In January 2004, I started a 5½ week trip to Guatemala with the goal of attending Spanish school.  Before I get to the picture and stories, here’s a geography refresher….  Guatemala is the first country south of Mexico in Central America.  On the southwest, Guatemala has a large border along the Pacific Ocean, and on the east, a small Caribbean beachfront (although any map printed in Guatemala will show that they still consider the entire country of Belize within their borders).  On my trip, I only had the opportunity to visit the southern region of the country.  The jungles of the northern Petén region including the Mayan ruins near Tikal will have to wait for another trip.

North America	Central America	Guatemala

Quetzaltenango (Xela)   (January 24, 2004)

The family, a husband and wife, probably in their late 60s or 70s, is very nice and talk with me for at least 10-15 minutes at each meal.  We talk about my profession, my family, traditions, or what activity I did with the school today.  It does get frustrating when I can’t communicate what I want to say, but they are very patient and help me.  They have been hosting students for eight years so they’ve become very good at making simple conversation.  Each day, I’ve found that I’m able to use some words from class that I couldn’t have said the day before.

....Tuesday’s activity was to take ¨El Bus Pollo¨ to a nearby town with the first church in Central America.  The town wasn’t very much, but the bus ride was crazy.  So-called chicken buses appear to be the primary form of transportation in the country (second is small 80s Toyota pick-up trucks).  They buy old US school buses deck them out with a luggage rack and ladder to the roof, a really loud stereo, a banner across the top of the windshield with a religious slogan such as Dios es Amor, an air horn, and then usually paint them wildly with bright colors and pictures of birds.  It takes three men or boys to operate the bus, and a bus is never full.  We sat three to a seat - and remember that children’s school buses don’t have all that much leg room to begin with - and the isles were crammed with people standing.  One man drives, one is in charge of loading and unloading luggage from the roof, and the third hangs out the door yelling our destination to potential riders as we speed by them.  At some of the larger stops he jumps out of the moving bus to solicit customers and then runs to get back on.  When there is a minute between stops, he shoves through the bus to collect a quetzal, about 13 cents, from each rider.

On the trip, I saw the nearest thing to someone being killed by a vehicle as I’ve seen in my life.  We were racing down a narrow street with buildings right up to the curb of the road, another bus was heading towards us in the opposite direction.  A lady with a baby on her back and her two children tried to run across the road.  They got to the middle of the road when our bus was blowing its air horn, and she realized that she couldn’t make it past our bus nor get back to the other side in front of the opposite bus.  She stopped in the middle of the street and miraculously no one was hit as the two buses passed on either side of them.  Everyone on our bus was watching in shock with our horn blasting, and then just kind of laughed as we sped on down the road!....

"oldest church in Central America"

San Francisco el Alto

Then, on Friday, we took the chicken bus to the town of San Francisco el Alto, which supposedly has the largest market in the Central America.  Each city or pueblo in Guatemala has a Mercado on a specific day of the week.  In San Francisco, there were thousands of people shoving their way through blocks and blocks of flea market type booths.  You can buy very literally anything.  People bring home-made textiles, clothes, pottery, and furniture.  You can buy butchered meat, chicken, even crocodile!, and fruits and vegetables of all sorts.  They also sell cats, dogs, and live pigs, sheep, ducks, doves, cows, etc.  Others are selling household products and factory made clothing and shoes.

6 Feb 2004

Hola cada uno,

Where to begin?  Much has happened in the past couple of weeks, and I haven't made time to send an update.  For the weekdays, there's not a lot to report.  Mostly I have studied my Spanish, so I guess I'll start with my trip to the beach two weekends ago....

En la playa...  On Saturday, I went to the beach with my Nebraskan friend Rick and two German girls from his school.  To get there we took a series of chicken buses – I never thought I could share a child’s bus seat with a family of 4, and still be decently comfortable! – through fantastic jungle highlands.  When we finally got out of the mountains and onto the Pacific coast, we arrived at beautiful black sand beaches, great waves, and intense sunny skies.  I could lie in a hammock or sit on the beach in front of the restaurants and easily forget that I was in such a poor country.  Although, for a reminder I only needed to walk a few feet past the restaurants and see the beach filled with stacks of garbage, or stroll back to the dirty, dusty city.

 Champerico

Domingo perezoso....  I spent the next day studying in Quetzaltenango.  After breakfast with my Guatemalan parents, I went to a restaurant and read the national newspaper.  I read articles about the ¨parliament central America¨ which the past president said he would have liked to turn into a central American EU.  Right now, it’s hard to tell if it will move forward or not.  I talked to my teacher about it on Monday and she believed that it’s simply an organization to give immunity to ex-dictators and corrupt politicians.

