It is a good thing that I charged the Kindle Fire last night because I have a lot to write and a lot of time to do it. This post was written on the bus to El Salvador and posted whenever I next have Wi-Fi (which hypothetically could be on the bus since it does have WiFi but the WiFi moves slower than the traffic I'm about to describe so probably not).
Before I continue, let's all take solace in knowing that no matter how long I'm stuck on this bus, it will still be a shorter amount of time than R. Kelly has spent Trapped in the Closet, waiting to be relevant again. (For those of you who weren't a tween in the mid-2000s, the guy wrote like a 30 part song that involved cherry pie, a midget, lots of cheating spouses, a gun and of course, being trapped in the closet. I still haven't actually seen the entire thing so I'm just assuming that he's still in there, singing his little heart out). There's also that other guy who was a slave for 12 years and they made a movie about him and it won an Oscar! So hopefully this won't last that long either but if it does, I want Jennifer Garner to play me in the film adaptation of Thomson's Travel Blog (it should also be musical). Oh, and for my last pop culture reference (in this paragraph... probably) to things that have lasted longer than this longgg bus ride, I don't think we will have the same outcome here as James Franco in 127 Hours. We don't even have a knife that could be used to remove any limbs anyways. (Plus what would we even want to cut off first? It seems very messy).
Now, the day started simply enough! We got in a taxi at 5 am and went to the bus station. Everything was going according to plan! Until the taxi driver overcharged us by nearly double what we owed him. The language barrier made things rough in the first place but he got money to make change for us but after giving us that change, he came back five minutes later and returned another 40Q. Like I'm sorry, sir but how did you just figured out that we only owed you 105Q after I gave you one 100Q bill and three 20Q bills. Oops! Whatever. It's weird but at least I got my money back. Next, we got our bus tickets. It was standard so I'm not going to describe waiting in line and buying them because I'm sure everyone who is reading this has waited in some type of line in their life and can imagine it for themselves without me turning it into the blog equivalent of Shakespeare in the Park.
The next bit is exciting because the bus actually left on time! 6 am sharp! If anyone thinks this is too good to be true, you would be correct because we stopped at 7:30 am. It is roughly a five hour ride from Guatemala City to San Salvador so this was not good news. (Side note, I started writing out all of my thoughts for this post at 11:30am, so you're in for a real treat of increasingly sarcastic, cynical and hangry comments). The bus driver came back to spit some Spanish at us and leave. Yeah, he didn't literally spit but he might as well have because we would have gotten as much information from his saliva as we did from his words.
Two women asked us if we knew what he said. What was your first clue? The fact that we speak English or when we were looking around for someone who might be able to translate for us and saying "What do you think he said?" That was the hangry talking and now that I've gotten it out if the way, I will say that we appreciated their help because it meant that we weren't 100% in the dark but like the sae 98% as the rest of the bus. The only information we had was that the border wasn't open yet. Apparently it was the day everyone at the border decided to play hookie.* The slow, essentially nonexistent WiFi meant that googling anything about the situation was out of the question so while Whitney took my sweatshirt to use as a second pillow, I got out my regular Kindle and finished reading Tina Fey's Bossypants.
*From what we could tell later in the day, the border wasn't accusing closed but the street was for some type of protest.
Now you're probably like but Thomson, what if you need to use the restroom? And trust me, I had the same thought but thankfully, the bus has a toilet! At least, I was thought I was thankful for this. The WiFi works better than this bathroom. The only thing that could make sitting still for for hours worse would be doing it in there. First of all, the bathroom was missing one crucial thing: toilet paper. The sign in the door says that the bathroom is "For Urinating Only" so I guess the bus company is under the impression that women don't do that. Next, if you find a few napkins to use and dare to enter, you will find a toilet so questionable that even the dirtiest of porta-potties would be repulsed. The bus's AC doesn't circulate in there either so it is like tailgating a garbage truck on a hot day, or, depending on who you ask, driving through New Jersey. And finally, we get to the smell. Our seats are at the front of the bus so we don't have to deal with the smell unless we have the misfortune of walking back there but it's almost as if Satan ate some muy caliente Mexican food as an appetizer, 10 pounds of curry for his entree and a bowl of diarrhea for dessert and then just waited it out on the back of the bus. And never flushed.
