A long way down!

The Gran Sueño Hotel in San Pedro La Laguna, eight o'clock in the morning.

I'm barely awake after a night that was finally neither too hot nor too cold – and quiet, too! There is not a whole lot of traffic here, especially this early in the morning.

Now, the relative silence is broken by music: clear voices sing what sounds like a hymn, in parts, but without accompaniment. How strange this seems on a Monday morning, loud enough for the whole town to hear! It must be coming from the Pentecostal Church a bit up the hill. Yesterday afternoon, when we went for a walk to get our bearings in our new surroundings after we arrived from Antigua, we heard Christmas carols from the same direction.

It should not really surprise me to hear hymns on a working day: Guatemalans are very religious people. This is evident not only in the many churches, but also in many ways in everyday life. Quotes from the bible are written on bill boards and house walls, and the tuk tuks – little three wheeled vehicles that serve as taxis in many towns and cities – have inscriptions like 'Jesu Christo', or 'Jehova es mi pastor' written across their windshields.



      Tuk tuks, as here in Flores, are an important mode
of transportation for locals and tourists



A shuttle picked us up at our hotel, the Casa Luna in Antigua yesterday morning around eight, and dropped us off here in San Pedro on Lake Atitlan in the highlands of Guatemala about five hours later.

While we travelled on a very good highway for much of the way things changed dramatically for the last thirty kilometres, which took about an hour although it was all downhill. It was hair raising, nerve wracking, and sometimes downright scary - but it was awesome!

Once we had turned off the highway we started the steep descent to San Pedro. We needed to get down to the lake, at 1500 m altitude, from 2200 m up top.

The road, still paved, but very narrow, was worse than the ripio we had encountered on the Rta. 40 in Argentina, with huge, sometimes quite deep holes. A few times the damage from the landslides earlier this summer was still visible, too; the road had been washed out and was only marginally repaired. The driver, whose skills I greatly admire, manoeuvred his vehicle around the holes, not an easy task when there could be oncoming traffic. Even worse were the tight, tight curves that hardly had enough room to turn, sometimes very close to the precipice. He honked his horn when a curve was particularly difficult to oversee, and a few times I gasped when we managed just in time to slip back into our lane when an oncoming vehicle appeared suddenly. To our right was the mountain, to our left the very steep grade.

During all this, however, we had a beautiful view of the lake and some of the volcanoes that ring it. Coffee plants with still green clusters of berries were growing on the steep hills, dusty like the many flowers. Tuk tuks were just as much part of the traffic as pedestrians, men, women and children carrying things up and down the hill, most notably firewood in big stacks. They were bent low under the heavy loads. The women often carry loads on their heads, but for carrying firewood they, like the men, wear a sling around their forehead that holds the load on their backs. They are so small, the Mayan people! Rarely there is a man as tall as I am, and women often don't reach much higher than my chest. Here, as in Antigua, many still wear their traditional dress, colourful skirts and blouses they have woven themselves, with an apron over top. I've heard many of them lead conversations in Maya languages. Twenty-one of them are spoken in Guatemala.

I was quite relieved when we had finally arrived at the bottom, in the little town of San Juan. Not much longer, and the shuttle stopped at the Gran Sueño hotel in San Pedro, a nice, clean place not far from the lake and downtown. Here, we'll stay until Wednesday at least, possibly until we return to Antigua on Saturday, unless we decide to move on to one of the other lake communities for the second half of the week.



At the dock in San Pedro



From Flores to Antigua

Antigua, city "under the volcano"

Very little street noise, except for a few early-morning cars; hardly a barking dog, but three different church bells tolling the hour – we have arrived in Guatemala's former capital, the beautiful old city of Antigua.

Worlds seem to lie between the lush jungle around Flores and the just as tropical, but much drier highlands we reached after a long day of bus travel on Thursday.

At about 10 in the morning we saw our backpacks disappear in the belly of a “Linea Solada” bus and soon were on our way. This bus was a big improvement over the last one we took from Chetumal to Flores. Then, we were surprised to find a 25 passenger Mitsubishi van of uncertain age instead of the comfortable bus we had expected. It was a hot day, and there was no air condition, though fortunately we were only thirteen passengers so that almost everyone had a seat to themselves. Still, we were very glad when the doors of the van opened after almost nine hours of travel, and we were released from the sauna-like conditions.



