Arrived safely

Finally, I have arrived in San Cristobal de las Casas in Chiapas, Mexico, where I will be based for most of my Mexico trip. It was a treacherous journey with visions of devastation on both sides of the road. Tomorrow I will remember to bring my camera cord to town & will post some photos of what I saw.

For now, I will just give you a verbal glimpse into what the journey was like from Guatemala City to Xela, the nickname of Quetzaltenango, Guatemala. It is a nickname based on the Mayan name for the town, which is the second largest town in Guatemala, next only to Guatemala City. After waiting an extra night in the capital, my friend Alejandra phoned again to say that she knew of a van that was driving to the capital to deposit tourists who were anxious to leave Xela fast, before anything else toppled. The driver would spend the night in Antigua after dropping off his passengers & would return early to Xela to pick up another van load of people leaving in a hurry.

There were only three of us in the whole vehicle. That meant that our belongings were in the vehicle with us instead of on top in the rain. There was a young woman from Boston who was my daughter's age, the driver, a young man 3 months older than my son, & me. I was picked up at 6am & off we went. The road wasn't too bad for the first hour & then we were stopped for an hour waiting for two backhoes to clear enough mud off the road to make it passable. Once clear, a line of cars passed going south. Just before the last southbound car passed, the mountain heaved again & created a 20 metre mountain over the only passable lane. After another hour & a half & we finally got through.

The two paved roads to Xela were not passable yet, but there was a third route, over a dirt road, that was the only possible route. It was long, circuitous, full of hairpin curves. The earth is mostly clay & was as slippery as clay can get. The name of the tour company that owned the van was Adrenalina Tours, & the name proved to be descriptive of the journey we had. It took us 10 hours, to go to a place that one can usually drive to in 3-4 hours. But arrive we did. We were witnesses to devastation on all sides, as you will see tomorrow with my photos.

We spent the night in Xela & then spent more hours yesterday driving from Xela to here, with more signs of how hard it is going to be for the local people to recover from this disaster. So many people have lost their homes, their crops & their animals. And several villages were completely destroyed by mud slides. If there is any way you can help, small or large, please consider it, as much help will be needed, probably for some time to come.

In the meanwhile I remain grateful to have arrived safely. In Canada, this is Thanksgiving weekend & I will end this posting with a quote from Melody Beattie that a friend just sent me.

"Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow."