Santiago Atitlan

We've spent the last week in Santiago Atitlan, one of the most tradional villages that lies on the shores of Lake Atitlan in the center of the highlands. It's inhabited by T'utzuhil Maya, whose women tradionally wear a red cloth wrapped in a halo around their head, along with the tradional skirt, handwoven with amazing patterns; the belt, hand embroidered; and the huipil, the woven and embroidered blouse. It's an incredibly beautiful area of the country, the lake is huge and surrounded by three volcanoes, the tallest reaching around 12,000 feet. Gliding across the lake in an 8 passenger boat with the water stretched out on all sides feels like sailing on the navel of the world. From all sides mountains rise steeply from the water, most of them cultivated with corn as far as 4,000 feet up the sides. On every side we could see the tan trails of mud where the earth has collapsed and fallen into the lake, some of them from this year's hurricane, some from earlier eras. We stayed in an inn owned by a friend of a friend and spent the week helping out the hospital in a town called Panabaj that was half destroyed by a mudslide. In places you can see where people have dug their houses out of the mud, their walls stained earth brown midway to the roof. From the sides of the road, many of the trees are buried in feet of mud, which has now hardened to a deep, dusty soil. Some areas are heavily coated in lime to prevent the spread of disease. The government has been killing stray dogs to keep them from digging up corpses. Further along, you come to a school built by a priest from the states. It can't be used for four more years, like the hospital, to ensure that any remaining bodies are decomposed. Past the hospital lies the area that has been declared a mass grave; nothing remains there but a swath of hardened mud, 150 yards across and flecked with debris from everything that lay in its path - cinderblocks painted in all the many colors that people paint their houses here; rebar, bent and twisted; cement and rock chunks; trees of all sizes broken; tools; toys and all the physical possesions that people built their lives from. This is also an area that was severely persecuted by the government from the 1970s all the way into the '90s, so in essence many people had probably just begun to live their life again when everything was swept away from them. The gyst of the persecution in Guatemala revolves around the government helping the land owners force the indiginous people off the land they had cultivated for hundreds, errr, thousands, of years. The government brutally tortured and killed more than 60,000 people. Of course, the US couldn't help but get mixed up in the interests of the land owners (being that they were the ones exporting bananas and such) so the US supported the leadership, aka, coups, of dictators who only worsened the situation. There's such a lot of sadness permeating this land, yet the people are open, friendly and beautiful. Our volunteering consisted of moving supplies from the excavated hospital in the mudslide to another hospital that will be able to use them. Our efforts felt pretty small in the large scheme but at the same time it feels good to have done something. Overall I feel helpless and guilty in the face of all the loss and devestation that the Maya people have suffered (and the poor ladinos as well). I want to give everything I have, yet I keep it and keep on traveling. I don't know how I can ever allow myself to feel bad about what I have and what I am doing in my life, yet somehow I'm rarely satisfied. I'm rich and lucky and free beyond belief, and so are most of the people living in the US; in New York I didn't have this perspective. Earlier today I thought that I wasn't getting anything out of traveling right now; I think maybe my problem is more that I'm getting too much out of traveling to synthesize it all at once. May I take this sadness and build it into my perspective on my own life; may I not feel guilty for what I have while at the same time wishing for more; and may we all feel and be blessed and rich and safe and happy and healthy in the coming year. Peace, happy new year, and happy birthday to me! (I've been singing myself happy birthday starting today and I think I'll keep it up until the second or so...)
-Sarah

