Tinker To Evers To Chance

Chichicastenago is known for its market, Thursdays and Sundays. An enormous open-air collection of booths filled with vegetables and chickens, hand woven cloth, hand embroidered quilts, carved wooden masks and figures of saints, machetes, it's one of the largest markets in Central America. The buses from Guatemala City and Antigua start to roll in about 10am, 11am, which meant we had a couple hours before the rest of the tourists arrived.

5am on the nose, someone set off a booming round of fire crackers outside our window. I suspect this was special for the Christmas season, but there were firecrackers everywhere. Dean kept saying he longed to be a Guatemalan boy with a pocket full of quetzals because everywhere they sold long dangling strings of little firecrackers, cherry bombs big as a half stick of dynamite, odd chicken-shaped firecrackers. Tables spread out with the cornucopia of a little boy's desires. Every spare corner in Guatemala was filled with small boys jumping up and down in a bang, bang gray cloud of smoke. Frankly, there could have been a vicious gun battle going on 1 block over and we would have shrugged and said, oh, more firecrackers.

This was the arch heading into the middle of town. I am standing with my back to the far edge of the market in the middle of an intersection with such a sharp turn, they positioned a traffic cop to manage the buses coming and going in each direction. Coming up through the arch is one of the vast fleet of American school buses, aka "chicken buses", that move people throughout Guatemala. The Toyota on the right is also a form of mass transit. They fill up the bed of the pickups, standing room only, and the triangular frame is for the passengers to hold on to and brace themselves. The bottom frame of many of these little pickups would be bent in a V-shape with the two bumpers as the low part of the V, from the weight. This one had just dropped off 20 or 30 people at the market behind me.

There are two churches in Chichicastenago. The bigger Santo Tomás Church on the south-east corner of the plaza and the smaller El Calvario chapel on the north-west. And these two churches were an odd combination of Catholicism and native Mayan spiritual forces worship. Outside of both were shamans swinging perforated cans of incense and praying loudly. Inside was a space filled with large flat stone blocks covered with lit candles and scattered flower petals and people on their knees having very animated discussions with their gods.

This woman was standing outside the front door of the larger Santo Tomás Church.

The steps of the Santo Tomás Church was the flower market area. These are bundles of poinsettias. The smoke is rising from a small fire at the base of the steps.

You would buy the flower petals here on the steps to take into the church for your offerings. They were also selling these bundles of fronds, maybe banana leaves. I never figured out to what purpose. I did watch a white woman walk up, buy an armful of them and walk off, away from the church. So, they weren't used as offerings. But there was a large section of the market, a street over inside a building, for the vegetables and fruits, so if these were banana leaves used for cooking, why were they have them here with the flowers rather than the other perishable food?

I did not figure this out.

The big thing about the market is that you're supposed to barter, that you can get a great deal if you bargain them down. The problem with this is that (1) I'm terrible at it and (2) when you do the exchange rate in your head, you're only talking about the difference in a couple US dollars. When their initial you're-a-gringo price is $10 for a beautiful handwoven scarf that took them a week to make, where ya gonna bargain down to? We bought some shirts, a beautiful pink and white scarf, a pink and green purse woven with a fish pattern, a green tablecloth woven with a pattern of white birds — our big purchase, we spent 17 dollars on that and the vendor girl danced with happiness that we'd paying that much, I bought a hat that Dean dares me to wear in public outside of Central America.

The biggest problem is that the market was so large and the vendors so aggressive that they quickly wore you out by being constantly in your face. Constantly pressing up to you and thurst some native trade good into your face, a lot of it really cheap junk. Runny nosed 5 year olds pulling at you to buy their worry dolls. Vendors chasing after you with armfuls of shirts and wooden beaded necklaces, yelling, Madam, Madam or mi amiga.

Somehow we managed without buying any of the thousands of carved wooden masks.

To escape from this this, we slide off into the cemetary on the edge of town.

The most interesting part of the cemetary I didn't get a picture of. At the back end of cemetary was a small black crypt with barred windows, a locked gate, and an altar set up in front of it with several dozen white candles burning in front of it and a thick layer of orange flower petals. There was a large chanting woman swinging a perforated incense burner and 2 guys on their knees praying loudly. There was some sort of native Maya ceremony going on, but there was also a couple of large men watching us watch the ceremony. I'd been warned about taking pictures of religious ceremonies and churches before going to Guatemala. That tourists have been killed in Guatemala for taking the wrong picture at the wrong time. But sometime it seemed to just require a couple bucks to show proper respect to the god in question and they were happy for you to take pictures. Unfortunately, we didn't have a guide with us in Chichicastenago and I don't speak Spanish. Which meant I couldn't figure out how to properly show respect and so there are no pictures of this moment.

