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A riddle for you. It is 11 AM in a small town in Guatemala. You own the only bus company in town and the next bus out is at 2.30 PM. What time would you tell a group of tourists the bus was leaving?<br />

The tranquility of Denmark and other great Mayan adventures

Patrick Gatland
2006-04-05 09:27:19

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A riddle for you. It is 11 AM in a small town in Guatemala. You own the only bus company in town and the next bus out is at 2.30 PM. What time would you tell a group of tourists the bus was leaving?

I guess the obvious answer is "the next bus comes at 2.30 PM. Why don't you go off and get some food, explore the town and return a few minutes before then".

However, in Guatemala time is a more fluid notion - instead, we were told "the bus will be here in 15 minutes" every 15 minutes for 3 and a quarter hours. So we sat in the terminal, watching both the pouring rain outside and the ticket salesman scare unsuspecting customers with a huge phallus that had been safely stored in a cardboard box with air-holes poked into the side. Why a big rubber cock needs air I will never know.

We finally did manage to get on the bus and the trip had a little touch of Australia to it when we went through a Fruit Fly Exclusion Zone and we had almost all our fresh fruit binned. Living up to his Guatemalan 5 reputation Ben managed to lysmuggle a bunch of bananas past the very friendly folks who patted us down.

After a forty minute stop to was the bus en route (?!?) we arrived in Flores - Gateway to Tikal. Flores is a small promontory that sticks out into a huge lake in the north of the country. The Lying Planet has deemed that this town "sucks arse" but we found it to be a fun place to hang out in. We really enjoyed the bars and restaurants that lined the lake. We sat and waited for the sun to set, beer in hand and occasionally we jumped in the lake to cool off after all our hard work.

Unfortunately my title of Navigator Extraordinaire was stripped from me in Flores when I got Ben, Linda and I lost in a town the size of my old backyard in Mill Hill Road. Adding insult to injury the moment I realised we were lost the skies once again opened up and the three of us looked decidedly unhappy as we traipsed, in single file around the ...

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