ESCAPING THE CORONAVIRUS: A KENTUCKIAN'S JOURNEY HOME
By Michael Phillips
I grasped the enormity of the situation when we pulled over to the side of the road, leaving Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, to go through our first police-mandated check-point. Because of recently imposed domestic travel restrictions, the Guatemalan police officers who circled our van wore surgical masks and tucked away their assault rifles. As I sat in the back of the van in an impulsive attempt to leave a locked-down country, I grappled with how critically unprepared and naive I’d been.
Illustration by August Northcut
Back in November, my wife Nicole and I planned a trip to Panajachel, Guatemala for mid-March to visit our friend Layla. As our travel date approached, the national conversation overwhelmingly centered on an assumption that the novel coronavirus wasn’t that serious and that it would go away quickly.
To give this moment some more context, I had to learn the language of “flattening the curve” and “social distancing” while I was already abroad - while I was already mostly restricted from coming back to the United States.
By Sunday, March 15, the news was mounting to a fever pitch, rattling off possible symptoms of an unfolding pandemic, and I started feeling sick. Whether it was from water I used while brushing my teeth or gringas I ate from a street vendor, I became desperately ill with food poisoning.
My body was in bad shape after fighting off a 24-hour nausea cycle. I was in bed the morning of March 16 when I was confronted with the news: our flight back home from Guatemala City was canceled, and because of Guatemala’s infrastructural and medical limitations, travel was restricted in the country for 15 days. Moreover, the airline that promised to compensate our tickets predicted flights would not resume out of Guatemala City until at least April 19.
We resigned ourselves to stay in the country for two weeks. I contacted the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala, updated my Smart Traveler Enrollment Program (STEP) account, and relayed our situation to Congressman John Yarmuth’s office. A prevailing sense of hopelessness and claustrophobia began to sink in as I started to understand the unintended consequences of traveling in the midst of all this.
To Stay or to Leave
Tuesday was a blur. At the time that we were preparing ourselves mentally to stay, we were also exhaustively exploring alternate options to get home. We went to the market to get some bare essentials. It wasn’t until we witnessed the police checkpoints, the majority of residents wearing masks, and the mandatory hand sanitizer application to enter any business that was still open that we understood the severity of the situation.
On Wednesday, Nicole woke up much earlier than I did. She’d done considerably more research than I had about other travelers stuck in Guatemala, and her anxiety about our situation was compounding rapidly. I’d convinced myself to try and get more comfortable with the probability of staying in the country for at least another two weeks, but Nicole, after talking with other travelers in Guatemala on the internet, had become convinced that the situation would grow worse for us if we didn’t try to leave. Rumors swirled that the travel ban would extend indefinitely.
I brushed this off as we consulted our host Adele over breakfast. We ate oatmeal and talked about the frantic energy of the moment and about what we needed to do going forward. Nicole brought up the idea to Adele that we may consider going to a border entry into Mexico based on a recommendation from a travel group on Facebook.
I was really weary and resolved to stay – I was just beginning to feel comfortable, and my body was just starting to feel normal again. Still, Adele recommended that we do everything in our power to leave the country. She called a friend of hers who’s a private driver, and after he called the immigration office, he relayed that we’d probably be able to cross through Ciudad Tecun Uman, a small city on the Guatemalan-Mexican border. No guarantees, though.
We devised a plan at the breakfast table: we’d cross the border and catch a cab to take us to a small airport outside of Tapachula to get us to Mexico City, where we would get a flight to Tijuana. From there, we would cross the Mexican-American border by foot to take a flight from San Diego to Chicago and then back to Louisville.
Because we’d planned to stay for the foreseeable future just the night before, our laundry was drying on the roof. After making the executive decision to leave that morning, I rushed upstairs to start packing. We shoved all of our belongings -- unfolded and dirty clothes, shoes, cameras, books -- into our bags in the span of 20 minutes. Less than an hour had passed since I’d gotten out of bed that morning, and now we were about to drive across the country with the very real possibility of being turned away by border officials.
Rafael, our driver, arrived with a friend in the passenger seat to accompany him on the long drive. Neither he nor his friend spoke English, while we had no grasp of Spanish. After stopping at an ATM to get money to pay him for the drive, we headed west and began our 4-hour excursion.