Another shot of the main Santo Tomás Church.

When we got back to the hotel, the driver was waiting for us, walked up and pointed to a name on a list. And we said Sí, Lore-urr-ah. The driver didn't speak any English, but he had a long conversation with one of the bellhops in the red shorts and at the end of it, the bellhop threw our duffle bag over his shoulder and marched off. And went down the street and down the street and then down that street. Dean asks me, where are we going? and I said, I don't know, I'm following the luggage. We passed the gas station with several vans, some marked with the name of the shuttle company, but the guy kept on walking. We ended up in a dirt parking lot next to an enormous Greyhound-sized bus. It was like turning a corner and finding a brontosaurus. This thing is too big to be here. The roads to get here are not big enough for this thing — how did it get here?

But the driver shows up and wants the voucher and tells us, sí, Lago de Atitlán. And the vouchers all say in Spanish where we're going and what they're supposed to do with us and he read the voucher. So, we get on the bus which is filled with tourists and watch this driver bully his way down the hairpin switchbacks. I think he only had to back up once or twice. It took a lot longer to get down than up and out the window we could watch cars passing the bus blindly on turns, except that we were high enough up that sometimes we could see over the turn and see the truck coming up the other way.

In Sololá, I had plenty of time to take that picture at the top, left hand side of the page because the only way the bus could get through town which had very narrow streets was to make a 20 point turn and back down one street, make another 20 point turn, back down another street, make another 20 point turn, and finally get going the right way. Somewhere in here, we hit something rather hard, everyone thrown forward in their seats, but the bus didn't stop. Maybe it was just a stray dog or a near miss with a small boy throwing firecrackers. I was too far back to see. Do you think that counts as an accident?

Eventually, we pull into a gas station there in Panajachel and a lot of Spanish is exchanged and everyone gets off. But we are nowhere near a dock and the map shows two docks and I don't know where we are on the map. Tarzan Spanish is getting me nowhere. Dean is behind me, trying to get the bags from underneath the bus before they disappear in the crowd. Even the other tourists don't seem to speak English. When this van comes squealing around the corner on two wheels with a guy jumping out before it comes to a halt and he's yelling La Via Maya, La Via Maya and pointing at me. I was holding the blue book of vouchers in my hand because that had the itinerary on it that said where we were supposed to go and it said La Via Maya, the name of the Guatemalan travel agent that the travel agent in Atlanta had subcontracted with, who had subcontracted our transportation to the Atitrans shuttle company who had subcontracted us to the driver / owner of this enormous bus. So, he says Hotel Bambú and pushes me in the van. Dean puts the luggage in the back of the van and gets in with me, but the guy is still running around yelling Spanish and more and more luggage is being put in the van. There's not that much room in the van. So, the guy looks at us, says Hotel Bambú and pulls us out of the van and waves down one of the little 3-wheeled scooter taxis. Except this thing is only big enough to hold 3 people, not 3 people + luggage. The guy has shoved our duffle bag at the scooter driver, had a short conversation about billing, and run off. So, I end up with the luggage all on my lap, with Dean tall enough, he's having problems just getting twisted into his seat.

And this little overloaded scooter roars off into traffic with real full sized cars and trucks, zipping in and out. I'm now in several steps down a chain, all of non-English speakers, and I have no clue where we're going. My reaction was we're going to die. Now I don't know if you've ever seen the movie, Die Hard, but there's a scene where Bruce Willis finally manages to attract the attention of a cop and convince him that terrible things are happening and people are in danger. And Bruce Willis tells this cop, welcome to the party, pal. So, you know Dean looked over at the top of my head peeping out over the pile of luggage on my lap and said that same line. Sometimes only movie dialog will properly express a situation.

Eventually, the cab pulls up to a wall and a line of vendors and there's another long conversation in Spanish and a guy takes the duffle bag and runs off. So, I run off after him and Dean runs after me. Follow the luggage. We end up on a beach and then end up on a dock and then get into this big boat and I can see Dean sigh with relief. If we're going across this big lake, at least we were going in a big boat. But the guy with the bag crosses the big boat down to a smaller boat. It's a smaller boat, but, ok. And then the guy with the bag crosses the smaller boat down into a tiny outboard motor driven launch. How could you not laugh at this? We were a baseball in flight in a double play, Tinker to Evers to Chance, thrown from hand to hand with no hesitation.

The half hour trip across the lake took an hour because we had to keep stopping to help other boats that were out of fuel or broke down. We end up on a dock east of town and the guy offloads the bags and says "voucher". This blew me away because, yes, we had a voucher for the boat ride, but had thought we'd fallen off the voucher system somewhere near a gas station in Panajachel. Up the hill from the dock was the 11 room hotel.

The view of Santiago Atitlán at sunset as we drank beer on the patio.

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