Sun, sand and... pigs?

This weekends´trip was to a tiny Pacific village called Tilapa.

What the guidebook said was that it was a traditional fishing village, relatively clean for Guatemalan beaches, and set in a mangrove swamp which you could do nature tours in. Sounds idyllic.

What the guidebook didn´t tell me was that turning up alone, I might actually be alone. After 4 hours on a dusty bus, the humidity thickening and encroaching on the limited breathing space we had each, I was desperate to get to the beach, jump in the sea and have a cool beer. But my high hopes dissipated with the body odour of the bus as I stepped off into a dirty, sandy square lined by empty comedores, plastic tablecloths flapping quietly in the warm breeze as if not to disturb the eerie silence. Not another tourist was in site, just a few dusty kids playing in the shade of one of the deserted huts. I began to think I was going to have to get straight back on the next bus and leave again, as locals stared at me curiously as I lugged my bag through the ´main´street. This led along a rotting boardwalk, replete with pigs wallowing in the cooler mud underneath my feet, to the river which separates the town from the beach. Here I encountered a boatman, dozing in the midday sun, who instantly jumped up when I arrived saying ´You want a mangrove tour chica?´

So, I had two options. Get back on the sweaty bus, or try to find at least some kind of life in this place, if not human. I foolishly went for the second.

But as with all foolish mistakes, they either turn out to be the best in your life, or the end of it. Luckily, this was the former. We pootled along the mangroves, spying wild boars, vultures, wading birds, and strange mud-dwelling amphibiasns, beady eyes and resonant croaks infiltrating my senses from all directions. Eventually we grounded on some charcoal grey sand, made so by the volcanic ash that forms these beaches, and the boatman pointed me in the direction of the ´hotel´.

I stumbled around in the burning sand, which may as well have been the lava that once made it, it was so hot, between delapidated straw shacks and empty-looking beach huts. The only life I saw were some chicks pecking in piles of rubbish and some more pigs, lazily snuffling along the makeshift path. I was beginning to worry I was a character in the Lord of the Flies, and that I was stranded on this slightly grubby beach-like wasteland forever. Just as I was giving up hope, and that sick feeling in the pit of your stomach that appears when you have made a grave mistake was beginning to settle in quite nicely, I spied a huge ´Gallo´beer sign - and lo and behold, it was a hotel! The guidebook was telling the truth, after all.

Beaming, I walked confidently up to the owner and asked for a room in my best Spanish. I thought he must have understood, as he said ´No room at the inn´or words to those effect. No room? But the whole place seemed to be deserted. Little did I know that this was the weekend the entire Guatemalan football team had turned up for training at the beach...

Dispirited, I slumped in one of the plastic chairs and asked for a beer. Then suddenly I heard a girls´voice call out to me in English. It turned out four other girls from Xela had arrived there the hour before me, and were just sitting down to lunch. So again my emotions were flipped over, and the beam returned as I joined them for a delicious luch of camarones, fresh fried fish, tortillas, salad and green chilli sauce. And after reassuring one of them that the rash she had on her foot was not scabies, as her friends had been telling her it was, I was graciously accepted on their weekend trip, and we spent the rest of the afternoon lazing on the beach, cooling off in the sea and drinking fresh coconut juice brought out to us by the hotel owners´daughter.

As the sun began to set, we all became quiet, along with the mangrove dwelling creatures we could hear preparing for sundown. The sunset was magnificent, the sun a roaring fireball of reds and oranges over the darkening slate grey sand, the whole effect was like a huge oil field on fire, the firery sky battling the awesome watery power of the waves.

Thoroughly relaxed, we thought our day couldn´t get better. But on the return lancha trip through the knotted mangrove roots, at first we giggled nervously at the darkness and stillness, our boatman teasing us and pretending we were in a horror film and some slimy creature was about to erupt from the lake. Our girlish giggles were stunned to silence as we broke out into open water - directly above our heads a whole forest of stars twinkled in the inky black sky, whilst in the distance huge bolts of lightning ripped silently through the billowing clouds, lighting up the rippling water around us. Fireflies buzzed nearby, adding to nature´s spectacular lightshow.

We ended the day which a slap-up meal of frijoles and tortillas in one of the tiny local tiendas, cooked with love by a typical Guatemalan Mother, who watched over us as we ate at the streetside stools. Then for an outside shower, still watching the storm, and reading by candlelight under the mosquito net, before an incredibly restful sleep on my simple straw bed.

The next day I visited Champerico, a better known resort further down the coast. We bumped along the coast road, lined with colossal plantations, excited children jumping about on the plasticworn seats. And I saw why I had made that decision to go to Tilapa (of course, I always knew it had been the right one all along and never doubted myself...) Champerico is a busy ´resort´full of weekending Guatemalans who sit in huge groups of friends or family at the plastic-bedecked beachside restaurants, drinking fresh limonada and eating camarones. But the beach is so dirty, strewn with the litter of thousands of humans, beach debris not being seaweed but strings of beercans and leftover piles of food. The humans are the pigs on those beaches, and they need the unpicky creatures to work their way through the trash. There is no such thing as rubbish collection is this country, and certainly no collective social behaviour to do anything to change it. People discard used items, whatever they are, wherever they are.

I stayed for a few hours, having a dip and reading, I would have stayed longer, if my happy blissful peace was not ruined by a huge wave suddenly galloping up the beaching and soaking me and all of the belongings I had with me in my bag! One of those situations where you want someone else there to laugh it of with, as I collected up my dripping towel and scurried away further up the beach like a crab. Problems, embarrassments and downright disasters in our lives are dispersed like the fine particles of sand rolling together in the waves when they are washed up the shore with others. So I will have to rely on you all laughing at me now, imagining me standing there, the stupid girl trying to wring out her towel and scrape away the gritty black sand from her skin...

When I had dried out as best I could I ran for the last bus home - the most packed chicken bus I have been on yet - seven or eight sandy, sweaty bodies crammed along each row, with more managing somehow to squeeze into the aisle. We really were a tin of sardines, and not fresh ones. And most of the Guatemalans, the holidaying ones at least, are not small people - so their squishy bits all just squidge between the seats until we are all packed in quite nicely. I´m not scared of accidents in those buses, as if we toppled, noone would budge and inch, we would all be aircushions for one another. What I did like is that a doctor, still in his scrubs, climbed aboard with the rest of us ragamuffins, not flinching when a snotty child leant against his leg or a market woman spilled her leftover bananas on his lap, and standing to allow a mother with baby attached to bosom to have his tiny corner of seat.

Home to shower thoroughly, to remove the sand and DEET and prawn shells, and prepare for my last week at the clinic. How time flies. If I could have imagined myself in the situation I am now three months ago, exploring and meeting interesting people and learning so much about myself and others, I would have thought pigs might fly.