Yesterday I took a driving safety course, required by the company I work for. It wasn't a bad experience. Good advice. Reminders like swerve to the right rather than the left into on-coming traffic and don't drive if you can't see past the hood of your car. In Guatemala the rule is "butts on the ground," which means when riding in the back of a pick-up truck down the highway at 75 miles per hour, don't stand.
It's dangerous, of course, and that's why it's illegal to do it in the United States. But there's no doubt you can get an excellent view of everything this way.
There are the street views, so different from the way things look in the U.S.
And there's the countryside, which has a beauty all its own.
We seem much more concerned about our personal safety here than they are there. I can only speculate on why this is. Perhaps the view there is more fatalistic. Again, I never saw a Guatemalan wearing a seatbelt, and it was very common to see a family of four on a single motorcycle. I asked my driver whether there were a lot of fatalities on the roads and he said yes, it was a big problem. So why, I wondered, didn't people wear seatbelts? His response was a shoulder shrug and a smile. "Es lo que es," he said. It is what it is.
And there's the countryside, which has a beauty all its own.
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