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The Chicken Bus to
Antigua
by Brendan Sainsbury
"Amigo..." rasps the man in the Panama hat, breathing the strong
aroma of Cuban tobacco into my face, "Y'know, there's an old
Guatemalan joke..."
I grimace as the bus lists dangerously to the right, throws me off
balance momentarily and delivers me rather unapologetically into
the lap of a heavily-wrinkled old woman, eyes closed and lips
muttering, a rosary clasped between her fingertips.
"Yes?" I reply breathlessly without too much interest. He tilts
the brim of his hat, glances behind him at a sea of bored,
work-bound faces and then leans forward and speaks in an almost
conspiratorial whisper.
"How many people can you fit into a chicken bus?"
 The
mouth is flat and serious, but the smiling eyes don't lie. "I
dunno," I say half-enthusiastically, playing along with him,
extending the agony a little longer as we screech to a halt at
some nameless road intersection somewhere between Guatemala City
and Antigua. The bus stops and the engine splutters. One person
gets off, and at least another five climb on board. We all take a
collective breath inwards and shunt back into the private space of
the person behind us. "It's simple," chuckles my new-found friend,
employing that rather hysterical form of Guatemalan logic. "Always
one more."
You have to psyche yourself up for Guatemala City. You have to
move yourself into a higher state of consciousness, prepare
yourself for the noise and the appalling traffic, the hot and
crazy disorder of the congested downtown core. I had arrived one
muggy morning in February on a mission. I had three weeks to help
build a small, compact gymnasium for a U.S.-funded orphanage in a
place called San Lucas. My old friend Pablo was my inspiration and
self-appointed local contact. Like an over-zealous tour guide, he
had waxed lyrical about spectacular volcanic landscapes, hard
altruistic endeavour and calmly contested games of football with
well-behaved street children. It wasn't his only exaggeration.
Quite understandably, he never mentioned anything about the
chicken buses either.
I e-mailed ahead early and arranged to meet Pablo at the airport.
He told me he had managed to fix us up with some accommodation in
a quiet, cobbled part of old Antigua, situated 50km to the
north-west. It was a blessing in disguise, as it turned out.
Guatemala City didn't look like my kind of place. It didn't really
look like anybody's kind of place. One hour "in the smoke," they
said, was the equivalent to puffing through an excess of about
twenty medium-tar cigarettes a day. I took it on trust. After all,
I wasn't going to be hanging around for long.
The bus stop was by the side of a marketplace on the Pan-American
highway. I couldn't see a sign as such, just a ramshackle stall
where a mean-looking chef in old army trousers conjured up chicken
tortillas and beans amidst a cloud of belching exhaust fumes.
"This is it," said Pablo, as a convoy of old requisitioned U.S.
school buses bore down on us. There was no identifiable queue to
speak of, no public address system announcement to the tune of
"PLEASE LET THE PASSENGERS OFF THE BUS FIRST," just lots of elbows
and arms and desperate jostling and the sight of Pablo's sunburnt
neck getting carried along with the surge of people in front of
me.
In Guatemala a
ride on a chicken bus is a veritable, if painful, glimpse into the
essence of life itself—a harsh and uncomfortable cultural treat
but a treat worth tasting all the same. Incorporated into the
reality of everyday life, chicken buses have become like
spontaneous meeting halls and marketplaces, forums where
self-proclaimed zealots can launch their dogmatic ideals to a
passive audience of temporarily-imprisoned listeners. To miss the
ride is to miss the true shades and colours of the country at its
authentic best—a country of humid coffee plantations and smoking
volcanoes, a land of Mayan legends and proud indigenous people.
The buses are
particularly boisterous first thing in the morning. Colourfully
attired Indian women battle it out in the aisles with screaming
children, a variety of domesticated animals and the ever-present
conductors who burrow through the crowds like contortionists
waving fistfuls of quetzal banknotes. While climbing aboard you
quickly find that you are stuffed inside in a way that even the
death-defying Houdini would have found intolerable. Getting off at
your chosen stop thus becomes a skilled and well-practiced art of
escapology. Gradually, as the destination approaches, you edge
your way forward down the aisle over a period of about ten minutes
or so until you have elbowed your way into "pole" position and are
ready to throw yourself, hopefully, towards the door when the bus
stops. The difficulty is, chicken buses don't technically stop—or
so it seems—they just kind of slow down so that the conductor can
boot a few more bodies out of the open door and abduct a couple of
passers-by to fill up the empty spaces.
It was thus that I arrived at my destination, Antigua, the former
Spanish colonial capital that nestles rather precariously in the
shadow of three imposing volcanic peaks. Fortuitously, Pablo
appeared to have come up trumps on the accommodation deal. From
the window of my private roof-top terrace I could gaze wistfully
upon Volcan Aqua to the left, blue, still and deceptively
peaceful, and Volcan Fuego to the right, steaming like a smoking
gun above me.
 Placed
beside its more urbanised and brash rival, Antigua is an engaging
respite, as beguilingly beautiful as the modern capital is ugly.
When the Spanish upped and departed with their money, trade and
commerce in the late eighteenth century, after a catastrophic
earthquake rendered the valley temporarily uninhabitable, they
clearly left most of their artistic imagination behind in the
haunting, if abandoned, air of the old city—not that you need to
use much imagination to conjure up the legacy of centuries past in
Antigua. That first night I ventured out early to find that I had
arrived during Semana Santa, the Catholic interpretation of Holy
Week. It's a festival of sorts when the cobbled streets are
covered in flowers laid out in intricate patterns, and the grid of
roads around the main square is traversed nightly by processions
of hooded sinners waving sweet-smelling incense. I stood by the
side of the road outside an Internet cafe advertising European
football matches and watched the swaying crowds pass by carrying
effigies of the crucified Christ. For me, there was still a tiny
fragment missing.
"Tourists," the travel writer Paul Theroux once said, "never know
where they've been. Travellers never know where they are going."
And there's a certain rationale in the resonance of these wise
words. You sally forth, you journey, you experience, but do you
ever really arrive? My mission beckoned, but, as I stood
mesmerised in the colonial jewel of Antigua surrounded by gap year
university students, tour groups and friendly voices shouting out
excitedly in my native language, I remembered momentarily the man
in the Panama hat.
There was just a small part of me that wanted to get back on the
chicken bus.
© Brendan Sainsbury 2004
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