DIA SETENTA DOS:
Viernes 29 April 2005 - Santa Catalina de Siena
Antigua Guatemala - Friday morning.
The usual fine Fernando's desayuno, then we're waiting for a key or locksmith so we can extract computers and clothes from the wardrobe whose key I lost. In the lobby we chat with Mary, a 45-year-old Atlantean here to adopt her second Guatemalan kid, chubby 8-month-old Oscar. The cost: US$18,000 in local lawyers' fees, US$5000 in US agency fees, and then some -- and that's a bargain in the modern world. Guatemala is second worldwide in adoptions, after much more populous China.
It's a booming business, with predictable tensions. Rumours of tourists stealing kids, of kids being taken for organ harvesting or satanic rituals. News of unwary tourists (and even undercover Mexican cops) being killed by angry mobs suspecting them of attempting child theft. Some adoptive parents told: when you're here to see the lawyers, don't leave your hotel. Not that I'd want to be on the streets of Guate (Ciudad Guatemala) anyway...
Mary is in a university community, same as Sharon whom we met two years ago, also here for another adoption. I wonder if members of said community are statistically unusually prone to offshore adoptions. Are there any statistics on this?
LATER: The lock problem is solved -- Mario removed the wardrobe door from its hinges. Gail will get another lock. I told her to bill us for the inconvenience. She said, "But how?"
Then down to the bank-lined zocalo to exchange our excess L4224 -- but banks don't do Lempiras here, only in Guate or at the border. Or maybe San Cristobal, or Tucson, or Sacramento. Or maybe we'll just check with a tour company that sends shuttles to the border, as Gail suggests. Yup.
We cruise around to a couple old churches, photographing Escuela de Cristo (scene of the wedding two years ago) and the huge Convento San Francisco complex (IMMENSE old ruinas). San Francisco includes the shrine and museum of San Pedro Betancourt, a local 17th century priest who established schools and clinics for workers and the poor. Nearby, at the fine Los Gigantes shop, we finally buy a few carved santos etc.
NOONISH: We munch bagels and read a language school brochure, go to check it out -- lessons and home-stay are just US$125 per week per person, so we'll check the accommodations tomorrow and maybe sign up for 2-3 weeks, WITHIN BUDGET! If we're busy there, these journal entries may become sparser.
We drive south of town, up the side of Volcan Agua, to the dirty Mayan village of Santa Maria de Jesus at 7200 feet (2000 higher than Antigua), noticably cooler, the traditional jumping-off point for volcano climbers and those who prey on them. Guatemala's cleanup hasn't reached here, not to Ciudad Viejo, the "old city" at Agua's violent base. The sky is still cloudy-murky (but not smokey), we can't see very far.
EVENING: Mary and Oscar are back -- he's cheerfully on the floor in a circle of cushions (only barfed on one), I'm baby-sitting while she's on the phone, reading to him from the introduction to Crichton's THE LOST WORLDS. Happy little bugger.
For dinner we scan the row of quasi-cheap eateries across from the Spanish Embassy. We're lured upstairs to the terrace of Cafe Boutique -- great food, cheap! The superb menu al dia is Mediterranean-Continental at a Guatemalan typico price. But watch out for weak drinks.
Back at the posada, some keyboarding and chatting. Margaret (mentioned here last week) says that the De La Fuente language school we're considering is GREAT! Glad to hear that.
DIA SETENTA TRES:
Sabado 30 April 2005 - San Pio V
Antigua Guatemala - Saturday morning.
Fernando's desayuno finale -- we recalculated our budget and found that we've overspent. We have a few options: A) Go into debt; B) Spend a couple weeks here in language school, then do a fast hot hard one-week dash up Mexico's Pacific coast; C) Leave now and wend our way slowly up the Sierra Madre Occidentale over the next few weeks, visiting all the mountain towns along the way.
We chose Plan C. So we'll leave immediately (Saturday morning) for Chichicastenango; do a final Sunday market there; leave Monday morning for San Crisotbal de las Casas, Chiapas, for two nights; thence to Oaxaca, Michoacan, Jalisco (not Tabasco), et al, skirting Mexico City. Hopefully we'll reach Bisbee about the time the money runs out.
And we'll have to carry our unchanged Lempiras all the way back with us. Ratz.
Ah well. It's been fun. It'll continue to be fun, somehow. We'll stretch this out for as long as we can. Guess we'll have to study Spanish at home, listen to our language tapes, just as we've promised ourselves for the last couple years. Gotta be fluent enough to do Cuzco and Machu Picchu next year. Hey Trevor, have you met any nice Peruvian girls yet? Heh heh heh...
