Five days and $2 Later: Hitchhiking Home from Nicaragua (pt.3)

(Continued)

Leaving Maarten, I am determined to make it to the Mexican border tonight,  a great feat, hitchhiking 550 miles. Not sure what awaits me when I arrive (borders, this border in particular, is notoriously dangerous), or when I will arrive, I stick my thumb out and ask every parked car that looks like they are stopping before the long ride north.

It is dangerous in Guatemala at night. Shops close, steel doors pull down tight over their already barred windows, most truck traffic stops as well for fear of bandits and hitting livestock. Still it is past 10Pm and there is nowhere for me to go but north. Soon it will be December 18th, and I am not sure I will make it home to see my boys for Christmas.

A trucker, younger than me, pulls off to the side of the road and honks for me to join the ride. This is a relatively good job to have in a country with high unemployment and an average household income of $5000 USD per year. He seems happy, content, has a small boy and a daughter. We talk about his family, the project, God and faith, but I am exhausted. He invites me to take the top bunk in the back. I fall asleep like a log.

I had no idea truck cabins were so spacious and roomy, but I knew this was the way to ride. We arrived in Tapachula very early in the morning and I stayed asleep until 6AM, rushing out to eat, get my passport stamped, and continue the race north.

Day 2:

A series of small rides bring me past the luscious mountain fortress of Chiapas, to the drier north near the border of Oaxaca. A combie (a small bus) offers a ride for free, a banda musician and his buchona girl, both very nice, pick me up in their pick up, and buy me a meal in their home village, a man with a busted radiator drives me, very very slowly to a gas station, where I catch a long ride in a brand new Volvo big rig to the Caribbean.

The hours pass as the sun sets over rippled reddened clouds, and a landscape that drifts more and more from the tropical jungle to the tropical deserts of Oaxaca to the north. Conversations come and go and I have a moment to reflect on my path. Every few minutes we pass a village, a restaurant, a bridge, a swimming hole, a farm where I stayed, the people who live there that I became friends with, that now pass by like a flash from a dream.