Festival de Santo Tomas

Further adventures in Guatemala have landed us in Chichicastenango... known for it's twice weekly markets. No matter where you find yourself in Guatemala you'll likely hear about this market as it is very gringo oriented (on non-market days Sarah and I were two of the dozen or so foreigners, on Sunday we saw about two hundred). We arrived on Thursday, just as the first market of the week was closing down. There is only a very small permanent market structure in the center of town that houses the everyday things that locals need and for the rest of the market a stick city is erected in the streets. For the Thursday and Sunday markets people from all over the surrounding areas bring crafts to sell to the tourists that descend on the town. Every vendor hauls their goods and a bundle of sticks and ropes. From about a dozen long poles, a good sized bundle of cord and a tarp or two every person creates their stall for market day. The hustle and bustle is amazing. Adding to the chaos was the festival de Santo Tomas. The town honors Saint Thomas for about a week with dancing, crowning of an indigenous queen, fireworks, pole flying (two men in costume climb a tall pole, wind a rope around the top and sit in a cradle to unwind the rope to the ground), and more fireworks. The fireworks are homemade and especially frightening. Structures are built, called Torritos (little bulls) that involve a small house shaped frame, one long fuse connected to dozens of different explosives and a little protective shell for the person who carries it. The fuse is lit, one man or two woman duck inside and dance as the fireworks blow in various directions. Very beautiful and very exciting. The real scary ones are the homemade versions of what us statesiders see on July 4th. I'd never seen exactly howe the lovely pyrotechnic displays are put into the sky before this week. A foot long metal tube perpendicular to the ground serves to guide the explosion upward. Insert one package of gunpowder. Light fuse and run. There are guys lighting of bombs all day at various times. So many so that I've don't even jump at shotgun volume blast anymore. During the day the fireworks are only loud... they save the colorful ones for the dark. Something about the more complicated bombs allowed for more misfires. The explosion that was supposed to propel the fireworks into the sky to safely disperse would sometimes only blow at half strength, leaving the crowd below to deal with the falling, burning and popping embers. I coaxed Sarah into the danger zone, explaining that it was really obvious when misfires weren't going to reach a safe height and it would be easy to see which direction they were going to blow. Sure enough I was right. We watched a Torrito or two and a half dozen big bombs without incident but when one of the firecrackers went astray we could tell. We could tell it was coming straight for us. I've never seen Sarah move so fast. We both ran and dove under a nearby porch as the burning embers lit up the street a dozen feet to our right. We were both giddy with adrenaline for at least an hour. Nothing like a near death experience to make you glad to be alive.
-Dirk

Two New Modes of Transportation

1. The ciclo. We got a lift to where the buses stop on the highway past immigration (there's no town there, and not much traffic of any kind...) from a guy who pedaled us in his little bike taxi thing, he called it a Ciclo. It's got the bike in back and the seats in front. He waited with us and flagged us a...

2. Chicken bus (who knows how he knew which one, some say the destination on the front and some say other words whose meaning I have yet to figure out) and it whisked us away to a crazy, dusty, packed, dirty bus lot in Coatepeque. This being our first chicken bus sans chickens, but very crowded, very loud, very raucous, old, brilliantly painted USA school bus. Buses, like the U6 I used to ride. But brighter. And fuller. Full of women wearing traditional Mayan garb, which is psychedlically bright, and old men, and kids, and mostly everyone has gold or silver teeth. We were going to stay on that bus which had a little layover and then continued to our destination city, which most people call Xela, the Mayan name. But our neighbor-passenger insisted it would take too long to wait for that bus to leave, so he hauled my bag off the bus, and I ran frantically after it, lost Dirk, as my pack was passed off to another guy, the conductor of the next Xela bus. My mochila was heaved on top of another chicken bus, and then I noticed everyone here is way less tranquilo than in mexico, they're all yelling, come on! come on! venga! venga! and I'm still looking for Dirk. He and his bag make it on the bus, and then we wait as it fills up three to a seat while vendors of fruit, chips, french fries in little paper cones, water, soda, fried plantains walk the length of the bus. Then we leave for a 3 hour ride up into the windy, cloudy mountians. The road is twisty, occasionally on a ridge and the drivers are crazy, passing other buses going up hill on curves, as they're stopping, and they honk at them as they go by. We got the wheel seat, so I was eating my knees for three hours while my ass fell asleep and I bonded with the window. We arrived in the terminal minverva in Xela, basically a big dusty road full of chicken buses of all hues. The best one had rainbow-irredescent glitter all over the grill, wings painted on the bumper and read, proud...and pretty (orgullosa ...y bonita). This was after 15 hours of buses, so it was totally surreal. Then we walked into the center, which meant we had to go through the market, which is a dark, narrow, alley covered from the elements by cloth, tin, cardboard, etc, and stalls on either side selling fruits (lots of citrus), vegetables, clothes, cloth, shoes, beans, pasta, herbs, chilis, all piled in big baskets, smoke filtering the light from the many comedores, scents of woodsmoke and people and dust. Welcome to Guatemala! Andele!