30 April 2005 - Saturday night.
Panajachel, Guatemala
Picking up where I left off earlier -- We rolled through the slot-roadways of Antigua to the suburbs -- Jocotenango with its El Merced-style church (and we skipped the La Azotea culture center today) and Pastores, town of bootmakers (must be HUNDREDS of boot shops there) and Parramos (where I always get lost at the square) and back through the exhaust-wasteland of Chimaltenango, where we ran out of Q's. Yes, we're Q-less newbies...
Past Tecpan, we were pulled over at a police checkpoint. Why don't we have a licence plate in front? Because we're USAnians, that's why, and many states don't REQUIRE a front plate. But no matter how suspicious we may look, we have the right papers, and they never check our load. Maybe that's because everything in back is covered with blankets, and we have our laundry spread out on top to dry. They take one look at the socks and undies and think, "No WAY am I going to handle that stuff!"
Just beyond, on a sharp curve, a semi-truck with PEPSI markings has crashed. Crates of sodas are scattered near and far. Good thing we don't drink the stuff. In the states, that load would probably be consigned to a Dented Cans outlet. But here? Hmmm...
CHICHICASTENANGO: We snake over the twisty trail to Chichi, replenish our cash and guts, and stop at Pedro's guesthouse (Posada El Arco) for a room. But he's raised the price, and the only room available is small, and it overlooks the backyard where loud live marimba music is wowing a party crowd. He's busy and we're too tired to boogie. Maybe next time.
We thread back through the sky city, past the usual quotient of burnt borrachos scattered around the rock-cobbled streets. We look at some so-so santos, have close encounters with large vehicles in confined vertical spaces, and head back to the PanAmerican Highway. Heavy smoky fog hangs around the caldera rim, 60°f up there, It's a treacherous drive down through Solola.
We discuss our favorite town names. High on the list are Chiquinula, and Pajuliboy, and something like Pancreatica. If I scan the Guatemala map I can probably harvest a few more.
PANAJACHEL: Evening finds us back at the Hotel Ixchel. We run the Gringotenango gauntlet and find a few more santos. Basta ya! (Enough now!) Pana is jumping on the international holiday weekend -- tomorrow is Labor Day everywhere but where it started, the US. Prices are up, of course. And Guatemala is generally more expensive than two years ago, even off the tourist track. Is that a sign of increasing prosperity?
Dinner on Calle Santander at Jose Pinguino's again, best Q20 menu al dia in town. Vendors come by to chat. Most aren't amused when I sing them my song, a litany of all the vendors' chants. Too bad.
At the hotel, many of the same old bugs are crawling around, and some new ones. But no dogs (except for the spaniel next door) or parties or gospel services, so it's much quieter. The manager looks like Gilbert Gottlieb without the annoyance. Our first floor room is mustier than the upstairs cuarto of last week. Yet we survive.
DIA SETENTA CUATRO:
Domingo 1 May 2005 - San Jose de Obrero
May (Labor) Day - Sunday evening
San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas.
PANA MORNING: Back to Comedor Emilio on the playa for breakfast again, best Q15 desayuno in the neighborhood. The walls are covered with oddments of posterage and handicraft -- Mayan rugs and carved masks, baskets and tiny sombreros, animal heads and horns and hooves, a Disney-Warner cartoon mirror (unlicensed), crucifix and crawdads, painted plaster fruit, a small fish tank. The comedor next door is strewn with giant bright model chicken buses and colorful dioramas of Guatemalan life, but their prices are double.
Climbing the rim, we pass a live cascada (waterfall), dead last week. Maybe it rained up in the hills. Or maybe somebody's catchment pond broke. ?Quien sabe?
BEYOND SOLALA: Riding along the rim, the Pan American highway heading over 9900-foot Alaska, are many bicyclists, dressed in flashy full kit with helmet, or in Maya garb, or Sunday best, or cowboy or work clothes, whatever. Many pedal- and motor-driven bikes bear passengers, usually female, sitting sidesaddle. There may be two or three such, in front or behind the pilot, feet bravely brushing the pavement.
More police checkpoints, before and after the busy Xela (Quetzaltenango) and Huehuetanango turnoffs. Ho hum. We climb the crest of the Sierra Cuchumatanes, decend along the long lush steep green rich Rio Santo Domingo valley from Huehue to La Mesilla. Roadwork stoppages with armed guards. A girl walking along, L-U-C-K-Y emblazoned across the firm round butt of her happy jeans.
Along the road, couples: a girl and her lamb, a boy and his dog, and man and his rooster, standing side by side. In the steep slot-canyon of Rio Santo Domingo, a shrine to Gerald B. Pierce, apparently a gringo who didn't make a sharp curve. Another shrine, steel-sided, crushed by falling rocks. A little Maya girl in traditional garb listening to Espanol rap on a radio, dancing wildly. A truck named King Kong. Restaurante El Divino Maestro. Funerales Nuevo Esperanza.
