There are some things I should dread, that I do not, and others that fill me with dread, needlessly.  Then, there are the things I dread, which bear dreading; today’s Guatemalan border crossing was of the latter sort.

Malacatan, Guatemala

Tony and I both sweat it from the moment we got up.  We’d heard the stories.  To quote our friend Rachel, “The Guatemalan border crossing scared the salsa out of us….”  Thanks for that.  The reality set in about an hour before we reached Tapachula, MX.  It wasn’t the multiple times we were stopped by truck loads of military men armed to the teeth with machine guns and what looked like anti-aircraft weaponry mounted to their trucks.  Those guys merely smiled, counted the kids and gave us the “pase adelante!” with a big smile.  It was the wiley little dude and his son who flagged us down in east nowhere, with their “official” looking badges to inform us that we needed to have our vehicle import sticker removed and a different one applied for Central America.  To quote my Dad, “That’s not mud on my shoes…” we kindly asked the “official” to step away from our sticker, thank you very much, and carried on.  “Let the games begin,” Tony quipped, with a wink.

There is nothing for keyed up nerves like having a good twenty guys whistling, waving and chasing the van at an all out run as the border crossing comes into sight.  Nothing, that is, like having two or three of those guys (and their kids, naturally) jump onto the running boards and the bumper and pound on the van roof and window glass yelling for us to stop so they can “help” us.  “Um, Mom… there’s a guy back here and he’s yelling at me!” came a nervous voice from the backseat… “What?  I can’t hear you!  There’s a guy up here and he’s yelling at ME!”

We rolled to the middle of town, with men still hanging from the roof rack, shouting and finally rolled down the window to speak to a man NOT accosting us.  “We need parking, ONLY parking, no help.”  A shouting match breaks out between the first guy to mount our van and the guy I’m talking to, the gist of which is, “This is my sucker, you can’t have him, I rode the van a mile to get here!”  Both the new fellow and I ignore the shouter and he points to a used car lot, “You can park there… 50 quetzales.”  “I have no quetzales,” I tell him, “And besides that, it’s too much money.  I have five American dollars, how’s that?”  He confers with a lady behind a desk.  She insists on quetzales, forty this time.  I insist on five bucks.  They agree to the five bucks and we park.  On the way out they look at me expectantly, “I’ll pay when we get back.”

tuk-tuk... if we didn't have so many kids we'd ride one!

Wide eyed kids in tow, we line up behind Tony who bores a hole through the shouting men and aims for the Mexican Migracion office.  The paperwork is simple.  I don’t even need the speech I’ve been rehearsing all morning about needing to keep our turista cards for reentry in three weeks (and to save a hundred bucks on getting new ones.)  The officials are polite, efficient and it takes five minutes.  Using the bathroom takes longer than checking out of Mexico.

Checking into Guatemala was another story.  It took roughly three hours and trips back and forth between copy shop, customs windows, banercitos and then back to the copy shop.  All the while the son of the shouting fellow watched me with his thick set eyes and the moment I came out of the official office he was on me like a bum on a bologne sandwich.  It cost 40 quetzales (which I was forced to take a loss on through a street side money changer) and a lot of smiling and nodding to eventually get the iridescent blue sticker and a “Via con dios!” from the kind military man sporting the pump action shotgun with shot balls a half a centimeter in diameter in his shells.  Armed border guards who smile cheerily and pat kids on the head add a certain, “je ne sais quois” to the whole experience.  I paid the lurking child one American dollar for going away when we were finished and congratulated myself on not getting fleeced on the way through.

Free scorpion (dead scorpion now!)

It’s a short ride to Malacatan.  We found a hotel (it came with a free scorpion).  We found a bank.  We had dinner, the best dinner we’ve had in a couple of days.  We have no idea what it cost, as we’ve yet to determine the exchange rate, but we don’t really care.  We’ve long decided that the first day in any new country is the most expensive and we’re resigned to our fate.  Our mission in the next 24 hours is to take lots of pictures and make mental notes of as many things in this region as possible for our little friend, Celia, who was born here a few years ago and was adopted by friend in NH.  To Celia we say: your hometown is lovely and you should be very proud to be a Guatemalan girl, we’ll bring you a treasure from home!