Following My Feet (Not My Gut) to Cobán: Backpacking Guatemala is NOT for the Faint of Heart
TL;DR always make a reservation, dumbass
I arrived late in Cobán off two seven-hour mountain bus rides. My Chichicastenango homestay hosts had told me, “No, no, don’t stay in Uzpantan overnight. It’s kind of a shithole. There’s nothing there for you. No hotels, nothing to do. Go on to Cobán. It’s better there.”
So when I arrived in Uzpantan ahead of schedule, maybe 2 or 3 p.m., I bought a Coke and some hot fried chicken and returned to the bus station to await my fate. The kid who took my backpack told me we’d leave in half an hour, though who know how long that’d be? The water in the ecofiltro looked cloudy to me, but I drank it anyway. We were still high up, the air thin, springtime humidity pressing in.
I waited there in the lot, 12-seat minibuses coming and going, bags of rice, corn, wheat strapped to their tops, 30 humans crammed inside. The dust kicked up every time a bus left or entered. I spent ten quetzales (the equivalent of a dollar) buying toilet paper and hoping “la fibra” I’d eaten would keep me regular on winding roads (my gut at least consistently told me that… and I listened!)
It did not occur to me more than twice that I should stay. No, I felt the impatience of the words “push on” and “get this over with.” To ride this energy to the top of the peaks and down the valleys on roads out of Uzpantan. As though I’d get a prize for not being weak, for needing rest, for taking it easy in an unknown place, a country I’d known for only two weeks.
When I got on the bus, merciful breeze telling me to keep my window seat, don’t move a muscle, the people came piling on, and eventually we left. On lush green circuitous bumpy roads alight with mist, then sunbeams, and whistling birds, I listened to a podcast on the scammery of celebrity guru to the stars “think like a monk” Jay Shetty. Plagiarism and cover-ups in the age of the internet? We think not!
When we finally arrived in Cobán, dusk was falling. The streets were packed, and though I had a hostel in mind, I had no reservations. It was shoulder season; who needed to plan ahead?
I tried to negotiate with a cab driver, who wanted like 20 bucks to drive me two miles into the city. I said no way, and he muttered something about rich gringos to the cabbie nextdoor. I walked with my backpack to the center of town, humidity pressing on me. “Shower’s coming soon,” I kept telling myself. Only one more block. But when I got there, more chaos.
I stepped into the place, set my bag down, and asked politely in Spanish for a bed.
“Sorry, we’re all sold out.”
The sentence just stood there for a second.
“You don’t have any rooms available?”
“No, sorry. There’s a big international marathon tomorrow, and every room is booked. It’s like this all over town.”
I sat down on the ornately carved bench in front of the desk for an hour, hoping that the one reserved party who hadn’t yet arrived wouldn’t show up. Every phone call, every text the manager sent, every guest who flowed in and out of the open doorway and into the night? I watched them and waited.
I went onto Airbnb and saw a listing way out in the forest that looked to have availability, but no. First the cab the manager called for me said they wouldn’t come for less than a fifty. And when I got on the phone with the house host, he said, “The listing’s outdated. We don’t have any empty beds for tonight.”
At this point, I was just begging for a shower, promising (like a dog) I’d be comfortable outside if they’d just let me crash. One of the workers, a 40-something dude with leathered skin, an Ed Hardy t-shirt, and a spiky black haircut asked me if I wanted to “camp” on the hotel terrace, out of view of the guests. I told him I didn’t have a tent, but I did have a blanket, and would he show me the space?
He said okay and led me up two flights of stairs to a patio overlooking Cobán. Music blasted through the night, twinkle lights of cobblestone restaurants, homes, and places of refuge laid out before us across the town. I sighed, yearning, and followed this man into an alcove underneath the stairs of the inn’s penthouse apartment.
Inside, old furniture lay strewn about and dusty. The single light bulb dangling from the ceiling (such as it was, re-bar and insulation poking out) illuminated a slanted concrete slab with a bare mattress on it.
My first thought was bed bugs. My second thought was mold. And my third thought was, “My mom’s gonna kill me when I tell her I stayed here… if this man or some other rando doesn’t get to me first.”
“Camping” on this mattress in this terrace-cellar space consisted of me dragging the bed to the only flat part of the floor, hanging up my towel for a door, and facetime my younger sister, Cassie, to force her to bear witness to what may be my last and final bedroom. “Just in case,” I told her, and she could do nothing but roll her eyes.
When I thought things were settling down, my host asked me for 100 quetzales, the equivalent of less than ten bucks, to stay there.
“You serious?” I cocked my eyebrow at him, the universal sign for “What the fuck?”
He shrugged and offered, “Or you can sleep with me tonight.”
I kindly but firmly declined, but he persisted and sat down on the slab to explain the merits of sharing my bed with a stranger. “I’ll make it worth your while,” he told me, or whatever the equivalent for that was in Spanish.
No, no, no, I refused him thrice and, as he left out the makeshift door, I asked him, “You’re not going to come and bother me in the middle of the night, are you?”
“Of course not,” he told me. “I’m not a bad man.” Hmm. Debatable. What’s the moral definition of coercion?
I paid him his money and thankfully fell asleep. In the morning, I woke up got the fuck out of there. I spent another week in Cobán in a neat little bedroom on the other side of town, following my feet to wherever they would lead me.