Friday, April 18, 2008

1. Guatemala (10/1/07 - 10/21/07)

Next Country --> 2. Costa Rica
Antigua
See all photos of Guatemala --> Guatemala Photos

I spent the first three weeks of my trip in the city of Antigua, Guatemala. I was really interested in learning the fundamentals of Spanish and heard Guatemala had inexpensive, high quality Spanish language schools. It also just sounded like an interesting place. Antigua was founded in 1543 and was one of the oldest colonial cities in the Americas. At one time it was actually the capital of Guatemala and had kept much of it's charm with its cobblestone streets and colonial architecture. It was also uniquely situated in the middle of three volcanoes -- Agua, Fuego, and Acatenango, one of which was active in 2002 (Fuego). Not a very comforting fact but it looked pretty from a distance.

My plane flight to Guatemala City was shorter than I had expected -- only five hours. When I arrived I immediately had that “I feel completely lost" sensation. To my excitement, someone from the Spanish school was waiting for me. As I got closer I noticed that my greeter (Oscar) was about fourteen years old. I remember thinking, I hope this kid isn’t my Spanish teacher. He took me to the school van outside, asked for a tip, and off we went to Antigua.

About an hour later I was dropped off in front of my host family’s house. Veronica, the host mother, answered the door and gave me a nice welcome in Spanish. I fumbled my way through something in Spanish, said goodbye to the driver and entered what would be my home for the next three weeks. Veronica showed me around a bit ("here’s the bathroom, here’s your room, here’s bla bla bla and bla bla bla," etc… and so forth). She probably told me something very important like don’t touch the red button on the sink otherwise this house will blow up and the town of Antigua will disintegrate. I didn’t care. I was so tired and couldn’t keep my head straight. I motioned that I was going to sleep for a while in my room. It was only 9am in the morning. Not the best way to acclimate to the new time zone, but it was something I could figure out later.

I woke up around 2pm and took a stroll through the town. It was still Sunday and classes didn’t start until the next day. I walked about 10 minutes towards the main center of Antigua where there was a ton of activity -- street musicians, cafes, chicken buses. I found a few tourists walking along and somehow convinced them to let me tag along for dinner. My first meal on my trip was pepperoni pizza. Not what I expected but sometimes you do what you gotta do.



The next morning I met my Spanish teacher, Jaun. Jaun is only in his early 20’s but wise beyond his years and an expert teacher. His method of teaching was very effective. We’d spend the first hour discussing major stories in the newspaper (politics, crime, education, American Idol, etc...) and with the remaining time, we worked on grammar and reviewed homework from the previous night. I felt that those one to two hour conversations to start off the day were the most critical. Guatemala was having their presidential elections when I was there, so that made the discussions even more interesting, particularly since the country was so politically charged.

There were also three other students from the school living with my host family, so we all ate breakfast, lunch and dinner together. The first week I had NO IDEA what people were talking about. I was just hoping that people wouldn’t ask me questions so I could listen to their conversations in Spanish. I caught the gist of what they were saying by the 2nd week, and by the 3rd, I could finally contribute a bit to the conversation and say things in the past tense. Instead of questions like, “Can I please have another piece of bread?” I was able to say things like, “I ate a lot of chocolate for desert back home. Do you have any here?”

I also met a bunch of people through the school and traveled with three of them each weekend to a few places around the country. Anne and Manon were from Holland (both on the far left pondering life, spanish architecture and the massive volcano in the background) and Tone, pronounced like Tuna, was from Norway (on the right checking out here camera). We went to a few key places over a three week period -- a beautiful lake, called Lake Atitlan; the Mayan ruins in the northern part of the country to a city called Tikal, and an active volcano, where we stood literally two feet away from flowing lava. It was a “don’t try this at home” kind of moment. Here’s a slightly more in-depth description of what we did at each of the destinations.


Lake Atitlan

Lake Atitlan was our first weekend destination and was a three hour bus ride from Antigua. Like Antigua, the lake was surrounded by huge volcanoes with steep hillsides and villages with traditional Mayan culture. The lake was HUGE – 8km across from north to south, 18km from east to west, and 300m deep. We ended up staying in a hostel that was up on the cliffs of the lake and located outside the main lake-side villages. It was a great place to use as a base and then explore different villages each day.

One of our favorite villages was Santiago Atitlan, located between the volcanoes of Toliman and San Pedro. Many of the locals here had kept their traditional Tz’utujil Mayan lifestyle, where the women made and wore clothes embroidered with bright colors, and the town’s religious brotherhoods maintained their ceremonies with a mix of Mayan and Catholic traditions.

One tradition, in particular, is the reverence for a deity called, Maximon, who is a combination of Mayan gods, Pedro de Alvarado (the Spanish conquistador of Guatemala), and the biblical Judas. I’m not sure how Pedro (or even Judas) made it into the mix but it was interesting nonetheless. Maximon is essentially a wooden figure draped in colorful silk scarves who smokes a fat cigar in his mouth. (See picture to the right for proof of said description.) Every Easter, the statue of Maximon is paraded through the streets of Santiago and afterwards resides for an entire year at the home of a different local family that receives the honor of caretaker. Throughout the year, locals (and tourists) visit Maximon, ask for blessings (cure for a disease, crops to grow, finally getting that promotion at work, you get the point…) and make offerings of candles, cigars, food, beer and rum. When you enter the room where Maximon resides, you’ll also see a large statue of Jesus on a cross as well as a Jesus in a life-size coffin. Interesting eh?

