Antigua

Antigua is the colonial capitol of Guatemala, situated at the junction of four volcanoes, two of them active. They moved the capitol from Antigua to Guatemala City after Volcan de Fuego erupted and buried half the old city in the 1700s. A good move, I think. Antigua is Guatemala's poster-child city, with red tiled roofs and colorfully painted buildings lining the cobbled streets. The central square has a fountain that rivals any I've ever seen, adorned with four mermaids holding their breasts and water squirting from their nipples. The city is strewn with ruins from the quake and eruption that prompted the change in capitol, you have only to walk a few blocks before coming across an abandoned church or monastery. 5th Ave is lined with trendy shops, and at the end is an arch that used to connect two convents - the nuns could cross the arch to get from one side to the other without being seen by anyone indiscreet, or anyone at all for that matter. We arrived in Antigua the 29th of December and stayed through the 3rd of January, so the city was full of tourists from all over the world there to celebrate New Years. It felt like the city was actually part of another country, with wealthy Guatemalans and other wealthy tourists (ourselves included) parading the streets, shopping, eating out, and generally not thinking about the poverty in the rest of the country. We took full advantage of our little tourist bubble and got a hotel room with cable TV, ate international cuisine, and shopped just like everyone else. New Years was full of fireworks, starting at dark and lasting well after midnight, fireworks were set off from three or four different points around the city, all near 5th Ave, where everyone was gathering to celebrate. In general, the fireworks in Antigua were much more predictable than those in Chichi, not a single one fired directly at the crowd. Marimba music played all night, and after several minutes of warning fireworks, the street would clear enough for a torito (the fireworks fused together on a frame resembling a bull) to dance and terrify the crowd. They also made toritos in the shapes of butterfly wings, with the fused fireworks in colored patterns out the length, with a finale of shooting fountains of sparks out the end of each wing. I ducked into a hotel doorway to hide from the last torito, music swelled in volume behind me, and suddenly materialized in to a band, ten or more stilt dancers, and other costumed figures, all reveling to a raucous salsa beat. A ten foot dancer cruised right by me, dressed in a tight white shirt with a white hood, red pants, face painted white with gold triangles extending up from his eyes and green patterns out the sides of his face. He danced by, head thrown back, eyes closed, hips swaying to the beat, and dancing the full on salsa footwork on his stilts. Whistles blowing, trilling ululations and beating drums, they paraded out into the streets. At midnight, with the street a sea of people, every person lit a gold sparkler and waved it over their head as a sign reading Bienvenido 2006 lit up in fireworks and a pinwheel torito exploded under the arch. I stayed out for the next three toritos, but a lingering case of food poisoning sent me to bed fairly early. After spending the next day recovering and watching movies, we greeted the new year with a hike up the still active volcano, Volcan Pacaya. Despite the assurances of the tour agent we bought the trip from that only five people were signed up so far, it turned out that every other tour operator sent their people on the same school bus as us, resulting in a crowd of about forty people hiking to the top together. For the first third of so of the hike, several locals followed behind us with horses saddled and ready to go, shouting at each break (of which there were many needed to accommodate 40 people) taxi! Pacaya taxi! The only challenge of the hike was the final ascent to the cinder cone, which is indeed composed of very small soft cinder rocks and sooty stuff, making the footing tough in addition to the strain of the altitude (about 7000 feet). Dirk skirted past everyone else, and by the time I next saw him, he was atop a hill creviced with smoking vents. The guide plopped down on a rock next to me, where I learned that he only makes forty quetzals (about 6 dollars) for each hike, even though each of us hiking had paid an agency around 50 quetzals per person. He sent around a hat at the end for tips, and I hope he did better off us than off INGUAT, the Guatemalan tourist center that manages the park. I also found out while we were talking that lots of people leave to work in the US, and that he wants to go too, but wants to go legally since he needs valve replacement surgery in his heart! All this and still climbing the volcano once or twice a day. We made it to the top together, slow and steady, to find a wonderland of smoking rocks, steaming vents, and at least two giant holes over 100 meters deep belching noxious sulfurous fumes that gave me flashbacks to organic chemistry labs in college. The sulfur turns the rocks near the edges of the holes bright toxic yellow, and some of the lava rocks are gold and iridescent silver, making the cone sparkle dangerously. The ground itself is hot there, as though to remind me of the boiling magma I'm sitting on, steam leaking out from under some of the rocks, mingling with the clouds rushing up the sides of the volcano. The descent was fabulous; Dirk and I took it at a full run, trusting the deep, soft cinder to moderate our speed with each footfall, not looking back until the ground suddenly hardened under us, and we sat down to empty our shoes and socks of the accumulated volcanic dust. Wheeeee! It was almost worth hiking up again for that sprint down. After such an early start, about five AM, and a vigorous hike, we spent the rest of the day recovering and finding ourselves a shuttle to Coban. I was glad to be leaving Antigua; the city has the air of a place that's made for tourists and not for the Guatemalans who live there, a Disney-ified Guatemala with clean, bright streets and nothing behind the colorful facades...
-Sarah