MEXICAN BORDER: Today (with almost nobody on the road) it's a four-hour drive from Pana to La Mesilla. Quick border crossing; we fill in forms, get sprayed and stamped, 1/2 hour total. And we still have our damn Lempiras; money-changers here are ruthless, want 30-50%. Maybe we'll get lucky at a bank in San Cristobal de las Casas (SCLC).
I want to point out that at NONE of our border crossings or police-military checkpoints has anyone tried to inspect our car's contents, or us. That ritual is reserved for re-entering the US. And it's the bottom of the car that's sprayed in La Mesilla, not ourselves.
Back to the low point on this route, San Gregorio Chimac for fine cheap Mexican lunch. Just enough pesos for the bill, so we leave a 20 lempira note for the tip. We probably can't go back there again. We zip along through this now-familiar hot (95°f) country, past Comitan and its migration-customs-agro checkpoint (all the doors were open but nobody was there), back into the cooler piney Chiapan mountains. At Amatenango we stop for more ceramics.
SAN CRISTOBAL: And suddenly, about eight hours after leaving Pana, we're in SCLC. Our old hostelry, Posada Mexico, is full, but just down the street at Hotel Los Robles we get cheap clean roomy stuffy quarters. Free parking around the corner. El Gato Gordo is next door; their cheap menu al dia still satisfies. We're slotted in.
We'll stick around SCLC for 2-3 days, long enough to change currency and oil and attitudes, pick up some supplies, and plot the next leg of our route: how best to get to Oaxaca? And see our friends.
Meanwhile, here are today's observations and opinions. Read'em and weep.
* SURVIVAL, DOGS, DRIVERS
* INSIDE MAYAN LANGUAGES
* INSIDE ROADSIDE CULTURE
DIA SETENTA CINCO:
Lunes 2 May 2005 - San Atanasio
San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas.
MONDAY MORN: In the Hotel Los Robles on Francisco Madero, our bathroom is sub-standard (clean but no toilet seat) but at least the water gets hot, eventually. Our large bare room (adorned only with a long low mirror) overlooks a tiny courtyard; the interior location helps block noises of sound trucks and propane truck clattering, somewhat. The Escher-esque winding stairways and passages help airflow, somewhat. This is a cheap clean place. We've had worse.
We stroll down to Comedor Pakal on Benito Juarez for our favorite cheap desayuno (18 pesos including coffee - and we get our first refills on this trip! without even asking!) but I miss those thick little handmade tasty Guatemalan tortillas. Then around the zocalo, where nobody will change our damn Lempiras. Then out to the Artesanias Mercado for more stuff. Then back to the hotel for a rest, and for me to type up these notes.
The good news: my left leg doesn't hurt nearly as much as it used to after a bit of walking and standing. The bad news: weevils have eaten my brain. Only a small fragment remains. This explains my writings. Or maybe it's those cheap alien implants, always short-circuiting. (BZZZZZZ!!) Damn implants...
Which reminds me that in response to my updated lyrics for an R.E.M. song posted a few days ago (LOSING MY RELLENOS), a Faithful Reader (hi Jacque!) sent me the lyrics to another R.E.M. song, FLOWERS OF GUATEMALA. Unfortunately it has nothing to do with Guatemala. The subject is Amanita (Muscaria), a toxic-hallucinogenic mushroom native to Siberia (possibly the source of SOMA) that also grows in North America. I don't believe it's found anywhere near here. Go figure.
AFTERNOON: Back to Comedor Pakal again for almuerzo (lunch), a great 22 peso menu al dia. Their Sopa Chiapaneco (bread soup) is much better than that a the expensive specialist's. Food over is better even than two weeks ago. New management? All the old faces are gone, the style is the same, but the product and service are superb. Such a deal!
The overcast thickens, slow heavy raindrops thud on the roof, a rain sprinkle escorts us to the iNet/tour office. This afternoon is cooler than we remember. A pleasant time to walk.
Back to the hotel but the lobby is empty, the front door locked. What to do? We head into our old neighborhood to see Jim and Meli. But the rain becomes a hailstorm, then a downpour. We duck into a sheltered doorway a block away. A fist-sized clump of garlic hangs over the door, with a horseshoe and prayer cards. No vampires or bad luck HERE, eh? Parrots screech in the courtyard beyond the slatted gate. Taxis splash a grimey shower of gunk against the high walls along the narrow sidewalks. Yuck.
EVENING: J&M invite us in for dinner and chat, which lasts for hours. I mention our Lempira problem, think that maybe we can find a TACA airline office (they fly all over Central America and sell tickets in all local currencies) and they might do a money exchange. Jim suggests that we just buy a ticket with our lempiras, then cancel the ticket the next day and take the refund in pesos or dollars. Jim says his favorite hobby is "gaming the system."
