Journey > Articles > The Chicken Bus to Antigua

"Amigo," rasps the man in the Panama hat, breathing the strong aroma of Cuban tobacco into my face, "Y'know, there's an old Guatemalan joke." I grimace, as the bus lists dangerously to the right, throws me off balance momentarily and delivers me rather unapologetically into the lap of a heavily-wrinkled old woman - eyes closed and lips muttering, a rosary clasped between her fingertips. "Yes?" I reply breathlessly without too much interest.

He tilts the brim of his hat, glances behind him at a sea of bored work-bound faces and then leans forward and speaks in an almost conspiratorial-like whisper "How many people can you fit into a chicken bus?" The mouth is flat and serious, but the smiling eyes don't lie.

"I dunno", I say half-enthusiastically, playing along with him, extending the agony a little longer as we screech to a halt at some nameless road intersection somewhere in between Guatemala City and Antigua.

The bus stops and the engine splutters. One person gets off and at least another five climb on board. We all take a collective breath inwards and shunt back into the private space of the person behind us. "It's simple..." chuckles my new-found friend employing that rather hysterical form of Guatemalan logic, "Always one more."

You have to psyche yourself up for Guatemala City. You have to move yourself into a higher state of consciousness, prepare yourself for the noise and the appalling traffic, the hot and crazy disorder of the congested downtown core. I had arrived one muggy morning in February on a mission: three weeks to help build a small, compact gymnasium for a US-funded orphanage in a place called San Lucas.

My old friend Pablo was my inspiration and self-appointed local contact. Like an over-zealous tour guide he had waxed lyrically about spectacular volcanic landscapes, hard altruistic endeavour and calmly contested games of football with well-behaved street children. It wasn't his only exaggeration. Quite understandably, he never mentioned anything about the chicken buses either.

I e-mailed ahead early and arranged to meet Pablo at the airport. He told me he had managed to fix us up with some accommodation in a quiet cobbled part of old Antigua situated 50km to the north-west. It was a blessing in disguise, as it turned out. Guatemala City didn't look like my kind of place. It didn't really look like anybody's kind of place. One hour "in the smoke" they said, was the equivalent to puffing through an excess of about twenty medium tar cigarettes a day. I took it on trust. After all, I wasn't going to be hanging around for long.

The bus stop was by the side of a marketplace on the Pan-American Highway. I couldn't see a sign as such, just a ramshackle stall where a mean-looking chef in old army trousers conjured up chicken tortillas and beans amidst a cloud of belching exhaust fumes. "This is it", said Pablo as a convoy of old requisitioned US school buses bore down on us. There was no identifiable queue to speak of, no public address system announcement to the tune of "Please let the passengers off the bus first”, just lots of elbows and arms and desperate jostling and the sight of Pablo's sunburnt neck getting carried along with the surge of people in front of me.

In Guatemala a ride on a chicken bus is a veritable, if painful glimpse into the essence of life itself - a harsh and uncomfortable cultural treat, but a treat worth tasting all the same. Incorporated into the reality of everyday life, chicken buses have become like spontaneous meeting halls and marketplaces, forums where self-proclaimed zealots can launch their dogmatic ideals to a passive audience of temporarily imprisoned listeners. To miss the ride is to miss the true shades and colours of the country at its authentic best - a country of humid coffee plantations and smoking volcanoes, a land of Mayan legends and proud indigenous people.

The buses are particularly boisterous first thing in the morning. Colourfully attired Indian women battle it out in the aisles with screaming children, a variety of domesticated animals and the ever-present conductors who burrow through the crowds like contortionists waving fistfuls of quetzal banknotes. To climb aboard is to be stuffed inside in a way that even the death-defying Houdini would have found intolerable.

Getting off at your chosen stop thus becomes a skilled and well-practiced art of escapology. Gradually, as the destination approaches, you edge your way forward down the aisle over a period of about ten minutes or so until you are within shouting distance of the door when the bus stops. The difficulty is, chicken buses don't actually stop - or so it seems - they just kind of slow down to allow the over-eager conductor to boot a few more bodies out of the open door and abduct a couple of passers-by to fill up the empty spaces.

It was thus that I arrived at our destination, Antigua, the former Spanish colonial capital that nestles rather precariously in the shadow of three imposing volcanic peaks. Fortuitously Pablo appeared to have come up trumps on the accommodation deal. From the window of my private rooftop terrace I could gaze wistfully upon Volcan Aqua to the left - blue, still and deceptively peaceful - and Volcan Fuego to the right, steaming like a smoking gun above me.

Placed beside it’s more urbanized and brash rival, Antigua is an engaging respite, as beguilingly beautiful as the modern capital is ugly. The Spanish upped and left with their money, trade and commerce in the late 18th century, after a catastrophic earthquake rendered the valley temporarily uninhabitable. However, they clearly left most of their artistic imagination behind in the haunting air of the old city - not that you need to use much imagination to conjure up the legacy of centuries past in Antigua.

That first night I ventured out early to find that I had arrived during Semana Santa, the Catholic interpretation of Holy Week. It's a festival of sorts - the cobbled streets are covered in flowers laid out in intricate patterns and the grid of roads around the main square is traversed nightly by processions of hooded sinners waving sweet-smelling incense. I stood by the side of the road outside an Internet cafe advertising European football matches and watched the swaying crowds pass by carrying effigies of the crucified Christ. For me, though, there was still a tiny fragment missing.

"Tourists", the travel writer Paul Theroux once said, “never know where they've been. Travellers never know where they are going.” And there's a certain truth in his words. You sally forth, you journey, you experience, but do you ever really arrive? My mission beckoned but, as I stood mesmerized in the colonial jewel of Antigua surrounded by gap year university students, tour groups and friendly voices shouting out excitedly in my own native language, I remembered momentarily the man in the Panama hat.

There was just a small part of me that wanted to get back on the chicken bus.

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