“Why you no choose Antigua? All the gringos study Spanish in Xela. Is better in Antigua.”

So spoke the middle-aged man at the filthy Guatemala City street corner where we were trying to find the next bus to Antigua. The Spanish had already been studied, though not by me, and we three gringos were on the leisure portion of our vacation. This was, in fact, the only part of my vacation. M. and C. had gone down two weeks prior to study Spanish in the mountain town of Quetzaltenango (more easily referred to by its Mayan name, Xela [shay-la]). We met up for one week of traveling around Guatemala before returning home. We’d been doing a lot of traveling around the country, and Antigua was to be the last stop before we headed to the airport the next day.

“You are from Nuevo México, eh? I have been there. I know Taos.” He pronounced this last word with a laboriously rounded vowel sound, obviously practiced but never quite mastered. “I lived there. I did, you know, whatever I could. Anything.”

We chatted for a couple of minutes about Nuevo México, about Antigua, about gringos, as a large bus—referred to here as a ‘chicken bus’ because of the wide variety of typical passenger species—backed into position near us. Most chicken buses are actually American school buses from the ’70s and ’80s with stern warnings still intact about not throwing gum at your neighbor.

“This is the next bus to Antigua, my friends.”

We hand our big backpacks to the guy standing on the roof of the bus, as is typical, keeping our most valuable possessions in a small pack we carry on to the bus with us to keep close at hand. We confirm with the driver that this bus goes to Antigua, and the driver’s assistant guides us to our seats and places the pack on the rack above our heads. The bus is already growing crowded, and we’re tired. We stayed last night in a bare-bones hostel in the mountains near Semuc Champey, three hours by unpaved precipitous mountain road from a small town called Cobán. We’d been awoken at 4:55 a.m. for our 5:00 a.m. minibus by some Spanish-speaking voice with a flashlight in the dark. The journey was too bumpy for sleep, and when we arrived in Cobán at 8:30 with empty stomachs and sagging eyes, the bus to Guatemala City, another four hours further away, was already loading. We hopped on board and continued the journey. When we arrived in Guatemala City, it was just a four or five block walk to the place where the bus to Antigua loaded, and the last leg would be an hour and a half at most. Almost there.

It seems strange that the assistant is so forceful, putting M. into a seat in the row in front of us, when she’d been heading to the row behind. When I realize our broken umbrella is still in my lap, I put it on top of the backpack on the rack above my head, and notice as I lower my eyes the hands of the assistant repositioning it next to the pack. He is behind us, helping other people into their seats and packing three adults and their belongings into every two-adult-width seat. A large man squeezing past me drops some coins loudly on the floor. C. and I moved our feet and help him locate a coin that has rolled under our seat. He thanks us and brushes past. I close my eyes for a moment. The bus starts up and begins rolling forward around the corner as C. starts shouting.

“Where’s our bag!?” I look up at the empty rack. Shit. I stand up, spinning around to scan the blank brown faces in the seats behind us. The two men, the assistant and the coin dropper, have already disappeared out the back door. They were so well-practiced, so by-the-book, but at the same time so obvious—after the fact, that is. Of course they were thieves. Why else so much attention to the bag? Why else seat M. in front of us? The bus is moving faster now. C. runs out the front door, explaining what’s happened in Spanish to the driver as she passes him. I follow, but the driver only slows, and we have only seconds to scan the crowd at the corner. They’re already gone. I grab the ladder on the back of the bus that leads to the roof, climb up to make sure our big packs are still there, and am ushered in the back door of the bus by the real driver’s assistant.

By the time we reach Antigua an hour later and find a phone to call the credit card companies, they’ve rung up $500 in charges. Once we get back to the States and all the charges appear, it will turn out to be over $1000. Fortunately, we won’t be held liable for the charges, but C. is out a backpack, a hundred in cash, inexpensive but irreplaceable jewelry, a phone card, subway passes, her driver’s license, and so on. During the ensuing days, at random moments, she will remember something else that was in the bag. The emergency rain ponchos. We’re driving down city streets on the way to the store when her eyes drop. The earrings were in there too.

But now the photos are back from the lab and I am reminded of all the transcendental, ephemeral beauty I witnessed. It began the day after I arrived. As soon as I got out of Guatemala City’s filthy crime-ridden slums, my overcrowded bus took me up along narrow mountain roads weaving amid volcanoes draped in fog. Peasants led burros along the side of the highways. Crews of itinerant machete-wielding men walked from field to field. Short barefoot women with toddlers slung in blankets over their backs and enormous bowls of food or cloth balanced on their heads waited on the shoulder for someone to stop and take them where they were going.

M., C., and I met up in Panajachel the day after I arrived, spending a couple of days exploring that town and some of the villages that line the volcano-encircled lake there, Lago Atitlan. We then caught an overpriced ten-hour bus to a town called Florés, which put us within a couple of hours of Tikal, the ruins of an ancient Mayan city in the middle of thousands of square miles of protected rain forest that spans northern Guatemala, western Belize, and southern Mexico. We spent a day in Florés debating whether or not our digestive trouble was caused by amoebas, but still took some time to eat good food (relatively good, when compared to the desayuno típico of eggs, clumpy refried black beans, and a little sliver of salty cheese) and swim in the lake. From there we hit Cobán, toured a coffee plantation, staying in a hotel that claimed to have hot water (a real luxury), but in fact the hot water just turned out to be less cold than usual. Stopping in Cobán broke up the return to the South into bearable pieces, and put us near Semuc Champey, with flooded caves we explored by candlelight and its serene cascading pools of mountain spring water. A little thievery amid all that? So be it.

Then again, it wasn’t my stuff that got stolen.

The worst thing about getting robbed is not really losing your stuff, but feeling like a giant sucker, and the days and days spent afterwards in fruitless "what-ifs?". That and the huge pain in the ass of replacing driver's licenses and calling credit card companies... But mostly just the rehashing of every minute detail, and the self-beration for having failed to see it coming. But you can't really spend the rest of your life contemplating your momentary stupidity, and luckily you do move on. At least the vacation was awesome, and you've got some great pictures of some cool times, and no pictures of the rat bastard thieves, who will hopefully fade into the past and out of memory.