the deeper in
Last weekend a couple friends and I visited a coffee and macadamia farm not far from the Pacific coast for a day and a night. We took a bus to the city Reu and then another bus until we realized we were lost. So we hung around on a corner for half an hour with some kids and dogs until we decided just to pay an old cab 100Q (~$12) to struggle the 25 kilometers up to the farm. It turned out to be pretty far in, embedded within a jungley rainforest out of which are carved a number of coffee farms. All of them are along this single uphill road, a mosaic of jagged rocks, supposedly as old as the farms themselves.
view from the finca:
The place wasn’t so remote, but you also couldn’t get to a store, clinic or pharmacy in a flash. The only bus runs every day at 6am (we had a rough morning the next day, albeit rewarded with a gorgeous sunrise) and, you can catch a ride on a pick-up, but they weren’t reliable, we were told, often not coming for hours. For my city-adapted self, these trips are something between an oasis and anxiety.
All my life I have lived close to things. Never more than two blocks from a tienda to get a diet coke in the middle of the night. Always fifteen minutes from a major hospital. When I grew up in LA, I didn’t live up in the mountains around the city, and in SF, I didn’t have an apartment deep in the Presidio. But even those places would have been close to everything, more or less. So too here in Xela, my host-family lives about five minutes from one of the city’s private hospitals. The only time in my life I ever have distance is when I travel on vacations. And it’s always kind of pleasantly jarring, discomforting for me. But it also feels like this absurd luxury to be so remote. Like it’s a selling point in the “eco-tourism” experience geared towards some urban elite.
When we were at the farm we met a high school student who lives the opposite life. He’s fourth-generation in his family to work on that land. He works Monday to Saturday and on every Sunday morning takes a pick-up at 6am to Reu to attend classes all day. When he returns in the evening, there are no more buses, so he walks home, the 25 kilometers, three hours, along the precarious road, inclines and descents, possibly in the rain.
Here in Xela, I spend a lot of time talking with my teacher Byron (or more so listening to him talk) about history, politics, wealth distribution, education, etc, in Guatemala. For all the bummer punch lines that these conversations end in, he still emphasized to me that here in Xela (the second-largest city in the country) people have it better: there are schools, universities, buses, resources – people have the means to try to get ahead, to learn, to earn more, but the people in rural areas have it real tough.
Early Sunday morning, our 6am bus rumbled along the uneven road, emerging from the farms in the hills. It turned onto a main drag lined with skyscraping palm trees, and I thought of Beverly Hills as we pulled into Reu. A misplaced association, but I guess it only amplified the contrast or emphasized some irony I can’t quite locate.
waiting for the 6am bus:
sunrise:
