A journal of a journey to the central-western highlands. |
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[another cold load of tedious transcribed journal notes - slightly corrected & expanded - a stream-of-consciousness travelogue, hence the curious style - oy - and stay tuned for further idle wanderings of an unexercised mind]
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Wednesday 14 May 2003Monday was relaxed, low-key, cloudy then windy.Tuesday was beautiful, but I got sick and I missed it. Hop into bed one night feeling great. Awaken early the next morning burning up, weak as a slime-mold, congested like a sponge. Bummer. Maureen called for medical help - same la doctora, different pills. Lung infection. Pills seem to be working, I'm Much Better Now. Lying abed all day is painful. Proceed to Wednesday posthaste. Midnight rain. Early early on the veranda, the volcanos were distinct under shifting clouds and the high bright full moon, shifting patterns of light revealing nocturnal details. Come dawn, the entire caldera shows with preternatural clarity, every fold and twist of geology, the lake's surface with alternate bands of ripple patterns. Birdsongs ring. Later morning after breakfasting in the Monterrey's adequate eatery, we're sitting at the thatched gazebo, observing. The sky is a bit darker, the lake view is muted magic, a tropical Tahoe without snow or smog. Boatsmen pole and paddle by in carved canoas, lanchas and larger craft ply the distance, swimmers splash-shout near the shore. Folks (locals and travelers) walk below us on the beach path to-from the nearby dock. Birds whirl around us. It's good to write of what we see rather than how bad we felt. Wednesday afternoonWe strolled the beach path towards town, looking at the low gaps of Santiago de Atitlán and San Lucas Tolimán, the high cones and cliffs elsewhere around the lake. Went for another healing lunch (in the Pana context, "healing meal" means we had something yummy and wholesome at Las Chinitas). Rain fell briefly on the patio roof. Back to the Monterrey, rest and relax. Clouds blow in; a heavy rain falls for some minutes, continues awhile diminished. Some enthusiastic drum-and-brass music wafts in from the north, too irregular to be unreal. Rain continues sporadically, intensifies etc. Clouds sheathe the volcanoes, pulse around the Lake, shimmer overhead. Thunder rolls slowly through the canyons, no lightning to be seen. We plot our remaining week. Maybe extend here a couple days until the medications have run their course so if there's a flare-up, the presiding physician can be called back. Maybe do a couple local tours - that eco-tour to Cobán is a no-go. Get to Antigua on Sunday, maybe upgrade to an ultra-confortable hotel between La Arca and the Plaza, easy access to our favorite places. We'll get this figured out. | |
Thursday 15 May 2003Sunrise illuminates clouds and mist beyond and around the volcanos, rippled water before them, still gardens below us, the usual outrage of birds. The first lancha breaks the avian sound monopoly, then the first human scurrying nearby. A couple expats checked in a couple doors down the veranda yesterday afternoon, Peter from Berkeley, California and Yolanda from Lima, Peru, both art professors now living in Guáte. He's been coming here 20 years, says the Monterrey is the best place on the lake. Very 'old school', it used to be full constantly, but then the old owner died and the new owner's sick and it's drifted. Peter said he once planned to buy it - I later asked 'Why not?' and he said that then he'd have to work, and be stuck here, and deal with the govt, etc. He knows all the staff. #10 is "Peter's room." But does the hotel dog know him? I'm feeling MUCH better now. I guess these were the right drugs (started Tuesday): We strolled into Old Town through rainy remnants last evening, trolled for more medications, then dined at El Chisme - very clean old-boho feel, very good chicken molé, small fireplace lit against the damp chill (might have been down to 65°f outside), nice jazz playing, an expat and sophisto traveler haven. More familiar faces drifted by. The night folded in. Morning now, it's about time to drag Maureen out to breakfast and to plan the next few mornings - maybe the local nature+ tour tomorrow and the 3-villages-by-boat Lake tour on Saturday. Then pack up, head towards the final phase of this trip.
We saunter up to the Hotel Regis' roadside strip for a fresh breakfast at Deli #1, orchids and quiet chamber music hanging over us. We slowly go upstreet to an internet cafe for email, stop at a fabric shop and exit with piles of cheap woven magic. We're directed back downstreet to an unsignposted tailor who'll make me bright Mayan trousers and shorts. His fee, Q15 each. The fabric, 5 yards at Q20 per. Total for both: Q130, US$16. Sixteen bucks. Custom made. Hope they fit.
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Que es Panajachel?I should try to describe Pana's geography and physical character. The municipality is a rough rectangle, 750 meters north-south, 500 meters east-west. West and north are steep cliffs, east is the Rio Pana and more steep cliffs. East of the lower Rio Pana is the Junkayá district, an equilateral triangle about 500 meters per side. Barrio Alto, the old town or upper Pana, is about the upper 1/3 of that rectangle. 'Gringotenango', the lower 2/3, and Junkayá are on flattish land and have a generally rectangular road grid. Barrio Alto doesn't - its roads and alleys and trails twist to follow the hilly terrain. Barrio Alto is where it is for a reason - Gringotenango and Junkayá may be submerged by the Lake's next 'curious' surface-level change. The heart of Barrio Alto is a typical but prosperous mountain village with many multilevel buildings jammed together above wavy streets, centered around the old church square and town hall. Every doorway is a business - store, bakery, shop, farmacia, butcher, posada, comedor, workshop, bar, school, distributor, office. Outside the town core the walls are lower and longer, the doorways fewer and leading into walled compounds containing residences and more of the same, as well as the occasional pricey home or swanky hotel. Gringotenango merges with Barrio Alto at Calle Principal aka Calle Real, which cuts diagonally southwest-northwest into the heart of town and forks into roads going upriver to higher towns and out along the lakeshore. Serious business happens here - transport, major purchases, serious celebrating, fire and police services. And those road forks lead to further expansion, construction. Junkayá, between river lake and cliffs, has a couple main roads and the maze of jungly trails and paths I described some days ago. East of Junkayá are more lakefront pockets and clifftop villages. West of Pana, beneath the glowering caldera cliffs, is another such pocket, San Buenaventura, formerly a coffee plantation, now two resorts and a nature reserve surrounding 3 unfinished(?) high-rise hotels - we'll tour there tomorrow. And that leaves the Gringotenango flats, the 1/2 kilometer-per-side square where we spend these days and nights. The dock road on the west, the river road on the east, calles Santander and Rancho Grando equidistant between, a few cross-streets, that's it. Calle Santander is where the tourist action is, a 500-meter long (and 5-meter wide) road absolutely crammed with attempts to separate visitors from cash. I may tally the enterprises here, but suffice to say, there are a shitload. Some are pretty tacky, some are the best places in the country to buy handicrafts (but that's beyond geography). From our current abode in the Monterrey it's a 150-meter walk "into town", to the heart of Santander.
Above Gringotenango, old Pana's situation greatly resembles Minori and Maiori on the Amalfi coast, towns in finger valleys, villages squeezed by geography, save that Pana's bounding walls are too steep for habitations and terraced gardens to creep up. And the Rio Pana hinterland is more extensive, so there's less need for such intensification. But as population increases, that may yet happen.
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Noonish and OnwardsBack to the Monterrey for meds, then it's immediately time for lunch. How hours fly when we're healthy! We have a fresh lunch at Deli #2, in a garden overgrown with bamboo and louder chamber music. Nice to luxuriate. (Note: Neither Deli #1 nor #2 are actually delicatessans - they are fine breakfast-to-late-lunch eateries in garden settings, albeit #1 is squeezed into a small space in a roadside strip at the middle of Calle Santander.) Now back through the post-noon chilling to the veranda and volcanos and lake and garden. Tomorrow's local tour is booked, the pants should be finished by then - no excitement for the rest of the day. Ah. Evening: Into town to Cafe Bombay for fine fare and to again witness morons goint to a vegetarian diner to smoke. Then up Calle Santander as Pana shuts down, the global village after twilight. The full moon glows fuzzily through high clouds, regarding migrating vendors and dogs below. Back at the Monterrey the night is still but for a male voice singing liquid couplets nearby. Full moon is hidden in the lake mist, or... ECLIPSE! Eclipse parties rage all around the lake and through Mayaland. Ancient rituals everywhere - fires, singing, dancing, rhythmic pounding, sacrifices. The moon must be returned! It's big news locally and on CNN - ECLIPSE IN CENTRAL AMERICA - evil portent, or...? FRENZY! | |
Friday 16 May 2003Early predawn, the full moon is high, reddish-brown and fuzzy through thick dusty mist, its reflection a stain across the effervescent lake. San Pedro village lights are almost hidden in that dull glow, the bonfires dim. The birds are screaming much louder than usual, post-eclipse, but the moon has returned from the jaws of the shadow dragon. As usual. Now the sky lightens, the mist whitens, the moon greys, village lights fade, volcanos in the mist step forward, but the birds are only marginally quieter. The first line of sunlight in the sky, the last line of white all around the caldera's lakeshore. The moon is nearly lost in blue-cold whitening haze. The birds are indeed quieter now. Morning has broken, softly. Last evening Prof. Peter and I spoke at length about art, photography (hey, 'photographer' used to be one of job titles, but so was 'librarian'), Mayan colors, Yolanda's painting, his glass-blowing. And his huge collection of glass hats, 5000 of them crammed in his Berkeley apartment - where to donate them when he's gone? Then he drifted away into basketball. http://www.ZoneZero.com == search--> Peter Pfersick MAYA COLOR: The Painted Villages of MesoAmerica, by Jeffrey Becom - Abbeville Press | |
Local Eco-Tour?Today we arise early for an eagerly-anticipated local tour. We prepare and synchronize carefully, present ourselves at the Monterrey's Alfil Negro (chess - black bishop) eatery a couple minutes after opening time - it isn't open. We quickstep over to Santander - our nearby favorites aren't open yet. We trot up to Deli #1 and order a good fresh breakfast - but the owner's there inspecting, and it's awhile before they start cooking. The hour of the tour van's arrival nears, so I doubletime back to the Monterrey for the pickup. I wait. Maureen saunters in. We wait. Finally the van arrives. The brochure says: FASCINANTE CUEVA Y CASCADA NATURAL So we expected to see culture and nature, which is what we got, but not quite as expected. Maureen and I were the sole passengers as the van's driver and semi-English-speaking guide picked us up and ascended to San Jorge, the village between Pana and Sololá. I guess THIS is a typical mountain town - poor and filthy, the men all going elsewhere to work, women and kids and dogs filling the homefront. The townhall, firehouse and ancient but reconstructed church were OK; everyplace else was strewn with trash, garbage, dogshit. Zillions of happy flies here. We toured the church, photographed the interior, the tower. We saw the pilas, the common washplace, which polluted wastewater irrigates the vegetable gardens. Besides the iglesia catolica we saw evangelical churches. Apparently the holy savants are too busy fighting for souls to bother teaching their flocks the basics of sanitation. We picked our way down narrow trashy paths and narrower filthier walled watercourses to view... the pollution problem. Was this on the agenda? We walked down a wider, cleaner road to a mirador, a viewpoint overlooking the Lake and the valley of Jaibalito village. Jaibalito was born of a power struggle when half of San Jorge's folks were kicked out. We wonder which is the