My journey to Mexico, Guatemala and Belize

Narrative picture story by Gay Wright

 

 

A second helping of Kumquats

 

Volume 2: 

Riding the Chicken Bus

With the Paddler Gods into Xibalba

 

A journey to Guatemala’s archaeological sites,

Towns and rural life in November 2006

 

Visiting El Naranjo, Flores, Santa Elena towns

With the market and bus stop,

Carmalita Village and trip to El Mirador in the mud,

Sayashe and rural life on the river,

Archaeological sites of El Ceibal, Aguateca and Dos Pilas

Uaxactun Archaeology site, village and museum

Yaxaha and Nakum

Tikal, museum and tent camping in the rain

Trip to the Belize border

 

A complete set of picture albums can be found on the CD or on my website

www.cmyfarm.com 

as the space in this journal is limiting.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

River trip to El Naranjo

 

November 20, 2006.  This section of the trip starts off when Marco Morales, my friend and owner of the Hotel Xilbalba in Palenque, left me in the hands of the boatman at the Guatemala border at El Ceibo.  With my bags loaded on the boat we took off up the San Pedro River to the town of El Naranjo, Guatemala.  I was now on my own and was concerned I would not be able to communicate, but Marco left such good instructions, I should not have worried in the least.  The day was partly cloudy and fairly warm, but the wind off the water was cold enough to make me bundle up in my warm shawl and pull my hat down over my face to protect it.  The landscape along the shore consisted of small scrubby trees.  The river itself was over a mile wide in places. The current moved at a pretty swift pace but the boats handled it well with their outboard motors making the herons and egrets fly off at our approach.  The boats themselves were about eighteen feet long, narrow in width with three or four plank seats.  Each boat had a canvas canopy covering the seating area.  There were three other men on the boat with me.  The fare for the ride was 10.00, which added to the truck taxi ride to the riverbank of five dollars, Marco’s personal escort to the boarder and the motorcycle taxi it cost me a total of 166.50 to cross the border into Guatemala.  Not to mention when I reached El Naranjo I tipped the man that unloaded my bags and hauled them up to the bus 2.00 and an extra 5.00 tip for the boatman who safely communicated my needs to the bus driver. Whew!

Before that even happened our first stop after a forty-five minute boat ride was a small dock where the immigration shack was located.  As we coasted into shore I noticed there were women washing clothes in the river and children bathing.  As we approached the dock there were several soldiers with guns standing on it.

I started to unload my bags, but with a lot of hand signals and head motions with plenty of undecipherable Spanish, I figured out I was to leave the bags on the boat.  One of the soldiers escorted me to the shack.  Inside were a couple of desks with computers on them and two officers.  I pulled out my passport and gave it to the officer who greeted me.  He looked it over and passed it through a card-reading machine.  Then he stamped it with his stamp, signed it and handed it back to me.  All that took five minutes.  He had issued me a three-month visa.  No extra papers and no baggage inspection.  Then he smiled and wished me a good day in English.  It was almost funny in a way, but not knowing what to expect, I came away surprised at the length of time it took.  Now, if I did not have a passport, then I might still be sitting in the shack as we speak.  I climbed back into the boat once again and the boatman took off at breakneck speed.  In about thirty more minutes we reached El Naranjo.  We pulled up to the shore and squeezed into an opening between a dozen or so other boats.  The shore was steep, but a man helped me with my baggage, taking it up the hill where the bus was waiting.  That is where I gave him a tip in pesos, as I didn’t have any Quetzales (Guatemala money).

The boatman spoke to the bus driver and told him I was going to Flores.  After that was arranged and I paid another ten dollars in pesos for the bus fare and the bus drivers’ assistant and several other men pushed and pulled my bags up on top of the bus to the luggage rack.  I kept my camera and lunch bag with me.  The driver showed me to a seat behind the drivers’ seat with a flourish of hand waving and I climbed on board.

 

The Chicken bus ride to Flores

 

Wow, a chicken bus.  Not the fancy dolled up ones with bright paint and decorations on the windows like you see in the larger cities, but a plain one that was a newer model than a school bus.  More like a small flat front metro bus.  When I sat down on the bus, it was full with my seat the last one available.  I thought we would be leaving soon, but we sat there for another hour.  I looked out of the window at the small town, which bustled with people doing their marketing.  There were shops that lined each side of the street which lead down to the dock area at the river.  There were food vendors and activity everywhere.  It was much cleaner and more permanently settled that the tent complex at the border.  The women wore bright colored wrap around skirts woven in native plaid designs.  Some ladies had embroidered blouses others wore plain ones. Lots of them wore shawls. The men wore shirts and pants mostly like everywhere else and the kids had modern clothes too.

During the time I waited more people boarded the bus and as there were no more seats, they stood in the aisle holding on to a metal bar attached to the ceiling.  More people scrambled on with whole family groups with four or five children and parents sharing one seat.  The kids never complained or whined, but hung on to anything they could grab.  By the time we left I could not see out of the windows for all the people packed around me.  I was sitting next to a woman with a small girl of six or seven.  In the aisle facing me was an older woman with a fat girl about six sitting on the console next to the driver.  In front of her on the other side of the console were three more ladies and in the passenger seat was crammed with two more.  Sardine City for sure.  I was amazed at how many people could actually fit. Everyone was orderly and patient as this was the way it was.  The drivers’ assistant stood in the open doorway and told the driver ‘Allende,” let’s go.  Three or four men came running up and jumped on the steps and were hanging out the doorway.  We chugged down the road barely making it up the hill out of town.  Every time a person wanted off, the assistant would climb up the ladder attached to the bus and get their bag, then holler down to the driver and we would go again.  Sometimes the assistant would climb the ladder while the bus was moving, get the bags, swinging them down to the owner, then as the bus started up again he would climb back down the ladder and stand in the doorway again.  Sometimes more people got on the bus than got off.  So the bus remained full for most of the trip.  This was par for the course until the passengers started to empty out of the bus the closer we reached Flores.  When it was possible to shut the door, the assistant sat down in the closest available seat.  He was the one who collected the bus fare and made change.  He didn’t give out tickets.  It was a six-hour trip through the mountains and valleys.  The scenery was gorgeous.  The mountains looked so pristine and green with an occasional house or village dotting the landscape.  The bus stopped at each village and places along the side of the road with a hut, house or shack standing by itself.  The two lane highway itself was paved and in excellent condition the entire trip of 150 or so miles.  I didn’t have any Quetzals, as I said before, so I had to rely on my lunch bag for something to eat. 

I had read on the Internet how the Guatemalan people are striving to conserve their environment, maintain natural habitat and be conscious of recycling and littering.  Wow, what a concept, to be so proud of the country you live in that you want to keep it clean, spotless and beautiful.  With that thought in mind I was watching the lady and girl sitting next to me.  They had just finished eating their lunch and were putting the wrappers and soda containers back into the paper lunch bag.  That is great, I thought, they are conscious of littering and are going to dispose of the trash at the closest waste bin.  I had barely formed that thought into existence when with a sweeping movement of her arm up and out the window the bag flew.  Arghhh! So much for her being litter conscious.  Of course, as a stranger in a strange land, I didn’t do anything but sat there with my mouth hanging open.  Soon they got off the bus and a man sat next to me that had been standing.  He took the seat for himself and didn’t even offer it the lady standing behind him holding a baby.  No chivalry here.  He had a coke and a bag of chips. When he followed suit, slinging his bottle and bag out the window too, I had recovered enough from my shock from the last bag sailing out the window that I looked at him and said, ‘No bien’.

By four in the afternoon we reached Flores with most of the passengers getting of in the sister city of Santa Elena, which was on the mainland just across from the island. There was only one other lady, who spoke English and myself left on the bus.  She asked where I wanted to get off and I told her to stop at Marstam Travel.  I was pooped.  The ride was long and hard and I had had enough culture shock for one day.  Korina from Marstam Travel Tours met me and escorted me to the hotel.  Then she took me to the bank to change my money into Quetzals and showed the locations of the food store and Internet places.  I settled into the La Jungla Hotel, three flights up a narrow set of stairs. The La Jungla Hotel on picture on left. The room was small, but possessed a good hot shower and TV.  I used the Internet down the street for a few minutes and brought some snacks for the trip the next day. 

 

Flores and Marstam Travel Tour service

 

The streets of Flores were small and narrow paved with cobblestones, having every street running one way, alternating directions.   These features were a left over from colonial times and have been preserved for their charm.  The buildings were two to three stories, mostly with shops on the first floor.  There were numerous restaurants, tour businesses and many hotels in between the souvenir shops.  All these were squeezed into the tiny island Flores calls home.  It sits off the shore of Lake Peten Itza in Northern Guatemala attached to the mainland by a road bridge to Santa Elena.  In order to get from one to the other you either had to have a car or use the motorcycle taxis that zipped around everywhere. Flores and her sister city Santa Elena are the largest cities in the area.  The next largest city is Guatemala City in the southern section. 

Flores was the last stronghold of the Itza Mayan people, finally giving it up in the 1600’s to the Spanish after a long struggle to retain freedom.  The Spanish dealt the final wretched blow by building their church on the tallest mound on the island where the sacred temple was located.

After a quick glimpse of the streets I went to bed.  The bed was hard, but as I said before, all the beds felt hard to me.  The sheets were clean and the towels adequate.  I took a good hot shower and must have slept fairly well as by morning I was ready to go on my first tour.  I found out by intensive Internet research that the best way to see the remote sites was to go on a tour.  They had them set up with meals, travel mode and guides.  All this was included for about the same as paying for meals, gas and guide expense doing it yourself.  I had corresponded for a couple of months with Korina, the tour specialist at Marstam Travel Tours.  She was very helpful and accommodating answering all the questions I asked e-mailing me information timely.  She spoke excellent English.  I was able to book the tours I wanted and was anxious to get on with the plan. 

However, the Universe was not ready to comply with my desires.  In fact, not only had it rained in Mexico but; it has poured in Guatemala for weeks before I arrived.  That was an un-seasonal fluke, which was not expected.  Even though the paved roads were dry and passable, the side dirt roads were not.  In fact, most of them were slopping over with axle gripping mud that oozed over tires and rubber boots.  That is knee high for those of us without boots at all. 

