Even a seasoned traveler has limits on a road less traveled

“If the world had any ends,” Aldous Huxley once wrote, “Belize would be one of them.” Still, I was happy in dilapidated Belize City. Although mold grew almost overnight on any undusted surface, the air was like velvet. Everyone spoke English, and it was safe, except in the evening.

But my real destination lay mysteriously to the west. I was bound for a trek through Guatemala as a real traveler, not as a mere tourist. I’d backpacked through Mexico many times and felt ready to tackle Guatemala by rural bus.

The evening before departure, I soaked up backpackers’ advice as they staggered into the guest house in Belize after the long journey from Guatemala City via Tikal.

“Take the day bus; it’s safer,” said a young Swiss student. “The bandits along the road lie low to avoid the army patrols during the day.”

“Take the night bus; there’s less danger,” countered a Scottish anthropologist. “The bandits and the army work together along that route anyway. That is, if they haven’t closed the road. It’s been raining for days,” she added.

I would be alone. My traveling companion had quit two days earlier, disillusioned by the lack of really cold drinks and his favorite brand of shampoo.

Before dawn I climbed over the bodies in sleeping bags that lined the floor of the guest house lounge. At the corner I found a taxi, and we crept toward the downtown bus station as the darkness lifted.

Belize City has one photogenic monument, the Swing Bridge that spans Haulover Creek. As we crossed, I glimpsed knots of men strolling the wooden sidewalks; a few leaned against the facade of a Chinese noodle shop.

The bus to the Guatemalan border was almost full as it trundled out of the dank station. Soon, bulldozers in a muddy field, a team of tethered mules and a new Mormon church marked the edge of town. A gaggle of schoolchildren in neat uniforms clattered on board. Mennonite families in their old-fashioned dress passed us in a convoy of farm trucks. And everywhere, the jungle crowded close to the smoothly surfaced road.

Our first stop was Belmopan, the new, instant capital built in the 1970s, the “Brasilia” of Belize. Its functional concrete buildings flanked an open market. Craving a cup of coffee, I wandered among the stalls and found a stack of insulated paper cups and a woman boiling water in a kettle. She sent a boy to another part of the market to get a jar of instant coffee, and I carried my drink triumphantly onto the bus.

Late in the morning we pulled into the Guatemalan border village of Melchor de Mencos, where we would change buses. As I made my way to the customs and immigration shed, I had to pass through a gantlet of money changers. They clustered around the few tourists in a feeding frenzy and even offered to cash traveler’s checks. I chose one of them and agreed to negotiate an exchange once I had actually crossed the border.

The Guatemalan border officials lounged in a bare office, their feet propped on desks. They demanded a $10 entry fee, which I had already paid at a Guatemalan consulate. I showed them a passport stamp and receipt to prove this. Reluctantly, they waved me on.

An almost empty yellow school bus parked at the side of the rutted road was to be my transportation to Flores, the gateway town to the Mayan ruins at Tikal.

Four fellow Americans were among the passengers. One of them had surrounded his seat with a dozen boxes tied with string. His companion staggered under the weight of two rucksacks. “Pottery,” she explained to no one in particular. They had bought two dozen large ceramic owls from an artisan in Huehuetenango and were now stuck with them for the rest of their journey.

We waited. It began to rain harder. The rundown turquoise and cerise buildings of Melchor de Mencos formed a bleary backdrop for skeletal dogs and ragged children.

Gradually the bus filled to standing-room-only with local people and their bundles, baskets and live chickens. Children clung to the adults’ legs or perched on piles of belongings. The odor of goat dung, acrid cigarette smoke and overripe tomatoes filled the air.

After a couple of hours the driver revved the engine. The bus slithered sideways in the mud, but at last we were moving.

“This is the real thing,” I thought, “total-immersion travel.”

Freed from constraints, rules and expectations, I was a clean slate, suspended in time and space, a receiver of incoming stimuli, sink or swim.

As the bus churned ahead through fields and patches of jungle, the only sound was that of passengers chatting.

