Guatemalan Mac and Cheese

We're glad to be back on the road. 2 weeks of Spanish school was great, just the right amount. Our brains are full, and we're ready to see some new places. Tonight we're at Panajachel, at Lake Atitlan. We kept thinking to ourselves, it's just a lake, how pretty can a lake be, maybe we should skip it - but, wow, a lake can be really gorgeous. Check out the pictures on our picasa site, link to the right. It's touristy, and really beach-y, but we have a campsite out of town, right on the lake, and it's super relaxing. Plus we made ourselves feel right at home by working on the van all day, and leaving broken appliances in our front yard! The fridge hasn't been working, and we don't really think we need it, so today Douglas tore it out and we turned the space into a giant closet. The fridge is sitting just outside the van. We don't know what to do with it.



I guess we're not really used to being back on the road and having to cook for ourselves. When we were at our homestay in Xela, Dona Juana made us breakfast at 8, lunch at 1:30, and dinner at 7:30. Usually fresh, handmade tortillas and rice and vegetables we didn't recognize. We were thinking to ourselves that it would be nice to be able to decide what we were going to eat, and to eat when we felt like it, but we haven't quite figured that one out yet. Yesterday when we were at the giant market, it somehow didn't seem like the right time to buy vegetables. And today, when we were working on the van beside Lake Atitlan, it didn't seem like the right time to buy vegetables. Not when we were walking into town to go to the internet cafe, either. Later. In Mexico, the tiendas all had some fresh veggies, some avocados, limes, tomatoes, cans of salsa verde.

Turns out the Guatemalan tiendas have fruit juice, every kind of hard liquor you can name, lots of hot sauce, bottled water, and ketchup. So dinner tonight was beans, cous cous, nutritional yeast, and ketchup. It sorta tasted like mac and cheese, but with beans. It actually wasn't half bad (god, I was hungry).

We've been feasting our eyes on textiles, instead, I guess. Yesterday we went to the big market in Chichicastenango. The best market I've ever seen, bar none. And we ran into our friends Linda and Maggie from Xela, even better! We had friends to drink beer with again.

The stuff for sale was out of this world. Gorgeous, giant Mayan calendars, woven and embroidered clothes of every possible color (usually all at once), bags of every size and material, never mind the frying chicken and toasting tortillas. It was bewildering. We wandered around for a couple of hours on total sensory overload. Here's a picture of Douglas at the stall where we bought a Mayan calendar.



We are *loving* Guatemala. We haven't even left yet, and already I'm thinking that we have to come back.

Streets of Xela

We've been spending some getting to know our little town. I just spent an hour at the nearby used bookstore, stocking up on books - I just realised, to my horror, that I was down to two novels!! eek! book emergency. Fortunately, english books are pretty easy to find, and I just got 4 for something like $8. whew. crisis averted.

My favorite discovery is the hot chocolate. Last week we saw it being ground, at El Molino, where the corn for tortillas gets ground. Fresh-roasted cocoa beans, smashed together with enormous amounts (laundry tubs full, seriously) of sugar, and sold in bars about the size of my head, 10Q each for the good stuff (about $1.10). Chunks of it melted into hot water (you can have it with or without milk, as you choose) are like a chocolate bar in a mug. O mi god. I am spoiled for life.

And, continuing with the food theme, always my favorite, yesterday at spanish school we got a cooking lesson, how to make fried plantains with sweet mole. Here is the recipe, in spanish first, and then in english:

Mole de Platano

4 platanos maduros
1/2 libra chocolate para tomar
4 onzas pepitoria
4 onzas ajonjoli
1 libra tomate
1 pedazo de canela
1/2 chile pasa (como pimiento)
1 pan dulce

Procidimiento

- frier los platanos
- cocinar en poca agua el tomate, la canela, y el chocolate
- licuar el tomate, canela y chocolate, y pan
- tostar la pepitoria, el ajonjoli y el chile
- licuar la pepitoria, ajonjoli, y chile
- revolver el recado con los platanos
- hervir por 5 minutos
- decorar con ajonjoli

que rico!!!

Ingredients

4 ripe plantains
1/2 pound drinking chocolate (you can get Abuelita brand in NC), and if you can't find it, use regular chocolate and add sugar to taste
4 ounces green pumpkin seeds
4 ounces sesame seeds
1 pound ripe tomatoes
1 stick of cinnamon
1/2 big red, not-so-hot chile, seeds removed
1 sweet bread, or some arrowroot cookies, just to keep it from being too runny

Method

- peel the plantains, and cut them into long thin slices, then fry 'em up
- cook the tomatoes, cinnamon, and the chocolate together, in a tiny bit of water
- in a blender, liquify the tomato mixture
- toast the pumpkin seeds, the sesame seeds, and take the seeds out of the chile
- liquify the sesame mixture (you may need to add water)
- mix everything together and heat it up for about 5 minutes
- decorate with a bit of extra sesame seeds

enjoy!!! It's kind of like fried bananas in chocolate sauce, with a bit of a spicy bite.