 

The trail to El Mirador

November 21, 2006.  Unaware of this situation I boarded the van Korina sent in the morning to take me to the village of Carmalita where the horseback tour would take me to the El Mirador Archaeological site.  The road to Carmalita wasn’t bad, mostly a washboard gravel one-lane road that lasted for sixty-K north of Flores and took two hours to travel.  The driver didn’t speak much English, so not much conversation took place.  He smiled and nodded a lot and made me feel comfortable on the way.  The village of Carmalita was sparsely arranged with a few wood houses around a large open field.  The headquarters for the horse tour was setup in a large wooden building surrounded with corrals.  There were horses and mules standing around in various stages of being saddled and loaded.  When I was introduced to the lady in charge she asked me if I wanted breakfast.  I was starved and told her yes.  She had a young teenage girl take me across the field to a small wooden house.  There was a picket fence in front of it that kept in the chickens and pig. I was seated at a table in the front room of the house.  Mind you, I was the language impaired being led around again, without any communication; smiling and nodding a lot to the people I met.  While I waited at the table I looked around at the interior.  Plain wooden planks made the walls, with a compacted dirt floor.  The roof was the thatched palm that all the Mayan houses had. The room held a well-worn couch besides the table and chair I sat in.  The back room apparently was the kitchen and off to the side was another room.  The chickens, pig and couple of dogs roamed freely throughout this area.  This of course, did not bother me, as I have a country place with chickens, although they don’t wander into the house.  

Soon an elderly lady came out of the back room with a plate of food for me.  There were eggs, beans and a hunk of goats’ cheese on it.  I was served a basket of tortillas and can of juice.  The plate of food looked ugly, but I was starved and plunged my fork right in.  It was tasty enough and I ate it all while a couple of kids sat on the couch and watched me.  I fed some of the tortillas to the chickens.  The children were amazed that I would feed the chickens and give them the tortillas to boot.  When I was finished, I thanked the cook and the young girl took me back to the tour headquarters.

The horse trail to El Mirador was a 45 K journey taking three days to get there by horseback, one day at the site and three days to journey back by a different set of jungle trails.  I was the only one taking this tour and was escorted to a horse waiting with three pack mules and two guides.  I had help boosting myself up and settled into a very small saddle.  The day was pleasant and sunny and I was delighted to be on my first trip to one of Guatemala’s biggest pyramid sites.  The first quarter of a mile was lovely.  The trail was wide and hard packed.  The trees thickened from scrubby bushes by the farm into the large jungle forest.  The birds sang and I could hear the howler monkeys off in the distance.  What a great day.

Bam!! The bottom fell out of the trail.  We ran into the worst clay mired patch that covered the entire horse path.  There was nowhere to go on either side, so the horses and mules had to wade through it.  As my guide, who was wearing rubber boots, was leading the horse I was on, I had to just hang on and be at the horses’ mercy.  That lasted about a hundred feet then we hit dry ground again.  I thought each time we plowed through one of these muddy patches, that would be the last one. (Note on this, when I returned home I started reading the adventures of Stephens and Catherwood in the 1800’s when they traveled in Guatemala and had to laugh when he described a similar ride he made.) Back to the trail. That was not to be the case and for six hours I had tree branches slapping me in the face.  I had to duck way down in the saddle to miss other low hanging ones and dodge sticker trees with monster poison thorns while all I could do was cling to the saddle as the horse lurched through the mud.  Several times the saddle would slip sideways and Arturo would have to run back and catch me before I fell off then re-saddle the horse.  When the horse tried to get close enough to the edge of the trail so she could get some stable footing she banged my knees into the tree trunks.  Mid way through the day we stopped in a clearing and had lunch.  There were some shelter frames and one had a palm-thatched roof on it.  The guide, Arcturo, passed out sandwiches he had in his backpack and some fruit.

While we were eating we spotted a baby monkey swinging in the trees.  We watched as he grabbed a branch that broke under his weight and went free falling down to the next branch, which he caught with his tail.  We were laughing about that when we heard something like rain hitting the thatched roof.  As the sky was clear, we looked up and saw the mama monkey in another tree.  She was hurling self-generated organic bombs at us.  I had heard that monkeys do that to keep visitors away from them.  She was protecting her young one with the closest product available.  I was glad there was a roof over my head when she let the barrage loose.

We continued on after we ate and went through more of the same kind of mud holes, slapping trees and thorn stabbing palms.  My knee was hit a few more times.  I was in agonizing pain and glad to get off the horse for the night when we reached camp. The guides made camp, stringing hammocks up on the skeleton frames at the campsite.  Each hammock had a tarp covering it.  The hammocks were equipped with mosquito netting that completely covered the hammock.  I was given two blankets, one I put under me and I covered with the other.  I also used my trusty shawl and small pillow I brought. There were several palapa style shelters with thatched roofs and under them were stone fire pits for cooking built on tables. The cooking pits were built with cement sides with a grill across the fire area.  It didn’t take long to build a fire and get the dinner cooking.  We had to share the camp with another tour that was on their way out of the jungle.  There were five students from Europe, their guide, cook and cook’s ten-year old daughter that had already set up for the night.

I helped make the salad of tomatoes and avocado while Arcturo fried the chicken.  There had to be three chickens in the pan.  I had one breast and Arcturo and his helper ate the rest.  Even though the helper rode a horse and led the three pack mules, Arcturo had to wade through the mud in rubber boots. I had to hand it to someone who could walk in rubber boots all day, let alone wading through the gummy mud.  They deserved all the chicken they could eat.  After dinner we snuggled down for the night.  I was fairly warm except for the two times I had to get up to find a ladies bush. It was cold, about 40 degrees, the coldest night on the trip and in the morning everyone was huddling around the campfire wrapped in their blankets.  The hammock wasn’t too bad except I couldn’t straighten out my legs.  The mosquito netting worked great, but I think it was too cold for them to be out.  A very clever set up. 

November 22, I was expecting eggs and potatoes for breakfast, but was offered jam and bread.  Not much of a breakfast.  I was given some hot water drink that wasn’t very good.  I really wanted hot chocolate, but that wasn’t going to happen.  The students were talking about their trip and mentioned they didn’t have much trouble walking through the mud, but I noted their shoes and socks were caked to the ankles with mud. I was hoping that day would be less of a hazard than the day before.  We bid them goodbye when they packed up and started down the trail to the base camp at Carmalita.

I watched the guides pack up the mules putting the hammocks, blankets, tarps, cooking goods, food all in gunny sacks and packing each pack, one on each side of a mule and lashing them down with special ropes attached to girdles to keep them from chaffing the mules stomachs.  The very last thing to be cradled on the top in the middle of the mule packs was the carton of eggs, (the ones I didn’t have for breakfast).  On top of all this a tarp was snugly secured around the load. 

The hope for a less hazardless trail dissolved as the trail became worse than the previous day.  I was lurched and knocked into trees and after my knee received three more vicious hits, I was done in.  I was thinking I only had four more hours to ride that day then another 6 hours the following day before we reached El Mirador.           

Gad.  Now, you know, I am not a woozy person.  Nor am I one to give up easily any task I undertake.  I consider myself to be a fair horse person and may be a mature sixty or so, I’m able to hold my own.  I think of myself as a tough ole bird, but each time that I was heaved in the path of a tree, I couldn’t duck fast enough or twist my leg out of the way in time and groaned with each blow I received.  I tried to relax and stay calm while we were on firm ground but as soon as the horse would go through another muddy patch sinking up to her leg pits that was enough for me.  It was so painful I could hardly ride and when the horse yanked her leg to loosen the grip of the mud, the saddle would give way and slide off.  Arcturo almost couldn’t reach me in time once and I was dangling in mid air between the horse and a tree until his assistant had to come help him catch the saddle.  The horse was knee deep in mud when the saddle gave way and when I came down I barely found a patch of firm ground in the bushes to land on. 

I thought to myself, “Are you having fun yet? Is this what you spent five hundred dollars to do for a week?  Is your health worth the risk you are taking with each movement the horse throws your way?  Do you dare sustain any more blows and come away not being able to walk for the rest of the journey?  Face it, without legs, nothing is going to happen except to be shipped home on a gurney.’  Ok, enough, I concluded.

I had to consider my health and being bummed up from this trail to see this site, or go back and regroup for something else.  As much as I didn’t want to go back I thought it was not worth a broken hip or leg to continue.  Not to mention what it must be doing to my blood pressure.  Ok, stop. 

When we reached a clearing to rest and water the horses in a green slimy water hole, the pain was running all the way from my ankles to my hips.  I could hardly get off the horse.  When I did manage to get my leg over the saddle I sank to the ground and couldn’t get up.  When I could move, I tested my leg and tried to work out the kinks by hobbling around the clearing.  I debated back and forth, to go on, to go back, what to do?   Now the tough part, I had to communicate to my guide that I was in pain.  This trip was the most arduous thing I had ever done putting it two or three notches above childbirth.  I thought of several words to relay to my guide that would indicate I wanted to go back but nothing worked until he hit on the word ‘returno’.   “Yes, returno to Carmalita”, I told him.  He got the message and also found the liniment to rub on my knee.  It was a nice gesture, but my knee was going to need more than that.  We ate some fruit while we rested and when I felt I could hoist myself back in the saddle we turned around and started back to the base camp.  By then it was about mid-day and I knew I had to ride about three or four more hours before we could stop for the night.  We passed the camp we stayed in the night before and went on to the first camp we had lunch the first day.  No monkeys this time.  We reached there about four in the afternoon after riding for 6 hours. 

As bad as I hurt, I hobbled around and gathered up firewood and started a fire in the cooking pit.  The guides unpacked the mules and made camp.  I sure was getting my Survivor experience, since I had always wanted to be on the show, but without doing the contests and eating the bugs.  Arcturo said we were going to have eggs.  Mind you, all these conversations were done with simple words and lots of sign language.  That wasn’t my speed to have eggs at night, but I saw some potatoes in the food bag that would jazz it up.  I am pretty fussy about the way eggs are fixed so I decided in order to eat I would have to do this myself.  Not that Arcturo wasn’t a good cook it was more that I really needed to do something constructive and be helpful.  I dug out the potatoes and borrowed his knife to peel them.  I had Arcturo get the firing pan heated with oil and set about slicing the tomatoes, cucumber and the last avocado.  When the potatoes were fried nice and crispy I made the scrambled eggs.  Besides that, I sliced up the pineapple and papaya.  We had a really nice feast.  I was glad the dinner came out so good considering it was the first time I had cooked over an open fire in a long time.  My family took my sisters and I camping when I was young and not only did this bring back memories of that, but my skills as well.  I think the guides were surprised that I cooked for them.  Apparently this was not something a visitor does on one of these tours.  I had always been taught to pitch in and help and I was really enjoying doing so.  Arcturo brought out the wine I was supposed to have when we reached El Mirador, but considering the top of the temple would have to live in our hearts, we enjoyed it under the thatched roof by the light of a candle flame and cooking fire.        

