La Tormenta

Greetings from now-lovely Antigua!

It has been quite the weekend. When I found out about the eruption of Pacaya on Friday morning, I feared I wouldn't be able to get into Antigua since the roads from Antigua into Guatemala were bad. But the tour agency assured me they were monitoring the situation and believed it was safe. So at 3pm on Friday, I was picked up and soon learned it was a full shuttle. There were 11 of us, plus the driver, crammed into a small, 4 bench Toyota van. All the other travelers were heading into Antigua in order to try to catch a bus to El Salvador, where the international flights were being diverted since the airport in Guat City was closed due to Pacaya.

I rode next to a very kind guy named Nathan, who had been volunteering in Xela for the past three months. Behind us were a hippie couple, complete with their ukelele, which I feared they would play during the whole trip. The couple in front of me had a laptop and DVDs of "Big Love" and "Entourage." They had Spanish subtitles turned on, so while were were careening through the mountains in the pouring rain, whizzing past tiny pueblos and mountain shacks, I watched HBO programming.

It poured rain the whole trip, and no one wanted their gear on the roof, even if it was tarped up. BUt since the shuttle was full, there was nowhere else for it to go. I had packed light, and had only a daypack with me, so my stuff remained dry in my lap. Yay. The last two members of our group to be picked up were two older women. One of them, a plump lady in her mid 60s, demanded the passenger seat from the guy who was in it. He refused, citing he got carsick and she said that she got sick as well, was a woman, and was older than him, and therefore she deserved the seat more than him. He wouldn't budge and they got into a heated argument in the rain, at the end of which she called him the P word, which made the rest of us crack up. She didn't win the fight, and ended up riding on the middle jump seat of the front row, in between him and the driver.

We rolled into the Tig around 6pm, and the rain was coming down really hard. Nathan, my shuttle buddy, decided to stay at the same hostel as Ali had booked for us, which turned out to be good because the guy who checked us in didn't speak any English and Nathan was able to translate for me. We expected MRM to be there, but she wasn't when I arrived, and for some reason my phone, which should have had over 100 minutes on it, was not making outgoing calls. So Nathan and I set out to find the internet, because I needed to reach MRM and he needed to try to get a bus ride to El Salvador. We tried to reload my phone 4 times, but each time it wouldn't take, even though the minutes were going "somewhere" and I still was charged for them.

Right before we left to find the internet, I realized I needed tampons, too. And I had left a huge sack of them in Xela thinking I didn't need them :( Problem was, I had no idea how to say tampons in Spanish, and the rain was coming down so hard it was painful to walk under, so I leveled with Nathan and explained my situation, and he luckily knew the word in Spanish and was so kind, running with me from tienda to tienda looking for them and translating for me. We finally found them at a 24 hour farmacia a few blocks from the hostel.

We got in touch with MRM and headed to a bar for drinks and food because everyone was kind of having a crap day, what with the volcano eruption and the weather and no one being able to get where they needed to go, and also MRM discovered on Friday that someone with access to her homestay relieved her of $300 bucks. So a drink was in order, even if we did arrive looking like a pack of drowned cats.

On Saturday, we reconvened at Cafe Barista which is a coffee shop on the corner at the Parque Central that MRM and I have nicknamed "Coffee, Coffeemaker." MRM's roommate Robin came, who I was so very happy to see. She is a missionary who was supposed to head to Honduras yesterday, but between Pacaya and Agatha, she isn't going anywhere soon, which has been a really frustrating and anticlimatic end to her three months here. Ali had left the hostel earlier to try to work out her Cuban travel visa, and Nathan had left that morning for El Salvador to try to make it home for his sister's graduation, so it was just me and MRM and Robin and MRM's friend Elisa at Coffee, Coffeemaker.

We ended up waiting for Ali for several hours, but she never showed up. At this point, the streets were beginning to flood in places, and the rain just came and came and came. We had no desire to head out into it again, but were sick of being at Coffee Coffeemaker, so we moved to MRM's homestay to regroup.

Regrouping consisted of laying in bed and watching several episodes of "Band of Brothers" and "The Pacific" while the water kept rising. At certain points the rain was coming down so hard we had to pause the DVD because we could no longer hear the dialogue. The rain also came at a 90 degree angle on several occasions, just plinging straight against the window while the wind, literally, howled outside. And speaking of howling... MRM has a witch who lives next door. We think. There we were, minding our own business, when this shrieking starts that is half Spanish, half something I have never heard. I gave MRM a "what the..." look and she exclaimed, "It's the witch! She does this all the time." So we slipped into our rain jackets and crept out onto the balcony to look over into the mini shantytown next door. I couldn't really see the woman but she kept yelling and cursing in this horrible, creepy way. While on the balcony we discovered that half the shantytown was completely under several feet of water, and some of the habitations, which had been constructed out of cardboard, had been abandoned. Soon, we realized it was because the roof of MRM's homestay was totally flooded, and the spiggot drained right into the shantytown cardboard house's "yard."

