planes, pickups and chicken buses - transpo in Guatemala

transportation in Guatemala is a thing to behold.  in the big cities, there are buses and taxis, but as soon as you leave, the situation changes significantly.  getting around between towns and villages is a little more creative.  to some popular destinations there are shuttles.  but for the local or low-budget traveler (or to any other destination) there are basically two options:  pickup trucks or chicken buses.  basically, if you want to travel between two remote villages, you start walking along the road between them and wait for a pickup to come by.  flag them down, whoever they are, and they’ll let you hop in the back with any others from along the way.   

chicken bus, photo from John Barrie

the “chicken bus” is a somewhat scheduled bus route between towns.  imagine a colorfully-painted old U.S. school bus, packed to the gills with people, topped precariously with luggage, chugging along on a rough road, belching terrible exhaust behind it.  no, there aren’t actually chickens riding in the bus, minor miracle, but there is always the possibility there will be some in a cage on top, going to market.  the drivers must pay the owners a set fee, so anything else they get, they can keep.  you can imagine this results in people being packed in like sardines – three adults to a kid-sized school bus bench – and drivers driving like bats out of hell to pick up ever more passengers and hit more stops.  in fact, each driver has a helper who climbs up on the bus – sometimes while it is still moving on the highway – to tie down, untie, and ultimately throw down luggage to people so they can get moving that much faster.  the roads between cities and towns are absolutely flooded with chicken buses.

our lancha for the week

around Lake Atitlan, of course, the main transportation is by boat, or lancha.  there are public boat routes between certain villages on the lake and private boats for hire as water taxis.  we had our own lancha for the week, though there always seemed to be a stranger or two hopping in.  extra money for the driver.  there is a phenomenon at the lake where during late morning and afternoon the wind picks up on the water.  this led to at least one adventurous lancha ride when I was in the boat alone, going to pick everybody else up.  the front of the boat kept lifting up visibly over the water and slamming back down, hard.  it was fun, since I had a good solid grip.  once everyone else got in and loaded down the boat, we got doused a bit with spray.  all-in-all, the lanchas are a great – and incidentally, the only – way to get around the lake.

tuk-tuks are another option within the villages (where there are roads or road-ish type paths).  I have no idea what sequence of events led to these typically-asian modes of transport ending up in guatemala, but they’re pretty cool.  and perfectly suited to areas with few cars and small roads.  unfortunately, we did not get to ride in them, though we did nearly get run over by them on a regular basis.

  

as for the roads… one of our schools was located pretty far up the mountain.  we took a boat to San Marcos in the morning, then walked up a path to the center of town, and got in the back of a pickup truck.  the truck took us over a bumpy, winding road (alternately cobblestone and dirt) to another village, then up into the mountain from there. after a while we changed to four-wheel-drive to continue up a “road” that just a year ago was only a path.  this stretch compared to a combination of the vehicle body twist ditch and the rough terrain track used at Ford for truck development.  only that makes it sound more hospitable than it was.  during this phase, we had to stand with our knees flexed the whole time to absorb the bouncing and hang on dearly to the bar added waist-high around the truck bed in order to do our best not to fall out.  that pickup might as well have been a trampoline.

(by the way, once the truck went as far as it could, we still had to hike up a path to get to the school.  and go further than that, mostly straight uphill, to get to the first houses of the village, then straight up a good distance more to get to the actual town of Tzununa.)

12 of us loaded into the back of this pickup for a long, rough ride, photo by Tom Egel

I won’t even attempt to describe the driving in Guatemala City.  rules are optional, speed is mandatory, passing distances don’t exist.  motorcycles fly between vehicles, which is frightening since the average distance between cars side-by-side is about four inches.  the distance between speeding cars and pedestrians is only slightly better (six inches?).  seatbelts and child seats are not used, and amidst all this chaos are people riding standing up in the back of pickups, even in the heart of the city.

thank goodness we had Ruben, the guy who knows all and gets us places safely!