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.