Our "luxury bus" from Chetumal to Flores



In contrast, a nice, modern bus expected us this time, with reclining seats, cool air streaming from the overhead vents: this time the eight or nine hours of travel would be a breeze – or so we thought.

The road south climbed steadily, but at first very slowly through beautiful, lush countryside. In Guatemala, just as in Belize, there is so much more agricultural activity than in the part of Mexico we passed through. Sugar cane and papaya orchards, corn fields planted on slopes that seemed too steep for machinery, beans and pastures – it seems as if every available space is used to produce food. We saw very few big fields, and just as little farm machinery.

Every house, no matter how small and poor, has a garden, not only to produce the corn, beans and squash that form the staple food, but full of flowers, too: bougainvillea and roses, calla lilies and a multitude of others I don't know, a profusion of yellow and lavender, pink and red, flaming orange and white.

After about an hour we entered a strange landscape. Forested, cone-shaped hills, first on the periphery of my field of vision, moved ever closer and soon were shoulder to shoulder. The road got steeper, the bus slower, and we climbed steadily. Here, it looked more like jungle again, and houses and villages were a bit further apart.

Not too long, and we left the hilly country behind. Now, pastures stretched far to the left and right, dotted with herds of white, cream coloured and brown Brahma cattle. Their ears are long, drooping, and strangely fleshy, and with their melancholy eyes and long faces they remind me of Spanish noblemen. Often they are so thin that I can almost count their ribs driving by, just like many of the small horses. Why is this? They seem to have enough to eat. Are they plagued by parasites?

At three o'clock we stopped for a bathroom break and chance to buy something to eat and drink at a restaurant not so far from Rio Dulce, the starting or ending point for river cruises to the former slave town of Livingston. This is supposed to be a beautiful trip, according to the “Lonely Planet”.

The Lonely Planet's assessment of our destination, Guatemala City, or “Guate”, as it is called here,was much less favourable: it sounded as if it was to be avoided unless one absolutely had to connect to bus or plane there. While we didn't plan to be there for long we had thought we'd spend a night before we moved on to the highlands. We don't have a set schedule, however, and it's nice to be flexible. On our last day in Flores we decided to instead go on to Antigua, only an hour further, and find a hotel there.

Meanwhile the road climbed again, this time quite steep, hugging the hillside. It felt as if we were driving disconcertingly close to the precipice. The bus, though obviously straining to manage the incline, kept passing other buses and trucks, tanker trucks and others filled with cattle and oranges and all kinds of other produce. Solid lines didn't pose a hindrance, and I was thankful to sit so far in the back: while I had a good view of the abyss beside me I at least couldn't see what was ahead.

The landscape, meanwhile, had changed. It had slowly become drier, and accordingly trees often had smaller leaves, and some looked almost thorny. Cacti, too, appeared between the trees, huge club-like upright plants with strangely white tips. Still there were orange, papaya and banana trees and the ever-present coconut palms.

In the early afternoon already we had started to notice how effective the air conditioning system of the bus was, and as the day progressed people started to put on more and more clothes. Some of the more experienced native travellers had brought warm jackets and shawls, some even blankets. I was wearing bermuda shorts and sandals and a sleeveless blouse, but had at least brought my rain jacket. If someone had asked us towards the end of the trip if we'd rather have our Turismo van from the last trip back, the answer might not have been so clear anymore: we were all freezing.

It was slowly getting dark, and Venus appeared in the sky, followed by more and more stars. We were nearing our destination. We were so late that there was no way we'd catch the last bus to Antigua. Guate didn't look very inviting in the dark – but then, outskirts of big cities rarely do, no matter where they are. The surroundings of bus terminals in Argentina and Chile didn't look much different, and neither do those of train stations in Germany. But what would we find at the bus station? Would there be dubious characters we would have to fight off, trying to lure us into some adventure?

No. To our relief we found that, along with the prices listed for different bus destinations, there was also a set rate for taxis to Antigua, 225 Quetzal, which is about $30. A bus company clerk sent us to a taxi driver, the bags were stowed in the back with a bit of shoving and pushing, and we were on our way again. It was almost 7:30 by now. What we saw of Guate now could have been a modern city in Canada: several McDonald's (the first two-story I ever saw among them), Pizza Hut, Domino Pizza, glistening malls and the streets full of cars: Toyota and Hyundai, Chevrolet and Renault, even BMW and Mercedes. Was this the same city we had entered by bus on the other side?