Because the roof was flooded, MRM had a leak that was dripping on her bed. So we moved her bed, and soon, two new leaks were dripping onto the bed's newest location. So we took all the electronics and anything that could be ruined by water, and tucked them into the shelf cubbies. Then we began to get really concerned about my stuff back at the hostel, which was stored in a wooden, ground floor locker. We decided to head out to check on my stuff, but not before Robin came in, looking like she had very literally been blown in by the wind. She was soaked and said, "Don't go anywhere! We need to talk! It's a Tropical Storm!" And that is when we learned that this really nasty weather we were living through was in fact a landfalling hurricane, not 24 hours after the volcano eruption. I swear, Guatemala...

We were going to check on my stuff and then go to dinner and a movie, but Elisa texted to let us know that the place we were working our way towards was closed because of the storm, and that stores along the road side were beginning to flood. So we headed straight for my hostel, where I was relieved to find my stuff still dry. But by the time we got there, we were soaked to the bone, despite rain jackets and scarves and umbrellas. Also at the hostel we found Ali, and her friend Thy, who had had a rubbish sort of day with the nasty woman at the travel agency who treated Ali like crap. They were eating canned beans and playing games on Thy's iPod, having given up all hope of heading out again into the weather. Almost as soon as we got there, the power went out in the city, and since we were still really hungry, we figured we had better hoof it out of there and try to find some food before everything was boarded up for the night.

We wandered down the main drag, looking for anything. But in the few minutes that the power had been out, places had shut themselves up. We finally saw some candles flickering in an alcove down an indoor hallway, and were happy to find an open restaurant serving amazing pizza and cold beer. We had a lovely candlelit dinner and before we headed home, the power had come back on, which was a relief because the city was very eery in the pitch black and fierce rain.

So Ali and I made an early night at the hostel, and then were awakened by our new roommate whose snores woke the entire room up. Ali kept asking him to roll over, which he did, and then he immediately began snoring very loudly again. By 2:30am I had decided I either needed to smother him, or find somewhere else to sleep. So I grabbed my pillow and blanket and moved to the couch in the main living area. It turned out to be really cozy, and the rain quickly lulled me to sleep and was loud enough to drown out Mr. Snore. When I awoke at daybreak, thanks to the church bells at La Merced, I noticed another two of our roommates had moved out of the room and into recliners. We complained to the owner who said that the snorer would not be back tonight.

So I was supposed to leave for Xela today at three, but as the news has been coming in, we began to realize how bad "la tormenta" was and Ali and I decided to stay in Antigua for another night, so the crews would have more time to clean the roads of mudslides. Getting to Xela is straight up and straight down on windy mountain roads, and nowhere you want to be if the roads aren't cleared. I had called my tour company to see if they were still running the route, and they said they were, but after I talked it over with the girls, we deciced Ali and I would stay put for another night as the mess gets cleaned up.

The country has really been hammered. Thy's boyfriend, who has been traveling for two days, saw some of the worst of it. He was rerouted to El Salvador, and his bus got across the border bridge shortly before it collapsed. Then, about 1am, their bus went into a ditch, in water that was waist high, and the passengers had to push the bus uphill for a half of a mile to dry the engine out. Once they had done that, the driver decided to remain the night in whatever little pueblo they were stranded in. He said the bus was full of "vegetation" from all the water that had been in it, and sent Thy a text message this morning that described his woes, ending it with, "We're taking the long route. An apparantly crucial bridge has collapsed. The whole country is f'ed." For whatever reason, probably because we're all a little delirious from sleep loss, this struck us as one of the funniest things anyone has ever said, and we laughed until tears were running down our faces.

And so, having weathered the first tropical storm of the season, we kicked off the morning with in-house roasted coffee surrounding a lovely garden at Fernando's. I have since learned that Xela was hit pretty hard as well. My friend Erin said they were stuck inside for two days because the flooding was so bad, and according to the paper today, Zona 2 has been declared "uninhabitable." Luckily, I live in Zona 1 and have talked to my housemother and my family there is safe.

So I will miss class tomorrow and the Monday afternoon movie, which is a disappointment, because we are watching "Che: Part 1" and one cannot get enough of Benicio del Toro.

So, to wrap up: we are all safe. Spent the weekend really cold and wet, wondering if this was the end of the world, but it was still enjoyable. Today has been gorg. We have wandered around and snapped photos and eaten fresh mango and wandered through markets. It was such a wonderful surprise to see the volcanoes again this morning. Usually, they are in sight from anywhere in Antigua, but the rain came down so hard all weekend, that visibility was terrible. It felt like we lived inside a claustrophobic dome.

Ali is wrapping up her Skype, so I will wrap this up as well and let you all know when I have made it safely home to Xela.