel the site of the 1994 Zapatista uprising. Ok. Well we wanted a real Mexican experience, didn’t we? Fried grasshoppers and all that? Ever ready to rise to the challenge, we boarded our night bus to Oaxaca with few apprehensions. After all, our guidebook said it was fine to travel through Chiapas, so long as it was on the Pan American highway. And the guidebook never lies.   Several army checkpoints later and sometime around 2am we were awakened suddenly by the bus lurching to a stop and a very bad dude jumping on, clad in a bandanna and waving a semiautomatic. He yelled at the driver in staccato Spanish, held the highly persuasive gun to his head, and the bus turned off the highway and plunged through thick undergrowth on another goat track trail for what seemed like forever. ‘What is it with us?’ I felt like screaming, ‘Only Bruce Willis has this much bad luck!’(and he doesn’t pay to do it, he gets paid), but I sat quiet like everybody else until the driver pulled up in the middle of a swamp beside another ominously quiet and black bus that looked completely empty. We were ordered off and into the swamp, our minds morbidly speculating on the fate of the people from the deserted bus. We waited our turn to be searched, our minds turning mournfully to all our high-tech gadgets that were doomed to become part of the Mexican resistance movement. After a while I began to think about mosquitoes. I remembered suddenly that Chiapas state is the only part of Mexico where the deadly strain of cerebral malaria has been reported. I started to dwell on this. We were in the middle of a goddamn swamp after all, at 2 in the morning, in the lowlands, it was filthy hot, and several bandidoes with semiautomatics stood between me and my mosquito repellent.. I wondered if they would just let me get back on the bus to get my RID. Very unlikely. Perhaps if I could cover myself in swamp mud it would protect my bare arms. Before I was compelled to take this aesthetically uncool measure, it was suddenly my turn to be searched, and I was so relieved that I didn’t even mind this Zapatista lingering a little too long on my breasts. When the bandidoes finally slunk off into the swamp, lights flickered on in the bus next to us, and a few of the braver ones emerged for a cigarette. We were a little cross that they hadn’t even attempted a smoke signal, but were glad they had not become hostages or worse. A sense of camaraderie slowly built up amongst the outraged passengers, until eventually there was enough bravaderie to propel the busdriver into his seat and our bus out of the swamp.       We sat sleepless in our seats until we pulled into Oaxaca, sometime the next afternoon. We found the first hotel we saw and collapsed onto a flea-infested bed. At 4am the next morning we were awoken by a supersonically loud hacksaw directly beneath our uncloseable window. I felt like suffocating myself with a pillow. What was it that hotel guy in Antigua had said - ‘tranquilo’? I got out of bed and started throwing the syringes from our medical kit like darts out the window. The torturous squealing continued, but I felt better. "This is what I call traveling," I said into the earplugs of my partner, "aren’t you glad we came to Mexico?" He looked at me blankly. I don’t know whether this was because his eardrums had burst or whether he was still in shock from the Zapatista thing. We sat on the bed together and opened a packet of chocolate covered cornflakes. "Well," I said, looking down at the trashed hiking boots at the foot of the bed that used to be of the top of the line, indestructibly perfect kind, and now looked like a pair of prehistoric beasts, "at least you’re not sneezing anymore." The sun rose, chickens did their usual thing, volcanoes rumbled on, and we sat in the Pombo hotel, eating our packet of ‘Krankies’, inexplicably happy that we had come. Back to features