Black beaches of Guatemala

Black beaches? like Hawaii? well sorta, yes, as in the sand is black, afluent like Hawaii, no. The guide books describe them as delapitated and that maybe there time has come and gone. I guess thats why were the only gringos there, which after spending a week in a very gringo'fied Xela was welcome. The menu wasn't in english.

On the way to the beach we stopped in at Tak Alik Ab Aj, the oldest ruins yet found in Central America and one of the few examples of the Olmec and Mayan culture mixing. The flora was just as interesting as the ruins, with orchids growing on most every tree!
Arriving in Champico the people were easily recognized as beach types, sandals, no shirts and lots of beach cruisers. This town was once a bustling port city, 2nd largest in Guatemala, during the height of the coffee fincas or plantations. There is a pier going out to sea and is standing by nothing shy of a miracle, and the railroad tracks end just shy of the pier. I presume this is how they used to load the coffee onto boats 100 years ago. Now, its being used to store fishing boats which get lowered off the end past the breakers. Off course I had to go check out the mechanism with which the fishermen risk there lives, more miracles that it works. Kim noticed that there was not a single unfilled hammock during the height of the day.



We really enjoyed our lunch of shrimp and fish fried in garlic and just before heading home, Maggie bought us each a green coconut to drink. This is a real treat. The milk is not as sweet or thick as a brown coconut, *just* right for a hot day at the beach.





Having photo uploading issues, but over in our pictures there are photos of this trip. The volcano is Sanguanita, and is very active. From Xela we can see the larger dormant volcano but only the PLUMES of smoke from the wee one. Driving down to the beach afforded a great view of the little one. I read in the paper that a group of geologist have just finished building six monitoring stations around this volcanoe in an effort to predict a larger erruption and avert deaths. Remember, Xela is the second largest city in Guatemala and about 10-15 miles from this volcanoe. Not sure if size really means anything in the world of volcanoes as the biggist volcanoe I've ever seen was the lake in Yellowstone.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowstone_Volcano

Well the bell just rang for classes to start again so. Yo va!

oo, and here's a picture of our host family

Weaving

Part of the mission of our language school is to teach us about Mayan culture while we learn spanish. Many of the teachers are Mayan, and they organize loads of informative events. Earlier this week, there was a speaker about Mayan cosmovision, a movie about the civil war in Guatemala, and an expedition to a see local weavers in action. The brightly colored woven cloth is famous, and we got to see how they make it.

It's super labor-intensive, like most things here. The weavers set up in a big field, with wheelbarrows full of long skeins of cotton thread. Then they stretch out the skeins, which are about half as long as a playing field, and organize them with what look like big combs. They count all the threads, and divide them evenly between the teeth of the big combs. They they paint the threads with natural dyes. First everything gets striped with black, and then the gaps between the black stripes get filled in with different colors.









Once the threads are dyed, they get taken over to the weavers, who are usually in the same family as the dyers, and they set up their giant looms to weave the cloth. We visited a weaving house, and got to see them in action. Here's a short movie of the weavers in action:




I even got to try my hand at the loom!! Here's a terrible picture of me trying to figure out how to do it - the weavers made it look so easy!! Apparently I was really lucky to get to try it out - our guide said he'd never seen them let anyone else take a go at the loom before.

Our first week in Xela

It has been nice to be able to stay in one place for a bit. Kim and I are studying Espanol in Guatemala's second largest city, Quetzaltenango, more commonly refered to as Xela. Its a town of about 200,000 people, and as in most of Guatemala, mostly Mayans. The women, and the occasional man, wear the amazingly embroidered and hand dyed and woven 'ropa tipica' making any outing into the narrow cobblestone streets an amazing experience. I wonder how many times they drop their groceries off their heads as they are learning to balance it up there!

Our school, Celas Maya, is a school that teaches Spanish and Quiche, one of the many Mayan languages. The complete immersion into the culture and the language has been great. We are living with a Mayan family, the Jocols. The mother, Juana has been great, welcoming us into her home and feeding us yummy food.

In the photo below we went up the road to grind some corn which we later used to make tortillas 'a mano' or by hand. These are way tastier than the ones Kim and I make in the States with Maseca.



