A Snapshot of a Guatemalan Bus Ride

In a small regional bus the size of a mini-van, we are 23 people packed like sardines for the two hour ride to the next town, traversing rickety roads and some of the most beautiful hill country I've ever seen. We are driving parallel to a mountain range that is pocked as far as the eye can see with hundreds of tiny hills rising up like moguls on a ski slope. I've never seen another landscape like it.

I am the only gingo aboard in a sea of indigenous people and feel a little bit as a guest that is doing her best to fit in at a party where it's obvious to everyone that I don't belong. The welcome is warm anyway. I am suddenly very aware of the iPod attached to my ears and that it represents several months salary for most of these people. I wonder if they have ever seen one before. Probably not.

Personal space is non-existent and the smells are a little funky. The man over there is standing upright in the doorwell and trying to catch some zzz's, the woman to my right is breast-feeding her two-year-old, using my sleeping bag as a pillow, while the man to my left is dozing off, head bobbing precariously in my direction and getting dangerously close to drooling on my shoulder.

An immutable law: There is always room for more. Just when you think there is no possible way to fit another living thing inside the bus, another family materializes from the hills out of nowhere and we stop and let them on. A woman boards carrying some sort of package wrapped in traditional cloth with the four corners pulled together at the top. She holds the bunched corners at the top with one hand and swings it around precariously as she navigates the crush of people. I realize it's a baby inside. She somehow manages to settle in and find a space where I could have sworn one didn't exist a moment before, all without rousing the baby...thus maintaining the perfect record of my never ever having heard a child cry on a bus here, no matter the conditions or how long the bus ride. I've never been able to figure that one out. Perhaps they just understand...this is how it works here, no use in fussing about it.