We also talk about travel, and various stuff, and of course politics. My take: the grand experiment with democracy in the USA is dead, at least on the national level,, and I almost don't care anymore. If I had the energy, I might explain why, but I don't right now.
We return to the Hotel Los Robles and the door is open. Our room hasn't been cleaned, no linen nor towels changed, nothing. I just noticed that the white walls bear strange marks, like lip prints and shoe scuffs and various scrapings. One more night, then we're outa here.
DIA SETENTA SEIS:
Martes 3 May 2005 - Malaria Tuesday
San Felipe y Santiago de Santa Cruz
San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas.
EARLY: Around the corner from the hotel, a guy is hammering away a his house facade, effecting repairs. His pounding reverberates through the walls. He stopped around midnight. He started before 6:00 AM. I didn't want to be up that late or this early. Will somebody please shoot the industrious SOB? Thank you.
The room and beds aren't really uncomfortable. Our quarters are mostly pretty clean and quiet. We aren't upset about anything, or feeling unhealthy. But it was hard to sleep last night. Comfy and familiar as SCLC is, it'll be good to leave -- for bigger cities?
NOONISH, we get the oil changed (at a stateside price) and hit the always-noisy Chedraui supertienda for a last fillup of road supplies - water, crackers, apples, UFO repellent. We go to the ex-landlords' to pick up our stored goodies but nobody's home. Try again later.
So we rest at the hotel after a cheap lunch of storebought crackers and juice. Rains come again, a brief flurry scouring the roofs and streets and storefronts, and resuming; the tourists scattering like herniated pigeons, the taxis as inevitable as taxes and trouble.
TRAVEL TIME: Travel rides in rhythms, the various beats flopping and overlapping and settling in like pond ripples from many tossed stones. The rolling rhythms of going somewhere; up-down cycles of being somewhere. The flexing phases of light and dark and heat and cold and hunger and impatience and fear and thrill. Getting up or getting down, early or late or medio, depending. A walking pace or flying whir or dead stop.
Driving to see or ignore what's here or there. Flashes of light off waves or wavy windows or fences or flinty metal. Warbles of tone dopplering by, modulated and heterodyned with the bursts and buzzes and burps and burbles of the ambient soundscape. Every element whirling about at its own pace. And we ride these waves, over the crests and down the troughs and into the splash of time. All travel is time travel. All time is now.
(If that last statement seems a wee bit flakey or facile or foolish to you, consider the lowly photon, the basic quantum of light. A photon travels at a specific speed -- by definition, that's the speed of light, or c. Absolutely NOTHING goes faster. As a traveler's speed increases to this limit, time seems to contract, to slow down. Attaining c, the contraction is infinite; there is no time. If you were a photon, you would only live in the infinite moment. Think about it.)
AFTERNOON: Two climates here in rainy season: summer morning, stormy afternoon. Some adapt transparently. The same two international bimbos in brief black party dresses walking in far parts of town, shine and rain. Vendors leaving tarps up constantly. Tires squeaking and shrieking on slick cobbles in any weather. Kids running heedlessly.
We retrieve our goodies, repack the car in an uncovered courtyard with only slight water damage, (if your gift is stained, that's why), ford the raging street-rivers, fend off the famished alligators swarming out of the sewers, and return to the hotel to chill out.
We climb the low easy stairs, swap chairs with one in an empty room (the original here was a real butt-biter), accommodate. I climb further up to the roof, great grey rainy vistas over the old colonial city and its hidden courts. Thunder and lightning. The flashes are seven seconds away, over two klicks, so I'm safe up there, right? We saw a newspaper's nationwide weather forecast earlier: rain in many places, hot everywhere low in Mexico. We *might* go up the Pacific coast a short way en route to Oaxaca, see if it's real.
EVENING: More rain, a farewell feed with J&M, and we're off. Tomorrow, the next phase.
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ITINERARY:
Our projected route, leaving mañana, includes:
San Cristobal, Tehuantepec, Oaxaca (***), Puebla (***), Izucar de Matamoros, Cuernavaca (*), Taxco (***), Toluca, Morelia (**), Queretaro (**), San Miguel de Allende (**), Guanajuato (***), Aguas Calientes (*), Zacatecas (***), Durango (*), Bisbee.
(Asterisks indicate the number of Michelin stars.) Some of these are just waypoints, not stops. Some may be skipped. As always, we improvise.
Around Tehuantepec we'll decide whether we want to go up the coast past Huatulco (**) a bit. Around Zacatecas (***) and Durango (*), budget and weather and mood will determine which route to take to Bisbee: the mountains, through Chihuahua (*) and then maybe Paqime (**) via Gomez Palacio or Parral de Hidalgo, or up the coast through Mazatlan (**) and Alamos (**) and Hermasillo. ?Quien sabe?
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