I was really pooped when dinner was over and was glad we had made up the beds before hand.  There was a bed frame made of branches under the roof and I had Arcturo put the air mattress he borrowed from the other group on it.  He hung the mosquito netting over the bed and tucked in the ends under the mattress.  I had two blankets again and put one under me as before.  I was fairly comfortable and could stretch out my legs.  It wasn’t as cold as the night before and I only had to search for a ladies bush once during the night.  When I got up to do that it was really dark and I could hear animals moving around in the black of the night, munching on the leaves.  I had to think for a minute before I realized it was the horses and mules.  Silly me, to think I would run into a jaguar munching on the bushes.

November 23, I had slept in my clothes for the second night in a row, the same ones I had been in all trip so when I rose, I was dressed.  I really didn’t want to leave the warm covers and lounged under them until the guides had the fire going and were rustling the dishes for breakfast. 

That is if you can rustle plastic dishes. I decided I really wanted to eat after missing a meal the day before and besides that, the dinner eggs were history.  We had cornflakes and some of the fruit I prepared for dinner the night before.  Milk came packaged in a plastic box carton.  Salt and sugar were also packaged in plastic bags.  Corn flakes were in a box labeled in English, funny, as everything else was in Spanish. (It must be an imported item thing). 

While the guides repacked the mules I walked around the camp area and picked up trash lying around on the ground.  There were many plastic soda bottles, plastic bags, wrappers and tin cans.  I burned everything that would go in the fire.  The cans I didn’t have a way of dealing with so I had to leave them.  I have to note that I am very adamant about trash cluttering up any place, being it is around a house, in the street or especially the pristine wilderness areas.  I really think it reflects the mindset of the person who lives there or visits any area.  I really didn’t come to Guatemala to look at other peoples’ trash.  I was saddened by the fact that other visitors and local people gave no thought to how they were choking up the environment.  If they had given any thought they would have left it clean and tidy for the next one coming behind them to enjoy.  Even if there weren’t any pit to put the cans, it wouldn’t have taken much effort to put them in a bag and carry them back to the base camp to be disposed of. The campsite we shared the night before also had a problem with cans and bottles only that site had a trash pit dug down about ten feet in the ground to be filled up with the trash.  That was also not only an eyesore, but it wouldn’t take long to fill if they kept putting burnable trash in the pit.  I did voice my opinion on this subject to Korina when I returned and she told me the guides were supposed to carry out all trash.  I hope for the sake of the forest and trails they use, that they practice that small bit of curtsey for the ones to come to visit in the future.  You know, it doesn’t take long to make a trash pile, and it takes even less time to keep from making one.  I would have spoken up to the guides about it but that restraining language barrier hampered me again. It seemed to always be there when I had something to say.

Continuing in this vane, speaking of trash, I didn’t see much trash in the towns, just the small villages seemed to be messy.  The streets of Flores were very clean and swept and I never did see any trash in the gutters.  I did see dumps not far from the edge of some towns and cities in other places on the trip. They were ugly and the buzzards flocked to them looking for morsels to eat.  Even there it would not have taken much to make the dump a little further off the highway to obscure it from the view of passing traffic.  Who wants to look at some one else’s garbage, let alone their own. Ok, down off the soapbox.

The guides were in a hurry so while I fussed about the trash they packed up and we were back on the trail by eight a.m. The trail seemed endless, one mud bog after another.  I felt so bad for the horses and mules.  I couldn’t understand why they didn’t just close the trail until the mud dried up.  You could tell that the mud was trod through over and over as the tracks showed countless trips through the same path until it was a bottomless pit of gray goop.  I realize it had to be an economy thing.  No trips, no eats.  But, I felt it was not very humane to treat animals like that.  But that is only my personal opinion.  Who am I to say how a person should run his business.  What a boggy trip.  Even as we were on our way out, another group was headed in.  Good luck to them, they would need it.  There were about eight people walking and some on horseback.  They looked younger and sturdier than me.  I’d had enough and the good sense to admit it.

We reached Carmalita by noon.  I was wracked out.  I could hardly get out of the saddle and caught my foot in the stirrup and hung there until a horseman, who undid my foot, rescued me.  My dangling leg didn’t help my already screaming hip.  I limped into the headquarters with a crowd of kids looking at me with wide-eyed wonder. Yeah, the ole gringa lady didn’t make it to the top.  I had to force a smile as I winced to the couch on the porch.  They called Korina in Flores and she said someone would come after me in a couple of hours.  Surprisingly enough Guatemala has come of age with cell-phone usage otherwise it would be the chicken bus to the rescue the next day.   While I waited they served me lunch of potato fries, rice and a chicken leg.  It was good as I was hungry again.  I also had a couple of canned juices.  I lay down on the couch on the patio and took a nap.  I found their bathroom facilities out back behind the patio garden. They had a wooden pole fence around a plastic outhouse.  One of the same types you see at job sites and inside it was a flushing toilet.  How funny, but surprisingly refreshing. That was worth a picture or two. 

 

At four in the afternoon the man arrived to take me back to Flores.  He spoke very good English and we had a very interesting time talking about Guatemala.  He was young and progressive besides being well mannered and a good-looking Mayan man of about 30 or so.  He told me about the great strides the new democratic government was taking to improve Guatemala since they came into office ten years ago.  After the peace treaty was signed the main roads had been paved, schools were built in each village and attempts were made to make the population aware of conserving the country’s natural resources.  He said only the children could pass on the education to their parents as the old ways had been passed down from generation to generation for the past three thousand years.  Nothing had changed and in order to bring Guatemala into the twenty first century the education system had to start with the children.  Besides reading and writing, there was education on conservation, social consciousness about littering and saving resources being the top most importance in order to preserve the land for generations that would come.

We passed through a gate at the entrance of the Mayan Biosphere Reserve and I asked him about why the gate was there and why it was only a rope stretched across the road.  He told me that in order to keep people from stealing the natural resources like lumber and rubber and other things that included archaeological objects from sites the gate was guarded by three separate divisions, the government soldiers, a civilian guard and a conservation team.  Each one would monitor the others to keep graft and payoffs from happening.  So two different troops were set up on the road to monitor who comes and goes. They would alternate at random when they stood watch.  Everyone watching each other kept them honest.  Good plan. 

We arrived in Flores about seven p.m.  I went straight to the hotel.  I was so grimy and dirty I stayed in the shower a long time.  I was extremely thankful for the hot water.  When I was limp enough I slid into bed.  I watched some TV (movies in English) until I unwound.  There were some very noisy people in the next room that kept me awake.  Sounded like a family fight with doors slamming and the yelling going on.  Besides that the bed had a tick in it.  I finally got up and turned on the light.  When I pulled back the sheet there he was, crawling around.  I caught it and flushed it down the toilet. I didn’t sleep much after that, feeling all sorts of crawling sensations and by morning I felt pretty rummy.

Thanksgiving, my day off

 

November 24, this is Thanksgiving Day at home.  I finally drug myself out of bed and testing my knee and I found I could walk on it.  Gingerly, but my hips were the sorest part of my body.  I gathered up my dirty clothes and went to the Captain Tortuga restaurant next to the tour office for breakfast.  They had a lovely covered patio that overlooked the lake.  There were boats going by with passengers aboard.  The sky was clear and blue with only a hint of clouds on the mountainous horizon.

After breakfast I took my laundry to be done and on my way back I stopped in a few shops to look at the textile goods hanging outside the shops. I spotted some cloths stenciled with the cosmic canoe myth.  Being Flores is on sixty-K from Tikal they were right in the neighborhood where the myth legend was found carved on bones found in a kings’ tomb.  I looked at some other woven textiles and bought several.  I even found a bedspread like the ones in the picture hanging on the front of the shop.  The textiles were brightly colored either woven on a loom or embroidered with flowers or birds over loomed material.

When I returned to the tour office, Korina was open.  She took me to the bank again and I exchanged more money into Quetzals.  I was never very comfortable with the money exchange and was constantly asking how much it equated to in American money.   The shopkeepers all had calculators and would figure the amount of the sale and then show you the amount so you could make the right change.  The going rate was 7.5 Q to one American dollar.   At the bank there was a guard that would knock on the door to let you in and another guard inside would open it for you.

Apparently there had been numerous bank robberies and they were double guarding the banks.  There were also armed soldiers in stores and shops along the streets.  That was pretty similar to what I saw in Mexico but not so much in Belize.  Every time I changed money I had to show my passport, both in Mexico and Guatemala.  I didn’t go to the bank in Belize as I could use American dollars as freely as Belizean money.  Every time I used my passport I was thankful I took the time and effort to get it and have it with me, glued to my money belt as it were. 

I had Korina take me across the street to a shop so I could buy the guides each a shirt as a thank you tip.  I didn’t have much of a chance to show my appreciation so I wanted to send something to them.  I also bought a length of rope for Arcturo to lead his horses.  I wanted to buy some gunny sacks, tarps and storage dishes, but learned that all the equipment the guides use is checked out of a central co-op supply from the tour headquarters.  Korina thought I should give them something personal.  After I was done with that I used the Internet for a while to catch up on my mail.  I had a smoothie and sandwich for lunch at the lovely patio café of Captian Tortuga and watched the boats sail around the lake.  The alligator was a bit of humor in the café. I had been so careful to write down all my expenses I made each day, but somehow with the exchange rate into Quetzals I blew it and couldn’t balance my daily expenditures.  I had taken the day off from the tour schedule and now was ready to start the next one in the morning. I was going to the sites of El Ciebal, Aguateca and Dos Pilas.  That would be a three-day trip by boat and jeep.

 

El Ceibal, Aguateca and Dos Pilas

 

November 25, 26 and 27 the tour company sent a driver to pick me up at seven a.m.  He was already loaded with the food and tents for the trip.  The driver was the same English speaking man from the day before.  We drove to the town of Sayasche, which was sixty-K to the southwest of Flores.  The road was paved the whole way dead-ending at the Pasión River crossing.  There were many boats docked at the shore.  These were the same type of passenger boats with the canopy cover I took from the border to El Naranjo.  I could see some of the boats were even larger and looked more like barges, as they were full of freight.  Various sacked goods, such as beans and rice were piled high in the boats waiting for crews to come and unload the merchandise. 

The only way to cross the river was by a huge ferryboat.  It would travel from one bank of the river then back to the other bank loaded with cars, trucks, semi-trucks, bikes, motorcycles and walking passengers.  It was powered by two outboard motors, one mounted on the front side and the other on the backside of the ferry.  The motors were attached to donut shaped wheels that would allow the motor to swivel around to steer the ferry.  Two men operated the motors and another man controlled the ramp and let it down when it reached the shore.  Only right now we were going up river to El Ceibal and didn’t need the ferry.             

