A Guatemala City to Atitlán Chicken Bus named Esmeralda parked on the street in Santiago Atitlán
Boat: SANTIAGO ATITLÁN to PANAJACHEL
Arrive: Hotel Bambú dock, 2:30PM
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Shuttle: PANAJACHEL to GUATEMALA CITY
Day and Date: Wed, 31-DEC-2004
Depart: PANAJACHEL, 4:00PM
Arrive: GUATEMALA CITY, 7:30PM
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Hotel: Hotel Westin Camino Real
Av la Reforma and 14 C, Zona 10
Guatemala City, Guatemala
Phone # 011 502 333 4633
Hotel Website
Check in: 31-DEC-2004
Check out: 1-JAN-2005
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Number of photos shot: 71
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Cutting The Legs Off The God
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You'll think I'm a terrible snob, but, you know, I don't hang with other tourists when I'm traveling. Especially American tourists. I know, I know, if you read the journals of all these kids taking their gap year traveling aboard, they have great stories about falling in with the couple guys from Chicago named Bruce and Todd on the banks of the Nile and how for 3 days, Bruce and Todd were their best friends on the planet and they all bought each other beers in the pub and talked about Australia. When for me, two guys named Bruce and Todd from Chicago are the reason I leave the United States.
I'm not impolite. I strike up conversations with people in buses and if I happen to be sharing the same dinner table. But I don't seek out other travelers. And this Hotel Bambú, while a lovely spot, was filled with the chummy selection of travelers. And frankly, this day would have gone a bit better if I'd kept my mouth shut. We went down to have breakfast and we'd only allocated an hour for this, but the hotel staff was beyond leisurely, moving right past forgetful, in fact. It ended up being more of a self-service 4-star hotel, the odd trappings of luxury as long as you were willing to do it yourself. We were waiting for our guide for the day, Dolores Ratzan, who was the former wife of Martin Prechtel, who wrote the book, Secrets of the Talking Jaguar: A Mayan Shaman's Journey to the Heart of the Indigenous Soul. He was an American who came to live in this area and became a shaman and who left because of death threats from the guerillas. She'd lived for a time with him in Santa Fe, had 2 sons with him, but after a divorce, returned home.
So, in the long wait for breakfast, a woman at the table next to us struck up a conversation. She was someone from somewhere in New England, traveling with her daughter who had come down to Guatemala for a couple months in a Spanish language school before heading off for another 6 months in South America. The woman at the other table had apparently had the tour with Dolores a day or so earlier. Somewhere in the struggle of getting breakfast from the hotel staff, I lost track of our conversation. The next thing I know some guy showed up at our table saying he'd been trying to book Dolores for days without success, could they just come with us?
I should have said no. But I was distracted and caught off guard and too many people were standing around that I didn't want to look like a jerk. Especially since Dolores had just showed up and it turned out that he'd already told her that they were coming as well. And worst of all, when he said "us", he didn't really explain that "us" included 2 whining teenaged boys who really wanted to go horseback riding instead. So, we stood with the guide watching this couple fight with their 2 sons. Neither us or the guide were particularly eager to have them join us. And then the 3 of us, Dolores, Dean and I, snuck off on the dirt trail toward town, making sarcastic jokes about teenaged boys the minute we were out of earshot. Dolores had 2 grown sons and a 10 year old with her second husband, so I don't think she had any more patience for sullen teenaged boys than we did. Her line was well, usually I just have to take what the travel agents book for me. You won't believe what I get stuck with sometimes.
The 4 of them caught up with us before we made it the 10 minute walk to town. Damn. I was walking fast. We should have ran.
One of the things we noticed in Guatemala was a fair number of cultivated fields of cabbage, but in all the time we were there, we were never offered a dish that contained cabbage. Apparently, it's cooked up into stews and soups and given to newlywed couples as a hope for fertility. We saw a lot of fishermen, but we weren't offered fish. We were seldom offered anything that wasn't plates of meat, rice, and beans with a little soft cheese, unless it was a kitchen with pretenses of international cuisine and, frankly, the international cuisine usually unsuccessful, but well-meaning. Really, the grilled meat and beans were usually the best option.
I did have a good stew of beef with a sauce made of tomatoes, pumpkins, and cinnamon in Antigua and a chili relleno that was made with a bell pepper rather than a relleno chili. Dean kept ordering tamales and thinking that he wasn't getting them until he realized that their tamales are entirely cornmeal and don't have meat or anything else inside them and don't come in a corn leave wrapping.
One local food wisas the one shown below. I unfortunately don't remember the name of it. When you open the green skin, it has lumps of sweet sticky white fruit in it wrapped loosely in a cotton candy way around a series of large black seeds.
