This is Guatemala...

This is Guatemala, when...

1) The bus shuttle for your day trip picks you up 20 minutes late and instead of bringing you to your destination, like you assumed it would, it drives around the city for 10 minutes picking and dropping off people until you stop around the corner from where you started and the driver tells you to get out of the car and wait for another bus shuttle.

2) you wait 15 more minutes, the whole time wondering whether a bus is actually going to come, or if you just got tricked out of $8.

3) the driver arrives and when you finally do get on the bus you head to an active volcano (Pacaya) where you have heard that several people died in 2010 when it unexpectedly errupted.

4) the guide, several men with horses, and many kids with walking sticks bombard you when you disembark the bus. The guide wants to simply take you up and down the trail before dark, but the kids want to sell you their walking sticks and they won't give up until that have sold you one. The men with horses just want to charge you to ride a horse up and down the mountain.

5) you find out that entrance to the park was not included in the ticket price, so you and your friend beg from the other tourists 100 quetzales (about 12 bucks) and you get it in return for a promise to pay it back.

6) 5 men with horses follow you up the mountain, waiting for people to get tired so that they can charge them to ride the rest of the way up the mountain, even though only one person actually wants a horse.

7) the terrain you are climbing up keeps shifting under your feet because it is actually not ground, but 25 cm of  tiny rocks and debris that rained down over the mountain and the surrounding area when the volcano erupted a year ago.

8) you get to the top of the mountain and half the group has ended up on horseback. Gringos.

9) instead of staying a safe distance from the steaming crater in order to take pictures, the guide leads you through hardened magma to a plateau right under the mouth of the volcano.

10) the guide provides clean sticks to roast the marshmallows you brought. Over lava.

11) you realize that the best s'mores you have ever eaten were cooked over magma (FYI this is quite a good way to toast marshmallows. With a fire the marshmallows are either slow to cook or on fire because you got them too close to the flame. Lava, on the other hand, toasts the marshmallows speedily and there are no worries that they will catch fire.)

12) as you reach the bottom of the volcano, your guide excitedly points off in the distance where you can see another volcano spitting lava into the sky juxapositioned against the dark night sky.

13) you climb back into the shuttle at 7, and the group drives for 20 minutes when the van starts to act up.

14) the van breaks down, full of 11 gringos and the driver. The driver gets out, calls someone, and tries to fix the car on his own.

15) he fails. (though this also happens in America. Frequently)

16) a tow truck comes up, and the driverof your van informs you that it is unsafe to disembark in this area of Guatemala, so you have to stay in the van.

17) the van is jacked up onto the back of the tow truck.

18) the tow truck pulls the van loaded with 12 people all the way back to Antigua in about 2 hours, only stopping once to pick up a passenger up from the side of the road.

19) this is the great adventure that you were hoping for.