We met the boatman and the guide, who loaded the tents and food along with my backpack on the boat.  We shoved off and headed up river to El Ceibal.  That meant the place of the big ceiba trees.  It took about an hour and half to reach the entrance.  There was only a small sign on the riverbank to mark the spot.  We were greeted by a couple of the caretakers who were fishing on the bank.  We sat in the boat and had lunch.  The guide, who introduced himself as Jesus, was an older gentleman of 69, a shaman of sorts as I was to learn he knew all the plants in the forest and their medical uses.  He passed out the sandwiches and we ate while watching a zillion teeny weenie fish swarming in the water.  I threw a crust of bread in for them and they looked like a school of man-eating fish devouring it.  They sucked every morsel from the bread in a few seconds and looked for more.  That was pretty funny, so I gave them another crust.  When we were done eating lunch and all the crusts were gone, Jesus and I got out of the boat, leaving the boatman to take a siesta.  My guide took me up a flight of steps that was carved out of the rocks in the hillside and then further up on a rocky path winding up the hillside to the top of the mesa.  The mosquitoes were terrible.   Even with my repellant I had to keep waving my scarf in front of my face to keep them out of my ears and eyes.  When we reached the top we took a left turn down a long path to the observatory building, which was built out of stones in a round shape.  In front of it was an altar with a flat stone with a carved jaguar head held up by stone legs shaped into monkeys.  This was the jaguar altar used for sacrifice.  We heard the howler monkeys the whole time we were at the site, but never saw any.  They sounded off with their rich bass voices talking back and forth to each other. They sounded magnificent, whooping it up in the tops of the trees.

We walked back along the same path and when we reached the point we came in we turned left again and walked to the main site.  There were many buildings to house the working staff.  It looked like a group of barracks.  The guide led me over to a roofed patio and showed me a reproduction of the site layout.  There were many buildings in the original site, but only a couple had been restored.  They found a good number of stele that sat in front of various mounds but only one temple that was rebuilt had a stele in front of each of the four staircases and several around the perimeter of the plaza. Many of the stele were fiberglass reproductions molded off the original ones.  We continued walking looking at the stele and came out where we started, having made a large loop of the site.  We walked back down the hill the way we came.  The whole site was lushly filled with palm trees, ceiba trees and many other species.  Jesus would stop and show me some plants or berries and tell me what they were used for. Of course, this was all done with sign language, simple Spanish words and a lot of reading between the lines.  I could get the jest of what he was saying, but could never remember the names of the plants.  The whole site was very pretty and very well groomed. I was disappointed that more of the site was still unexplored and not renovated, but that is the way it goes, lots of advertising hype and little to show for it.  The walk took us two hours.  I was glad we went uphill first as down hill was much better, only slippery in many places. 

When we returned to the boat, the boatman took us back down river.  I sure was glad to be able to stop slapping mosquitoes with my scarf.  They stayed in the forest lurking under the foliage.  The boatman cruised close to the shore showing us several alligators and a number of iguanas.  They were the same vividly colored ones I saw at Palenque.  I loved them all.  The river was also full of egrets, herons and lots of ducks.  On the way back to Sayashe we stopped and picked up another man.  Of course, he too, didn’t speak any English, so we had to read between the lines and do the best translation with the few words of Spanish I possessed.  We passed another river crossing that had a ferry. 

There were families of Mayan ladies and lots of children doing their washing in the river.  They would stand in the water beating the clothes and hauling buckets of water up to take home.  One family we saw the Mayan woman only had a skirt wrapped around her waist leaving everything else waving in the breeze. I missed that picture, as I was so surprised I found myself gawking instead of using my camera. The men were not fazed, as this was a very common everyday occurrence deep in the rural wilderness.  We cruised through Sayashe and continued down river to Aguateca.  This meant the ‘shinning cleft mountain’ in ancient Mayan.  The river trip took most of the afternoon, reaching the site about four p.m.  The boat landing was similar to the El Ceibal only this one had a huge wooden stair case going up at least 150 feet above the river which made the top landing tree top high. At the top of the stairs were several buildings. The caretakers of the site slept in one building and ate in another, the screened kitchen shack.  This was set up with four tabletop fire pits, a community picnic table and benches, a small table and chairs and several hammocks that hung around the porches.  They also had a huge stone building that was the visitor center.  It had huge screened windows, stucco walls, a stone tiled floor and beautiful thatched roof.  The first room held the concession counter and tickets while another was a make shift museum that held a series of pictures of the site. The rest of the rooms were empty.  One of the rooms the caretakers told us to set up the tents.  The men had to haul all the food and tents up the long flight of stairs.  They set my tent up in one of the empty rooms.  It was a medium one that they put in a pallet type mattress and blankets.  It was really cozy and snug.  They put up another tent next to mine for the boatman, who, I guess, was to make sure I was ok and to be available if I needed anything during the night.

I helped prepare dinner.  I found out that the man they picked up along the river was the cook. Of course, I didn’t find that out until after I started to prepare the food.  He scooped a bowl of water out of a bucket and handed it to me.  I stood there feeling stupid, not knowing what to do with the bowl of water.  After he scooped one out for himself and started washing his hands in it did I realize I had a ‘fingerbowl’ instead of a faucet to rinse my hands before I prepared the food.  Boy, dinner makings were a surprise for both of us.  Being they forgot to bring the chicken we had to rummage around in the food box and make do with tuna and macaroni. I added carrots, onions, celery and chicken flavoring to boiling water, cooked the macaroni and added the tuna to make a casserole.  I made a salad with tomatoes, avocado and cucumbers. We also had sliced up melon.  Here again, the men were surprised I helped fix dinner, but by that time I was used to it.  The men set up a small table on the open patio and covered it with a piece of plastic.  The cook pictured on the left and Jesus the guide on the right. The four of us ate together.  We even had a candle and a glass of wine; the kind that comes in a plastic box bottle and the same we had on the El Mirador trail. Really bad wine, but it hit the spot.  By the time we finished it was fairly dark.  The caretakers fixed their own food and ate in the shack.  They put out some food for a couple of Paca animals that would come up to the shack and eat.  I took some pictures, but it was too dark to get a good shot. 

I went to bed when it was dark.  They had electricity for a few hours at night supplied by a generator.  I crawled in the tent and listened to the night sounds before I drifted off to sleep. I slept pretty well.  I had taken a paper cup in the tent with me and used it during the night. In the morning I found I had filled it almost to the brim.  I found the bathroom in the morning, up the hill connected by another flight of stairs going 30 feet further beyond the visitor center building.  Oh, my aching bladder, that would never do during the night (as a remedy I found the closest bush outside the door.) Only now, I had to use it and found it locked.  I was alone so I found a bushy tree to hide behind.  An hour later one of the men came and unlocked it, but it was too late then.  I just said thank you and went in and washed my hands.  Wow.  I found flushers out in the middle of the boonies.  How wonderful, I wish I could have waited. I kind of wondered if the flushed goods went all the way to the lake water.  I could see the drainpipe running downhill.

We had potatoes and scrambled eggs for breakfast.  To this we added papaya and melon.  Breakfast was good.  I left the clean up to the cook while the guide and I went to see the archaeological site that sat on the ridge just beyond the visitor center building.  We took a path along the cliff base to the right of a long set of wooden steps that lead to the top of the ridge.  It was a long walk, taking about four hours. We started at one end and walked along the base of the cliff then climbed up to the top of the cliff mesa.  There were many palms and trees growing along the ground in front of the cliff that hid it in spots.  Along the way Jesus showed me natural holes in the cliff wall where the rain would run down the cliff and collect in them, making a fresh water basins.  Water drizzled down the cliff face draining from the mesa above.  We reached a lookout point where we could see the whole Petexbatun River and Laguna wet lands we traveled by boat the day before.  The view was so beautiful I could see why they built a special platform with a roof covering it.  From there visitors could sit and rest and enjoy the scenery all the way to the far horizon.  After a brief stop we climbed up some more to a natural gorge that split the mesa top.  The Maya used it for a defensive system, building bridges only in a few select places.  There were many ceiba trees at Aguateca, but not as huge as the ones in El Ceibal.  After seeing the gorge, which split the mesa with a thirty-foot deep cleft, we climbed up higher and came out to a flat area on top of the mesa where the first plaza was located. Aguateca was in existence from 810 A.D to 100 A.D. One building had columns in front of it, possibly a meetinghouse and across the plaza was the royal residence. The howler monkeys had been making noises the whole way while we were walking.  As we stood on the plaza we could see three of them in the trees at the edge of the plaza.  They were shaking the branches and swinging from limb to limb.  Jesus spotted one howler climbing down a tree.  I managed to catch him on video camera and filmed him as he walked on all fours across the whole width of the plaza area then climbed a tree on the other side.  What a spectacular sight, as they rarely are seen doing that.  The monkey didn’t even know we were about fifty feet from him.  See the video footage on the video CD.  When we looked at the royal residence I spotted a tarantula in the grass.  He was big, but he was also dead.  We walked from plaza to plaza looking at all the buildings in the site that had been exposed and the bases cleared and room walls rebuilt to show what they looked like when original.  They had signs posted with pictures of the buildings showing how the thatched roofs would have looked on them when in use.  We made our way to the primary plaza that housed the temples and steles.  We sat and rested on the columned walls of the administration building and looked at the unfinished temple across the plaza.  The plaza was full of trees and was shady and cool.  When Aguateca had been attacked they built defensive walls with sharp poles stuck in the top like a fence.  They had to use stones from some of the buildings to build these walls, but in the end they lost and the site was captured, sacked and burned, then finally abandoned.  On the side of the plaza was a twin temple dedicated to one of the governors and there were two steles in front of it.  The center of the plaza also had a stele. 

When we were done looking around we walked down the set of steps and came out by the bathroom building where we started.  I was pooped.  We arrived back at camp just in time to be served lunch.  The cook laughed at me when I looked surprised at the prepared meal.  He seemed to say, ‘Yeah, I can do this with out you to help’.  I laughed too.  It was funny and clearly transcended the language barrier with good-natured humor.

After lunch I rested in a hammock the balance of the day.  Since we were not going to ride horses to Dos Pilas (the reason: too much mud on the trail) we had the afternoon to rest then take the boat back to Sayashe in the morning to meet with the jeep that we would continue the trip.

