Standing next to the stinking metal carcass that was once our luxury bus, I had to smile as I flashed back to my conversation with the ticket agent in Santa Elena’s gritty bus station, where I had purchased my expensive fare 24 hours earlier.

“Es mas cómodo,” meaning it’s more comfortable, she assured me before I slid over 200 quetzales for the first class express bus to Guatemala City. Even with my pathetic Spanish skills, I was seduced by those tantalizing words

"In Don Pedro I had stumbled onto the veritable ramen noodle of language schools—dirt cheap but more than able to satisfy of my basic needs.”

Two buses and nine hours later, we rolled into Antigua on an overstuffed chicken bus, as passengers sat stone-faced and the driver blasted a local radio station, which served up the Beastie Boys and Modest Mouse over the crackling public address system. After splurging on a luxury bus to transport me across Guatemala in the dead of night, it was no small irony to be arriving in Antigua at dawn on a far more pedestrian public bus that cost five and a half quetzales—about $0.75 USD.

We covered the final hour of the trip with passengers standing shoulder to shoulder in the aisles and packed four across in the cramped seats that were perfectly proportioned for elementary school students, our teeth chattering as we bumped along the narrow cobble-stoned streets. Finally, we pulled into Antigua’s bus depot, where I emerged sweaty and disheveled, wearing yesterday’s clothes.

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