We were feeling weary of Guatemala and considered moving on to El Salvador, but we pressed on to the huge Lago de Atitlan, which sits in the highlands a couple hours west of Antigua. Its a very large ancient volcanic crater lake surrounded by three volcanoes and several Mayan villages. American hippies believe the Lake and its “mysteriously triangular volcanoes” are the site of a “spiritual energy vortex” and are somehow “linked” to several other famous places on earth. The energy vortex has psychic healing properties and so hippies have colonized the area since the sixties.
When the bus dropped us off in Panajachel I was immediately and firmly convinced of the existence of the energy vortex. I had an unshakable feeling that I’d been there before. Rather than being linked to the pyramids at Giza or the ruins at Macchu Picchu I’m sure that there’s a cosmic link between Panajachel, Phan Ngu Lao, and Thanon Khao Sahn. The rasta hats with dreadlocks sewn onto them, the impossibly banal T-shirts and the supernaturally terrible food can only spring from the same mystic source. I’m sure parts of Goa and Bali are just as scummy. Backpacker ghettos will steal your soul and make you hate the human race in an amazingly brief period of time. It is imperative that one spends as little time in their vicinity as possible.
So we got across the lake to the tiny village of Jailbolito and based ourselves amid the gardens of Volcano Lodge and terraces of Casa del Mundo. After running around Guatemala, lakeside time in hammocks reading and bird watching was very welcome. We paddled around on kayaks, swam and visited several of the little Mayan towns by taxi. We got caught out on the lake in the thunderstorms and watched the clouds bang short straight bolts into the lake while the thunder echoed back and forth off the volcanoes.

We took lots of pictures and and some video of us playing with spider monkeys and coatis.

Volcan Fuego sent out a lot of smoke over Antigua when we were there. We watched it send up plumes over coffee in the morning that dusted the city with ash. We wanted to trek up it, but it was covered with bandits. So we went to the smaller Volcan Pacaya instead. We scrambled up Pacaya’s crunchy ropes of lava fields and cooked marshmallows over glowing cracks in the earth. The summit made loud bangs every time it ejected rock, clouds of gases and ash. We had lunch on the volcano surrounded by cows, dogs fighting over food and some kids who wanted to rent us horses. On our drive away the people in the truck ahead of us fired a few shots from a pistol out the window. Not at us, just carelessly out the side, while still in the village, with children playing nearby. Yeehaw.

Volcano photos.

Antigua is Central America’s European city. The Spanish made it their capital during their occupation, despite the fact that its surrounded by volcanoes and is prone to being leveled by earthquakes. Whole blocks of the city are the rubble of a collapsed church or fort and are preserved as attractions. Antigua is riddled with shops, proper cafes and grand churches. The old fortress like houses are useful for the modern security situation. Spanish houses present a high blank wall to the street– these days topped with cyclone fencing– and a door large enough for a man to ride a horse through leads to the concealed opulence of a gardened courtyard surrounded by the rooms of the house.

Photos of Antigua.

The limestone pools of Samuc Champey are several miles outside Coban city. There, in the mountains a strong river punches under a section of rock leaving a weak current to flow over a series of blue-white limestone pools. The river reappears at at the end of the terraces not only from the ground but also fountaining from the canyon walls above, revealing that the mountains are honeycombs. We swam and basked in the pools for most of a day with fish nibbling on our toes. Look at the pictures.
After the pools we bought freshly ground chocolate patties from some little girls and walked over to the Santa Maria caves. These were not walk in and look at the colored lights caves. Holding candles, we followed a silent guide into a grotto filled with opaque water up to my waist. Deeper into the caves we stepped on strange crunching things and dodged bats as above us clusters of meeping batlings clung to stalactites. As we progressed, the cave ceiling descended and the water rose. We had to swim and re-light our candles to reach further chambers. Some rooms had stiff breezes, others still air with raging currents of water. We were very cognizant of how little we could count on footing, light or air as we ventured into a new room. Our mute guide lead us through a hammering waterfall, up, over and down through many tight spaces. We trusted his gestures for us to jump and free fall in the dark for ten feet down to deep pools. You’re not supposed to touch cave formations as the oils from your hands will retard their growth, but that’s not an option when the alternative is being swept off into the dark by a fierce subterranean river. If we explored by ourselves we would have used lots of rope and SCUBA to discover which step into the black water was a hundred foot dive or which chamber housed an inescapable whirlpool.