I watched the caretakers take turns making tortillas.  One would come out with his bowl of soaked corn to the corn grinder they had mounted on a table and grind the soaked kernels into masa.  Then he would take it into the kitchen and use a banana leaf or piece of plastic bag and laid it on the table to pat out each tortilla.  When they were all patted they would take the tortillas and put them over the fire to cook.  Each man made his own tortillas.  I don’t mean several, I mean a whole stack a foot high. While he was making the tortillas for the next meal he had corn soaking in a pan for the next time.

These men were bachelors, as there were no ladies there to help them.  I wondered if they ever were to marry would they let on they knew how to make tortillas? 

I did help with dinner, reinventing the tuna and macaroni recipe from the night before fixing it with the vegetables.  We also had fruit.  I went to bed at dark considering I had hiked over five hours that day and slept fairly well again.  Before dawn I could hear a bat fluttering around the room and he would hit the tent with his wings, making a tap, tap, tapping sound.

It was at this point of the trip that ants bit me during the night.  I had taken off my socks to let my feet breathe, but kept the rest of my clothes on.  (Rising fully dressed once again).  Since I only had my socks off I was only bitten around the ankles and part way up the calf.  I didn’t really notice until I started to itch.  The poison of the ant bites didn’t develop until several days later when I noticed red welts on my feet and legs that were oozing a clear liquid.  I dabbed cortisone cream on them, but they really were bad.  I had used the Benadryl I bought in Chetumal to ease the itching. I suffered with these bites for several months, carrying them with me throughout the entire trip and still have scars today.  It seemed the poison would stay inside the bitten area then flare up again and again.  Not at all like fire ants in Texas.  I never saw any, but found ants in my backpack when I reached Belize.  I had to buy a can of bug spray to kill them off but never knew if these were the same ants.

In the morning we had breakfast of corn flakes cereal and fruit.  The men would take hot water and pour it on the cereal and shake on the sugar and powdered milk.  I had hot chocolate this trip because I requested it instead of coffee.  Every thing was canned except for the fruit and veggies.   Salt and sugar was packaged in plastic bags as the last trip along with the milk.  Mayo was in a sealed plastic pouch with a lid attached to one corner making it pretty efficient. Chicken flavor came in foil packets. After we loaded everything the men hauled it all back down the stairs to the boat.

We started back up river to Sayashe through the narrow channel of the marshy bushes that soon opened up to the Laguna.  Once past the Laguna lake the river narrowed back down.  We saw more families washing clothes, men in wooden dug out canoes fishing, lots of herons and egrets and once again the small ferry we saw coming in.  When we arrived in Sayashe we parked the boat on the riverbank across from where we first came in, on the town side.  Only the backs of the buildings showed, and only when you entered the street from the river could you see the storefronts and shops.  There were signs advertising all sorts of things.  The one I got the best laugh out of was the sign for Gallo beer.  Gallo is rooster and since I raise chickens I found that pretty funny.

We had to wait for the tour driver in the jeep to take the ferry across to where we were waiting.  While we stood on the shore I took pictures of the people and the ferry.  Families would come out of the town and board a boat either to go across the river or up river or down.  Some of the older generation women were dressed in native clothing with the wrapped skirts and blouses covered with gaily-colored shawls.  Some of the younger teen-age girls had on mini skirts and of all things – high heels.  Walking in the loose rocks along the shore was a task but they managed to step lightly into the boats.  Many vans (taxis) parked along the shore waiting to pick up passengers to take down the road to other settlements.

The ferry was having a problem maneuvering its load and lining up to the place the ramp would be lowered.  It had to back up and reposition itself several times.  There was a huge semi-truck on board that made it difficult.  I asked someone what was in the truck.  When he told me bottled water I could understand why everyone was so patient.  He carried the staff of life.  He had Chaac in a bottle, so to speak. I watched the smaller barge boats being unloaded sack by sack by men who carried them on their shoulders and backs from the boat to a waiting truck on the shore.  No tractor lifts here.

When our jeep finally arrived off the ferry; my English speaking Mayan man was driving it.  We bid the boatman goodbye at this point and continued down the road to Dos Pilas Archaeological site with the cook and guide, Jesus.  We slowly made our way through the traffic in the town, maneuvering around other cars and motorcycles past shops that lined the sides for four of five blocks.  There were many people shopping in the stores.  Goods of all sorts were hung all over the front entrances.  I saw mostly plastic dishes and vases with bright stripes on them and clothes.  There was a lot of construction material and hardware stores, plus the many food vendors.  The highway was well paved which continued all the way south to Coban and beyond to the southern part of Guatemala. We passed the turn off going to the Mexican border that continued with a rutted dirt road that was not even on the map.  The driver told me that was the way I would have come in on the chicken bus had I taken the river route from Frontera of Mexico. (The one that the Federalies had closed.) That sure made the way I came seem worth the expense and like a super highway.  We turned off at a small village on a white gravel road that went to Dos Pilas.  It was unmarked by any signs indicating the way.  Any person unfamiliar with the lay of the land would never have known where to turn. Even at that, the driver had to ask one of the villagers which street connected to the site road. 

We passed several villages with children playing, women carrying water or sewing sitting around open doorways.  There were chickens, pigs, turkeys and plenty of dogs running around. Out beyond the settlements were fields of corn.  Some freshly planted, some with the corn a couple feet high, some with stocks bent over with drying cobs and some with men planting seeds.  They had a pouch around their waist and dropped seeds in the hole in the ground that they poked with a long pole. Nothing had changed in 3000 years.   Just park a temple next to them, paint it bright colors and light a fire on the top and you would have transported yourself back into Mayan culture centuries before without even changing the characters.  There was a lot of acreage burned off to make way for cornfields.  The men remarked that it was so sad to see the forest disappearing for the sake of the corn.  It would take fifty years to grow back and the corn depleted the land in less that five.  Most of the clearing didn’t include removing the rocks.  They just planted around them.  I marveled at how they were able to plant in such straight rows, until I saw a marker with a string stretched in a straight line to another marker.  Ok, clever.  I was told they do that to be able to plant beans or other things in between rows.

After an hour of driving through the corn patches we found a lonely sign that marked the entrance to the site.  The road at this point turned into a narrow mud path, just bigger than a cow trail.  We made it through a number of mud holes, until a really deep one sucked in the jeep miring it up to the axles. Not having knee joints like the horse the jeep only dug in deeper each time the driver tried to back up or go forward.  The cook and guide got out and put branches, rocks and what ever in the ruts to help heave the jeep out.  I stayed in the jeep and kept my mouth shut.  I learned that a long time ago; don’t offer women suggestions in a man’s dilemma.  Grant you, it was a hard task for me to do, but I managed.  After an hour of doing that, they gave up.  They were mostly covered in mud themselves and they were not getting anywhere, except becoming dirty.  The guide and I walked on to the site, which was only about five minutes further up the muddy road.  The driver walked out to find a tractor and the cook stayed with the jeep. 

The site was small but pretty.  More lovely palms and ceiba trees graced the landscape.  The mosquitoes were bad here too.  There were no ancient buildings showing, only mounds draped in a mantle of green moss.  There were a number of steles that were fiberglass reproductions standing next to the originals lying on the ground.  The main thing to see was the glyph carved staircases on two temples.  The temples were still mounds of rubble under the ground cover, but the stairs were partly uncovered in places and protected by thatched roofs.  The stairs were supposed to have encircled the whole temple with carvings.  This recorded a history of the site chronicled in stone.

We walked to the back of the site where the guide spoke to several caretakers.  They had cabins like army barracks to live in.  There were men in almost every cabin.  One had his door open and I could see a hammock and small table, but nothing else. There were so many men there, the site, even though it was grown over with green moss, was freshly raked and mowed.  All of these sites had a large amount of caretakers to discourage thieves from coming in and raiding the sites of artifacts and poaching wild animals.  One of the men spoke some English and showed us the natural spring.  Next to it was two cenote holes with water that he told us was the reason Dos Pilas was named.  Meaning two springs or water sources.  The man showed me some carved wooden animals and boxes he made.  How could I say no to such a friendly person, considering he only had me to show his wares?  I bought a lovely hand carved box shaped into an oval, complete with hinged lid on it.  It was only about four inches in diameter but very well crafted.                      

Jesus had told the men about the plight of our jeep and two of them jumped up and offered to come back with us to get the jeep out of the mud. 

When we arrived at the mud hole the jeep was sitting on the edge of the huge crater it once occupied and was ready for the trip back to Flores.  We thanked the men for offering their help.  Before starting back we had lunch.  Yeah, you guessed, tuna sandwiches and fruit.  I never enjoyed a tuna sandwich more.  We ate as much fruit as we could and on the way back we had to stop again and have a fruit break. We had to eat up the rest of the fruit in our food box because there was an agriculture inspection station on the road we were taking back to Sayashe and they would confiscate any fruit we had with us.  We passed a house with several children playing in the front and gave them a pineapple. We stopped on the road before we reached the village and ate the watermelon and several oranges.  We were gorged to the gills when we turned on the main highway.  I was so full I hid an apple in one of bulging pockets that were filled with other stuff and managed to get through the inspection with it still in my pocket.  We all had to climb out of the jeep while the lady guards looked inside our bags, boxes and under the seats.  They were pretty adamant about their fruit search.  When we reached Sayashe we said good-bye to the cook and guide after I gave each of them 100-Q tip.  Apparently these guides and cooks contract to the tour companies and are pressed into service when a tour is booked.  The vehicle drivers are employed directly by the tour company and work full time. 

It was seven p.m. when we reached Flores.  I was really tired and since I hadn’t changed clothes in three days I was really ready for the hot shower.  I was pretty grimy and dirty and probably smelled that way too.  The only thing that saved me on these days and the rest of the trip as well, I had packed a couple of boxes of feminine light day pads and could put a fresh one in my underwear each day.  That way I may have been dirty on the outside, but kept fresher inside my clothes. 

The night wasn’t as noisy as the last one had been, I slept fairly well but my bones hurt in the morning.  Break out the Tylenol and press it into service. 

 

Yaxha

 

November 28, Yaxha in Guatemala is not to be confused with Yaxuna in Mexico. I had to be up and ready to take the trip by seven a.m.  Another driver, who did not speak English, came to the hotel and picked me up in a truck.  This was only going to be a day trip so I only had a small lunch bag with me and my cameras.  We stopped at the Santa Elena market and I bought some peanuts and small local fruit, but could not find any bananas or other kinds at his booth.  The road to Yaxha continued past the turn off to Tikal on the good paved highway that continued on to the Belize border.  Only when we turned off on the Yaxha road did it turn into packed washboard dirt.  We gave a ride to a worker waiting on the corner turn off and dropped him off at the site.  We continued up the road to Nakum which was 22 k past Yaxha. 

