Laurie Weed's Portfolio  Travel Writing  Central America Index

November - December 2005, Guatemala on the Gringo Trail

Guatemala:  A Subjective Best-Of List:

 - Peering into the sulfurous mouth of Pacaya, one of Guatesmala’s 3 live volcanoes.

 - Hiking from San Pedro out to La Finca (the Ranch) and spending the day lazing at Lake Atitlan on a private, palapa-covered dock.

 - Eating hot pupusas (flat bread fried around local cheese, then smothered in mashed avocado and chile sauce) at the street stalls, followed by a cup of azole (sp?), a sweet, warm drink made from maize that tastes like runny corn pudding. Yum!

 - Swimming in the brilliant green pools at Semuc Champey, surrounded by pristine rainforest.

 - Admiring the hypnotically bright, intricately woven cloth made and worn by indigenous women in the highlands.

 - Traveling among Guatemala’s amazing variety of cultures, from diverse Mayan villages in the highlands to Garifuna-Creole settlements on the Caribbean coast.

 Guatemala on the Gringo Trail

I arrived about a week ago and have been making my way west from Guatemala City to San Pedro, a very small town on Lake Atitlan. I stopped along the way to check out the colonial city of Antigua (cute, but very touristy), visit the huge craft market at Chichicastenango, and climb Pacaya, an active volcano. Those who know me well will wonder what I was thinking (or drinking) with that last one, so let me just say it *sounded* like it would be a walk in the park.

It wasn't. Although Pacaya, one of Guatemala's four active volcanoes, is now a national park, supposedly you still have to go with a guide and a group due to the risk of meeting armed banditos on the trail. I don't know if that's really true or just a rumor created by the guides' association, but I decided it was worth $5 not to find out the hard way. The uphill part of the 7km hike almost wrecked me, and *then* we got to the volcano. The thing about volcanoes is, they're made entirely of volcanic rock and ash, so you're either clambering up very sharp edges or sinking and sliding in several feet of loose soot and rock - it's something like walking up a mountainside in fresh snow, only really, really dirty.

I chose to participate in this little adventure in the afternoon (because as you may know, I detest morning) and that meant by the time we got to the hardest part of the trail, it was very windy and quite dark up there inside the cloud layer. We passed several lava fields, created as recently as 2000, before I realized this could be miserable *and* dangerous -- woo-hoo! I almost gave up before reaching the top...particularly when the guide jogged way ahead to "make sure she's not too bubbly today." I finally got up to the ridge, blasted by hot, poisonous gasses for the last several feet. Amid all the sulfur and whatnot, I kept smelling burning rubber...and realized it was the scent of our shoes melting on the rocks. Yikes. After a quick peek into the mouth of the beast, where molten lava was churning away less than 10 meters from where I stood, I hot-footed it (quite literally) back into the chilly cloud layer. Getting down the volcano was sort of like sandboarding (without a board), or being buried up to the waist in soot and ash. I got back into town around 8 p.m., just in time for the nightly water outage -- therefore no shower....sigh. But apparently, you can walk into any restaurant here and sit down and order a meal while looking like a chimney sweep, and no one will bat an eyelash.

Fully recovered after a few lazy days here at lake, I'm starting Spanish lessons this afternoon with the goal of improving my language skills enough to jump off the tourist track within the next few weeks. Now, I've tried to learn Spanish a couple of times in the past, and what usually happens is that I get so confused, I lose the ability to communicate in *any* language. However, with at least 4 months ahead of me in Latin America, I'm hoping I can make a breakthrough this time. Wish me luck.

San Pedro de Laguna, Lake Atitlan

After Antigua, I headed out to Lake Atitlan as planned. Damage reports from Tropical Storm Stan varied from “minimal damage” to “totally destroyed.” Of course, the truth was somewhere in between. Two months post-Stan, most places had returned to business as usual. San Pedro, the hub of the backpacker circuit, was unaffected, although two villages close by (Santiago and San Marcos) suffered devastating losses of property and lives. San Pedro’s cheap and reputable language schools are all the rage—and exactly what I was after. Oddly, Spanish is not the first language spoken here. The natives speak X’utujil (say “Sue too heel”), a nearly extinct Mayan dialect that sounds like a series of tongue clicks and throat-clearings.

I signed up for classes at San Pedro Spanish School, along with a week of homestay, supposedly with a local family. A friend from New Orleans (now living temporarily in Houston), took a holiday to join me and we stayed in San Pedro for two weeks, having a lot fun and squeezing in a Spanish lesson here and there. Our homestay was really just a rented house for students, run by a X’utujil woman named Rosa. She was a fantastic cook, and conscientious about catering to the vegetarianas even though it was clearly cramping her style. I was content eating beans, eggs, tortillas and plantains, but one night she brought us all a special treat -- a steaming heap of fresh tamales in cornhusk wrappers. But they’re not vegetarian, she admitted, frowning…they have a little bit of chicken inside. Would that be all right? Would I like to try one? Not wanting to hurt her feelings, and hoping the odds of getting sick from a tiny bit of steamed chicken were slim (I do eat chicken occasionally at home, just not on the road), I told her I would love to taste her tamales. I had it in my mouth before it occurred to me we hadn’t discussed which part of the chicken was involved. Guatemalans make their tamales from leftover scraps, and inside this one was slimy wad of semi-raw chicken fat. That was the last time I made an exception to the no-chicken rule.

San Pedro is a traveler’s “scene,” and within a few days, Lanay and I knew everybody in town. Shortly after arriving, I met Colin, a roving linguist and professional bon vivant who would become my adventure partner throughout Guatemala and into Honduras.

