Monday morning in Guatemala City, and we’re waiting for Lionel, our driver, to arrive and take us up to Solola, about a three-hour drive. The hotel is the Casa Grande, an old converted townhouse of planters located in the Zona Viva and next door to the U.S. embassy. The Reforma is a busy thoroughfare blanketed with tropical trees and flowers but choked with urban buses and car traffic. No flowers are smelled—only diesel exhaust. Out for a walk in the rush hour, I see young Guatemalans on their way to work and school. Some are already at work cleaning sidewalks, shining shoes, delivering to stores and restaurants, and standing guard over it all are the ubiquitous security men with black pistol-grip shotguns and automatic pistols. In front of the U.S. embassy, a long line of visa hopefuls await their ticket to prosperity, around them policemen, soda venders, and a couple of old men, dirty, sitting on curbs with manual typewriters ready to prepare necessary documents. A couple of blocks away, another equally long line of well-dressed young people fill out applications for jobs with Pollo Campero, a local fried chicken fast-food chain. There too, armed guards stand by.
My brother and I pass by the Capilla de Yurrita, a chapel built in the early 20th century and dedicated to the victims of the volcanic eruption of Santa Maria in 1902. The Capilla is baroque bright red-orange and is surrounded by high iron fences topped with concertina. Embedded in the sidewalk are chunks of volcanic debris and a sidewalk of obsidian probably produced by the volcano, which by presidential decree of the time didn’t occur. We wander a few blocks further down the busy Septima Avenida to the gun shop. It's very early, but the owners seem glad to see us. I inquire about the price of a black stubby shotgun on the wall. The salesman, in glasses and polyester shirt, takes it down and gives it to Dave. I hold it all wrong and tell him I know it's all wrong. At least I have muzzle control.
He tells me that it is difficult for a gringo to get a gun these days. The government agency—while no law exists prohibiting the sale of arms to foreigners—has not been willing to issue permits, although recently, "una israelita" got one. I ask whether "una venezolanita" or other attractive female foreigner might succeed, and he concedes it's possible. Rifles he expects in a few weeks and a new policy with respect to foreigners in 4 to 6 months. He fluffs off my question as to whether "special transactions" might succeed. He tells me that a Guatemalan with the right documents could get the task completed in no more than 3 days. I am surprised by the relatively tight control over weapons here. One would think it would be very easy, but obviously it's not. Walking away from the shop, I wonder aloud to Dave whether selling guns in a country so full of guns might be a difficult business. We laugh about whether it is possible to rent a helicopter gun-ship for safe touring.
The hotel is the favorite of Americans and other foreigners seeking to adopt Guatemalan babies. The dining room in the enclosed courtyard (burdened with the screech of jets landing at nearby la Aurora) is the feeding place for these new parents. They are stiff with their new babies, overly cautious and not comfortable. Some look ridiculously old and only thinly bearing the look of desperation over mortality. The babies howl when they’re put down and seem thrilled to be held and fed and loved unconditionally, desperate as lottery winners holding their tickets to immortality.
Lionel shows up in his Lancia cab, and we begin our road odyssey to Pana. First, we visit the Hiper Pais supermarket, and I am reminded of the shopping in Guadalajara, only here, the parking lot has dozens of armed guards in camouflage. The store is of Wal-Mart proportions and has un poco de todo, but no Crisco. We stock up on bottles of hot sauce and cans of Coke and pile back in the car. Piled in the car with our quickly gotten bags of groceries, I am reminded of the recent film 28 Days Later, where a group of live people squeezed into a London taxi drive through the English countryside seeking others like them in a land of people infected by the horrible Rage virus. We feel different here and somewhat under siege and in danger. The embassy has a posting on its website called "Recent Accounts of Crimes Against Foreigners." With very little context on several levels, the site is a listing of serious crimes that have occurred over the past two years or so where "foreigners" were victims. The crimes range from muggings to murders and everything in between. Most worrisome to me is that there is a disproportionate number of these events which involve tourists in a cab or bus traveling the highway we are about to set off on. These crimes, the site points out with its Joe Friday matter of fact tone, can also occur in broad daylight.
Then we’re on the road. Up the Calzada Roosevelt, around its bends, now only barely showing the painted words on the high soil walls: "En obras como este invierta el Gobierno sus impuestos..." and "No criticamos el Gobierno," it used to say. Since the last time I came here and the first, 20 some years ago, it's changed markedly. Many more people and lots more houses and stores, but strangely, I can still remember vividly the first time I traveled up this road on a bluebird bus, its stereo playing a song by Camillo Sesto called "Preguntame", the feeling of excitement of the new life I was building ahead of me, accentuated by the roller coaster ride up the mountain switchbacks in this old school bus. I would not then have imagined that 21 years later, I would be coming up this road again. Lionel tears through the traffic narrowly, missing one disaster after another and now grateful for the National Police presence I used to dread. I wave to them as though to encourage them to watch out for us and keep the robbers at bay. In the early '80s, the National Police were considered corrupt and an instrument of national oppression. Their registros and those done by the army along this road bewildering long ordeals where all of us would have to get off the bus. They would search through the bus and then frisk the male passengers. On one especially eerie occasion, they brought along a man wearing a dark hood, only his eyes visible, who walked along like a trained dog, sniffing, and looked at each one of us, probably to recognize "subversivos".
The condition of the highway is remarkably good. Much of it has been widened and repaved in the last 10 years and feels like a relatively expeditious and safe travel. In the higher elevations around Tecpan, the population is very thin, and only small villages are found, little huts in the midst of hillside fields; these are not homes, but camps for these farmers to sleep when their crops are near ready, and they can work longer hours and prevent thefts. Many of the fields along the route grow large watermelon-sized and shaped squash. Many others appear to grow broccoli and cauliflower, principally for export to North American markets. Just before los Encuentros, we encounter a burning "landfill", which is just a ravine off the side of the road where municipal trash is dumped and incinerated. It's a project, surprisingly, of the national environmental protection agency, I learn later.