The road deteriorated rapidly, worse than the muddy track into Dos Pilas and the driver successfully maneuvered through a dozen or so deeply grooved mucky tracks until a mud hole swallowed the front end of the truck in the mud.  We were buried in past the axle but somehow he managed to back it out after several times rocking the truck back and forth in the trench. Whew!  I was surprised but very glad as there were not any tractors available here, considering we were already 12 k into the road to walk out for help.  We turned around and slithered back through the ruts we had already made, when we came to a spot that was really deep.  He chose an alternate way through a side trail, but we had to get out and put rocks and branches in the already deep grooves to fill them up.  It was horribly marshy and we were the only two people around.  This driver did a great job.  I waited on the road while he tackled the mud track and maneuvered the truck through it without stopping and came out of the other side in one piece.   Yeah!  Now it’s on to Yaxha, the site on the lake of the blue-green water. 

The day was still sunny and warm when we arrived.  The site was beautiful with huge plazas and many temples to look at.  Even though there was restoration work everywhere there was no one working. There was some serious money being spent here.  There were wooden staircases built on each temple to allow you to climb to the top and see the view without damaging the temple sides and stairs to help you ascend the tiered plazas with ease. I walked the whole site and climbed every stair.  I especially liked the plaza area where they filmed Survivor Guatemala.  The Mayan driver that spoke English had told me they closed the site for three months to the tourists while they were filming the show.  I paused there to rest and have lunch.  It was so peaceful and serene. The many lush trees shaded the plaza between the temples. The breeze gently waved through the branches keeping the plaza cool, even though the day was fairly warm in the sun.  There were not many people walking the trails and I felt I had the place to myself.  The groups I did encounter, I just waited until they passed me or walked around them. 

It took me over four hours to see everything.  The last place on the map to see was the Red Hands temple.  It was the tallest temple at Yaxha. That was breath taking, not only the view, but also the height of the top of the temple itself made you feel like you were swaying.  I clung to the edge of the temple-top stonewall and peered out over the edge to see the ground below.  That only took three seconds before I saw enough.  The view of the scenery all the way to the horizon, the rest of the temples that you could see peeking out of the treetops and the lake beyond it were stunning. The staircase was built behind the temple leaving the front of the temple with a pristine view. There were 168 steps up and 250 steps down through two plazas to reach the parking lot. Now with the average step being 8 inches high I figured the temple from its own plaza was about 112 feet high and 166 feet to the level of the parking lot. Utterly amazing the way it was built. I made my way through the last of the plaza levels and arrived at the truck about 1:30 p.m.  I looked around for the driver and one of the caretakers at the ticket booth pointed to him sleeping on a bench.  Guess he was worn out from the wrestling the mud hole.  I offered him my apple that I still had in my pocket, as I was sure he did not have anything to eat all day.  We arrived back in Flores about 3:30.  It seemed to me that the villages on the way to Tikal were cleaner, more painted and dressed up to impress the tourists than on the Sayashe side.

I was tired, but used the Internet for an hour.  Of course I couldn’t resist the shops again and stopped in the one with the stenciled cloths.  I asked the shopkeeper if he had the cosmic canoe carved out of wood.  It only took a minute to get across what I was looking for and he ran across the street to another shop and opened the door.  He went rummaging in the back room and came out with two canoes.  One had the original seven passengers and the other had two less.  Well, of course the short version would not do, but the seven-passenger canoe was about three feet long. It was exquisitely carved out of two-tone wood native to Guatemala and the passengers were done with a very nice attention to detail. In case I haven’t told you the canoe contains the paddler gods, the stingray or day god and the jaguar or night god and the passengers are the peccary, iguana, corn god or king, the monkey and the macaw.  The peccary represents the constellation Gemini, the Macaw is the north star of the big dipper, but I haven’t found out what the iguana and monkey are for.  These constellations ride the elliptic along the Milky Way.   For more information on this read the article on my web site about the cosmic canoe myth. I was hesitant to buy it because I was concerned that I would not get it in my bags.  I bought it anyway. This was only going to sail by me once and the boat docked here.  I did manage to stuff it into my large bag and still have room for my clothes.  I also found some really nice woven textiles, a bag and a knife.  I stashed them all them safely away too, making a total of eight bags to travel with.     

I finished shopping and retired to the hotel, up the three flights of steps and took a shower.  I was tired, so I waited to pack my bag to go to Uaxactun and Tikal in the morning.  I wasn’t to leave until ten a.m. so I had time. This would be a four-day trip, two in Uaxactun and two in Tikal. 

 

 

 

Uaxactun

 

November 29, I finished repacking my bags and used the Internet a few more minutes to catch up on things at home.  The tour driver took me to the bank in Santa Elena to change some more money then took me to the bus station.  I was to meet the woman, Neddie that owned the hotel in Uaxactun at the bus station.  She would escort me to her place and make sure I got off and settled in my room.  While I waited at the bus station the driver stayed with me and made sure I got on the right bus.  Sure enough just as the bus was ready to pull out she came and the driver made a hasty introduction.  She spoke a bit of English, but it still was a challenge to communicate.  Off we went in an empty bus.  Granted a chicken bus, but this time it only carried the two of us.  That is until we reached the market a couple of blocks away.  Now that was the hub of activity.  The central core around the area the busses parked, people bustled about getting on and off busses, taxis, selling and buying food, wading in the muddy streets and jostling each other in the process.  I was flabbergasted. A man, who seemed to be the bus herder, guided the bus into a spot next to six or seven other busses.  Across the way the taxis lined up waiting for passengers.  The passengers themselves were buying goods and food to take home.  I sat on the bus and watched everything.  The woman, Neddie, got off and went in search of some chicken for dinner.  Soon some people came and loaded their goods on the bus behind the drivers seat.  Everyone that boarded the bus had some sort of supplies he stacked in the seat behind the driver.  When that seat was full and overflowing into the aisle the second seat was filled with goods.  This went on until the bus was full of people and all their shopping goods.  Young girls from six to sixteen came on the bus or to the windows selling sodas, sandwiches, chicken and rice on a plate, cookies, apples and fruit, ice cream in cones and a dozen more things.  They wore real pretty fancy aprons and carried their wares on trays.  Even one lady was hollering “Sandwiches” in English.  That made no sense since no one was speaking English.  Young boys also had goods, mostly drinks, candy and gum.  One boy had a tray of combs, razors and other grooming supplies. They were not shy and almost pestered you into a sale.  I had to keep saying ‘Tango esta’; I have this, even if I didn’t.  I didn’t like the looks of the food and later on as the bus chugged up the highway, I broke out the can of tuna I bought at the store and made me several tuna sandwiches.  I could get three sandwiches out of a can mixed with the mayo out of the container I salvaged from the last overnight trip.  I also kept the hot chocolate. 

We started off with the bus loaded, but without Neddie, that was my guide and arm hold for this leg of the trip.  Surely she would not miss the bus.  After several turns around corners in the market area she showed up and hopped back on the bus. The bus made a steady stream of passenger drop offs and each time a family group would get off each child had a package to carry.  Even the smallest boy of five never went empty handed. By the time we reached Tikal we were only half full. Or is that half empty?  In any case we drove through the park entrance and made a right hand turn on to a muddy dirt road just past the ticket booth in the Tikal park site.  Leaving the paved highway behind, we traveled another 20 k to Uaxactun; besides the 60 k we already had come from Flores. It took longer to drive the last leg of the trip than it did to Tikal. The road was flanked with jungle forest, which opened to cultivated fields and back to forest.  The trees were so thick it was hard to see anything beyond the edge of the road. The road was rutted and bumpy and went up hill and down winding through the forest. By three in the afternoon we reached the village of Uaxactun.  The remaining passengers got off with their goods and the last stop was for Neddie, driving up right to the door of her hotel.

Now I don’t know what I expected the hotel to be, but it was a charming little complex behind a wooden fence.  It held a large screened in dining area attached to a kitchen.  On the other side of the open courtyard was a row of buildings with three rooms to each. These were the guest quarters.  They were simple but comfortable with a pair of twin beds to each room.  The ceiling was screened showing the top of the thatched roof beyond it.  The door to the room was split so the bottom half could be closed and the top left open for ventilation.  The bathroom building was at the end of the buildings in its own house.  Three bathroom units were provided with a flushing toilet and shower in each compartment and a vanity sink sitting on the sidewalk in front of the building.  Beyond this was the clothes washing area with a big cement two compartment sink and lots of five gallon buckets full of water.  I checked on the shower; finding it only had cold water.  Brrrrrr.  Not for me, shades of Mexico revisited.  They had a large tank sitting on an elevated frame and they refilled it with a smaller tank on the back of a pick up truck.  No running water besides the water they hauled in on the truck.  They had pipes running to the bathhouse and the kitchen, but nothing else.  I settled into my room and my hostess asked what time I wanted to have dinner. 

I had time to look over the village before dark.  The village was divided down the middle by an old airfield making the buildings flank each side of it.  There were several large meetinghouses and smaller shops, mostly places that served snacks and drinks.  Behind them were the village houses.  There were several churches, of which, were Episcopal or Pentecostal.  As soon as I crossed the border into Guatemala they made their appearance solidly announcing their presence in every village and town.  The Catholics had Mexico, but Guatemala was in the hands of the Christian zealots striving to convert the heathens.  Of course that statement is a bit sarcastic because the Mayan have always been deeply religious and clung to the old but stable gods of their ancient culture and didn’t need saving.  Oh, well, so much for my opinion on Christianity.

In the middle of the airfield area was a soccer field, basketball court and horses staked out keeping the grass munched down.  They could have used a few garbage collectors here, as there was lots of debris scattered all over the field, road and in the ditches. 

I had dinner of chicken, carrot salad and French fried potatoes.  They turned the electricity on at dark and it ran for a few hours.  They had a TV in the dining room that was hooked up to a satellite connection.  It was all in Spanish.  My hostess tried to convey to me that I was invited to join them at a town celebration and dance that evening at the meetinghouse.  At first I wasn’t going to go, but not only were they insistent, but I felt I would be insulting their gracious offer for an outsider to join in a village event.  I accepted and after dinner walked down to the meetinghouse.  It was beginning to fill up with people.  They all stood around inside and out waiting for the event to start.  I wasn’t sure what to do so I milled around looking at the crowd.  My hostess found me and took me by the arm and escorted me inside to a front row seat.  The stage was set up with chairs and there were signs on the back wall in big letters.  Even though the village looked sparse and ragged the men and boys were dressed in clean white shirts and dark trousers.  The girls wore high heel shoes and fancy dresses or skirts and blouses.  Neddie, my hostess was dressed in a lovely suit and fancy hat with hose and high heels.  There were little kids everywhere.  When the ceremony started and young people climbed the steps to the stage I figured out it was a celebration for students graduating from school. They all were presented diplomas with lots of speeches from each of the teachers or school officials involved with the village affairs.  They all stood and sang the Guatemalan national anthem when the flag was carried in.  Not only one verse but also, the song seemed to contain six or more verses.  I was really impressed not only with the song, but the way they sang without music and how they all had strong clear voices that resonated through out the building and into the night air. They stood as a group proud of their achievements holding their hand horizontal over their hearts with the thumb pointing down as they sang.   Most of all they impressed me with their being proud of being Guatemalan and their standing the community.  I was really touched to the point of bringing tears to my eyes.  I couldn’t understand what they said, only the way they felt it and conveyed the feelings. 

