Jiaqi

One of the things I love the most about Guatemala is it's public transportation. It's happy, efficient, helpful and immensly diverse.Let me guide you through some parts of it:

 

The word camioneta literally means “small truck”, but in English they are usually refered to as “chicken buses”, due to their diverse cargo of everything from people to live chickens. Chicken buses are american school buses given new life in Guatemala. Outside theyŕe painted in bright colours, inside proverbs and prayers and pictures of Jesus the virgin Mary share the space with banners for FC Barcelona. They usually work on a fixed schedule, but not too fixed. I've both missed buses that weren't supposed to leave in five more minutes and ran to buses that then stood still in parking lots for 45 more minutes before taking off.

 

The larger pic-ups, with sturdy walls and often brightly painted, are used as cattle transportation, goods transportation, human transportation... When they're designated only to transporting humans they usually work on a fixed schedule. They leave in the mornings with the teachers going from the town to the communities up in the mountains, or to bring people down from the mountains to the town on market days. If they transport goods, and aren't too full, you can usually signal for them to pick you up when they pass. I have so far not shared a picop with cattle. Though, when I think about it, there was once a pig travelling with us on market day.

 

The smaller pic-ups are privatly owned, usually with welded railings on the sides and above so that people can hold on and goods can be stacked higher. I haven't worked out yet if there's a system or a schedule to these, but I don't think so. Normally you just stand on a street corner or on the road and wave at passing cars, asking them where they're going, and if they're going your way you get on. You pay the driver when you get off, and in some magic way it seems the amount is always the same for the same distance, even though the drivers and the cars change. I really like this way of organizing the public transport simply by picking up hitchhikers and have them pay a couple of quetzales for the ride. It's a great win-win.

 

But the greatest thing about public transport in Guatemala isn't the beautifully colored buses or the diverse travelling company or even the way you can ride on the back of a picop into the mountains at sunrise. The best thing are the smiles, the helping hands, the way people make room for each other where there really is none. The way it's almost impossible to get to the wrong place because there is always someone putting you on the right bus. My best example yet is going to Lago Atitlán this weekend. We got to the bus station at three minutes before 7, saw the bus leave, and spoke a number of ugly words before a man looked at us, asked us where we were going and put us on a different bus. We were kind of nervous, because this bus definitely didn't say it was going where we were going. When the helper came to charge us and we said we were going to Santiago Atitlán, he said “I don't go there, so you'll have to go with me to Patulul and change buses there. Don't worry, you can't go wrong”. He said it would take an hour and a half to get there, so when we'd been travelling for two hours we were once again a little nervous. But we did arrive in Patulul, and the helper and the driver signaled to us to get off, yelled to the driver of the bus we were getting on to wait and pointed us exactly to where we were going. It turns out it was the same bus that we had missed by ten seconds two and a half hours earlier in Guate, and we arrived in Santiago just on time.