Over the course of the first hour out, both Nicole and I sat mostly in a tense silence. It’s hard for me to communicate the raw uncertainty that seemed to cloud our early journey. Still, as we took the winding roads that circled the lake, it was hard not to remark on how beautiful our surroundings were. It was still morning, and the smoke from the industrially burned sugar cane hadn’t rolled over the lake yet. We could, for the first time since arriving in Guatemala, see clearly the massive volcano that towered over Lake Atitlan.
Another remarkable feature was the absence of chicken busses, which are typically vibrantly decorated modes of transportation for people, goods, and livestock, and pickup trucks with people in the beds. Since we’d arrived, we’d seen countless busses with unique ornamentation and designs and trucks with workers on their way to whatever job. There was an eeriness about how empty the roads were, but neither of us really felt inclined to talk about it.
Checkpoint
About halfway through, we encountered our first police checkpoint. Rafael, in hindsight, had taken us on a path to avoid as many checkpoints as we could, but this one proved unavoidable. A police officer ushered us into the hazard lane on the side of the road cutting through a small town.
Once we were parked, we asked our driver through a translator app if everything was going to be okay. Even though he didn’t really understand what we were asking because of a poor translation, he responded bluntly yet nonchalantly in Spanish: “posible.”
He exited the van, and while he was talking with four police officers, we tried to ask his friend what was going on through the same translator app. The attempt at communication proved totally futile; the service was spotty, the app glitched and we settled back into tense uncertainty.
The three of us in the van hawkishly looked out the back at the conversation between Rafael and the police. After ten minutes -- which felt like hours -- the police began talking with another driver. We watched Rafael subtly step to the side, pull his phone out of his pocket and begin to call someone, when we heard his friend’s phone ring in the front seat. After about a five-second conversation between the two, the friend sitting in the passenger seat hung up and got out. Walking in the opposite direction of the police blockade, he looked over his shoulder for about the first ten feet before beginning to sprint down the road.
At this point, Nicole and I panic. “Where did he go? What’s going on? Are we okay? Did we do something wrong? What is happening?”
We feverishly ask each other these questions back and forth and watch Rafael start to talk with the police again. I think to myself that he’s bargaining with them based on the way he gestures with his hands.
“Was this the right call? Are we about to get arrested? What is going on?”
Minutes pass before an ambulance arrives. A doctor gets out of the passenger seat as Rafael and four police officers approach the side of the van. They open the door for the doctor to take our temperatures and monitor our breathing patterns. It became clear to us that this was a precautionary measure: they didn’t want people with COVID-19 symptoms traveling between cities and towns in Guatemala.
While the doctor calmly examined us, I noticed all of the police officers brandish their phones to take pictures of us. Behind them, a number of passersby joined and also took pictures of us with their phones. Finally, just as the doctor gave us the all-clear, our driver asked one of the officers to take a picture of us, too. While I was initially thrown off by this, a wave of relief overcame me as I gathered we would be able to continue the drive.
Photo from Rafael’s phone. From left to right: two men I didn’t meet, our calm doctor, me, Nicole, Rafael.
Rafael’s friend returned with a bag in-hand. As he approached the van, he pulled out two medical masks for Nicole and me. With the four of us back in our seats and with a wave of approval from a police officer, we continued our drive west.
The van was mostly silent as we passed through a number of other towns, each having speed bumps to slow down traffic on the mountain roads. We were stopped at two other checkpoints. Both times, Rafael was able to show the officers the picture of us with the doctor on his phone. Because of this foresight, we were able to bypass the checkpoints without having to stop.
In the final stretch of our drive, what I initially thought to be fog enveloped the van and the mountain roads we navigated. Rafael instructed us with his hands to roll our windows up, because the fog turned out to be clouds of smoke.
The nervous energy of the van after the checkpoints and the ominous, almost apocalyptic lighting in the smoke amplified our uncertainty as we got closer and closer to the border. In the moments before reaching Ciudad Tecun Uman, it started to rain. We passed several motorcyclists pulled over underneath trees to wait for it to pass.
Finally, we reached the city on the border. Rafael dropped us off right outside of the customs office. The air was thick and hot as we retrieved our luggage from the back. I immediately started sweating in the 95 degree heat as I looked around and gathered that people were confused to see Nicole and me.
I paid Rafael, thanked him profusely, and bid a cautious farewell to both him and his friend.
Crossing
The customs office was located on one side of a bridge that connects Guatemala and Mexico over the Suchiate River. As we walked up to the office, several street vendors approached us offering to exchange our quetzales for pesos and sell us clothes. We passed several border patrol officers armed with assault rifles as we were directed to a table outside the customs office.