Cultures on every continent have practiced skull binding since people became people. Neathertals did it, prehistoric Homo Sapiens did it, Incans, Egyptians, Celts, Sumerians, Indians, Chinese and of course the ancient Mayans were no exception. Using various devices, baby’s heads were bound from birth to produce a long oval shaped head. This deformation extends the total brain volume by up to fifty percent at the expense of compressing the pre-frontal lobes. No one in modern times knows what the mental effects of this practice might be or why it was so common in so many places for so long. In the absence of a perfectly oblong head, headdresses  were used to mimic the desired shape. This global practice really only died out about two hundred years ago.

In addition to loving coneheads, the Mayans also prized, crossed eyes, and droopy lower lips. All of the Mayan rulers are depicted with these features. Interbreeding of ruling families may have lead to genetic conditions with these attributes, leading to their perceived status. In any case, if they weren’t fortunate enough to actually give birth to a coveted downs syndrome baby, you could bind their skulls, mutilate their lips and even train crossed eyes by mounting some dangling beads close to your child’s eyes to focus them inward.

We went to the rain forests of northern Guatemala to see the ruins of an ancient city and temple complex at Tikal. Before dawn we climbed to the top of the tallest temple where the peaks of the ziggurats are all that poke above the trees. The sun rose through the canopy mist and painted irregular shadows over the trees to wake up different parts of the forest. The first thing the male howler monkeys do in the morning is scream their lungs out in an eerie echoing wail through the sleeping jungle. Soon tropical birds start exchanging news and then then the insects join in. As the light of day filled in the we saw butterflies, spider monkeys, and even crocodiles. The density of life was greater than you find in a temperate forest, but not like the coral reef on land feeling of the Amazon jungle.

Started around 400BC, we missed Tikals’s peak at about 700AD. The Yucatan Peninsula, from southern Mexico through Guatemala and Belize was the heart of the ancient Mayan civilization. Never so much an empire as a collection of city states, they still managed to build enormous stone temples, cities and develop vast stretches of land for agriculture. The Mayans never formed an empire, but a collection of city states each with their own maize agricultural works. Around 900BC everyone abandoned the Mayan cities, more or less simultaneously never to return. No one knows why, but the sudden collapse of an over stressed agricultural system is a fashionable theory. Tikal was soon covered by the forest and stayed that way for almost a thousand years before nineteenth century Spanish missionaries rediscovered it.

The ruins themselves are made of one cubit blocks of limestone thickly cemented together. A cubic cubit is about the largest you can carve stone and still have men carry it. The ziggurats are uncomfortably steep. Unlike the honeycombed tombs of the Egyptians, these temples were often built over previous pyramids, meaning the entire structure is solid rock. They are positioned and oriented for astronomical purposes and helped compute the marvelously comprehensive Mayan calendar. The Mayans integrated solar, lunar and several planetary calendars to form possibly the most accurate calendar of the ancient world. The conquests of various city states is recorded in the temple’s hieroglyphic engravings.

You might recognize some of these temple pictures as George Lucas used Tikal in Star Wars as the exterior for the secret rebel base on Yavin.

Guatemala, like most of Central America has been stuck in a post colonial, feudal hangover for hundreds of years. After Cortez conquered Mexico, he sent a demon named Pedro de Alverado to pacify the Mayans and find gold. De Alverado enslaved the local people with gusto and brought the priesthood along to convert them. The evangelism succeeded when they pointed out to the Mayans that The Devil, the Mayan god of death and de Alverado himself might all be different aspects of the same concept. These days the people with the most Spanish blood still own the coffee plantations and the Mayans live in stick huts in the countryside among the ruins of their ancient culture.

The most recent war only ended 10 years ago. It was leftist guerrillas vs the incumbent fascists and their American Central Intelligence friends. Like all conflicts, the little people, mostly Mayans, were in the crossfire. Unlike, for instance, Cambodia, Guatemala’s protracted conflicts were wars of factions and death squads. There were frequent massacres but not organized genocide. Guatemalan culture is horribly scarred with violence but not extinguished.

After the wars, the country is flooded with weapons. In wealthy egalitarian places like Switzerland that’s a fine thing. However, if you’ve ever lived near Oakland you may understand what its like to live near abundant firepower, cultural poverty and extreme wealth divides. The official homicide rate over the whole of Guatemala is at least twice as bad as majorly fucked up cities in the United States. I’m sure most rural killings are not recorded. With few police in the country, local justice is often a mob, a rope and a tree. Everyone walking in the country carries a machete and its not uncommon for people to ride shotgun in a truck.

