Publications

Caryn Anderson

The following is a travel article published by STA Travel in the Travel Journals section of their web site in 2002.

Central America: An Alchemy of the Spirit

I want to say that he was the one who was afraid, but the fact is we both were. We justified it as wisdom," and "prudence." Guatemala was not exactly Florida, or even Cancun. Some funky stuff had happened there - stuff that infolved words like "kidnapping," "rebels," "armed bandits," and "death." "We'll just stick to Belize," we said to ourselves. "There's more than enough to do there, and they speak English." But life had other things in store for us.

It all started the very first night. Sitting outside our little pension in Belize City, playing with our proprietor's pe quash (like a raccoon with a 2 foot long ringed tail), we got to talking with a young couple from Canda. "Oh no, you must go to Guatemala. It's fantastic! At least get over to the Mayan ruins of Tikal. It's just a few hours from here by bus. Make sure you go very early in the morning. Go to the very back of the site to an area called the Lost Kingdom. As the sun begins to rise all the animals come out to feed. You can't just stay here in Belize, you don't know what you're missing!" Hmmmm. We stared at each other. We went to the beautiful island of Caye Caulker, sat in the sun, snorkeled on the reef, drank beer, fed the pelicans and thought about it. Peer pressure I believe it's called. Eventually the humiliation of our own cowardice convinced us to make the journey to Tikal. Thank God!

Sitting alone in the dirt parking lot just over the border, waiting anxiously for the alleged bus that would take us deep into the jungles of Guatemala, our trepidation grew. What are we doing? What is going to happen to us? At last a nameless bus arrived. Is this the one? Off the bus came a number of sinister looking men with enormous black bushy mustaches and aviator sunglasses - just like we'd seen in pictures. The only thing missing were the guns and ammo belts slung over their shoulders. We stared at each other again. We took a deep breath, and with no knowledge at that point of how to put a sentence together in Spanish we meekly approached these imposing characters and mumbled, "Tikal?" They startled us by grabbing our packs and throwing them under the bus. Stripped of our belongings, we turned over our money and hesitantly stepped onto the bus, not knowing if this was really the right bus, or if we would know when to get off again. And so began our marvelous adventure into the unknown.

We soon came to love the excitement of not knowing. We came to hunger for the thrill of heading off blindly to a new destination based solely on the recommendation of other travelers. We came to adore the Guatemalan people. We gave up planning completely. We learned to speak Spanish. We gave up the "tourist" buses and rode with the locals and their chickens - just as happy to get on the wrong bus as the right one.

New friends we made on a boat tour of the local zoo in Flores (near Tikal) convinced us to join them in the beautiful volcano-encircled town of Antigua in the south. Drinking buddies there sent us up to Panajachel on the lake in the highlands. The guy who tattooed us in "Pana" got us on a bus to the colorful markets in Chichicastenango. A young man on that bus put us on route to the ruins of Copan in Honduras to meet a wild monkey who loved to sit with his arms around me! A German riding with us in the back of a pick-up from the Honduran border to Copan sent us further into Honduras, down to Tela, in search of the Garifuna people. And we ended up spending two rainy days on the island of Roatan (the divers paradise of Honduras) waiting to get a flight back to Belize to catch our plane home.

We returned to the States transformed. We were no longer tourists or vacationers; we were adventurers, explorers, travelers. We came to truly appreciate the words of Thornton Wilder: "The test of an adventure is that when you're in the middle of it, you say to yourself, 'Oh, now I've got myself into an awful mess. I wish I were sitting quietly at home.' And the sign that something is wrong with you is when you sit quietly at home wishing you were out having lots of adventure."

It may not sound very honorable to say that peer pressure and the shame of our cowardice were the motivation for our journey, but in retrospect I wouldn't have it any other way. Belize, Guatemala and Honduras are the perfect crucible for an alchemy of the spirit! Whatever your motivation...just go! You may periodically find yourself in an "awful mess," but you will never regret it!

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