Guatemala: Home to violence, danger, and really really nice locals.

Guatemala is dangerous. My travel guide told me so. The internet told me so. Heck, CNN told me so. So when I decided to go to Champerico this weekend with a friend from school and his mom, and our teachers told us to be careful, I was slightly worried. They gave us the warnings. Stash your money in multiple places so that if you get robbed you don't lose everything. Leave your passport in Xela. Don't bring credit or debit cards, just cash. Carefully choose your hotel, make sure you see the room before you pay, and watch your belongings because they can get stolen from your room. Don't wander away from the center of town, and stay together. And whatever you do, don't forget that Champerico is really, really, really frickin' dangerous. Muy peligroso.

Entrance to Champerico

Dangerous looking hooks

This pier was actually a little dangerous, but only because the supports were rusting away

We decided to go despite the wonderful reviews. Champerico has a beach, I wanted to get back on a surfboard, and Noah wanted to surf. It just so happens that Noah is a really good surfer. I knew this before I saw him surf, when he told me that he has ridden both Mavericks and Pipeline. Pretty cool.

To get to Champerico, we had to take a chicken bus. These are all over Guatemala, and are pretty much a major transportation method across the country. For 20 quetzales (or under $3), I took a four hour bus ride. Dear Montreal transit system, please take note of this fact. On the bus, instead of having to worry about my money, belongings, and life, as I had been warned, I instead met Luis. Luis is a Guatemalan who lives in Xela and struck up a conversation with me, in Spanish of course. For about an hour, we spoke about our past travels, education, architecture, and food. Before he left the bus, he invited me over to his house for dinner with him and his wife when I returned to Xela, and left me his phone number. But first, he told me how to transfer buses to Champerico, and how to get to the beach once we were there. Of course, this was after he apologized for having lost touch with a friend in Champerico that surfs, who he otherwise would have called ahead to inform of our arrival. This would not happen in Montreal, but it does here...

We arrived in Champerico and as Noah got his board ready, I immediately began looking for a place to rent a board of my own. I was quickly told that there are no surf shops in Champerico. The internet lied to me apparently. Fail. However, the first guy with a surfboard that I asked immediately offered to lend me a board the next morning. One of his boards. A brand new one. I thanked him but had to decline, as I told him that I wasn't a very good surfer. No worries, he had an old clunked he would lend me. He gave me his name, told me he would be on the beach in the morning, and said that worst case I could just ask a local where he lived. He was the only guy named Mokako in town. So far, everything I had been told about our trip to Champerico was a lie. There was still plenty of time to get in trouble though...

Please note that this is Noah, and definitely NOT me

That night we ate amazing seafood, costing about $10 for a beer and a pound of calamari. Perfection. In the morning, I woke up early and went for a swim while Noah surfed. He is indeed, pretty good. Mokako wasn't out, but I figured I would catch him in the afternoon. Noah lent me his board and I tried to paddle out, but got pounded and quickly remembered how hard surfing is on the arms. I now plan on trying to get into better shape before I make it to my next beacjh destination. Unfortunately, for the rest of the weekend the surf got so big that not only did Noah not surf, the locals didn't either. It was just closeouts, and 6-foot high whitewash.

On Saturday evening, we chatted with a local surfer for awhile after he came out of the water. When we told him we were going to take off for a walk on the beach, he warned us about where we could and couldn't walk safely. Once again, really nice locals trump everything we had heard about the dangerous town of Champerico. After another splendid seafood dinner (octopus this time, with 2 beers, for just over $10) we crashed out to the pounding bass coming from a wedding afterparty that raged into the wee hours of the morning.

Young children on horses may or may not be the most dangerous part of Champerico

Sunday morning the waves were still too big to go out, being simply unsurfable, so Noah and I headed to the pier to watch the sets come in. There I met an older man who waved me over and asked if I spoke Spanish. Almost 45 minutes later, we had finished a conversation where he told me about where he lives, what he does, where he studied in the past, and how its cool to see foreigners (see "white people") that actually come here to learn the language instead of just be ignorant and squeeze by without it. Although I couldn't pick up everything he said, I held my own, and just like I had on the chicken bus, I now had a new friend.

Another one bites the dust. Lo siento Maradona...

From breakfast on the beach...

...to breakfast in my stomach.

We left Champerico around noon today, and two cramped bus rides later made it back to Xela, alive, healthy, and without any icidents. Sure, if we had wondered around the streets in the middle of the night looking for trouble, I have no doubt that we could have found it. If we had chosen the sketchiest hotel in town, or flashed our money as we walked down the street, we could have been robbed. And if I walked up to a guy with a face full of tattoos and started talking crap, there is a high probability that I would have been stabbed. But the same can be said for many areas of downtown Montreal. If you look for trouble, you're probably going to find it. And unlike Montreal, in Guatemala, if you're not looking for trouble, you'll probably just find really, really nice locals. Like the surfers who treated us with hospitality instead of localism, my new friend the fisherman, and Luis, who I plan on calling this week to make dinner plans with.

Despite the fact that newspaper headlines in Guatemala often involve headless bodies, cemetery shootings, and police corruption, maybe the so-called "developed world" has a thing or two to learn from "one of the most dangerous countries in the world"...

Pura Vida.