As soon as I got on the 22:00 bus to Guatemala City, I realised I had made a fatal mistake. The temperature outside the bus had dropped about twenty degrees centigrade since the height of the midday sun, however the air-conditioning temperature inside the bus had not been changed at all. All the Guatemalan passengers were wearing jackets, trouser and carrying blankets. I was wearing shorts and a sleeveless vest and carrying a packet of Cheetohs. Immediately, I knew I was going to have an unpleasant 10-hour journey.
Even after putting on the long-sleeved top I had packed in my hand-luggage, I could feel my body temperature plummeting. As a couple of Guatemaltecos sitting nearby stared at me from underneath their fleece blankets, I tried not to think about the Marmot sleeping bag in my rucksack locked away underneath the bus, which boasts sleeping comfort to temperatures of -7 C.
Instead, I started to get creative. First. I repositioned myself as far as I could away from the window seat where a constant icy draught was blasting down from above. Then I pulled my socks up as far as they would go to keep an extra centimetre or two of ankle covered up. Then I crossed my legs to try and trap the heat between them.
Unfortunately none of this made a difference. I could still see my breath in front of me when I breathed. So I started to get more creative. First, I attempted some Jedi mind tricks to try and convince myself that I was actually really warm, but those didn´t work. I then briefly found religion, but nobody heard my prayers that the half-empty bus would fill up with fat, sweating passengers that would heat things up for me, only thin Guatemaltecos in jackets got on at every stop, blankets tucked casually under one arm. In desperation, I even started to consider wrapping the roll of toilet paper I had in my hand luggage around my cold, bare legs. I probably would have done it as well, if it had only been 4-ply quilted Andrex, and not 0.5-ply crepe paper I had stolen from a posada in Mexico for short-notice taco-induced emergency bowel movements.
In the end, it was my two cotton head scarfs that saved me. Around midnight, I discovered that if I wrapped one scarf around each bare leg, they gave me a little protection against the Artic temperatures onboard the 22:00 bus to Guatemala City. With my legs covered, and the collar of my long sleeve top pulled up above my ears, I eventually managed to get a few hours of miserable broken sleep.
Arriving in Guatemala City around 7AM (the morning heat hitting me like a clenched fist as I stepped off the freezing bus), I decided to head straight to Antigua to climb a volcano. However, Pacaya´s molten lava will need to wait until tomorrow. Today, I am going to catch up on sleep in my 8 pounds a night Antiguan hotel room, melt the icicles from each nostril, and try not to electrocute myself in the shower.
