MAYA-HO! _{Guatemala, Easter 2003}

Thursday 1 May 2003

We didn't realize until last night, when posters and events clicked together, that today would be MAY DAY - DAY OF THE WORKER - LABOR DAY - all over the world, except in the US where it was originated but was later moved and neutered. On the TV news today: all over the world, the usual rallies and demonstrations and riots. No good old American beach parties and beer blasts. Who's doing it wrong?

In Pana, fleets of tour shuttles and premier buses arrived and disgorged their cruise-ship crowds onto the streets, into the eateries, into the able clutches of vendors and innkeepers to further increase Pana's prosperity.

But we were told that Labor Day was no big occasion in Guatemala, that all we were seeing was the normal Thursday influx. Some of the newbies joined us on the road to Chichi and its huge market, but not that many.

On The Road To Chichi

So this morning we finished repacking, had a tasty fresh breakfast at Deli Cafe #1 right next door to the Regis (NOTE: our fave return eateries in Pana are Las Chinitas and Deli Cafe #1 and Sunset Cafe) and hopped onto the shuttle with a load of Swiss, German and Ozzie voyagers. I had the rising glaring at me for the whole ride, so all the pictures I took were shitty. Delete delete delete...

We slowly climbed the steep caldera face past ominous Sololá and immense terraced south-facing slopes and exotic farms, up to the armpit bus-stop junctions, and finally onto the (in)famous steep winding Chichi road.

Pana to Chichi is 37 km (23 mi); the ride lasted 1.5 hours. That's 16 mph in a new vehicle on modern paved highways. Consider the implications.

The road is festooned with signs warning of various dangers and crosses commemorating its victims. I suppose the landscape is wildly beautiful but the haze and glare diminished the effect for me. It was still a surprise to top a ridge and enter Chichi, a sky city bounded by steep ravines.

Into Chichicastenango

The shuttle van threaded a chaos of eroded streets and market frenzy (dumping the other passengers there to shop) and took us to our assigned hotel, the Chugüilá. It SUCKED big-time. THIS is mid-range? We were stuck into a far high dark musty smelly noisy ugly room where the waterpipes just gurgled (I had to wash my hands in the toilet tank). It was insecure, remote, unliveable. We thought: We're outa here!

We quickstepped around the block to our first choice, the delightful (as it turned out) 'budget' guesthouse Posada El Arco and found that one room was indeed available. Pedro the proprietor offered me a handtruck/dolly, which I hauled over market-busy rough-cobbled streets and up the Chugüilá's dusty fortress stairs, loaded our bags, and schlepped on back to the El Arco.

I took care to snag our prepaid voucher from the Chugüilá's unattended front desk - maybe we can get our money back from Toliman Excursions but even if we can't, the El Arco is worth the loss.

(Strange - except when we first arrived, the Chugüilá's open front desk remained unmanned, so we couldn't tell anyone at the time just how badly the place SUCKED. Maureen used to work for a county welfare department, and she said they would never have sent a client to anyplace as bad as the Chugüilá. It doesn't even qualify as a welfare hotel.)

In the El Arco, we decamped into our large patio room (complete with fireplace, TV, running water, and cleanliness, all lacking at the Chugüilá) and then signed in. Pedro brought out some cold beer, we all sat around for most of an hour chatting and joking. He suggested eateries pro and con, arranged for next-door home-cooked dinners (FABULOUS!) and offered us a van and driver to tour some remote sites we'd longed for but feared having to chicken-bus to.

Then Maureen and I went out back, to the beautiful garden-orchard which (on clear days) offers views north to the mountains, the Cuchumantanes. We sat in the shade of a huge avacado tree, avoided being hit by falling fruit, and chatted for another hour or so with Joe, a Guatemalan-American with an almost impenetrable Rhode Island accent who's a distant relative and current houseguest here. Birds chirped, lemons and figs ripened, breezes blew, avacadoes fell, we luxuriated.