After about an hour we reached Antigua. Cobble-stone grid-line streets, often one-way, houses presenting closed fronts, lots of people, locals as well as tourists walking – we had arrived at the “one must-see destination in Guatemala” (Lonely Planet). Our taxi driver was not very familiar with the city and had to ask three times for the address of the hotel we had chosen, again from the Lonely Planet. When we knocked on the door we found out that it was full. We had unloaded our backpacks already, but since we had passed a lot of hotels in the vicinity we sent the taxi driver on his way and went looking for a different accomodation on foot. Kurt used the cast-iron knocker on a dark wooden door not far away, and we were let into the spacious courtyard of the Hotel Posadita. Yes, they had two rooms for us – and the rooms were beautiful! They were also expensive by Central American standards, but we didn't care: all we wanted to do was cast anchor at a safe place for the night.

No rest yet, however: we were told that we had to pay for the rooms in advance – but not here. The hotel's owner also owned another, bigger hotel in Antigua, and payment had to be made there. We just dropped our bags – I still in shorts and rain jacket – and waited for a courtesy shuttle to take us to the |Hotel Don Rodrigo La Antigua. By now we were almost numb with fatigue, and very hungry: all we had eaten since breakfast was bananas and peanuts.

Still we couldn't help but notice the beauty of the place, the antique furniture and tasteful decoration. We paid, and decided to eat right there at the restaurant. We looked a bit out of place among the elegant diners in our travel-worn clothing, but we were served with competence, and the food was delicious. Maybe if we had been a bit more alert we might have chosen another beverage than the – admittedly very good – Chilean red, which, at 230 Quetzal, cost half as much as our meal.

The shuttle drove us back to our own hotel. We would take time to inspect the beautiful surroundings more closely in the morning.



Courtyard at Hotel Posadita



Our room at the Hotel Posadita

An impression from Tikal

Night has fallen in Flores, Guatemala, where we have spent the last couple of days. Traffic noises finally have almost disappeared, and the excited voices of children and young men swimming and diving in the dark in Lake Peten right across the road from the hotel have fallen silent now, too. While I ate Whitefish from the lake for supper tonight I have no idea what might be found in nightly diving excursions in this beautiful lake.

There are many impressions from Guatemala, and also from our bus trip across Belize two days ago, but I'm tired after getting up at four this morning for a tour of the Maya site at Tikal.

A glimpse of Tikal

Musings from the end of the road

A gem among the garbage

Plancher Beach, about 20 km north of Malahual, Saturday afternoon

This should be the most romantic place to write: I'm sitting under a palm tree, its fronds interwoven with those of its neighbour, white sand forming a thin crust on my tanned feet and legs, the surf a constant ebb and flow in the background.

It would be the most romantic place indeed if there weren't some alarming accoutrements: the ruins of a house on the beach right beside me, wires and pieces of rusty, broken mortar, a few small piles of smoldering garbage, so close that the acrid smell fills my nostrils, the long stretch of beach – free of people, admittedly, but no more attractive because of it – lined with a seam of seaweed that's the ideal resting place for all kinds of refuse. Medicine and pop bottles, milk crates and plastic containers, light bulbs and things I'd rather not stoop down and investigate too closely happily share space with shoes bleached from long travels in sea water: on our half-hour walk along the beach I could have assembled at least five pairs, though they wouldn't necessarily have been matching.

Where am I? I am at the end of the road – literally. This place, Mahahual (or Majahual), is the last beach where we could stop on the way to Chetumal, and our hostess in Tulum had suggested we'd go there if we wanted to enjoy the ocean one more time. We drove most of the day yesterday, even though the distance was not so great, only about 180 km from Chichen Itza. Most of the time seemingly impenetrable jungle was on both sides of the road, a sea of green leaves and vines dotted with yellow, red and pink blossoms.