 Parco Centro, Quetzaltenango

Later, I went to the city central park and met a Japanese girl who is also here studying Spanish.  We struggled through conversation in Spanish for about two hours.  She’s a tour guide near Tokyo and would like to talk with her Spanish-speaking tourists.  She’s worked for her company for 15 years, and at the beginning of each year, she takes 3 months unpaid leave to travel.  I have been pleasantly surprised by myself in meeting so many people on this trip, but it has been quite easy.

En la selva y en el volcan...  By far, the most exciting thing that I have done this trip was taking a two-day hike through the jungle and up to the base of a very active volcano.  I went with a volunteer group of foreigners called the Quetzaltrekkers.  For $40, they provide bus transportation, backpacks, tents, sleeping bags, and prepare all meals on the trek.  Although reasonably priced for Americans and Europeans, it is rather expensive compared to similar for-profit groups.  Quetzaltrekkers uses the money to bring teachers from other countries to teach Guatemalan children.  In our hiking group of twenty, we had seven teachers from the Basque region of Spain whose trip had been sponsored by the group.  Also, we had 3 guides (from Spain, Australia, and Ireland), 2 15-year-old local boys, 3 Canadians, an Israeli, a girl from Belgium, Benno from Switzerland, myself, and a Californian.

	earthquake fault	school lost on opposite side of fault

The trip started with a bus ride back into jungle area in the same direction as the beach the week before.  When we got off the bus and caught our backpacks as they were thrown from the roof luggage rack, and started an hour hike in the open sun across a huge field of volcanic white rocks and boulders.  Our first destination was to visit a ghost town split in two by an earthquake in 1976. On one side of a 100-foot crevice was the town, and on the opposite side was the school building.  It was an extra-tough break for the community, considering that the town of Something had been relocated and named Nuevo Something after being destroyed by a volcanic eruption back in 1902.

From here, we moved on to a small lake to do some swimming with little tadpole-looking fish that enjoy nibbling on people.  My Guatemalan Mom says that they are good for you since they remove dead skin.

 

 Volcán Santiaquito

Next, we moved into the banana trees and giant versions of every tropical plant that you’ve ever seen at Home Depot or Lowe’s.  After another 4 hours of hiking through humidity and heat, we arrived at the campsite across a large crevice from the base of the volcano, pitched tents, and started to settle in for the night.  After sunset, the volcano rumbled about every 10-15 minutes and showed us spectacular glowing lava flows from the top and rolling down the side of the mountain.  It was a very odd feeling to lie on the ground in the tent and feel the slight rumble of a live volcano throughout the night!

The next morning, we moved in just a little closer and watched as the volcano threw boulders down the mountain and puffed giant mushroom clouds of smoke with each of its small eruptions.  Each time the smoke and rocks looked as though they made it about halfway down the side of the mountain, but just as we turned around towards the campsite, we heard one more loud rumble and looked back.  This explosion was much bigger than any of the others, and the entire side of the mountain -- top to bottom -- was blocked by smoke.  Our guide, who had been on the trip some dozen times previously, said he’d never seen such a large eruption.  As the smoke kept billowing and billowing in our direction, we all got a bit nervous, but I don’t think anyone felt that it wasn’t worth the experience!  Finally, it died down, and we realized that we’d survived, so we hiked back out of the jungle, through the open volcanic rock field, and hired two old Toyota mini-pick-up trucks to carry the twenty of us and our packs back to Quetzaltenango.

I haven't got you caught up yet, but I'm going to send this out now anyway.  In the next edition, look forward to some ¨traveler's illness¨, Spanish school burnout, a move to warmer weather, kayaking, and Yolanda - the bread lady.

Adios,

Vince

12 Feb 2004

Hola amigos,

First, thanks very much to everyone who has written back.  It really encourages me to want to tell you more (too much at times, I'm sure).  Acknowledgments are much appreciated!

OK, I left off at the volcano trip to Santiaguito (the live volcano), and I promised to tell you why I had to get out of Quetzaltenango (also know as Xela - pronounced Shey-la).  Xela is quite high in altitude (1500 meters) and encircled by mountains, which produces two things:  nights and mornings near freezing and a pool for pollution.  The homes have no heat, and I always felt on the verge of having a cold.  Then, to top things off, after the weekend hike, I must have eaten or drank something that did not agree with me.  I don’t know a polite way to say it, so I’ll just say call it ¨traveler’s sickness¨, and you can just think about what they say about drinking the water.  At the same time, everyone that I was meeting was talking about a beautiful lake nearby.  Then, the tipping point was that I had fallen behind studying everything that my teacher had taught me.  So after I couldn’t finish my class on Monday due to my ailing stomach, I decided to quit my school and catch the bus to Lago Atitlan.

