It Took A Village

I left Antigua early Sunday morning and headed for the Mexican border.
I left on Sunday morning because I’d read that while they’ve got temporary repairs on all the damage they are closing the road for most of Monday to make more permanant repairs.

It’s slow going due to twisty mountain roads but it’s quite beautiful and peaceful. It was here that I had my first trouble with the Landcruiser. High in the
mountains, lots of pine trees and really cool looking people. The women
especially. Don’t get me wrong, they’re not sexually attractive (to me,
though it’s obvious by their numbers that they are to others). Anyhow they
are impossibly short, wide of shoulder and hip. They look as I imagine a
female hobbit would. They carry themselves with a comfortable dignity.And their dress is fantastic mix of colors. Each one a little different and as you drive through the mountains you can see the colors and patterns vary somewhat. I think they’ve got something going similar to the Scottish.

Anyhow this particular area is where much of the damage occured due to
Stan (the hurricane). Forty two bridges were damaged and twelve completely
destroyed.

The road is of the familar twisty mountain type. As you drive along the
remaining half of the road you get views of 2000 foot drops down the side
of the mountain.

Luckily I was going slowly when the Landcruiser started screaming and
became uncontrollable. I was in a curve and quickly crossed over to the
wrong side of the road. I got the car stopped in the middle of the wrong
lane, no one was around. The car wouldn’t really move and it certainly
wouldn’t go in the direction I pointed it. I got out and noticed that the
left front tire as in a sharp left turn and the right front was in a
sharp right turn!

I crawled under the car and saw that the tie-rod steering ball joint on
the left side had broken. By manually repointing the left tire I was able
to pull off into a small village.

As you can imagine I had the whole (male) population of the village
helping and advising me on what to do. I bought 20 ft of bailing wire and
made a pretty good repair. Then I limped into the nearest big city, about
an hour drive. Cool place named Quetzaltenango.

I found an excellent old colonial style hotel near the city center and got
a room. Unfortuanately it was Sunday. So I waited out the night and went
looking for parts and a mechanic the next morning. It was easy to find the
mechanic and I found a Toyota dealer. Of course they didn’t have the part
so they ordered it from Guatemala City to arrive the next day.

That’s when I started getting bored. I was able to check Bentley into the
hotel and I had safe parking. All to the good, the biggest problem was
that the car was parked aways from the hotel and required staff assistance
to get at it. This arrangement made it difficult to explore around since I
couldn’t easily drop off Bentley when I needed to go someplace that didn’t
want him around.

I was sure that one of two things would happen, either the parts wouldn’t
show up the next day or they’d be the wrong parts. The next morning I went
to the toyota dealer and the parts had arrived. But they were not the
right ones. The dealer said he ordered and got the parts his catelog said
were correct so he couldn’t do any more.

I had wanted to get Toyota parts but I gave that up and after walking all
over the place I found an after market replacement. I had wanted to
replace both the left and right ball joints under the theory that they’d
seen similar numbers of potholes; however the store only had the left one.
I was happy though because that was all I really needed to get back on the
road.