This morning we went to Fuentes Georginas, a local hot spring where they've built a couple of pools and a bar. This rivals the relaxation offered by David's sauna.


The trip there was fun, we took a local bus, more on these later, and then a pickup truck up into the hills. The views from the back of the pickup were great, the fields were more like raised bed gardens, with carrots the size of your forearm coming out of the rich earth. Here's a short video(mute your sound):



Have you ever wondered where the US school busses go? Well, they're here! And bright yellow is just one of the colors. You can't imagine what great paint jobs, right down to each wheel lug nut, they put on them. After they trek up to the US to get their bus, I think the first thing they do is mount a ladder and roof rack. Next comes amazingly shiny chrome everything, and then they smoke a lot of pot and head to the paint store. These busses will certainly be a subject of many of my photos. Here's a primer

And now, turn up the sound for this video, and I doubt your speakers will compare to air horns on narrow streets:


The school has kept us amazingly busy, homework, activities, and then there are the markets and so, so much to see and do. Hope everyone is great!

ps. we've updated our links on the right - new photos and videos.

Guatemala!

we made it to Xela (Quetzaltenango) on time for our language school!! With 50 minutes to spare, actually, before we're supposed to be picked up by our host family. We're road weary. I wouldn't recommend trying to drive all the way through Mexico in one week. But we're here, and Guatemala is gorgeous. More later. They have WiFi at our school, so you may hear lots from us, if they don't keep us too busy with spanish lessons. We may also have time to upload photos. xo

Where sugar comes from

We're going fast trying to get to Guatemala for our Spanish lessons. Our map (which we got at the place we bought our Mexico insurance, Sanborn's in McAllen, Texas) is pretty good. It shows most of the roads we need and we don't have to guess too much. My favorite towns are the ones that aren't on it.

We're passing through beautiful little mountain towns like Papantla and Ozuluama - they're tucked in the hills away from the highway. The roads are really narow and the buildings aren't set back at all, so you feel like you're going through little canyons. All the houses are built of cinder blocks mortared together and then painted really bright colors - but they must put another layer of mortar on top because you can't see the brick outlines. All the houses are small and very square, kind of lego-like. The shops are mixed in. They're mostly doorless - well, they don't have front walls either. They're cubes with one side open to the street. I think they have metal grates to pull down at night. The streets open out onto small squares with park benches and lots of people milling around. Panantla had a big basketball court with ahuge stone relief carving as its back wall, in the same style as the pyramid decorations at El Tajin, the ruins we visited. The towns are just so *pretty* - there's a lot of attention paid to aesthetics.


We must be travelling a little off the beaten path, too, because we're getting lots of stares. Today we stopped at a small market to buy a 20L jug of purified water to put in the van's tank (cheap at 20 pesos, or $2 - a coke was 8 pesos). A kid of about 8 was working there and ran off to get change for us. He must have told his friend there were gringos at the counter, because next thing another kid appeared, and he just stared and stared at us. His mouth wasn't hanging open but just about!! I said 'Que tal?' (what's up?) and his eyes just about fell out of his head. When we were pouring the water into the van, Douglas heard him telling his friends 'and then she said ¿Que tal?' and giggling like mad. Douglas thinks they're staring at my hair, but I think they're staring at his crazy sunglasses.

Everything suddenly got very tropical, too. Once we left the hills, we got into orange and sugar country, and it smells like it! Most trucks that go by are either full of oranges or stacked with sugar cane. I have some pictures, but we haven't managed to organize getting them onto the web yet. Soon. We stopped at a stand to buy some oranges, and I think we got charged a gringo tax. We got 4 oranges and a couple of bananas, and asked how much. She said 10, with a little lift of her eyebrow. I already had a 10 peso coin out ($1), so I handed it over, and this sly grin spread across her face like she'd just overcharged us by a lot. I guess I{ll bargain next time.

Here's a picture of a truck loaded with sugarcane:



Rules for animals are different, here, too. Dogs roam wherever they like, even well-kept ones with collars. They always look like they're going somewhere, too, like they have an errand to run. Hroses are thethered on the verge of the road, munching grass. All the farm animals look pretty happy in their sunny little fields.

*next day*

We're in San Cristobal de las Casas, now, and is it ever charming!!