We stopped once in Tepich, a small Mayan town along the way, looking for a supermercado, but finding only mini-mercados, places where you can buy the very essentials, but often not even fruit (though most often several kinds of beer). We were looking for bread (which we found) and cheese (which we didn't), water and, yes, some cold Corona or Sol, hoping for a few bananas or avocados (in vain). Gerda and I attracted a lot of attention when we walked down the street a bit to check out a second mini-mercado: two women of considerable size and such light skin. The Maya are a very short people, and I have seen women who reached no higher than my chest, very few men are as tall as I am. Everybody greeted us with a friendly smile, and especially the women and children are always happy to interact, even without many words.

Looking for a spot to eat our meal we had some trouble to find a place to stop: no picnic areas at all, no open places on the side of the road. We decided on a small dirt road disappearing in the trees. It led to a few beehives and a field of newly planted bushes that looked like something to be cultivated, but which we could not identify.

As everywhere garbage of all manner was strewn on the road and in the surrounding area: people don't even consider to pick up the leftovers of their meals and take them with them. This is probably my biggest, or rather the only big complaint I have so far. It didn't smell like garbage, however, but the sweet scent of flowers filled the air, and I counted six different kinds of butterflies, among them two spectacular specimens, one big and orange, the colour of calendula, the other dark grey with a green or khaki pattern, depending on where it came to rest – perfect camouflage.

We turned off the main highway at a town called Cafetal and drove for about fifty kilometres through swampy no-man's land. Strange little trees as far as the eye could see, their roots growing a couple of feet out of the water so that the trees looked as if they walked on stilts. To me, it felt like crocodile habitat, and I briefly imagined what it might have been like to walk through this swamp when there was no paved road yet. Traffic was very sparse, and when we finally arrived at Mahahual we were quite surprised: it looked like a work in progress, with more hovels and half-finished hotels and houses - many of them long since abandoned - than finished and attractive places to stay. There were lots of advertisements for beach front lots, some newer, some almost overgrown by trees and hardly readable. Which boom was responsible for this mess? When had all this been conceived, and when would it ever come to fruition?

The beach, too, lacks the Carribean charm of the one at Tulum. It is a lot narrower and by far not as beautiful. We drove along the beach and finally decided on the Cabanas del Doctor for our temporary living quarters. The palapa is comfortable, nice and cool during the night and right across from the beach: the surf sings me to sleep at night, and I have to walk not fifty steps until I can let the waves lick my feet.




Sunrise at Malahual



                                            ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Meanwhile it is Sunday night, we are in Chetumal, very close to the border to Belize, and will take the bus to Flores, Guatemala, tomorrow morning at seven. What will we see on the way, and what will expect us there?

Snorkeling

Early morning at the Hotel Dolores Alba, about five kilometres from Chichen Itza.

The sun has been up since six, and night sounds have been replaced by bird noise. The birds are not so easy to spot, however: the dense vegetation provides good cover.

We have spent the last day and a half here, and visited Chichen Itza three times. The first afternoon we drove over to find out if we needed to pre-book a guide for the next morning, and were told that we could go in for free since there was only an hour left. This was nice; it gave us an opportunity to walk through most of the site and get a feel for it.

The guided tour yesterday morning was very worth while, and we learned a lot. More about that at a later time, hopefully.

A special experience was the light show we watched at the site the first night. It was very well done, and we heard about things like the creation myth of the Maya and the history of Chichen Itza.

We were seated right across from the biggest temple, the castillio, many of the other buildings in our field of view, arranged around a huge open field. The light lifted each building out of the darkness in turn, but as much as this human-created splendour I was struck by the beauty of the star-filled sky that stretched above. Little remained of the artificial light that dimmed the sky around the hotel. The triangular face of Taurus appeared over the horizon, the Perseids a smudge above, and suddenly a big meteor streaked along the southern sky.

This was a moving experience for me, just like the one I had three days ago when we were still at the Posada los Mapaches:

We went to Akumal, a lagoon about 25 km north of Tulum, where snorkeling is supposed to be great.

I had never done this before, and while I really wanted to try it out was a bit apprehensive if I'd be able to. I was quite glad to hear that I wouldn't need the fins, and once I had figured out that the mouth piece goes all the way into the mouth, once I had practiced breathing deeply through my mouth only and to forget all about my nose, I was okay. The lagoon with its quite clear, very calm warm water was a perfect place to do this for the first time.