Officialdom vs. Unwashed Veggies

I am trying to decide which is worse: the chance that you might get cholera, hepatitis A, typhoid fever or a bad case of the shits from unsanitary food or the frustrations, headaches and costs of dealing with officials here in central america and Mexico. So far the jury is still out. I have to say I've only had one bad experience with food so far. It certainly wasn't as bad as it could have been, I only spent four days with an unhappy belly and am still occasionally haunted by harrowing visions of pollo de naranja (orange chicken.... what was I thinking?). On the other hand, without exception, every time I need to interact with a government official I am overtaken with frustration, a general nausea and a lightening of my wallet. I can't say I've been hit with la mordida (bribes- or literally: the bite) but the government itself loves getting some of my money. When Sarah and I entered Mexico we both received our tourist cards and stamps in our visa but they gave her 90 days and only 30 to me. After about two weeks in Oaxaca we realized that one month wasn't going to cut it so I began the process of getting an extension. The oficina de migracion wasn't very centrally located... actually it was buried in the midst of suburbs outside of town. The official posted hours were 9am to 1:30pm but when I arrived the first day I learned that a 4 and a half hour work day had proved to much and it had been shortened to 4 hours and they closed at 1pm. There wasn't time to fit me in so I returned for round two on the next day. On the second day I learned just how convoluted the process was really going to be. I needed to prove I had $50US for every day I wanted to extend. I needed a copy of every page of my passport. I needed to purchase the official forms at a papeleria. Once I had obtained the forms they needed to be filled out by typewriter (what tourist packs a typewriter!?) and returned to the office to be approved. Once approved I needed to pay the 210 peso fee (about $20 US) but the fee could not be paid at immigration... I needed to go to a bank (remember the center of town is about 2km away) and get an official stamp there. I learned all of this the day before we were to leave for Puerto Escondido but luckily (or so I thought then) the was an airport in Puerto and an oficina there. Once in Puerto I managed to get a nice letter of recommedation from a doctor that Sarah knew thorough her volunteering in a cervical cancer workshop. Armed with all of my very clean, lovely, stamped and official documents (in a manila folder!) I went to Puerto Escondido's immigration office (once again about 2km outside of town). I presented my documents one by one and was getting more and more confident that I had tamed the bureaucratic beast. I smiled as I delivered my final and most elegant blow: the letter of recommendation with a very elegant header and a government stamp, signed by a doctor and extolling my virtues. Everything came to a halt. Before I could say, "que?" a copy of my passport, the letter and Sarah's name had been entered into the official record as delinquent. We were traveling on tourist visas and volunteering. The head honcho was pissed at our transgression. He called his counter part in the town that was closer to the workshop and rattled on for 15 minutes in a tone of voice that reminded me of a petulant 8 year old. He refused to help me in any way and insisted that Sarah and I go to Huatulco and change our paperwork immediatly. Seeing as it was noon there was no way we could travel the 80km before they closed at 1pm. This was my last day before my visa expired and I was seriously considering just making a break for the Guatemalan border but our friend August volunteered her excellent spanish and experience dealing with this type of thing and we managed to get everything sorted out in Huatulco the next day. We just all kept our heads down, didn't mention anything about volunteering and managed to get me legal in just about one hour. All said, adding 30 days to my passport cost me about 800 pesos in fees, documents, taxis and about 15 hours of my time. Our border crossing was a little synopsis of this experience where we had to hop from building to building trying to find where we get the official "we have left Mexico" stamp and where we receive our new "we are now in Guatemala" stamp. We tried to head to what we had heard was the easier of the two border crossings but as we approached the last turn between the two crossings our bus driver told us that the good one had just "fallen" (turns out it has been down for about a year but every one pretends otherwise). Subsequently we had to walk about 4km and checked roughly 20 buildings for the guy with the stamp. For those of you who make this trip don't be fooled. Just because two of the buildings say immigration doesn't mean anything. The guy is actually housed in a little unmarked booth next to a lady sitting at a desk outside. Sarah and I both received 90 days this time so we can relax for a few months (hopefully) before we need to deal with anymore government representatives. For the time being I'm not eating my salads and turning and going the other way when I sense bureaucracy near by. I've not sure which is worse but I'd rather not deal with either.
-Dirk