Before we headed home, we took a quick stop to a huge outdoor market called Chichicastenago. Professional shoppers beware. If you're not careful you'll end up buying up the place -- T-shirts, electronics, clothing, pieces of chicken. I held off on the street food but if that's your thing it's paradise. After a few hours we were back in Antigua again Sunday night and ready to tackle our Spanish classes the next day.



Tikal

Our 2nd weekend we flew to the city of Tikal in the northeastern part of Guatemala, near the border of Belize. Tikal was the center of one of the largest ancient Mayan cities dating back to before Christ. The Mayans settled in the area in 700 B.C. and then eventually built up a complex system of pyramids by 200 B.C. By 250 A.D., Tikal had become an important religious, cultural and commercial city for the Mayan empire.

We took a short one hour flight from Guatemala City to the city of Flores which was right outside of Tikal. We got into Flores at about 7:30am, and it seemed like we were the only living souls around. Shops and restaurants gradually opened as the morning wore on, and we started to look for a hostel. We stopped at one hostel that was recommended to us and asked the owner to show us around. She took us to one of the rooms, opened the door, and we watched a cockroach the size of small mouse run across the room. One of the six guys who was sleeping in the room looked up at us and said, “Hey dude, what’s up?” I could feel the bed bugs waiting anxiously to settle in at this place. We asked the owner to politely close the door, and we left the hostel.

Not impressed with our first hostel attempt we decided to just eat, which is generally the most common way to pass the time while traveling. While at the restaurant we got a recommendation from the owner to check out a relatively inexpensive hostel down the road. He also said the owners had a lot of security and didn’t try to rob you either. We thought that would be a nice feature and decided to check it out once we inhaled our omlettes. Food, as always, was more important than finding accommodations. We eventually headed out, found the hostel and settled there for two nights. It was clean and safe like the restaurant owner said. And our stuff was still there by the end of our stay.

That day we bought tickets to do a sunrise tour of Tikal and then spent the rest of the day just touring around Flores. We decided to take a Tuk Tuk (a little motorcycle carriage type thingamajiggy) to the nearby Actun-can caves. When we got there we hired a guide to take us through a huge network of caves. It was definitely a good idea to get a guide otherwise we would have easily gotten lost in the maze. He showed us a number of limestone formations that were in the shapes of birds, horses, snakes, people. You name it, and we was saw a shape of it inside the walls of the cave.

He eventually told us that we needed to leave within the next thirty minutes since the bats in the cave would all migrate outside for the night. That sounded like a good idea to me. Within a minute of him telling us this, I looked up with my headlamp, and we saw hundreds of bats flying chaotically overhead. More and more bats appeared by the minute, and eventually we told the guide that we’d had enough of the little Kamikazi bats, and we were fine leaving. One of the girls later asked him what would have happened if we were still in the caves when the bats were migrating outside. He said, he wasn’t sure, but it wasn’t a good idea to be there. We thought that was prudent.

We went out in the town that night for dinner, had a few drinks and eventually got back to the hostel at around 1am, which was just in time to get a two hour night sleep and leave for the 3:30am, sunrise tour to Tikal. Whoever convinced us to do this early morning tour was a total $@#!. Oh wait…that was me. Nice going, Ryan.

However, I must say that it was all worth it in the end. We got to Tikal at around 4:30am, hiked for about 45 minutes and climbed up a massive pyramid in pitch black. There were about thirty of us up there, and we were completely silent. The next hour was spectacular – hundreds of howler monkeys roaring in the distance (although small, each one sounds like a lion when they roar), the sounds of hundreds of birds, and the fog peeling away only to unveil massive pyramids in the distance. If there’s any place to sit and meditate that place would be it.

For the rest of the day, we went on a tour of the city center (about 16 sq km) where there’s over 4000 Mayan structures. The national park itself is 550 sq km with many more Mayan ruins spread throughout. We spent the day inspired by the huge pyramids and imagined what life was like here 2000 years ago. I ended up taking four million pictures here but was able to widdle them down to about twenty or so.


Volcano Pacaya

The final weekend in Guatemala, a group of us from the school visited Volcano Pacaya, another active volcano about an hour and a half by car southeast of Antigua. The hike up there was only about an hour and a half and was relatively easy. Once we arrived, our guide told us that we could actually work our way up to the flowing lava, put a wooden stick in it, and watch it create a ball of fire. Let’s just say it’s not a tour you’d find in the U.S. We spent an hour or so wandering and taking pictures of the lava. It was…how does one say….REALLY HOT!! Push the play button below to see a video of the lava.




Guatemala ended up being a great introduction to Latin America for me. The scenery, the people, the colors, the lava. And the Spanish I learned along the way would also serve as a great foundation for the rest of my trip. The landscapes and the people left a lasting impression.


See next country --> 2. Costa Rica
or
See all photos of Guatemala first --> Guatemala Photos

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