As soon as I put my head down I suddenly was in a different world, a world I knew nothing about. The landscape above the water had no consequence for what I saw now. Why is it that, although I knew about it in theory, I couldn't have imagined that rocks jutting out of the water, densely overgrown with vegetation, would continue under water, would be part of a landscape that was like nothing I had ever seen before?

Fish, big and small, swam by me unconcerned about my presence. The biggest, about half a meter in length, were of a deep marine blue, edged with silver, sometimes a bit of yellow; others, only slightly smaller, had the opposite colour composition. Swarms of smaller, black-and-white or yellow-and-black striped fish parted when I slowly made my way through them, only to close again behind me. Sunlight painted changing patterns on the rocks that sometimes were quite close to the surface so that I had to watch not to scrape my knees, with a rich growth of algae which the fish were grazing, intent on what they were doing, seemingly not interfering with each other at all.

I made my way along the side of the lagoon, gazed into deep crevices and caves without feeling the slightest desire to enter them: the dim twilight at their entrance would soon fade into ever growing darkness. No, their mysteries were there to be explored by more adventurous souls than me! I didn't see the famous sea turtles that were supposed to be feeding here, too, but even without them my life was enriched by this glimpse into a life I would never be part of.

Musings from Posada los Mapaches

Eleven pm, Posada Los Mapaches, Tulum, Mexico

It has been dark for hours – just as long, in fact, as if I were at home. This, however, is where the similarity ends.

I'm sitting in the walled yard of the Posada los Mapaches, wearing shorts and a short-sleeved blouse. A sudden breeze stirs the palm fronds and flamboyan  leaves above me, but when I look up, almost expecting another sudden downpour like this morning to blow in, I see stars and the moon. A few days past full, it is shrinking not on its right side like it would be at home but on top, resting on its rounded bottom in the velvet sky. Night insects – cicadas? - have been chirping softly but without interruption since night fell a little after five. For some reason my mind concentrates more on them than on the traffic noise from the highway, the only thing that mars this idyllic setting a little. Mosquitoes, claimed to be quite bad by some of the people who reviewed this hostel on Hostelworld, are no problem at all, certainly nothing even close to what we experienced in Alberta this summer.

It is hard to believe that we arrived only yesterday evening – winter and cold and the life at home are already far, far away.

After a five-and-a-half hour flight from Calgary we landed in Cancun at 3:30 yesterday afternoon, picked up our car and made our way to Tulum along the coastal Highway, 307. Traffic was steady, but not excessive at first, and thinned out more and more after Playa del Carmen. Driving seems to be less crazy than in Argentina, a fact none of us laments.

When I looked for rooms in Tulum on the internet I fell in love with this place: Mayan style huts right across from the entrance to the Tulum ruins, about two kilometers north of Tulum. There is only one private room, which my brother-in-law Kurt and sister-in-law Gerda are using, and four dorm-style rooms for four people each, with bunk beds, one of which we share with a guy from Spain. The bathrooms are shared, but everything is clean, and the owners are very friendly. Chelo, a woman of around sixty, is the owner/manager, together with her two sons. She greeted us with a big hug when we met her this morning.

We decided to spend the day at the beach, and visit the ruins in the afternoon, but we woke up to dark skies, the humid air pregnant with rain, and sure enough, breakfast was barely over when the skies opened. It didn't last very long, however, and by about ten-thirty we were on our way to the beach. Already tour busses and tourists were everywhere – until we had passed the entrance to the ruins, and the surrounding market where merchants offered all kinds of more or less authentic Mayan art and crafts.

We managed to ignore their offers and beckoning and kept walking, and soon we had reached the beach – almost free of people at this time. We spread our towels in the shade of some palm trees, making sure that we didn't come to sit right under the coconuts. Supposedly more people are killed each year by falling coconuts than by sharks ...

The beach is every bit as beautiful as the descriptions we read: powder-fine white sand, no rocks, no shells, the ocean a deep blue-green in the distance, but the most vivid turquoise close to the beach, until it starts to pick up that powdery sand and looks like cafe con leche – mucha leche.

It is late, after midnight, the cicadas are still singing, and the traffic noise has ebbed a bit. I better go to bed like the rest of the group: tomorrow is another day!