Modes of Transportation

1. Planes, taxis. We all know about those. Boring.
2. 1st Class Bus. We haven´t taken one of these yet, but they´re the same as those big ol´buses in the states.
3. 2nd Class Bus. This was how we arrived in Puerto Escondido. The buses range from old school buses to old Greyhound buses to old microbuses. The one we took was a ´70s era Greyhound-type bus, silver-paneled with green-tinted windows. A good number of the windows had cracks in the tinted layer, lending a spider-webby feel to the view. The driver had a little altar in the front of the bus between the two front windows, composed of a rather gorey crucifux and some brightly-colored somethings. There´s no AC, so we opened the bus windows and closed them as appropriate. People get on and off where ever they need to along the route, so it could take anywhere in the range of three hours around the scheduled time to arrive at your destination. Or, as happened on our ride, you encounter a parade along the route and have to detour around it on very narrow dirt side roads that leave about an inch on either end of the bus to turn. Occasionally people get on to sell things like empanadas, tamales, bananas (we´re pretty sure this old woman paid her bus fare in bananas) and most dramatically of all, giant fresh lobsters for 120 pesos per kilo (about 5 dollars a pound).
4. My personal favorite. Camionetas (little trucks). These are taxi collectives that are very cheap (less than a dollar a person) and drive on a certain route back and forth all day. You flag one down in your direction and hop in the back of the pickup truck. There´s two benches on the sides, and a rack on top of the cab and a big tent-shaped tarp over the top. You either ring the doorbell to signal you want to get off, or you knock on the roof of the cab. I love them! You get to ride in the back of a pickup with the wind blowing in your face and the sun shining and it´s a normal way to get around.

-Sarah

The Way Things Work in Mexico

I am constantly amazed by the fact that things work here, even when it seems to my american eyes that there is no logic to why or how or when or whether something will be accomplished. An example. We went into a bodega on the main street of Mazunte. An old toothless man drinking a corona out front yelled for someone in the comedor next door to come help us. We wandered around for a few seconds with no attention, observing the clear local Mezcal packaged in a small vinegar-bottle package, giving off a MOONSHINE vibe... Then a little girl of about 7 ran in barefoot to help us. (An aside: the kids run very free here, always barefoot, playing and laughing, helping out in stores and the places their parents work.) Dirk asked her for a pack of Marlboros. She climbed up on the shelves behind the counter, being to short to reach otherwise, and said, no we don´t have those (no los tenemos). He asked for a different brand, some sort of generic Mexican brand, and she said, no, asked for a different kind but no, no, all we have are these (esos son los solos que yo tengo), and pulled down a pack of Marlboros. OK, we´ll get these, and gave her a 100 peso bill, which is worth a little less than 10 dollars. No one ever has change for a bill bigger than a 50 on hand, unless we´re talking a supermarket or hotel, so after subtracting the amount on a little calculator, she ran off to get change from someone else. But, no, this one has a rip in it, we can´t take it. OK, we pull out a new 100 peso note and hand it to her. A few minutes later, a woman came out from the kitchen of the comedor to make our change for us, and we´re on our way. The best part of this mellow chaos - call it disorder perhaps - is that everything actually works. Ha!
-Sarah

Swimming with the Natives

Sarah and I are passing time in Mazunte for now. It is a bit east of Puerto Escondido and much, much smaller. Mazunte´s main industry used to be hunting turtles for meat and eggs. Since the early 90´s when killing turtles was outlawed Mazunte has switched to tourism, still based around the turtles. Today we jumped in a boat with a few other visitors and went out to sea. We caught some nice mellow 8 am sun and a different view of the coast... all very tranquil. We spotted our first turtle about 5 minutes into the ride, as one of our guides was explaining where we were going and where we could expect to see turtles. "¡Buena suerte!" the captain yelled and took off for more sightings. We soon found our second turtle of the day so we cut the engine and coasted up to him. Turtles have internal ears so if they don´t look up to see you approaching they have no warning. I imagine this turtle was even more suprised than I was when the guide at the front of the boat (Juan)dove out and tackled the poor unsuspecting fellow. Juan held him up by the back of the shell so his front flippers and head were out of the water and invited all of us to jump in. Five tourists swarmed into the water, found that we had stopped the boat in a mess of jellyfish (medusas here in Mexico) and just as quickly jumped back in the boat. I had been scared of jellyfish for years, hearing all sorts of horror stories in Hawaii, but honestly it wasn´t that bad. Not pleasant, but not bad. I was imagining all the turtles watching the antics of these strange, awkward land creatures and having a good laugh. "Serves them right for sneaking up on Terrance like that." We had more success hanging out with the other turtles we found... we probably saw about 50 today but only harassed three. Sarah held on to one for a while and then got a swimming start to release him. Watching him dive with such speed and grace only increased my awe of these long living creatures. Just before we turned around to head homeward we found a huge pod of dolphins going about their business. We saw one young fellow showing off for us... he leapt out of the water 7 times, waving his tail and nodding his head. Once again I was humbled by the grace of the animals who live in the ocean. We jumped in the water to see if they wanted to hang out but the dolphins had other things going on today. After three and a half hours of swimming and climbing out of the boat it was a welcome relief to get my feet on the sand, just in time for lunch and siesta.

Above is the view from our little room. The sound of waves breaking is a perfect backround for a quiet nap.

-Dirk