cleaner half. Maximón or BustOur next scheduled stop was a Maximón (San Simón) shrine, where folks with economic or physical or attitude problems make offerings to the evil saint (who's like your drunk pervy uncle if he's a demigod). We parked at another mirador and descended a rocky track to another filthy hamlet, where three little Maya girls were to lead us onward. The shrine path led steeply downward. Maureen refused, I descended. Duh. The hillside had been dumped with rubbish for a long long time. The trail was literally cut into a slope of brush and compacted litter. At the bottom, a shrine and rituals. Maybe. Barefoot in my Teva river sandals, I started a reverse ascent of Mt. Trashmore. After a bit I asked, How much further? Only a kilometer more, seńor - straight down, down there around the bottom of the caldera cliffs. Gracias NO, I replied and reversed track, huffing and puffing my way back to the top, with barely a breath to spare. Our miniature guidas were paid off, scurried off. We returned to the mirador; I breathed heavily for awhile. Good thing I took today's antibiotics early, eh? Natural ParadiseThen we went to the San Buenaventura district and everything changed. Our cute if English-deficient guide led us up a gentle jungle trail into the nature preserve.. We stopped for a breather, and beheld a band of spider monkeys clamboring through trees just a few feet away. Good deal for these primates - larger primates come to their home to entertain and feed them (bananas). Continuing up the trail, across a half-dozen suspension bridges, a real Indiana Jones experience, through the tropical forest up to a 100+ foot cascada that in summer (rainy) months is a power waterfall and was now pleasantly wet. (It probably includes wastewater runoff from uphill villages so don't open your mouth.) The jungle here is an old shade-cover coffee plantation, among the few remaining stopovers for north-south migrating birds. BUY SHADE-COVER-GROWN COFFEE, ENCOURAGE ENVIRONMENTAL PRESERVATION!! We passed the monkeys again, several of whom were literally hanging around+out, and went next door to butterfly preserve. Think of a giant butterfly net in the trees, a hectare aviary for flutterbys, and you've about got it. Many beautiful plants (Maureen will list those) and butterflys (many monarchs, many others). And near a mirador, a gnarly raptor. A large brownish hawk, white breast, yellow+black beak. Just sitting there. Watching us. Posing for close-up pictures. Then he hopped up, squeezed out a shit, hopped over to the mirador and posed some more. Probably finds us featherless bipeds endlessly amusing. Those high-rises were just beyond butterflyland, but we never got the story on them. And that was that for the tour. The first part was informative but crappy, the second part was crappy and too challenging, the third part was slow and spectacular. Several lines from the brochure didn't materialize, but it was a cheap tour and we gave no tip, so WHATEVER, we wouldn't have seen what we did otherwise. The Reserva Natural Atitlán is worth a return visit. Be sure to buy some bananas. Then you can go ape. | |
Return to PanaWe hopped out at Calle Santander, picked up my cheap pants (the alien trousers and fiery shorts both fit fine), went to nearby Deli #2 for a fresh lunch in their tunnel garden with nicely recycled quiet music - same tapes at both locales, better speakers here. Back to the Monterrey for rest and writing and to watch stormy clouds blow onto the lake - and now it's flashing and thundering, raining heavily and steadily. That'll taper off; we'll wander into town for dinner and to book tomorrow's lake tour and maybe an early return to Antigua on Sunday; and another day will be shot to hell, pleasantly. The rain doth diminish, the thunder doth yet roll, lanchas dasn't yet smite asunder the Lake's surface. There could be more. A few hours ago all was clear - from the Maximón mirador 1000+ meters up, we looked straight down into San Buenaventura, Gringotenango, Junkayá - but Barrio Alto was sequestered behind a ridge. We beheld each shining detail, every sighing tree, the very roof we're under now. A virtual reality display, minus the virtual. EVENING: I predicted (above) that the day would be pleasantly shot to hell, and so it was. I uploaded the last slew of journal notes, we had a healing dinner, strolled up into Old Town and heard some fine piano jazz played by the reedy proprietor of El Chisme. A nice mellow night, the first Friday of this rainy season. | |
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