After the ceremony the D.J. cranked up the music and started the strobe lights flashing around the hall.   It was pretty hypnotic watching the lights flash.  Pretty soon the young teenagers started dancing.  It was disco, but not like I had ever seen.  They kind of shook and shimmied their bodies all over dancing face to face but did not touch each other even though they danced as partners.  The lights got the best of me and I excused my self and walked outside. 

The night was clear and the sky was full of stars.  The clearing around the area of the airstrip made the sky reveal itself in all its glory.

I stood and drank in the light of the heavens looking for familiar constellations.  They were there, but a little off center from my northern latitude perspective. On the horizon blazed the planet Venus.  It was gorgeous.  It was huge.  It was like a strobe light in itself, flashing blue and red lights through the atmosphere.  I had never seen anything like this at home.  No wonder the ancient Mayans revered Venus.  It was truly spectacular.  My hostess, Neddie, found me gapping at the sky and took me by my arm again and walked me back to the hotel and to my room. 

 

Uaxactun Site

 

November 30, the morning was overcast and didn’t clear off until mid-morning.  I had breakfast served with the best pancakes I have ever eaten; they were like crepes, very light and fluffy.  There were some of the presenters from the ceremony having breakfast also.  They were friends of Nettie and lived close to Antigua.  That was a two-day driving journey.

The two men in the party were in the Army and were the drivers/escorts to the lady and her twelve-year old daughter.  The girl had taken English in school and knew a fair amount of our language.  She looked older than twelve, being tall and carried herself with regal poise and charm.  Besides being very pretty, she had a wonderful bright friendly smile.   She was able to translate some of the information to me about them and the ceremony the night before.  They were the ones responsible for the school program that taught the students in the village.             

            I found the sign for the trail to the site tacked to a fence post and walked up the dirt road passed the village houses to group B of the Uaxactun Archaeological site. I was disappointed with group B.  All the mounds were still piles of rubble covered with vegetation.  I could see the outline of the ball court buildings and looked at several stele that were too wore to see anything.  When I continued down the trail and came to group A, the buildings improved.  There were numerous stele covered with thatched roofs.  One had a marker that put the date of the stele at 430. A.D.  That’s pretty old. The large building located in group A on the principle plaza was a huge building (A-5) that had been renovated many times in the past.  It had been extensively excavated.  The building was pretty baffling, until I consulted a book on the site when I returned home.  It showed how the temple was built through the various time periods and I was able to piece together my pictures to the temple profile.  It was really fascinating the way it was built and to stand inside it and stand there and wonder how the ancients did it, how they worshiped their gods and how they lived for the many centuries it took to go through the renovations. 

            From there I could see another building trough the trees.  I made my way down a path to a building they called palace 18.  It was huge, being three stories high.  I climbed through out the whole place, down the corridors, up the stairs, stood on the top most point and looked over the edges of the roof.  I could see beyond the tree line to the horizon and down to the village below.  The whole site was built on small hills and terraced into various platforms to hold the temples in the plazas.  From there I walked down hill and could still see the levels of terraces from ancient times.  The path led down the hill to the village, which pushed almost up to the first terrace.  They had small houses surrounded with fences.  I walked down an alleyway and found a path that led to the runway clearing.  I crossed the runway, making note of the many children carrying buckets of water.  Some on their heads in vases and some plastic 5-gallon pails balanced on a pole across the shoulder.  They came from a well on one side of the runway.  They must have had to make many trips during the day to supply each household with fresh water to cook and bath with. 

            Between the store that served cold drinks and the church, I found the path to the second part of the site that held group D, E, F and H. I passed by more village houses and said hello to the children playing in the yards.  Immediately, as if on cue the mother came running out of the house with a box.  She stopped me and showed me some cornhusk dolls they had made.  Apparently all the women and girls make these dolls, as I saw them in several places.  They were very pretty, dressed in bark and feather skirts, holding baskets of dried flowers.  How could I refuse, as I was the only visitor the village had that day and the only one walking around looking at the site.  She was in the right spot when I came up the path and must have been waiting for me to arrive.  Of course, I had to admire each doll in the box and I took my time making my selection.  I really didn’t want any dolls, but they were very well crafted and she probably really needed to make a sale.  Taking all this into consideration, I bought two.  They all smiled at me as I left continuing down the path to Group D.  That group only had two large mounds in it that were still unexcavated.  I went on down to group E.  Now I was getting somewhere.  This group held the observatory building and the platform with the three temple buildings that mark the spring, summer, fall and winter equinox and solstices.  There were Witz mountain masks on the side of the observatory temple.  They had a temple number 10 that was nicely renovated and part of a staircase and platform in front of it.  I spent a lot of time looking at it.  There were four other people sitting around on the grass having lunch.  After not seeing many people at the other sites, I was almost surprised to see them.  I was getting used to solitary visiting.  I left there and walked down a path to find group H, but there were so many paths branching off the trail I wasn’t sure which one to take.  I was getting tired so I gave up and went back to the hotel. 

            On the way I encountered two children about 4 or 5 that were trying to get a coconut out of its’ shell.  As I came closer they eyed me with wary looks.  I tried to motion to the young boy that if he would give me the machete he had I would break open the coconut.  He wasn’t having any of it and clung on to the machete with all his might.  By that time two older boys came to see what was going on.  I motioned to them to take the machete and crack the coconut open for the kids.  They laughed and talked with each other and finally convinced the young boy to let them have the knife.  With a dozen or so whacks the coconut broke open and I pried out some of the coconut meat and handed to the young girl.  The boy would have nothing to do with me and just sat there and glared. I left them to dig out the rest and walked up the hill to the hotel. 

            Next to the hotel was a shop where a man was weaving a chair out of canning material.  It was very nicely done in a dark reddish brown and white cane material.  I said hello and watched him awhile.  He got up and showed me some other things he had made.  I took a couple of pictures of his work, which included a beautiful clothes cabinet standing by the back wall of his shop.  Being I had time I wandered down the side of the runway a little further as far as the meetinghouse, but there really wasn’t anything to see.  I went back to the hotel and had lunch and rested.  Later in the afternoon Neddie opened the museum for me to see her exhibits and I spent some time looking at the wonderful collection of Mayan art that came out of the site here at Uaxactun and other sites.  I found the plates, vases and bowls very exquisite and was able to touch them, very gently and take pictures without glass partition between the art objects and me.  That was a special treat.

            Neddie asked me what I wanted to have for dinner.  In the process of what was available and what I liked we were able to translate spaghetti.  Ok, that would be fine.  I came later when she told me dinner was ready and I sat at a table in the dining room.  I looked around at the kitchen area and I could see the cooking fire pit they used was the same as the camping sites I had been to before.  It seems to be the standard stove in Guatemala.  It is very efficient and if it is not broken, don’t fix it.  The cook allowed me to take her picture at the stove.  I had been very careful not to offend anyone by taking their picture without asking except for the times I made sneak shots through the car window.  Mostly they were from the rear when they didn’t see me.  I had to be fast as there was no stopping the vehicle and scaring them to death speaking in English.  The people were shy, but friendly and I didn’t want to push the envelope.

When dinner was served I sat and ate by myself until three men came in.  They were travelers from Belgium and had just come in by the chicken bus.  They were interesting to talk to and we spent some time comparing notes on traveling.  They spoke English well, besides Spanish and I marveled at their ability to travel around the world and see the sights with out a timetable to adhere to.  I had to leave the next morning by the chicken bus, which spent the night at the village and departed the next morning about 5:30. 

There were no stars to look at, as the sky was still overcast, so I went to bed about seven.  I woke about 4 a.m. to the sound of beating on the roof.  What’s this?  Good grief, it is rain and it is coming down in buckets.  Oh, this would never do.  Not when I had to catch the bus in an hour and half.  I lay there and listened to the rain pound down and soon gave up on the notion it would quit.  About five a.m. I heard some people moving about.  I put my head out the door and asked if they were taking the chicken bus.  Somehow they got across to me through the language barrier, yes, they were taking the bus. It was at the corner, and yes, I had to hurry, because it left in five minutes.

I already had my bags packed and I just had time to grab them and run through the rain, slid down the hill from the hotel to the corner where the bus waited.  I almost didn’t make it, as the bus started to pull away when I reached it.  I had to holler and hit on the bus to make it stop.  I was soaked to the skin when I boarded the bus.  There were about ten people on the bus all looking like wet rats in a cage.  We were off and running, as it were, sliding through the mud on a two-hour trip to Tikal.  I didn’t think we would make it.  The bus slithered and sashayed up hill and down, making deep grooves in the already sloppy mud being hammered by the rain making it run in rivers down the road.  I mentally sucked in the fenders when the bus came too close to the edge of the road and pushed it by proxy when the bus would stall in the grooves filled with slimy sludge.