And yes, the vivid description was entirely necessary especially when you consider that fact that we've been parked on the highway for four and a half hours now and I have nothing to do except come up with overly detailed rants about everything around me (that sentence was written at 12:01pm so we've been on the bus for a grand total of seven hours now).
And I know you're like hey Thomson, you said you had that book, you should be fine and not bored at all and the answer is yes, I'm "fine" but it's the sarcastic fine. Like as far as I know, my identity hasn't been stolen recently, I still have all of my fingers and toes, Teen Wolf hasn't been cancelled and a meteor isn't hurtling towards us but my patience is as thin as a corn tortilla.
Also, entertainment wise, they have a TV on the bus, which was in Spanish, but it was something to look at! Until they turned off the screen but left the audio running. The crazy part was that the movie they were playing was Cloud Atlas which is, from what I've heard, nearly impossible to understand in English so I wasn't keeping up with the Spanish at all... But maybe someone else was and they were probably mad that they turned the picture off without any warning.
Whitney has been sleeping through most of this ordeal; she alternates between using my sweatshirt as a pillow and using me as a pillow and when she's awake she complains that she wants Cheetos and sings the one line of Kanye West's Famous that she knows (it's the controversial one about Taylor Swift that has been inexplicably blowing up the internet this week even though the song came out months ago. It isn't fit for print. At least not by me on this forum -- I'll talk about the devil's hypothetical bowel movements but I try to avoid using naughty words. If you want to know what the line is, check out Buzzfeed.
Now, at 11am, something very exciting happened. We started moving!! Everyone was amped! Until we realized that we were moving BACKWARDS! Yup. The only place this bus has gone in nearly five hours (12:16pm now) is BACKWARDS. I'm not even sure how close we are to the border but I have feeling we'll be out of gas -- or worse, this Kindle will die -- before we reach our destination.
UPDATES --
12:26pm - Traffic on the opposite side starts moving again. There is hope for us after all.
12:28pm - We start moving in the correct direction. We don't want to get too excited but it was worth writing down
12:29pm - We start imagining how long the traffic behind us must be but stop because it makes us sad.
1:41pm - They got the tv screen working again by smacking it (I guess they never turned it off, just faulty equipment). They started another movie and it's in English but it's that weird one where they put Johnny Depp's brain in a computer.
2:00pm - Movie is still on but the screen is dead against
3:00pm - We are officially in El Salvador. We got to the border at roughly 2:20 and they collected all of our passports while we were free to go to the bathroom. Yup, that's right, we didn't have to see an immigration officer to exit Guatemala. Whitney and I ate the worst pupusa in the history of the world on the bus (I knew we shouldn't have gotten pupusa here specifically and that it would only lead to disappointment but we were so hungry. It was not the introduction to pupusa that Whitney deserved because pupusa is like THE thing to get here and is delicious when done properly). They also changed the movie while we were out. I have no idea why. The new movie was also in English and has Christopher Plummer in it but that's all I got because I missed the title sequence. It looks like a period piece of some sort (the screen is going in and out again). Whitney got Cheetos which she found to be far more satisfactory than the pupusa and I must, unfortunately, agree.. Then someone came on the bus to return our passports; we got stamps for exiting Guatemala but none for entering El Salvador. They actually put my exit stamp OVER a stamp I got in Canada when I flew from LA to Calgary last year. Not overlapping but entirely over the stamp! To be fair, the Canadian stamp was nearly invisible because Canadian immigration didn't care to make sure they had enough ink but it's a little weird. Hopefully it isn't problem in the future but if it is, I can say, hey, have you ever been through Guatemalan immigration because I literally have not! Someone from El Salvador came on the bus to check our passports again and this person did not seem to like that Whitney and I had been to Belize before we'd been to Guatemala... I can't keep track of what countries don't like each other and why! But, I mean, everything is fine. We got through and are now just itching to get on the road again as it is now 3:13 and we are still parked at the border.
3:16pm - We're off!
3:25pm - We agree that two days in San Salvador was the right decision because we won't be seeing much of anything today
4:03pm - It's raining. A lot. Fingers crossed that it isn't when we get to San Salvador. Whitney wants to "hope optimistically" which I said is the only way to do it. Also the TV just came back on but I have no clue what is happening or if it is even the same movie.
5:00pm - I am finishing/posting this entry to my blog from our hostel in El Salvador. It's been exactly 12 hours since we got on that stupid taxi. Oh, and it's still raining.
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