#engine transplant

I'm on a bus ride from Guatemala City to Quetzeltanango (known also as Xela) about 200kms to the northwest. I'm on this bus because the bike is again broken. C has gone ahead and I hope to find him in Xela. Yesterday I put me and the bike on a pickup truck from Coban in the middle of Guatemala, on a 4 hour trip SW to Guat City. This after on Saturday on wet and greasy roads with several drops of the bike, with slow-motion slides down the asphalt, the gear lever came clean off and the front sprocket, which transfers power from the engine to the chain, dropped out and onto the road. It's not unreasonable to think that the repeated drops onto the gear lever precipitated this calamity. But there's more. Always more it seems. The gears had been periodically crashing, dropping out of gear under engine braking and having to be kicked back up into gear with a sharp flick of the left toe, indicating more serious problems with the gearbox. Three kind men from the electrical company stopped in their works pickup truck to help us out, as I stood dejected and a bit shaken after the third slide. While I mentally ticked over and acted like a spare part, C arranged with them that we should put my bike on the back of their truck and they would take us back to our last stopping point, Coban. That day we had been riding north for the city of Flores, with its nearby Mayan ruins at Tikal, set amid rainforest with howler monkeys and thick mists. Another set of ruins I haven't seen and probably won't have an opportunity to visit on this trip. Plenty more Mayans in the sea or something. Anyways. Shit. I'm digressing and writing boring dirge. So. Enter. FRITZ KLIMOWICZ!! Best mechanic in Central America, champion motocross rider in his day, and extremely nice man. I took the bike to his workshop in Guatemala city after giving money to men from Coban with a pickup truck. The problem is more than sprocket-deep. The gears are worn and this poses a dramatic hazard and I think I'm lucky not to have had the engine pretty much explode while in a steep corner. Fritz *just happens* to have a spare-parts bike just like mine and with an identical engine. No shit. He is now REPLACING THE ENGINE!!! With a much newer one!! It'll cost me, but not a bank-breaking crunch. While at the workshop a great big Guatemalan bear of a man appeared. Frank. He speaks good English and translated between me and Fritz, sharing my worries about this or that aspect of the job. In a quiet moment he explained to me that Fritz's son had also been a Guatemalan champion motocross rider, but that he had been kidnapped and murdered, his charred body found in a burnt-out car. ... Frank will be sending a driver to collect me from Antigua when I return to Guat City. He's offered to look after the bike here in Guatemala should I wish, without charging a penny. Who knows. ¿Yo? No. So much time lost to broken things, be they my bike (mainly) or C's various extremities and bones. I'm on the bus and the main aroma is of burning brakes; a lot of descending of hills. Semuc Champey. A great canyon with tranquil pools which sit 75 meters above churning underground torrents of a large and powerful river. Photos to follow. Man the motorbike ride to get there was a fhuuuuge thrill. Adventurous terrain. So much I haven't mentioned or posted, and so much ground covered in the last week. The photos below are from this week. We rode past a landslide which happened last year killing 30 people. I've never seen anything like it. Millions of tons of earth, half a mountain which just fell in on itself. Sheer edges where a forest just ceases and meets a new chasm, a freshly minted cliff. Xela is the centre of NGO activity in Guatemala, and I am arriving now on the bus. I have no idea what the next few days will bring. It's rainy at the moment but I think we will be heading out on a big hike up a volcano. Enough from me. Thanks for reading.