Ceibal, Where I Am Given A New Name

At this point, we had been traveling for 36 hours. A plane from San Jose to Houston, a 3 hour layover, a plane from Houston to Guatemala City, a 5 hour layover, a puddle jumper from Guatemala City to Flores. Even at 5am, the check in counter at the airport was a mess. Two terminals at the counter open and both occupied with large parties trying to buy tickets for complex itineraries and no part of the process seemed computerized or automated. Finally the woman manning the terminal for first class took pity on me and took my ticket. At which point, I turned around to get the other bag of luggage from Dean and found him being yelled at by a gentleman who claimed that he was there in line before Dean so he was moving his stuff in front of Dean. It was at then, handing over the tickets that we had gotten the night before, that I noticed that my name was wrong on the ticket. The ticket was for Laura, not LeeAnn. Now in the US, this would have been a problem. This would have required 2 layers of management and a security specialist to resolve and I would've had to consent to a extra body and luggage search. This woman took our tickets, our passports, and didn't blink an eye.

I have a vivid memory of looking back out the window, under the wing of the small plane as it powered up its engines at the end of the runway, and seeing the bright dawn light hitting the volcano that looms over Guatemala City with the rest of the city still in darkness. But mostly, by the time we reached Flores, I felt like I'd been shot from a cannon. Like a time traveler who stands still while everything accelerates madly around her.

At the Santa Elena International Aeropuerto, we were booked to hook up with a guide to take us upriver to the Mayan ruins of Ceibal (also spelled Seibal in some of the literature). And there was the guide booth with a sign with my name on it, except that my name had changed once again to Laura Geringha. And, of course, Spanish speakers don't pronounce it "Lore-ah", they pronounce every vowel, so it was "Lore-urr-rah" (which rhymes with the communications officer on the original Star Trek). We decided that I had somehow been enrolled in the Guatemala Witness Protection Plan and, for my safety, my name had been changed. At random points for the remainder of the trip, I would correct their pronunciation of Laura.

We had seen the town of Flores from the air as we landed — it's built on an island about a hundred yards off shore into the middle of the lake, connected to the mainland by a narrow road. They took us on a short driving tour of the town in a van so we could pick up the cooler with the lunch and the guide could get his rain gear. The interesting thing about Flores being that it was built on top of a Mayan town that was there when the Spanish arrived in the 1500s. I had started reading Mayan history before the trip, so I could better appreciate the ruins at Ceibal and Tikal, and that was the thing that surprised me the most. I had thought of the Mayans as a culture that flourished for 8 or 9 centuries around the time of the Romans and the Vikings, built these huge temples in the jungle, and then vanished. But in fact, the people of Guatemala are Mayan, speak one of the 29 dialects of Mayan, with Spanish as their second language. Apparently, the Spanish even stumbled onto the Mayans before the Aztecs and when they asked the Mayans about gold and other treasure, the Mayans were smart enough to say, you know we don't have any of that stuff, but those Aztecs up there, you go get them. That's the people you want to conquer right there.

The guide immediately launched into a discussion of the politics of religion in modern Guatemala. According to him, in this area, people are more likely to be Mormon or Church of the Nazarene than Catholic. This was not unusual, the Mayan people we met and talked to considered themselves spiritual people and religion was a popular topic, frequently, the first topic they would hit on. An ice breaker topic. Which is very different from the US.

After almost an hour, bouncing around in a van on wide dirt, loose-stone roads, we came to the river across from the town of Sayaxche.

We didn't take the ferry into town. The guide, Joser, said that this was his home town, he'd been raised there, but the drug dealers had moved in, so they'd been forced to move on to Flores. Instead we caught a boat here up the river to the national park with the ruins.

It was an hour long boat ride, the river filled with turtles and 3 feet high great blue herons, egrets and kingfishers, boys in shallow draft boats fishing, the air moist with a hint of rain. Women washing their clothes, knee-deep in the river.

The ruins were a 30 minute hike into the jungle up from the river. We had the guide and all the ruins, in fact, to ourselves, just a couple lonely park rangers cooling their heels.

This first structure was the remains of an astronomical observation platform. You face westward as you climb the main steps, west being associated with death by the Mayans. At the foot of the stairs was a large flat altar, large and round, like a Chinese restaurant table that seats 10, with a very eroded jaguar head sticking out the front. The Mayans did do blood rituals, both on themselves (the kings and other royals bleeding themselves for blood to burn to the gods) and sacrifice of captives of war, but they were never as gung-ho as the Aztecs who seemed to have specialized in human sacrifice on a large scale. The Mayan believed that the gods had made multiple attempts before they created the current world and had only been successful when they mixed their blood with cornmeal to create man. So, you needed to give up some blood to repay the gods for creation. If fact there's one story that claims the Mayan royals slashed themselves deeply, perhaps in the neck, to prove their immortality to the commoners.

Joser took us to see the ball court, which was not restored, so it looked more like two matching mounds of dirt with trees growing out of them. But you could get a sense of scale. If you think of a hand ball court, this was about the same width and maybe twice as long with slanted targets on either side on the short direction. It was played with a solid rubber ball, so the player wore pads on their arms and legs and a thick, Michelin-tire-man pad around their waist. And they couldn't use their hands or feet to move the ball, they bumped it with their hips, legs and elbows. According to Joser, our guide, sometimes the winning team was sacrificed to the gods, sometimes the losers, sometimes they gave up their possessions rather than their lives. What happened with the game ended varied from place to place and periods of history. The problem being that the Spanish weren't interested in all the aspects of the local cultures and didn't write about things they weren't interested in. And then there's this small matter of a Franciscan missionary by the name of Fray Diego de Landa who, in 1549, destroyed all the native Mayan books that he could find. He burned the entire written history of the Mayan people, almost nothing on paper survived, only the carved stones.

And Ceibal had a collection of beautifully carved stone stelae. You're supposed to notice that the faces are very non-Mayan looking. The Mayan royalty clamped the heads of their babies to make them more sloped and elongated and Mayan royalty wore an ornament over the bridge of their nose to accentuate the single line of the nose up the sloping forehead, which the faces in these carving do not. Their eyes are rounder, less narrow, than carvings at other Mayan sites.

Some Mayan experts believe this is a sign of non-Mayan invasion. Joser believed it was a sign of non-royals (or middle-class, as he put it) trying to emulate royal Mayan culture and continue tradition after the collapse of the Mayan kings and the big cities, like Tikal.

On the way back to the river and the boat (where the boat man had spent the afternoon waiting for us), the jungle was noisy with howler monkeys. They're surprising small when you see them, maybe a little bit bigger than a spider monkey, but they make the most ungodly racket. They are very territorial, even though they move every 6 days, hoot and holler at each other, the big males with a backup choir of 1 or 2 smaller males.

They drove us to our hotel with time enough for a shower before dinner. After which we immediately collapsed. We're such party animals when we've been up since 0430.

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