A day at the dentist; an evening with a con artist; chicken buses: I don’t have enough words or pictures to write a full entry about all of these, so please accept, instead, this entry of mini-stories.

Lake Atitlan is surrounded by relatively isolated small towns, each becoming known in its own way as a tourist destination. San Pedro is for the druggies, San Marcos is for yoga and hippies, and Santa Cruz is tiny and mostly just to relax. I stayed a few days in San Pedro, learning weaving and meeting Diego, the famous chocolatier, but I soon moved on to Santa Cruz. It was there that I met one of the most interesting characters of my trip to date.

In a slightly dark, relaxed, hostel style bar, I listened to a shortish, brown-haired guy introduce himself. His eager, lisping voice was immediately recognizable as the same I had heard annoyingly talk of Nietzsche earlier in the day, going on and on about his work while I tried to read in a hammock. His name was Darius, and he’d apparently went to school in Boston. He was in Guatemala relaxing from what he implied was a high-pressure analyst job for financial institutions in NYC. Something to do with using neural networks for risk calculations.

I’m not particularly interested in risk calculations or neural networks, but given his slightly anti-social tendencies and his mathy job, I suspected (correctly) that he had gone to MIT. It isn’t often that I meet people from my alma mater on the road, so we talked for a bit about our favorite and least-favorite classes, where we lived on campus, and what he majored in. Apparently he’d taken Course 18 (that’s math for most people out there) and amazingly graduated at the age of 19… with a PhD. That would explain the anti-social behavior.

Darius was passionate about math, always going on and on (in a bar no less!) about the beauty of numbers and even flashing around notebooks full of complicated calculus equations. He claimed to speak 14 languages fluently. He talked often about his 1.8 million frequent flyer miles expiring in August and offered to give them away to anyone who needed them. He threw a fit when our bar table decided to play rummy rather than blackjack. None of us knew whether he was for real or not - me least of all. He knew some insider MIT jokes but got others terribly wrong (asking if Athena, our campus computer system, was Windows or LAI-nux, mispronouncing Linux…) That evening, he tried to talk a pretty PhD student in neurology into sharing her private room with him and pouted when she refused.

I escaped off to my dorm room, unsure exactly where he ended up for the night. The next day, there was a giant “WANTED” poster on the hostel wall - obviously, he was a fake. My first official conman! More interested in snaring a girl than actually making money off of people, I think he may want to rethink his story.

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Guatemalan chicken buses are famous among backpackers - incredibly cheap and incredibly crowded, people brag about taking them and assure others that yes, they are that bad. Brightly painted American school buses are given extended seats so that each can uncomfortably fit 3 adults (and 3 additional children if necessary.) The rides are actually full (with people overflowing into the aisle and out of the doors.) The craziness of chicken bus rides are NOT overstated! Squeezing onto a seat, surrounded by Guatemalans wearing traditional clothes and carrying baskets of weaving, baked goods, or flowers, a three-hour ride might cost $2 dollars.

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In Xela, slightly grittier and much more “Guatemalan” than Antigua, tons of Americans congregate for Spanish lessons. It’s also an increasingly popular center for medical volunteers. I was able to sit in on a free dental clinic sponsored by the “Pop Wuj” language school. One dentist (Dr. Andrew Baron, a prototypical New Yawker) brought several boxes of supplies and spent a week extracting teeth from patient after patient.

In Central America, I’d seen many people with gold teeth - some totally gold, other only edged in gold or silver or even, in the case of one Guatemalan woman in traditional clothing, with a golden star embedded in each of her front teeth.  At first, I’d thought that people just had terrible teeth here; of course, eventually I realized it was done as a show of wealth, or a fashion statement.  Dr Baron confirmed that for me, actually - he was quite impressed by the general state of Guatemalan teeth, cleaner and with far less decay than  inner city kids in New York.

At the clinic, I was able to spend a morning watching parents bring in children for a checkup (sometimes even an extraction!) and then cautiously lower themselves into the chair to be examined.  Just being in a dental office made me uncomfortable, and as the assistants sterilized tools and prepared numbing shots, I couldn’t keep from shivering.

As it’s a free clinic, without a drill or trained assistants, Dr Baron is unable to do any fillings.  He had to make a decision based on the amount of decay and patient pain as to whether to pull the tooth or do nothing.  He speaks no Spanish, so one of the assistants asks the questions:  What tooth hurts?  How much pain?  When does it hurt? and we all struggle to interpret the answers.

At least they have Novacaine!  A teenaged girl comes in - it’s her second visit to the clinic because they couldn’t extract the tooth successfully earlier in the week.  So off they go, to try again.  The dentist leans over her, pulling and tugging,  twisting on the forceps.  No luck - one minute passes, then two.  We all watch uncomfortably as the woman sits patiently in the chair, her fashionable shoes visible, legs relaxed rather than tense and twitching like my own.  “It’s loose!”  This tooth must have HUGE roots because even loose, it still doesn’t come out.  A second injection of painkillers is required.  “Normally I would split this down the middle,” Dr Baron says, but obviously here, in the small, dusty room filled with the gear of a traveling dentist, he isn’t up for the task.

The girl waits patiently, the dentist tugging away… cracking noises, the sound of the forceps scraping… and it is out!  The girl laughs, and we all examine the trophy tooth, giant with its roots splayed out. Congratulations, the dentist tells her, and she leaves. I don’t know her name, only that she was number five in what would be another long day of patients.