On the Road

After two weeks, the scene’s charm had worn thin and we hit the road. Colin and I accompanied Lanay back to the airport before traveling on to parts unknown. Perhaps this is a good time to mention that the first night we all hung out together in San Pedro, right after suggesting we travel on in tandem, Colin lit me on fire by knocking a live hookah coal into my lap. It was an accident, but definitely an indicator of his knack for getting into (and sometimes out of) all kinds of trouble. Perhaps one day I’ll add a full chapter to this memoir called “Travels with Colin,” but for now I’ll just throw in a few choice tidbits. Overall, he was an excellent travel partner and since he picked up Spanish in a matter of days, I was usually happy to let him play interpreter—knowing the chicken bus wouldn’t wait while I struggled to put together a complex question using only three verbs.

From Guatemala City, we continued north by bus for a few hours and then had to transfer again, managing to locate the correct mini-van just as it was departing. The ticket-taker threw the passenger door open to reveal a vehicle already stuffed with 15 people. There were no more seats, but he prodded me in anyway, pointing to a short piece of two-by-four wedged between the rear bench and the side of the van. Brandishing my ticket, I started to tell him (in terrible Spanish) that I paid for a seat and couldn’t—wouldn’t—spend the next two hours balancing on a plank one butt cheek at a time. As I stammered, the driver revved the engine and honked a final warning to board or get out of the way. Ever helpful, Colin jumped in and glibly announced to the entire van (in perfect Spanish) that I could not possibly sit there, couldn’t they see I was much too fat? Mortified, I turned on him and protested his methods…but he did get me into a seat.

The van barreled off, stopping frequently along the mountain road to pick up more passengers. By the time we reached our destination, we counted 23 people (including two babies) packed inside—surely a matter for Guinness World Records. My hard-won seat was shared with a heavily pregnant Mayan woman holding two more kids, and Colin had several local rancheros draped across his shoulders and lap, one of whom appeared to have a serious skin condition.

Semuc Champey

It was dark when the van finally spit us out at a traveler’s lodge in Lanquin. We claimed the last available beds, so anyone who arrived after us would be swinging from the hammocks strung outside the bar. El Retiro Lodge, set on a lush hillside leading down to a river, is a collection of cheap, charming bamboo huts and tree houses, unfortunately managed by grumpy Euro-trash. In the morning, we would discover that half of San Pedro was already there, like us, to visit nearby Semuc Champey National Park, where a natural limestone bridge has divided the river into a stunning series of clear, aquamarine pools connected by waterfalls. Since El Retiro runs a convenient daily tour to the park, we resigned ourselves to the Gringo Trail once more.

The tour included entrance to a newly discovered cave just outside the park, which must have been discovered by divers, as it’s mostly underwater. Wading through pitch-black caverns in waist-high icy water was one thing, but halfway in the water got much deeper. I can barely swim in broad daylight using both hands, so swimming inside a mountain in dark, deep pools while holding a candle aloft was a rather terrifying prospect. We swam for at least an hour, though I actually have no idea how deep or long the pools were—I was too focused on not drowning. Luckily, some kind Samaritan (no, not Colin—he was too busy jumping off things and instigating false snake warnings) took my candle and swam with me.

 Just when I thought it couldn’t get worse (never a good assumption), we came to a shallow cavern that appeared to be a dead end. Our guide grinned and pointed to an eighteen-inch hole in the cave floor, where the water rushed down through the rock wall and crashed into another pool somewhere below us. Squeezing into a rock in order to be shot out the other side by a waterfall is not the sort of thing I normally do for fun, but it seemed marginally safer than trying to swim back alone in the dark. Obviously, I survived; the waterfall only drops about ten feet. Still, it’s the kind of activity that explains why travel insurance doesn’t actually cover anything if you venture outside your hotel.

The Jungle Chicken Tour

After a couple of days of splashing around in the park, we traveled by truck to Lago Isabel, the largest lake in Guatemala. There, three of us hired a guide to take us into the delta where Rio Polochic meets the lake, a wildlife refuge reportedly teeming with rare birds and howler monkeys. The delta, Guatemala’s second-largest largest wetlands, is impressive. Maybe it was just the threatening black sky and pelting rain, but it looked to me like the end of the world. Although we didn’t see them, we could hear the eerie cries of howlers in the distance, and our canoe floated silently past several enormous bird nesting sites. Unfortunately, our ersatz guide was really just an enterprising boat owner who didn’t know much about the local wildlife. He categorized every bird we saw (at least 40 varieties) as either a parrot, a water bird, or a “jungle chicken.” When I pointed out a crocodile, submerged to the eyes near the shore, our brave leader paddled nimbly in the other direction.

Rio Dulce to the Caribbean Coast

Back on the chicken bus with all of our gear, we stopped off at Finca El Paraiso (The Paradise Ranch), where you can take a short walk through the jungle to an amazing natural hot spring. Even the waterfalls flow hot, dropping 12 meters into a clear, deep pool. Colin and I liked it so much that we doubled back there the next morning. Since it was my birthday, we then hopped off the backpacker circuit and splurged $10 each to sleep at a yacht club (really) on Guatemala’s Riviera, the Rio Dulce. A tropical storm broke loose that night, but we were dry and cozy in the lap of luxury, with a spacious cabana to ourselves and sailors at our beck and call… (OK, I made that last part up.)

When the sun came out again, we caught a boat downriver to the Caribbean coast. Our last stop in Guatemala was Livingston, a colorful Garifuna settlement that happened to be celebrating something or other that night. We were content to sit out the fiesta on a covered veranda, sipping coco locos and watching the torrential rain turn streets into canals. It seemed a fitting farewell to Guatemala. In the morning, we would ferry to Puerto Barrios, and then figure out how to get into Honduras.

 To be continued.

***

 © 2005, Laurie Weed. All Rights Reserved.