The first stop on the tour was a visit to Maximón. (Ignore the sullen teenaged boys, ignore the sullen teenaged boys.) He's a local native god, the wooden carving is 600 years old. He likes cigars and alcohol, particularly a local form of moonshine. He dresses in western clothing with a cowboy hat and layers and layers of silk scarves. People from the village offer their houses for Maximón for a one year period that starts right after Easter. It's a great honor to be chosen as the home for the god and he takes over 1 room on the house during the day and goes upstairs to bed at 7pm every night. After all, a god needs his beauty sleep. The family still lives in the house while Maximón, we came and went through their kitchen.
The couple kneeling on the mats have come with their shaman to ask for a good son-in-law. They have a daughter who was getting old enough to marriage and they wanted a good son-in-law, hard-working, no drinking or drugs, a son-in-law who would be good to their daughter.
And just to show how they mix this up with their Catholic beliefs, at the far side of the room where you can just make out a string of colored light, that's a glass case holding a life-sized carved Jesus figure
Once a month the shamans come and wash the clothing on the Jesus and Maximón sculptures and redress them. They save the water from washing Jesus' clothing and drink it later as holy water. They, however, don't drink the wash water from Maximón. And you see how short the carving is. You see, Maximón apparently talks back to the shamans, either in dreams or directly, and tells them what to do. Well, I guess Maximón was telling the men in the village to run around on their wives and do bad things, so at some point, they cut off a section of Maximón's legs to warn him to behave himself.
The couple didn't seem to resent us being there. They came over as they were leaving and shook all our hands and thanked us.
Next stop of the tour, the local cathedral, complete with complaining teenage in foreground. Let's pretend I did that on purpose to give a sense of scale to the photo. The church was built on a Maya temple, which is why the narrow, steep Maya temple-ish steps on the right that lead up to the front door.
The church priest during the worst of the conflict between the guerillas and the paramilitary death squads during Guatemala's civil war had been an American by the name of Father Stanley Rother. And apparently he'd waded into this dispute hip-deep, complaining to the soldiers that his parishioners were so scared that they were bedded down in his church every night because they thought the thicker walls would protect them from the gunfire. And he was assassinated for his trouble. Dolores had known him well and was quite moved as she talked about him and the good things he'd done for the local people. She showed us the spot here he died and the stains from his blood.
The church walls were covered with crosses. One for each local person who had died as a result of the conflict. This is only a small section of the wall.
One of the things that had been stressed to me repeatedly about Guatemala was never, never take pictures of children. That the local believe that rich American tourists kidnap local children for organ transplants and somehow digital photography is part of this. That tourists have been killed for taking pictures of children. But... this church was filled with children tugging on your sleeve and asking you to take their picture in exchange for 5 quetzals. The oldest one in the group below was quite adamant, and only 1 quetzal apiece, 5 for the group. So, I took the moment, looked left, looked right, and took the picture. Notice the enthusiasm in exchange for my 5 quetzals (about 75 cents). These obviously are their show me the money faces because I didn't pay until after I had the picture.
Ah, the last stop on the tour was a visit to her parent's house where we got a chance to sit down in the courtyard and watch her mother weave and talk a little about how they lived. I ended up buying one of her scarves for $20. A beautiful red and black thick cotton that has been keeping me warm since I've come back to California winter.
If I was to plan this trip, knowing what I know now, I would have stayed here in Santiago Atitlán for New Years Eve. Hotel Bambú apparently throws an annual feast and everyone hangs out on the patio watching the town light up with fireworks. The church was being decorated for a special New Year's Eve mass. Instead, that afternoon we caught the boat back to Panajachel.
At the dock, we met a shuttle to Antigua, this time a 14 seat van completely full with Americans and Canadians. All our luggage tied onto the roof rack. In Antigua, we transferred to another shuttle which took us into Guatemala City. So, we ended up back in the hotel described in the guide book as a good place if you're on an expense account. A big glass hotel that could have been in San Francisco or Chicago in an empty downtown area that wasn't walking distance to any restaurant.
We checked out the hotel restaurant which turned out to be rather boring standard buffet and opted for the room service where the food was excellent and we ordered a bottle of champagne. I know, I know, New Year's Eve in a foreign country and we're getting drunk in a hotel room and just laughing and messing around with each other, old movies in English on the TV. We are a boring old married couple. The shuttle driver the next morning told us we'd missed a good fist fight between two women in the bar at 3am.
A 1pm flight the next day and long haul back to rainy San Francisco. A Sunday of rest before work. No one even knew we were gone, well, except for the multiple people I gave my itinerary to in case we ended in trouble, somehow the victims of violence. But after all the State Department warnings and all the tales of violence, I didn't feel any more unsafe in Guatemala than I would anywhere far from home. The drivers are always crazy in a foreign country, the cities at night confusing and dark. I felt like the Guatemalan people had taken care of us like we were their family. We've never traveled this way before where a travel agent just took care of everything and we were handed off from new best friend subcontractor to new best friend subcontractor. So, there were times when we were confused about what was going on. Usually I would spend 6 months researching a trip and not have a local guide. Certainly I would highly recommend this travel agent, the arrangements were excellent, but I shouldn't have neglected my own research.
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