I was pulled out of my reverie by a shriek; one of the Americans had offered to hold a bundle for a woman standing in the aisle and did not expect a cloth-swaddled piglet to be deposited in her lap.

A short while later we lurched to an unplanned halt. The passengers fell silent as two soldiers in dark glasses swaggered through the bus. They looked at the identity papers of three men seated at the rear before jumping off again. After they left, a woman wailed.

An hour later we were stopped again. There appeared to be an army base nearby, judging from the bedraggled buildings in the distance. We all got off and lined up in ankle-deep mud while boy soldiers armed with old rifles slowly examined our identification. They carefully scrutinized my passport upside-down. One American sauntered away from the group to get a better look at the army installation. His companions hissed at him to get back in line. I tried to appear nonchalant, reassuring myself that they probably would not bother a foreign tourist--or rather, traveler. My fellow passengers lived with this every day.

After two more hours of washed-out roads, putty-colored mud and steady rain, we came to a bridge that the driver apparently considered unstable. He asked us to get out, and we trudged across it. On the far side we huddled under sheets of plastic--the walls of a makeshift restaurant--while our bus, carrying only the driver and one elderly man, inched its way toward us. The restaurant was out of food, and I was grateful for the bread, bananas and bottled juice I carried.

Some time later, when the afternoon sky was beginning to brighten, we stopped again.

“A flat tire?” I asked the man behind me. He shrugged. As we piled out and milled around at the rear of the bus, one of the Americans, whose Spanish was better than mine, reported that the bus had run out of fuel. Thirty minutes later our resourceful driver flagged down a passing truck and siphoned fuel from it into the bus.

The remainder of the ride to Flores was uneventful. It had taken 10 hours to cover the 112 miles from Belize City.

As we pulled into town the man behind me tapped my shoulder.

“Good hotel,” he said, pointing to the two-story blue stucco San Juan Hotel and Restaurant. I thanked him and soon collapsed on a sagging mattress in an $8 room with a primitive shower.

I heard dishes rattling in the tiled dining room and the chatter of a Mexican soap opera on the TV in the lobby. Outside the window of my room, small boys were setting off firecrackers in a vacant lot.

After dinner the sun was still up, so I went for a walk in downtown Flores. Listless children presided over the musty interiors of dim little shops. Outside a few samples of their wares were on display.

I thought of all the travel books I had read, from those listing four-star hotels to environmentally correct student guides to budget travel. There is so much they do not tell you. As I entered a narrow shop that sold leather goods, woven textiles and silver jewelry, I recalled a typical guidebook warning: “Don’t accept the first price quoted. Always negotiate; it’s expected.” The small drawstring cloth bag that a round-eyed 8-year-old showed me would retail for $12.50 in imported-crafts stores back home. It was a steal at the $4 asking price, and I didn’t have the heart to haggle.

After two days at Tikal, it was time to move on. The southward Flores-to-Guatemala City leg of the trip loomed, 16 to 20 hours on the road if we made good time and didn’t hit any washouts. But should I choose the day bus or the night bus?

I had proved that I was a traveler, yet I also had the luxury of choice. Inherent in the concept of immersing oneself in another culture is the possibility of withdrawing from it at will, becoming part of it yet remaining apart.

I opted out. I decided to skip the bus and fly to Guatemala City. It cost only $60. Having come this far, I was ready to reenter the 20th century, to choose the easy route for a while.

There were no security checks at the small Flores airport. Nor were there any pigs or chickens in evidence during the one-hour flight. Flight attendants offered trays of candy. Glossy magazines were stacked in a rack. I sat next to an American botanist who was involved in a research project on the Mayan biosphere. I had suddenly become a tourist again. I was back in the predictable.

It was my loss. I had not wanted to be insulated, protected, culturally myopic. But the utter freedom of fatalistically boarding a bus and going where it took me was a casualty of the road through the Peten jungle. I turned to the window and searched for it as we ascended through the rain-forest clouds.