Deeper Into Chichi

We headed into the market chaos. Yow. All of downtown Chichi is a seething frenzy of stalls and sellers, with a distinct lack of buyers. Maureen bought a nice shirt (too small) from a guy who'd seen us in Pana yesterday. She inquired about business; he said it was lousy, there were few tourists and they just weren't buying anything. Everything mostly looked like 100 times of what we've already seen. Hasn't anyone here ever heard of SUPPLY AND DEMAND?

We cautiously entered (by the side door) the famous Iglesia Santo Tomás (church) where Mayan and Roman rituals merge. An incense bonfire smoldered on the front steps, fanned by censor-waving devotees. Inside, clusters of candles burned all over the walls and floors, commemorating Mayan chiefs buried there. Rose petals were strewn everywhere. No stations of the cross were visible, just dark devotionals. In the nave, a committee at a table oversaw the basilica, while a technician pumped local radio music into the sound system. Incense smoke blew in through the front doors (which may be used only by elders of the Cofradias, the Brotherhoods). We've never seen a church like this.

We had a tasty and sanitary lunch in Chichi's commercial heart at Villa de Los Cofrades #2, poked around the mercado some more. I bought another 'antique' (maybe) pot fragment and we talked with a Dutch couple (slightly our juniors) about pottery and their South and Central American hiking trip (they LOVE everything here!) Then back to Posada El Arco so Maureen could rest.

More And More Chichi

I couldn't get enough of el mercado and went back to stomp its precincts repeatedly. Spent nothing but was severely tempted by certain hammered tin devotionals, somewhat larger than milagras and rather more expensive.

I finally wore out, walked back to the guesthouse. I sat in the garden awhile chatting with the other guests, a group of Methodist medical missionaries who spend their days repairing the inhabitants of remote villages. We spoke of travel (they've been all over) and people and pickpockets and nature, the usual shit. They'll return to the US in a couple days.

I dragged Maureen out of bed (she's a little feverish again, 99.9°f) and next door for a superb homemade chicken dinner (the chicken was chased down just hours ago) in the neighbor's adobe kitchen. Clemencia is a great cook; Rolando is a lucky man. We learned slightly more Spanish while munching that healing meal.

(After dinner, Maureen's temp was down to 99.1°f - chicken fat as Jewish-Guatemalan penicillin? But later her temp's up a bit. If she's not cooler by morning I'll get a MD.)

Whatever we were expecting in Chichi, this ain't it. The 'fabulous' market is redundantly disappointing. The views are obscured. The infrastructure is curious. It's hotter and drier, flatter and bumpier, greener and browner, that the guidebooks were able to convey. And we haven't even seen the edges yet.

Wait, I know where I've seen this before - in photo postcards of Quito and Cuzco from the early 1920s. The same high dry dusty post-colonial city scenes, but with more wires and cars now. A different continent but the same imperial-villager interplay.

Friday 2 May 2003

The medical missionaries early, noisily, to depart for civilization, or at least for a breake at the lake. We eventually staggered down to Villa de Los Cofrades for a fine but noisy breakfast, the street below filled with chicken buses not market stalls. In the Plaza the market seems to be dismantled only for fervent festivals, but the roadways are more navigable today.

We walked slowly. Maureen's still feeling punky but not quite in need of medical care. Yet.

St Tomás church is east of the Plaza. The Rossbach Museum faces the south side, with a fine and fascinating (if ill-lit) collection of REAL ancient Mayan artifacts, and a back porch affording a sweeping view of Chichi higher environs.

West of the Plaza sits La Calvaria, like a half-size version of the revered Iglesia Santo Tomás. Outside, incense pyres smoulder atop the worn steps. Inside, a plainclothes priest chants and gestures above a glass-encased Christ figure, while its processional counterpart is lit by guttering candles in a smoke-blackened chapel.

Across the Plaza, next to St. Tomás church, is the municipal building, with the Ladino city 'hall' and the office of the indigenous alcade -- parallel governments here. This is the most curious town I've ever seen.