 San Pedro la Laguna

I landed in a small slow-paced town with a strong beach-feel called San Pedro La Laguna near a beautiful lake surrounded by -- you guessed it -- mountains.  The lake is considered one of the three energy vortexes of the world, which attracts people who can’t find it within themselves to ever leave.  Hence, San Pedro and the other dozen small towns that surround the lake are co-inhabited by Mayans (Indigenous), Ladinos (Spanish/Maya mixed), and extranjeros (Europeans and North Americans).  Prices in the town are embarrassingly cheap!  My room was 15 Quetzales or less than $2 per night, and a wonderful choice of the world cuisines cost only $3 per meal.  I spent the week in the sun, kayaking, napping in a hammock, eating, drinking 40-cent giant licuados (fresh fruit smoothies), catching up on my lessons, hiking through coffee fields and forest to the top of one of the mountains, and simply recovering.

In many ways, it seems like a time machine may have dropped me off in San Pedro in the 1960s.  There is quite a large hippie community around, including a group of ¨Rainbow People¨ who live in the mountains and have large parties where everyone is invited to share in love and peace, along with mushrooms and marijuana, if you’d like.

The day after I arrived in San Pedro, I ran into Benno from Switzerland again.  He and I have many of the same tastes, so we’ve been traveling together since.  From San Pedro, we took a short boat trip across the lake to visit a town called Santiago, which is one of three homes for the saint San Simone, also known as Maximón (pronounced Mash-she-moan).  They say that Maximón is an odd mixture of Catholic and Pagan Mayan religions.  He is a 4 foot tall, legless, wooden man who is dressed in a black suit jacket, 10 ties, a straw hat, and a pair of size 15 black dress shoes.  I may have missed something in my translation, but I think that they cut his legs off, so he wouldn’t leave.  The Catholic Church preaches very strongly against worship of him, but the locals continue to bring rum, cigarettes, cigars, and candles to him with their prayers.  About half of the rum is poured down the wooden mouth of Maximón as he is tilted backwards, and the other half is mixed with Coca-Cola and consumed by the attendants.  The cigarettes are consumed similarly.  The candles are in about five colors, each representing wishes such as prosperity in work or love, or death to an enemy.  The small church that houses Maximón is decorated like a gaudy Christmas trees with flashing colored lights, tinsel, and tissue paper cut-outs.  If I didn’t witness so many locals coming into the place and treating the whole situation so seriously, I would be certain that this was simply a gimmick to collect a couple Quetzales from the few tourists around.

As it seems in most any place in the world, the locals have their particular craft or good that they want to sell to the tourists.  In San Pedro, it was ¨pan¨ or bread.  About ten women and girls walk around the town, singing the same annoying tune, which I came to hear in my sleep....  Pan de banano, pan de zanahoria, pan de piña, pan de coco, pan de banano y chocolat, and on and on and on.  Additionally, as excellent sales persons, they attach themselves to you by knowing your name and asking your friends where you are when you’re not around.  My bread lady was Yolanda, and she made sure that I bought at least one loaf from her daily.

After my week off in San Pedro, I hit the bus again and headed for Antigua, which of course means another chicken bus story....  On the mountains heading out of San Pedro, the road has a ridiculous steep climb up a zigzag path.  The eight-or-so turns are so sharp that our school bus had to stop, honk the horn for oncoming traffic to hopefully stop, back up a few feet nearly hanging the back end of the bus over a straight drop down, and then complete a Y-turn in order to pass each curve.   For anyone used to driving a standard transmission, I hope you imagine that second in which the driver has to release the brake, let off the clutch, and punch the gas in order to get the bus moving forward uphill in first gear without stalling or rolling backwards off the cliff.  Those eight hairpin turns up the mountainside have been by far the most frightening series of events for me on this trip.  At each turn, I held my breath, closed my eyes, and gritted my teeth.  One miss, and down we’d go, but of course all passed without incident as it does dozens of times everyday.

Benno and I arrived in Antigua without much more excitement.  Antigua is a real exception to the reality of Guatemala.  Despite multiple cycles of construction and earthquake, the architecture of the town has been preserved without exception to the Spanish conquest style of the 16th and 17th centuries.  There must be three tourists to each local in the city, and they even have crews that pick trash up off the street!  The restaurants and clubs are fantastically decorated, and prices are much closer to those at home (although often negotiable).

 Antigua Guatemala

The weather here is nearly ideal and the Spanish schools are supposed to be among the top quality in the country.  I pay just a little more than I did in Xela, $135 per week, which includes all meals, my room, and 25 hours per week of one-on-one instruction.  I have a room above a Panaderia – bread and pastry shop.  In addition to my Guatemalan parents, their boys of ages two and seven, I also have an Australian brother, a Swiss brother, and a Japanese sister that share the big house/bakery.  We all get along quite well.  Our parents -- who, by the way, are probably a year or so younger than me -- talk and joke with us often in Spanish, and the other students and I go out in the evenings and try to practice our limited Spanish.