We had to fill out paperwork pertaining exclusively to COVID-19 and have our temperatures taken once again. After we’d submitted our documentation, we experienced another moment of total communication breakdown. We tried every tool we had available and still failed to understand where we should go next to cross into Mexico. The heat felt hotter, accentuated by our quickening heart rates.
In a moment of pure coincidence, four backpackers sprung into the border crossing office. “Do you speak English? Are you trying to cross the border too?” Nicole asked.
We gathered that three of them were English and the last was Swiss. Two of the group were fluent in Spanish. Nicole and I gratefully clung to this group as we navigated how to leave Guatemala and enter Mexico.
We filled out our final documentation in Guatemala and crossed the nearly kilometer-long bridge into Mexico, when we discovered that even these people had met just that day. They’d stayed in a hostel in Antigua the night before and had individually been contacted by their embassies to attempt a border crossing here. In contrast, the U.S. embassy had, some two days after the fact, contacted us to let us know of all the newly imposed travel restrictions in Guatemala.
With the help of our new friends, we passed through the Mexican immigration offices smoothly to enter a sprawling marketplace in Ciudad Hidalgo. There, we exchanged currency and secured two cabs to the bus station in Tapachula to regroup. Split into two groups of three now, we embarked on the nearly 50-minute drive to the city.
Our new guide and translator, who introduced himself as Tim from Brighton, talked to us about his nearly 3-month trip through Central America. We discussed our past travels, and I remember an almost uncanny feeling resembling comfort in not focusing on the coronavirus or on our journey out of the country.
We regrouped at the bus station in Tapachula, where Tim booked us another cab to the airport slightly outside of the city.
We would take a flight from there to Mexico City, where we would change our original plans (again) and book another for the following morning to Atlanta. Because we arrived at the Mexico City airport at 11:30 pm, and our flight the following morning was to board at 5:10 am, we decided to spend our layover in the airport. With the mask covering my mouth and my hat covering my eyes, I slept on an airport bench for nearly 2 of those hours.
We showed up in Atlanta around noon, and moving through customs was jarring because of how fast the process proved. The airport felt like a ghost town.
The #StayAtHome Coming
We finally got back to Louisville a little after 3 pm on March 19, but not before a flight attendant named Donnie chastised us for our stupidity. He rightly balked at how lucky we were to be sitting on the flight with him after we explained our journey over the last two days. Sleep deprived yet wired from our continued adrenaline rush, we slowly began to understand with greater context how fortunate we were to pass through three countries with practically no complications.
Coming back and grappling with the changes brought on by COVID-19 has been a massive learning curve. The fatal implications have understandably cast a blanket of fear over both the national and state consciousness, and in these trying times it’s hard to find glimmers of hope or opportunities for solace.
After my journey home, I find myself having conflicted feelings wavering between guilt and gratitude. I’m upset with myself for being naive enough to go on the trip in the first place. I put us in the strained position to get back home, and I am responsible for deciding to travel in what would eventually be labeled a pandemic. While it may seem futile at this point, I can safely articulate that I wouldn’t have traveled if I’d understood better the increasing magnitude of the situation.
But at the same time that I have these feelings, I can’t help but foster immense gratitude for those who helped us along the way: Layla and her gracious family for welcoming Nicole and me, Adele for facilitating our travel to the Guatemalan-Mexican border, Rafael and his friend for successfully navigating different checkpoints and driving us across the country, our new European friends for guiding us through the border to the airport, and the different Guatemalan and Mexican border officials who had the patience to deal with incredibly unprepared, clueless, and anxious Americans.
In the weeks that have since passed, the Guatemalan government has applied more strenuous restrictions to combat the spread of COVID-19. In addition to more police checkpoints monitoring and prohibiting commercial travel between cities, there’s now a nationwide curfew preventing people from being out between 4 pm and 4 am.
The United States Embassy in Guatemala has begun evacuating American citizens, but at a cost: one-way charter flights from Guatemala City to Miami were initially priced at $1,000. Both the tightening emergency travel laws and the high evacuation prices have made me feel that much better about our decision to get home in the way we did.
While it’s certainly a wonderful thing for Kentuckians to explore and engage with cultures around the world, for the foreseeable future, it’s best we all stay home.
As you settle in at home during quarantine, be sure to check out KTW’s Speaker Series programs through KET Streaming.
Michael Phillips is a professional writer based in Louisville, KY, and has been part of the Kentucky to the World creative team since July 2019.