We got stopped by another police officer on the way, in a small town in the Tuxtla mtns just south of Catemaco. A few cops had set up shop in the middle of the highway, and one whistled us over to the roadside. They all had machine guns and WWII era pistols. He wanted to see ID, know where we were going, etc. And then he asked for a soda!! Too bad we didn't know how to say 'we're smelly hippies and we don't drink soda'. We said we only had coffee, and then he wanted to make us one! Our end of the conversation probably sounded something like this 'sorry I do be, spanish no good, coffee?' We hesitated long enough that he let us go, luckily. Though it might have been fun to make coffee for all the cops in the middle of the highway. He wasn't menacing, like the cop in Tampico - he was pretty smily. I think he was just curious.

Later in the day, driving through a big town, all the traffic got diverted slightly from the highway to go through a police checkpoint. There was a big sign saying 'if they ask you for money, call this number'

And to give you a picture of what the driving is like here - imagine you're passing a big slow truck on a narrow highway. Then someone passes you, while you're passing the truck! and there's someone coming the other way in the oncoming lane! hours and hours of this, while mopeds with 5 people on them join the stream of traffic in totally chaotic ways.

Thanks for keeping in touch - we love the comments!!

Our First Bribe!!

We´re in Mexico, in Ozuluama, just south of Tampico, on the east coast. We crossed the border yesterday. No one really asked us where we were going or inspected our car, or even looked at the car. Instead, we were told to park and walk from office to office, paying small fees to various people. I(Douglas) really liked the small private enterprise that only did photocopies, which are needed for one of the offices (different building of course). One dollar and he of course knew exactly what needed to be copied. The only person who resembled a customs officer was the woman at Migracion, and she was really too motherly to be a customs officer. She was very patient with our broken spanish.

Once we crossed the border, everything was different - there were no lines on the road and drivers drove wherever they felt like it. Horse-drawn carts trundled along the side of the highway. Every building is a different shade of BRIGHT.

We camped in a small coastal town called La Pesca. A recomendation from RV Camping Mexico by Mike and Teri Church. La Gaviota turned out to be a dump, but the town is super cute. White Pelicans and oyster catchers by the hundreds. A bike ride this morning disproved my fears of biking on the roads here. I think the drivers are used to slow moving horses, peds, and bikers. Of course we love the old school bikes that many folks are riding here, although there´s lots of cheaper mountain bikes too.



Driving through Tampico today, a cop steps out into the road to make everyone stop, and we all did. The only difference between us and everyone else is how white we are, and so we were motioned to the side. The cop explained that we were supposed to stop behind the line - the obvious question is what line. Nonetheless, he tells us that its going to be a 3000 peso fine ($300US), but conveniently, we can take care of it on the side of the road rather that go to the police station. Hmmmm, what to do. We balked, and he asked how much we could afford for this traffic violation. Not being the best negotiator, I (D) said 300 pesos ($30). This seemed reasonable to him, but we then had to pay him through the passenger window, out of sight of the road. hmmm. Well, it was a first for me, Kim and La Tortuga, a bribe. We had been gazing happily at the Mexican countryside, the happy cows grazing in their fields and the brightly colored houses, people walking and talking to each other everywhere, and saying that America could use a little more Mexico. This has balanced our view. And whats with rose tinted sunglasses anyway?

We´re really enjoying having the van - we can go wherever we want, whenever we want, and at the end of the day we´re in our own cozy home, instead of an unfamiliar hotel room. Our stuff is shaking down (and out), each thing to its own particular place in the van, and lots of living space left free. With a few small exceptions, our fully-loaded van looks like we´re on a trip to the grocery store. How did we ever live without a VW? The question of the day yesterday was - Is there enough room in the van to play hackey sack? We decided no, but not by much!

We´re planning to speed through Mexico, so we can relax in Xela (Quetzaltenango) in Guatemala. We plan to start language school there on Jan 15, and stay for 2 weeks. Tomorrow we plan to spend the night on the Emerald Coast, or maybe a little south of there. Cross your fingers that the cops we meet are honest!!

Did it all fit?

Amazingly, all that, plus countless knick-knacks that Douglas had in the shed, actually fit in the van. Of course, I'm taking a couple extra relays, nuts, bolts, and mass airflow sensors, and any other kinda sensor I had back there. It has taken a couple extra days in Asheville figuring out where, and how, everything will live. I just got news that the deodorant has been jettisoned. The extra starter motor got nixed, the unicycle even got the boot, although Dean, who convinced me it was superfluous, seems a little TOO pleased that its staying here...

One last around the block trip on the unicycle, a bit of boring banking business in the am, and we are heading out of the wonderful town of Asheville tomorrow. This place is wonderful, with some of the best people ever to share the days with. Yesterday's new years day hike up Pilot mountain with Dean, David, Annette, Don and Bess will be a day to be remembered.