Sweet River

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I was tired and banged up but I figured that this shouldn't stop me from pressing on to Rio Dulce given that it was only about 2 hours away. I gave a North-Irish backpacker a ride to a turnoff where he was going to try to hitch a ride into a more remote part of Guatemala. I figure that he's probably dead by now judging by the condition of the road that he started down. I arrived in the chaos of Rio Dulce before noon and quickly decided that I should try to find a place to stay in the nearby hamlet of San Felipe where the helpful touts directed me to a cheap hotel with a secure place to park my car. I befriended one of the touts for the purpose of practicing Spanish and to tap his treasure trove of local intelligence. He suggested that we should go to the annual Rio Dulce fair to look for "buenas chicas" which sounded like a fine idea to me because it was such a dumb thing to do. And dumb it was... The "feria" was not unlike the Youngwood carnival or any other festival that we have come to know and love in our part of the world. They had exactly the same dumb mechainal rides (even more rickety) and carnival games. I kid you not that the "bomberos voluntarios" sponsored the bingo and wheel-of-fortune games. It was as if some little town in Pennsylvania had been completely overrun by spanish-speaking brown people. We did indeed find some "buenas chicas" participating in the beauty pagent that would crown the queen of Rio Dulce plus some others who were college students running a bar that specialized in luring in male customers with their youthful good looks. I learned from this experience that the men here like them a little portly and overdone while I tend to prefer them plain and thin. We talked to a couple of girls for awhile. It came up in the strained conversation handicapped by my horrific Spanish that I didn't have a girlfriend because she just died. I didn't intend to make up a story like that but it was the only story I could invent with words that I knew. It's hard to say for sure but I think that the one girl was buying into the dead girlfriend story. The other seemed skeptical. I thought about taking a hit off of the Guatemalan picante sauce to sell it with real tears but the overwhelming urge to drink all of the water in Lago Izabal probably would have ruined that plan. It was a dumb thing to do...

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