Back to Posada El Arco; we're sitting shaded in the garden. Haze is still thick, views impaired, but the scents of strange plants and smokes are alluring, wafted in by the midmorning cool breeze. Later that breeze blows away much of the haze and the Cuchumatanes loom invitingly in the north under a cumulus roof.

Maureen's still tired so I stomp around some edges of this sky city. Away from the more imposing structures of concrete or brick or stone, much of Chichi seems made of plastered adobe, sometimes painted, sometimes maintained, sometimes not. (We noticed this on the drive in - more adobe means higher and drier and poorer.) Walking some of the rough stony streets makes one long for Antigua's nice easy cobbles. The ridge drops away westward to the cemetary, a colorful funzone for the dead.

Back to Santo Tomás church, the interior is transformed, decorated for a wedding with wide swaths of white veils forming arches from peak to head-high at the walls and hung with white paper bells. The candle-clumps and some rose petals have been swept away. The committee and soundman are gone, but kneeling supplicants still sway before the hammered-silver altar and its candle-blackened figures. A few explosions outside, otherwise all is tranquil.

I peered into the San Tomás Hotel and saw a colonial wonderland even a high-powered corporate executive would like, sumptuously outfitted, intricately decorated with artefacts and live parrots, and providing breathtaking views of Chichi's eastern precipice and the ranks of forested highlands beyond. Nice rooftop swimming pool, too.

Midday - Maureen's still tired but not feverish, so I'm out on the town again, lunching adequately but dully just down and across from Villa de Los Cofrades. The chicken-bus ballet we previously witnessed from above is now in-your-face, RIGHT HERE. The buses negotiate the narrow intersection OK (although the fockers like to GASSED me in the adjacent InterNet cafe) but larger lorries are forced to back-and-forth their way around a 90° turn, coached by shouting groundcrew.

Chichi observations

I almost never see a Maya smoking - almost the only burning cigarettes I see here are in the mouths of Euro-Gringo visitors, and maybe a few Ladinos. Mayan women wear head-coverings when out in the sun; Ladinas carry colorful umbrellas. Everyone spits in the street.

CD sellers function as open-air DJs, providing the mercado with a techno-rock soundtrack. Country-western music in a local dialect fills a side street. Hank Williams and Jimmy Rogers classics in Quiche - yodeling Mayas. A passing sound truck blasts ads for expensive home phone systems. Nobody sings in public, drunk or sober - no buskers.

After lunch I circumnavigate Chichi's plateau. Across the El Arco bridge is an open hall with evangelical services, the same Maya women's song of two chords and one note that I heard Sunday at Pana's playa, followed by a guy preaching emotionally. A little further, another sturdier hall filled with men, its halls featuring posters for a presidential candidate.

A little further and I'm on the adobe-house-lined dirt road between the San Tomás Hotel and the precipice's knife-edge dropoff. I continue down to the narrow isthmus joining the sky city to the outside world - down one side, that knife-edge - down the other, a terraced canyon dropping down eventually to Santa Cruz de Quiche.

Overlooking that western canyon coming back into town are some very scenic hospidajes and hotels and comedars. The road dips a little, then climbs five steeper blocks (lined with homes and shops) up to Santo Tomás church and the market plaza. Dozens of men lie dead drunk on the sidewalks in those five blocks, all burnt black by the sun and their impending deaths. Many pickups emblazoned with DIOS ES AMOR (GOD IS LOVE) drive by, but I don't see anyone stopping to pick up their brothers from the street.

Back at Posada El Arco, my feet and boots are about worn out. Pedro volunteers to carry the boots to a cobbler to repair the heels, and offers his van and driver to take us to Nebaj and Joyabaj over the next couple days. I think we'll stay here a little longer, eh?

We go next door to Clemencia's kitchen for another great meal and language exercise - today she chased down a cow and some squashes, not a chicken. We talked about family and food. Then Pedro arrived - we're going for the weekend, he'll be our guide - a tour that's just totally impossible with any of the commercial services. We sure like it here.