Time to leave

Rainy day in November

A week ago I returned to the parklands of central Alberta, left behind – as always with a tinge of sadness- beach and forest, oyster shells and starfish, colourful foliage and colourful meals, putting, ferry by ferry, plane by plane, distance between myself and the island.

We were granted another whole week of decent fall weather, nights colder than they had been, down to -12 or -14, day temperatures hovering around the freezing mark, trees now all bare, grass tan and brown. Yesterday it felt like Chinook weather and got all the way up to +11, which made digging up the leeks a pleasurable task. There have been other years, years when I had to use all my force (and the digging fork’s leverage) to get this work done, hard frost having arrived much earlier, catching me unprepared.

Tonight I woke to the quiet whisper of rain on the metal roof – a nice sound, soothing, putting me right back to sleep. The rain continued, sometimes drizzle, sometimes pattering drops, for most of the morning, let up around noon, and returned in the middle of the afternoon. 

We drove for an hour to attend a going-away party for a German harvest helper, and on the way already the drops on the wind shield suddenly flattened out, clung and slid down reluctantly: this was a different kind of moisture. Fields on the side of the road showed a hint of white, and by the time we reached our destination it was snowing. When we left, sometime after nine o'clock, road conditions were decidedly poor, snow accumulating on the slippery highway, gravel roads softened by the rain and now slick with slush. I was glad to be home after a much longer drive than normal.

Sure enough, Environment Canada had caught on, too, as I found out when I looked at the weather forecast after our return:

Weather warning in effect.

Tonight

Periods of snow ending before morning then cloudy with 30 percent chance of flurries. Amount 5 cm. Wind becoming north 20 km/h after midnight. Low minus 5.

It is time to leave, and it seems we are leaving not a day too soon.

Tomorrow we will embark on another adventure. This time we are going to explore the Mayan ruins in southern Mexico and Guatemala, and the natural beauty of Costa Rica. My musings, then, will once again come from places 'away from the farm', and I will try and update them regularly.

Ever since I started reading adventure stories as a child I dreamed of the jungle and its mysteries. I can hardly believe that this dream is about to come true! 

Musings from a place by the sea

I have exchanged the farm for a small island retreat this week, as I have done at this time of year for the last four years. It is a place where the busy world seems to stand still for a while, where the mind comes to rest and thoughts turn inward. People come here to be nourished in body and soul, to meditate and write and simply 'be'. Meals are delicious, exclusively vegetarian, and during this week they are taken in silence to honour the needs of the participants of a silent meditation workshop. It is, as some tell me, a place for 'hippies', and most certainly as different from my usual environment as it can be.

                                          ~~~~~~~~~~~~

When I wake up this morning it is barely light, but from my window high up in Bluff House I can see that the tide is very low. It is a special gift when this doesn’t happen during the night, and I put on my jacket and rubber boots and walk down to the beach.

Not even the geese are awake yet, and the faint glow from the east that turns the smooth ocean into a sheet of muted light is hardly enough to see where I put my feet. I walk along the tide line, small piles of seaweed dropped haphazardly along its course by the receding water. In a little while the geese will be here, tousling the piles with their beaks, looking for food. So far it is very quiet. Only the regular heart beat of the ocean is keeping me company, small waves moving in, spending themselves with a little hiss on the shore, leaving only a trace of foam that will soon be gone.

With the growing light the world around me is waking up. A short unmelodious call makes me look up: my old friend, the heron, flapping overhead, neck curved and feet outstretched. He lands on one of the big rocks jutting out of the water during low tide.

Next are the geese, appearing out of nowhere, or so it seems: suddenly twenty or more of them are walking along the beach talking to each other in low voices. Yesterday afternoon they were gathered for a nap, all of them standing on one leg, head tucked under their wings.

It will be a little while longer until the bald eagle couple will appear. Yesterday morning I watched them glide overhead before they came to roost on one of the big evergreen trees along the beach. I’m always surprised that such big majestic birds can have such meek, high voices. The hawks that kept me company at home during harvest time sound much more sure of themselves. But maybe they don’t need big voices, maybe their size is sufficient to ensure their status at the top of the bird hierarchy. 

This place by the sea is once again folding me into its arms, nourishing me as it has done since I first came here.