Half of Columbia’s cocaine makes a stop in Guatemala en route to its favorite customer and the police and military are some of the larger gangs that help it along its way. This work has the cops a little distracted from policing and there aren’t really that many of them to begin with so deterring crime in Guatemala is largely a do it yourself endeavor. Any business that that could conceivably be knocked over has a guy or two standing outside it with a pistol and shotgun, an enormous overhead to doing business. Automatic weapons seem reserved for the Police and Soldiers. At least in public.

Despite the claims of sensational media, violence most places is usually between people that have pre-existing personal or group relationships with each other. As a visitor, just talk to locals and keep your eye out for vulnerable situations like anywhere else.

I love border crossings. I’m always fascinated that culture can change so abruptly within a few feet and it always reminds me that in the 21st century we’re all still huddling in armed camps. These transition zones also are often an opportunity to see a country at its worst. Borders grow their own special ecology of lowlife. Traders, thieves, tourists, touts, soldiers and smugglers are all mixed up sitting at the same stools eating road food, talking about the weather and affirming cliches to each other in improvised interlingua.

From laid back Caribbean culture we passed into a place full of cowboy hats, bright woven colors and  guns. The gears of my brain’s Spanish machinery were seized from years of neglect. My mind was in full exhaustive learning mode every time someone spoke, jumping and grabbing at half comprehended phrases like an eager but retarded puppy. There’s no African blood in Guatemala,  the people are Mayan and Mestizo. The Mestizos live in the cities but the Mayan majority lives in the country. Mayan Women all wear the colorful woven skirt of their village and a blouse with a translucent shawl. Due to working along side the Mestizos for generations, Mayan men now dress like cowboys.

A lot of the country’s money comes from Coffee plantations but there’s not much of a coffee culture in Guatemala, its just an export.

Some pictures of Flores, Guatemala.

One early morning after a two hour boat ride to the middle of nowhere we came to The Blue Hole. The Blue Hole is an ancient underground sea cave who’s roof has collapsed leaving a great dimple in the continental shelf. Our open water PADI certification is for 60ft but the blue hole dive is to 130ft, the human pressure limit of SCUBA gear.

After getting off the boat we dumped all the air out of our buoyancy gear and fell down through the water for a long time. Surrounded by sleepy seven foot reef sharks the sunlight slowly faded away. We swam through colossal stalactites covered with barnacles as the effects 130ft of water piled onto our heads took hold. At that pressure, nitrogen in the bloodstream is forced into nerve membranes and causes a general disruption of function.  Mandy reported some minor visual hallucinations and my own coordination and general sense of focus were very impaired. Other than being an enormous cave at a silly depth, there isn’t much life at the Blue Hole. Its a novelty dive. That pressure isn’t good for you, we felt dazed for at least two days.

We needed a lot of time to work the bubbles out of our blood after the hole. So we chilled out on Half Moon Caye, fed a barracuda from the dock and watched red footed boobies nest in the trees before our final dives. We took some photos on Half Moon Caye.

The Aquarium was reef on one side overlooking an apparently infinite abyss on the other. Green and hawksbill turtles swam slowly through  packed rainbows of fish.  Framing the streaming highways of life were magnificent coral. Improbable constructions of neon Red, Green, Purple and Orange stack and fanned out and up. The reef structures host all manner of tiny creatures doing little tiny urban creature things on a smaller and more sedate scale than the whirling abundance immediately outside.

The first thing we did was to motor out to the cayes and plop ourselves in the Caribbean proper. The cayes are just sand that piled on top of reefs and is now sort of held in place by colonial coconut and banana trees. Reggae takes over from the city’s American Hip-Hop.

We based ourselves on Caye Caulker, the much less developed of the two major diving cayes. Frigatebirds kite overhead, people truck around the sandy paths on golf carts and bicycle. Stray dogs and cats roam with crabs and the occasional iguana.

Our first night on Caulker we went for a sail with some Dutch and Serbians, circumnavigating the island first by sunset and later by moonlight. Sailing is fantastic, it magnified my envy of Jason’s sail from Panama to New York. I might be content to stare at moonlight on the ocean from a creaking sailboat for the rest of my natural life.

Some photos of the cayes.