I’m working on a list of statistics about my World Race. Number of hot showers, number of borders crossed, number of beds slept in. Currently I’m working out the number of hours I’ve spent on a bus, and my best guess is 25. We’re on a bus right now, that big luxury bus I mentioned in the last post. With the border crossing, drug sniffing dogs, and bathroom breaks, it’s hard to tell, but the ride is supposed to be somewhere between 15 and 20 hours, which is not bad at all for a World Racer. 12 hours ago, our promised armed guard standing with us at the deserted soccer field, we saw a massive vehicle approach us on La Ermita’s single main road. We piled on, and were delighted when we sat down on the softest seats we could have imagined.
The idea was to sleep from 3 a.m. to whenever we decided we wanted our breakfast of cookies and fruit. I had a hard time sleeping and woke up earlier just as the sky was beginning to lighten around 5. My stomach hurt and, hoping it was just from hunger and not motion sickness, I dug into my snack stash, which consists of plantain chips, stale cheesy popcorn, a large packet of soursop knock-off Kool Aid mix, and a grand total of 18 cookies.
Kori told the team the other day that she’s eaten over 150 cookies this month in Honduras, and we laughed and didn’t believe her. Then she told us to check our math: cookies are served every day with coffee in the afternoon. Sometimes at breakfast (my seat mate Henry, who is from Honduras, informs me that anything counts as bread when it’s breakfast time). When we go to pulperias, we get Chokis, which are pretty much like Chips Ahoy but riskier to pronounce and dipped in chocolate. Chokis come in a pack of six. Add to that our team’s habit of late night cookie time, and the math frighteningly does work out. I didn’t want to eat my Chokis so soon, so I opened some Chikys instead, which are like little tea cookies, and looked out the window.
We were driving through land we hadn’t seen yet. Aside from the occasional machete-bearing man walking down the road, there were few signs of life. I saw the sunrise over a vast wash of forest and mountains. The mountains here are different than Washington’s. There is no snow, of course, and they tend to be more symmetrical with large expanses of exposed brown rock. They seem more accessible, too. If my brother David were with me, he’d ask to pull over and do some climbing. And I’d tell him to be careful, because this looks like a place where dinosaurs still roam the earth.
We aren’t driving straight to Guatemala from Honduras like I thought. First, we crossed the border into El Salvador, and then we drive across the whole country, which is about a 6 hour ordeal. Sometime in the next couple hours, we’ll enter Guatemala, and from there go to Antigua.
Henry’s next to me on the aisle. He’s not a World Racer, but he plans to become a missionary and is going to work with some Adventures in Missions people in Antigua for several months, so he’s hitching a ride with us. Henry’s taught me a lot of things. I learned about Honduras’ seal and the people who are represented on the money. I also learned about the animals of Central America.
“There are animals in the mountains, and I forget how to say it in English…” Henry mimed what I thought were ears.
“Rabbits?” I guessed.
“No, Santa Clause uses them.”
“Reindeer?”
“Yes.”
“You have reindeer in Honduras?”
“Yes,” said Henry. “People hunt them and mount their”– he mimed antlers –“in their homes.”
“I thought reindeer only lived in the snow!”
“No, they are here too!”
Nicole told me later that Henry didn’t mean reindeer exactly, just deer. Probably some sort of fearsome Honduran deer.
The two best things about this bus are the on board bathroom and the air conditioning. This morning when we were sleeping, it was freezing. Then the sun rose and we got to El Salvador and it’s hot in here too now. My stale cheesy popcorn doesn’t sound so good right now, and I’m drinking water, but I’m running low. I decided that the best bet would be to pull out my peppermint essential oil, which is one of the best things I packed. It repels mosquitoes, freshens your breath, heals headaches and nausea, and, I hoped, provides a pleasant cooling sensation when applied liberally all over your face. I do feel much cooler now, but I think that invigorating scent woke up Henry.
We saw a massive volcano, a perfect cone with a summit shrouded in clouds. I don’t know which volcano it is, but Henry said it’s dangerous. I was astounded. Volcanoes don’t look like that where I’m from. This looks like the kind of volcano you see in a science textbook. It looks perfect and you can see all of it at once. It’s surrounded by flat, flat land.
Oh, but just as I’ve been writing this, I’ve seen the greatest thing yet: the ocean. The Pacific Ocean. It feels like it’s been a long time since we saw so much water.
I know that there are hours and hours left on this bus. When we finally get to Antigua, tired and hungry and grumpy, our legs will be stiff and we’ll be stressed. I’ll be expected to do all my team leader duties, like getting cell phone minutes and getting our team budget and making rational decisions about our food, and I’ll be too tired to focus on much of anything. But for now, I’m enjoying driving through this cool place that God made on the bus.