On the way home one evening, we witnessed four men pulling another off his bicycle and taking off with the bike, but other than that, the city seems safe enough.  Many stores and delivery trucks of all types are guarded by men with a sawed off shotgun.

I’m very pleased with the progression of my learning.  This week, I finally learned to use past tense, so I can stop saying stupid things like, ¨Yesterday, I am going to the laundry.¨ Of course my vocabulary is quite limited, but at this point, I can often understand when someone is willing to speak slowly and directly to me, and I can carry on a simplified conversation about where I’m from, what I do, things I did over the weekend, etc.

You're up do date!  I think I'll be taking a short trip down to another beach on the Pacific coast with five or six other students from my school this weekend.  Then, I've got one more week of school and another weekend before I head home.

Hasta luego,

Vince

27 Feb 2004

Hola otra vez,

I made it home a couple days ago, so naturally, I’m busy thinking about my next trip!  If things go perfectly, I may take a long trip through Mexico and Central and South America beginning in May.  One possible three week leg will begin in Belize for snorkeling and scuba diving, and then move into the jungle of Northern Guatemala for hiking and camping with the monkeys on the way to see the Mayan pyramids, followed by a few days of white water rafting towards the South.  From there, it’ll be time to catch a boat from Rio Dulce to the Guatemalan town of Livingston on the Caribbean coast.  Most of the residents of Livingston are of African descent and supposedly live an unusual salsa-meets-reggae style of dance, food, and language!  Next, it’ll be onto a 3-day sail with onboard dining and sleeping down to Honduras for more scuba diving.

Well, to quickly finish up the details of this trip, I’ll tell you about a trip to another weekend trip to a black sand beach.  To get to Monterrico from Antigua, we took a bus ride and then took a twenty minute boat ride through the channel lined by mangrove trees.  Probably the most interesting thing about this trip is the way the water in the channel changes from salt water to fresh water (or sweet water as said in Spanish) dependant upon the season.  When we passed through, the water was fresh and the level was about 5 feet below the winter salt water level, exposing the fantastic root structures of the mangrove trees.  Also, the channel was full of lily pads and hyacinths, which our guide told us, go dormant when the water becomes salty.

 Monterrico

Finally, for my last weekend in Guatemala, Benno and I took five hours by bus and another 3½ by van along a cliff-side rock and dirt road to a backpacker’s resort in the middle of corn and coffee fields.  The camp consisted of three dorm buildings for about five people each and a covered dining room, which is the only place within an hour to eat.  We also took a cave tour with headlamps and inner tubes.  The cave formations themselves were not so spectacular, but for me swimming inside a cave and climbing underground waterfalls was awesome.

 Semuc Champey

A 10-minute walk away from the camp is a national reserve called Semuc Champey with spectacular, natural, cascading pools of crystal clear blue water and surrounded by lush green trees and ferns.  The pool at each level is about the size of a standard swimming pool, and is fed by soft waterfalls from the pool above.  The system is fed by a small diversion of the river than runs through the pool, while the majority of the water runs through a natural tunnel below.  There were no more than 15 people in the entire park while we dived from pool to pool and climbed up and down waterfalls.  The park is simply amazing!  There’s a huge amount of construction and the dirt road leading to the park, and I wonder what will become of the area if they pave the road.

I made it home a couple days ago, so naturally, I’m busy thinking about my next trip!  If things go perfectly, I may take a long trip through Mexico and Central and South America beginning in May.  One possible three week leg will begin in Belize for snorkeling and scuba diving, and then move into the jungle of Northern Guatemala for hiking and camping with the monkeys to see the Mayan pyramids, followed by a few days of white water rafting towards the South.  From there, it’ll be time to catch a boat from Rio Dulce to the Guatemalan town of Livingston on the Caribbean coast.  Most of the residents of Livingston are of African descent and supposedly live an unusual salsa-meets-reggae style of dance, food, and language!  Next, it’ll be onto a 3-day sail with onboard dining and sleeping down to Honduras for more scuba diving.

After 4 weeks of Spanish school, I believe that I have learned more than any other way possible.  Of course, I make lots and lots of mistakes when I talk, and here are a few of my funnier bloopers…

Jabón = Soap  &  Jamón = Ham.  At a restaurant, I asked for a sandwich “con queso y jabón”.

My teacher taught me the verb “contribute”, and asked me to make a sentence.  I wanted to say, “Some people contribute money to groups that feed children”, but I didn’t know the word for feed, so the sentence came out…  “Alguna gente contribuyen dinero a grupos que comer niños.” or “Some people contribute money to groups that eat children.”

And, finally, in one of my broadcast emails, I referred to Americans and Europeans as “extrañaros” or “strange people” instead of “extranjeros” or “foreigners”.

Hasta próxima viaje, el final.

Vicente