 

Tikal and camping in the rain

 

But, make it we did and when we reached Tikal at 7:30 the rain had reduced to a fine mist.  I climbed off the bus and went over to the Jaguar Inn.  I rented a tent for the night that was set up in the inner courtyard.  They had a bathhouse with toilets, but again the water in the shower was cold.  That put an end to the hot shower dream I was having and I went to the restaurant instead and ordered breakfast.  I had the American dream breakfast, scrambled eggs, toast, potatoes and digging in my backpack got out the hot chocolate I saved from the last camping trip and made my self a cup out of the hot water I ordered.  I sort of lingered hoping the rain would stop, but the mist persisted and by the time I finished eating I trudged wetly back to the ticket booth and purchased my ticket to see the site.  The museum was only a few feet away and I started there thinking again that maybe the rain would stop.  I was able to take pictures of the exhibits with out flash and I was happy about that.  The caretaker at the door that sold tickets to get into the museum also had reproductions of the carved bones that depicted the cosmic canoe.  I just had to get one.  Of course, the bone was a cow bone and not human and the carving was rendered in red ink same as the original.  I also bought a book on Tikal.  When I came to the display that showed the original bone carving I was disappointed it was so old and faded looking.  It was a shame, but after a number of centuries, what was I to expect. I still recognized it and was happy to have seen it with my own eyes.  That has to be my favorite of all the art pieces that has ever come out of any of the sites.  For a story about the creation myth it relates, see the back cover of the album or read about it in a separate listing on my web page.  From the museum I began to walk up the trail.  I tried to keep up with some of the groups with guides so I could hear what they were saying, but they walked too fast for me and soon I was lost in the mud.  I walked all over starting with the side temples of North zone complex, Q, R, O, P, shifting my direction I walked down a trail I thought would come out at temple 3, but actually I found myself looking at the back of Temple one, the temple of the jaguar.  I went up the path from the back and entered the plaza.  There was Temple One with temple two across from it flanked by the north acropolis and on the other side was the central acropolis.  I was overwhelmed by the shear size of the temples.  I took some pictures and climbed up to the central acropolis when the mist started to come down harder.  I sat in one of the rooms where some of the elite would have lived.  The place was crowded with throngs of people. I looked over the central acropolis and watching closely on where I stepped as to avoid slipping, I climbed down the staircases built for visitors and went over to look at the north acropolis buildings.  There was a huge assortment of them that had been built over and added to over the centuries.  Under one layer of the building they found a mask similar to the Kohunlich sun god masks.  I didn’t climb any of the temples as I thought they were too high for me.  I walked from there to temple three then made my way around to temple four, which was under construction.  I walked through the Temple of the Ventanas around the corner to complex N and down the path to the grand pyramid six and on to the Lost World complex.  As I came to the last building in the lost world, I encountered a whole troupe of Coti Mundi animals.  There must have been several dozen of them.  I filmed them on video for several minutes.  They didn’t even know I was there.  Other people came by and stopped and watched them too.  After that I went around the corner, past the ball court and entered the seven-temple area.  There was a lot of restoration being done to the temples and several buildings that were on one side of the temples.  I walked around the back and looked at the trenches that were dug to find the perimeter of the building base.  I followed the path around the back of the south acropolis, but it was not been restored yet.  The path came out at Temple Five.  That was impressive. Not only had they just finished the restoration in 2005, there was a palapa set up with pictures of the restoration.   Besides that they had built a staircase along one side of the main steps so people could climb up.  Not for me, not only was it still misting from the time I left temple One, I was getting pretty tired and hungry.  Gad, it was 3:00 p.m. and visions of tuna sandwiches danced in my head.  I decided to start down and finish looking at the rest of the site the next day.  I made it down about half way before it started to rain fairly hard.  I reached my tent as the rain started to pound down.  I had my backpack and lunch sack in the tent along with the mattress pad and blanket I was provided.  I sat there and ate my sandwiches along with a coke and bag of chips I bought at the souvenir shop at the site entrance.  I was really tired as I counted up the hours I had been on the trails and climbing through the buildings, wow, 6 hours nonstop.  I arranged the mattress pads and blankets to make it as padded as possible in the bottom of the tent.  It rained harder.  I sat there and made notes and recorded my pictures and anything else to keep myself busy.  It was still pouring when it got dark.  I was stuck inside the tent, as sheets of rain seemed to want to cave in the roof.  I gave up and figured I might as well go to bed.  I had the zippered windows open some for ventilation, as it was 77 degrees with 110% humidity.  I checked the rain outside to see if the water puddles were going to fill up and float away the tent, but the grass was still absorbing the water.  It was getting mushy, but the rain was not near enough to flooding over the edge of the tent door.  I pulled out the shawl and pillow, along with a space age blanket I brought with me.  I had it for years, still wrapped in the original plastic bag.  I unfolded the thin foil sheet and it made a blanket big enough to cover me.  I don’t know why I haven’t seen them for sale recently, but they were all the rage awhile back. I covered loosely as anything seemed to make it sweatier.  The condensation dripped from the ceiling of the tent right in my face. I woke up thinking the tent had sprung a leak.  I checked outside the door again to see how high the level of the water was and after that woke several more times to look with the flashlight to access the condition my condition was in.  It poured all night.  This clearly was not a fun choice I had made to sleep in a tent, but I was not able to change to a bungalow because by that time everyone in the hotel was gone and I didn’t want to get soaked trying to make a change.  My circumstance was so bleak and miserable it was not even funny.  In fact the more it rained, the more irritated I became and by morning I had made up my mind to scrap my plans to go to Copan chucking Guatemala completely and head for the Belize border. 

Dec 2, the morning was gray and foggy with the rain reduced to a mild mist.  I got up and waded through the water carrying my suede boots to the front of the Jaguar Inn from the camping ground at six a.m. and to my delight there was a combi going to Flores. What universal luck, or was the Universe just telling me something about making my escape before I needed an ark. I threw my bags in and without even thinking about breakfast we took off.  This was surely going to be better than a chicken bus.  We stopped and picked up passenger after passenger until the van was overloaded.  When one would get off, two would get on.  This must have been the ‘Chicken Little’ bus, (attempt at humor) I thought, in my saturated state.  When we reached Santa Elena everyone had to get off the combi at the bus station.

A motorbike taxi pulled up to the bus and he took me across the land bridge to Flores.  He wasn’t very acquainted with the town as he kept going up one street and down another looking for the Captain Tortuga restaurant.  It was good for me as I was able to see more of the town streets and after he asked directions several times we finally made it.

Korina wasn’t open yet as it was only 7:30 in the morning.  I left my bag at the restaurant and walked down the street.  I used the Internet again and found out the weather in Texas was dry but the temperature had dropped to 34 degrees and was expected to dip as low as 27 by that evening.  Which was worse cold or rain?  Toss up, if you ask me.  It was not raining in Flores, but the overcast was heavy.  On the way back I stopped once again in the textile shop.  This time the shop owner saw me walking down the street and came out of his shop to greet me.  He was smiling and waving; “Hola, Senora”, to me as he practically fell over himself to reach me.  I didn’t disappoint him, and bought some more things for gifts.  The textiles were beautiful and I couldn’t seem to make a choice, so I bought several of each.  They accept credit cards and have no problem processing them.  Korina was open when I returned to her office and I told her about my plight with the rain.  I told her I was going to scrap my plan to rent a vehicle and drive to Copan as I wasn’t going to get caught in the bad weather.  I was instead going to catch the bus to go to Belize.  I repacked my bags in her office, stuffing my dirty laundry, new purchases and only leaving me to carry my camera and lunch bag.  My eight bags were overstuffed by this time making them round and fully loaded. I also had way too much Quetzals and instead of going back to the bank to re-exchange the money again I had Korina take me back to the store I purchased the shirts for the guides where I had seen some beautiful embroidered blouses.  I found one with birds on it that took two months to sew.  That was the most expensive thing I bought, as it was 240.00 dollars in American. I also found a beaded purse, necklace, belt and several other items that came to 105.00. The amount beyond the Queztals I had, I put on the credit card.  The lady at the shop gave me a small zipper bag with a beautiful embroidered bird on it as a present for buying so many things.  She, too, smiled a lot when I was done.  You know, in Mexico there is a lot of bargaining between seller and buyer, but in Guatemala and also Belize, there is no bargaining. In Mexico, a lot of the vendors lay their goods on a tarp on the sidewalk, but not in Guatemala and Belize.  Mostly they are in shops, or tent shops in the market places.

Korina called the bus station to find out when the bus left for the border.  I bid her farewell and thanked her for all the arrangements she had made and the kindnesses she had showed me while I was in Guatemala. The English-speaking driver took me to the bus station and we found a combi leaving at 11 a.m. going Mechclor de la Menchos, the town on the border of Belize instead of the bus. The combi, as with the chicken bus was filled to the brim with passengers when we left.  I was the first one to get on so I had the seat behind the diver next to the window.  We had covered the bags with plastic bags to protect them from the rain and the drivers’ assistant put them on the top of the combi in the luggage rack as it had started to rain again.  We picked up more passengers at the market on the way.

We were full to overflowing leaving the assistant standing next to the door all hunched over to keep from hitting the roof with his head.  We were still packed when we reached the border. The last thirty miles of road going to the border was unpaved and when we hit that stretch, it was mud hole city again.  We slipped and slid all over the place and almost didn’t make it through some of the deep grooves.  But, make it we did and I was so glad to see the pavement in the border town I could have knelt down and kissed it.  We arrived at 1:30 p.m. having traveled 90 K. I had saved enough money to pay for my bus ticket and the taxi I would take to the border and tips.  There even was a man who exchanged money from Queztas to Belizean money standing at the taxi stand, but I didn’t need him as I had figured my money to the last amount I would need in Quetzals.

            Everyone bailed out of the combi as that was the end of the line.  Someone flagged down a taxi for me and he loaded up my stuff and took me to the border about a mile away from the ragged town of Melchor de la Menchos.  He drove me over the bridge between the two countries, passing the huge line of people waiting to have their passport stamped to leave Guatemala.  I shuttered to think I would have to leave my bags sitting at the immigration office in care of someone and walk back across the bridge and wait in line to get my passport stamped again.  I paid the taxi driver the last 20 Q I had.  He found a Belizean taxi driver to take my bags from him into the immigration station and wait for me to be processed.  He was nice and even though I couldn’t understand him, I could follow what he was saying between the lines.  The Belizean driver spoke English.  Wow. I had forgotten Belizeans speak English.  I was not sure about the taxi-driver, as he was a black man, thinking he would speak a Garfunican dialect.   He told me to talk to the immigration officer about my passport, so while I stood in line with one bag at the immigration desk on the Belize side he stood by another counter with the rest of my bags.

I told the immigration officer that my passport had been stamped when I entered the country and did I need to walk back across the bridge to get it stamped now as I left.  Apparently not, as he looked at my passport and put his Belize stamp on it and I was officially in Belize.  The next counter down a black lady officer asked me, (in English, got to love it) what I had in my bags.  I told her my dirty laundry, souvenirs and rest of my clothes.  She sort of wrinkled her nose when I said dirty laundry and looked at the plastic covered luggage I was wheeling, hesitated a moment and then told me to go on.  I exited the door to the processing building into the parking lot.  The taxi driver went to get his taxi while I waited with my bags at the curb.  Several other taxi drivers tried to coax me away from my driver and steal his fare.  I told them no, but they were persistent.  It almost made me feel like I was sorry I could understand them.  At least if there is a language barrier, you miss a lot of bullshit. 

 

            The story continues in volume three, my visit to Belize.