I managed a 7 hour layover in Beijing so I just drove in an out of its major tourist trap.

Tienanmen Square is a huge empty expanse of flat stones. Mao used to stand a million people in there just to have a chuckle at being leader of all China. Its surrounded by soviet inspired architecture and sitting in the middle of it is Mao’s reliquary hall containing his remains preserved in stasis.

The forbidden city really is a small town within Beijing. Huge halls that now contain museums surround even larger ornate buildings and vast empty plazas. The city gives echos of its past power, but denuded of the live processes that would surely have filled it while it was active. It might be cheesy, but I think historical re-enactors would help fill the vast and dead feeling courtyards in the forbidden city.

I was reminded I was in Asia on the way back to catch my plane when my taxi driver pulled off the highway to urinate against a tree.

I only managed a couple snapshots of Beijing.

Geoff and I took the train into Shanghai for the weekend. In between Chinese cities the landscape alternated between abandoned communes, and freshly stamped out planned communities. Five hundred units of the exact same house arranged in maddening tessellation. The families I saw on the streets and in restaurants were odd inverted pyramids of attention. Grandparents and parents all focused on one single child.

I hadn’t seen many pictures of Shanghai, so the quantity of inventive, colorful sky scrapers that appeared all around us surprised me. The 1930’s architecture of The Bund has banker’s granite fortresses standing shoulder to shoulder with each other. They form a stolid line of columns that look out over the river over at the new growth appearing every year in Pudong. China is pouring money into Pudong to see how many crazy looking multicolored steel and glass buildings its can stuff in one small area before cosmic fish mistake it for a reef and start swimming about it.

Other than touring The Bund, Pudong and Nanjing Road, we didn’t have time for much other than drinking formaldehyde free beer. A barmaid we talked to wanted to know all about the USA. “Is there really a problem with racism against black people?” Every time China is in our news, we feel obligated to mention Tibet or Falung Gong. I think Chinese news compulsively mentions that the US keeps huge populations of black people in rape cages for smoking joints.

Photos of Shanghai.

I went to China for work a couple months ago. It was my second time in China and I got to visit much more central urban places. My workplace was in Hangzhou, a small city of six million people built around an enormous lake. It felt like walking around a city of one million in a rich country with an excess of tall apartment buildings and hotels. Geoff figured that it was indicative of the fraction of people there with enough disposable income to patronize shops and services.

Every horizon was prickly with cranes pulling up dozens of new high rises. Little patches of old asia were still around, but I almost missed the narrow alleys of vendors and people squatting to play cards or eat noodles entirely in the cities. There wasn’t much street food in the parts of China I saw on this trip. The traditional markets were there under old cement communist bunkers, taking cover from the shiny new towers. Several times a day small colorful bursts of fireworks pop off over the sky, likely launched by individuals. Occasionally larger barrages go off that might be part of a corporate or government event?

On our daily commute to work we often couldn’t see across the river through the smog.  Due to the oppressive pollution, the Chinese have outlawed most petrol fueled bikes. So the scooters are all silent electrics with a few propane models scattered among them. We did see a cop on a proper 450cc motorcycle.

The overall level of wealth in Hangzhou was  greater than I’m familiar with from southeast Asia, but there’s clear economic disparity. There aren’t legions of beggars in Hangzhou. Actually, there were hardly any beggars. The wealthy were far more noticeable. Buick is doing quite well there. Owning one of their vehicles is a status symbol. The VP of my company’s China office had a personal driver for his. There were plenty of Audis and BMWs on the road. A Ferrari was parked on the sidewalk outside my office building. We saw Porsche’s, Maserati and an even a Bently on the road. Near our hotel was a Rolls Royce dealership. Geoff commented that he saw more exotic cars in Hangzhou than he has in San Francisco.

With an inexhaustible cheap labor pool a great many people are paid to stand around. At the entrance to restaurants two girls would hang out like curtains and sometimes two more inside just to usher you to the host. Standing around all day doing absolutely nothing, the girls look more look bored and dejected than attractive. Men who are paid to stand around look a little better, mostly because they’re wearing security uniforms or are actually in the military. Standing at forced attention masks their brains melting under the excruciating tedium.

Despite the plight of the underclass, one of my favorite things about China is how assertive the women are compared to other Asian countries. I’m guessing its a product of communist egalitarian ideology. Its quite pronounced when you compare it to the rest of Asia, where women are very subservient, basically do most of the work and reap few of the rewards.

Some photos of Hangzhou.

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.