Two weeks later, while on my way to Semuc Champey, my shuttle driver pulled over to a little hotel on the side of a dirt road so that we could use the bathroom. I didn’t have to use the bathroom, so I stayed in the shuttle. Of course, as I was sitting there, I could hear one of those songs playing inside the hotel, but I thought nothing of it because I had given up. However, after 6 hours at Semuc Champey, we passed through the same hotel, and I heard the other song playing inside. Deciding that this would be my final attempt, I got out of the shuttle, ran inside, and asked the teenage kid behind the counter if he knew the name of this song. He replied, “this one? This is ‘Te Amo’ by Makano.” I was shocked. I then had him play a few other songs that were on his playlist, and before long, we had found the other song as well. I was grinning from ear to ear, and this poor kid was VERY confused.

I have always been fascinated by a song’s ability to transport me back to a particular time and place. Sometimes, when I particularly like a certain place, I will listen to a song over and over so that the next time I hear that song I will be immediately reminded of being in that place. Before coming to Guatemala, I downloaded a lot of new music in the hopes that one of those songs would eventually be the song that could bring back all of my memories, good and bad, of the time that I have spent here this summer.

Continued…

Continued…

I was neither optimistic nor excited about having to spend 4 days and 4 nights in Guatemala City. Normally, 5 weeks spent in small towns and villages would leave me absolutely craving some big-city action, but I had heard enough horror stories to leave me utterly dreading having to research in Guatemala City. “Well, my friends and I figured that it would be okay to walk where we needed to go since it was broad daylight and we only had to walk a block—unfortunately, seconds after we stepped outside, someone was shoving a gun in our face and screaming at us, so we just started running in the opposite direction.” “Oh yeah you definitely shouldn’t take a chicken bus into the capital…they’ll slash your pockets in those terminals faster than you can say ‘dinero.’” “Make sure that you stay far away from the red intra-city buses—I heard that there are at least 2 armed robberies every day on those buses.” Needless to say, I was anxious. But, when the time came, I hopped onto the shuttle that picked me up at my hostel in Antigua, and 45 minutes later I was standing in front of the Xamanek Inn in the heart of Guatemala’s safest district, Zona 10 (also known as “Zona Viva”).

Continued…

Typically, when one thinks about Central America, some of the first words that come to mind are “hot,” “tropical,” or “sunny.” Strangely enough, though I find myself in the heart of Central America, I would use none of those words to describe my first four weeks in Guatemala. What many fail to realize is that Guatemala’s terrain is extremely diverse for a country of its size, with mountains, plateaus, and high altitudes characterizing nearly its entire Western half (known as the Western Highlands). This is where I spent the first half of my Guatemalan route; as such, instead of hot, tropical and sunny, I would use the words cool, comfortable and rainy to describe my experience thus far. Starting in Antigua, I worked my way through the Lake Atitlan region, all the way up through Chichicastenango and Santa Cruz del Quiche to the Ixil triangle in the north (Nebaj, San Juan Cotzal and Chajul), and then over to Huehuetenango and Quetzaltenango.

Continued…

In all fairness, I don’t know the exact meal that caused the horrendous series of events that followed. It could have been the pollo dish, it could have been the ice in my glass (even though I always say that I only want ice if it is from a bag), and it could have been vegetables in a salad from the night before that had been cleaned with tap water. All I know is that after that meal, I was pretty exhausted, and I went back to my hotel room (I’ve never been happier with a decision to stay in a hotel room with a private bathroom), where I proceeded to fall asleep for 3 hours. This was warning sign number one: Eli Berger does not nap, so I already knew something was wrong. When I woke up, my 36-hour love affair with the toilet began. Then the fever began to rise. And it kept rising. It got to the point where I couldn’t see straight, and I felt like my bed was on fire. At that point, I began to realize that I was dealing with more than a case of the “shits.” Dehydrated beyond belief, I summoned all the strength I could muster to drag myself down the stairs to the water cooler on the first floor of the hotel. And by “drag myself down the stairs,” I mean that I had to do the 1-year-old-learning-to-go-down-stairs routine where I sat on my butt and scooched my way down two flights of steps. Once at the front desk, I tried to ask the concierge, “If I need an ambulance, can you call one?” but my tense or mood must have been incorrect, because he interpreted my question as, “I need an ambulance, can you call one?” It was just as well, because clearly I did need one. Within 5 minutes, I was being whisked away to the hospital, where I was promptly hooked up to an IV (my first).