Se alquila telefonos (telephones for rent)

After the touristyness of Antigua, we headed north, into the hinterlands of Guatemala. But first we stopped at Coban for a tour of a coffee plantation, and got to see every stage of the process from seedling, to picking (each red fruit has two green beans in it, and they squirt out if you squeeze the fruit - they have a really vegetably smell and are covered in sticky goo), to washing, to drying, to roasting (we went into the tiny roasting room, where they have a wee little roaster and two grinders, the size you'd see in a coffee shop at home, and two folks roasting and packing each little bag of coffee by hand). We also got to taste cardamom fresh off the bush - yum!

The central part of Guatemala was gorgeous to drive through. Rolling hills, the forest getting more and more tropical. We drove a little ways off into the jungle to eat a bite of lunch and start soaking the purple beans I bought in the market in town. Here's a movie:

(coming soon-the internet cafe is closing...)

Some of the roads were out-of-hand bad, too. One day we drove for 8 hours, and only went 100 miles!!! 100 miles!! The roads were dirt, and sometimes sand, and incredibly windy. Here's a picture of a chicken bus coming up a hill towards us on a really sandy bit:

(coming soon-the internet cafe is closing...)

Somewhere in the planning of this trip, we worked out the total mileage, and the number of days we had, and figured that we'd only have to drive 100 miles a day to get to Argentina in 4 months. We thought, great, an hour and a half a day, maybe 3 or 4 if the roads are really really bad. ha!!

Once we got out of the hilly region, the roads got a lot better. Only the major highways are paved in the north, and all other streets in a town are dirt, which makes it kind of easy to find the way out of town - just follow the ashphalt. If you hit dirt, you've made a wrong turn, and you'd better go back to the center of town and find a bus to follow.

Things got increasingly tropical as we headed north, and the folks got poorer and poorer. I wonder why those two things seem to go together. The Peten was also hit pretty hard by the war - many of the Mayans who fled their villages ended up living in hidden jungle villages in the Peten. Maybe the area is still recovering - the peace accords were only signed in 1996.

The north is also the country of motorbikes - everyone has one, even the schoolgirls. You see them motoring around, two to a bike, with their little plaid skirts hitched up and their braids flying. No one wears the Mayan typical dress up here, either. Just in the highlands.

Then we got to Tikal!! We spent a night on Lago Peten Itza, near Tikal, and that was glorious. The water was so clear you could see to the bottom even in moonlight. We also met some interesting Italians who are driving from Buenos Aires to Alaska, and we exchanged tips about the road - how handy that we're going in opposite directions! On their advice, we waited until 3 pm the next day to go into Tikal - that way you get a few hours in the afternoon, and your ticket is still good for the next day. Tikal was absolutely magical. Read on to Douglas' post for stuff about Jungle and Birds, birds, birds!!!

Antigua - picture perfect

Antigua is the hotspot for tourism in Guatemala. It's a UNESCO world heritage site, and it's packed full of language schools. So we thought it would be easy to find. But it turns out that they've rerouted the (very new, nicely paved) highway *around* Antigua, and not put up any signs!! You actually need to exit at a different city, drive through that city, and arrive at Antigua. And there are no signs!!!! I guess most people don't drive themselves here, but still!!

Once we found it, we liked it - well, sort of. It's amazingly touristy, and pretty expensive. But so lovely!! Every view is just perfect, cobblestone streets lined with brightly painted colonial-style houses. Little shops selling marzipan animals and cappuccinos. It was charming. We unfortunately ended up staying in a parqueo, which is a gravel lot surrounded by big cement walls with razor wire on top, but we spent all of our awake minutes out in the city, so it didn't really matter.

We of course ran into our friends Linda and Maggie, which was nice - it's funny how we keep running into them, even though we're not planning to. I guess we're just walking the same path through Guatemala.

We decided to mail some packages home from here, before we went on our volcano walk. What a saga!!!! First, all the DHL-type shipping places had closed their offices in the past year or so, so we trooped around town looking for all of them, only to be told they were closed. We finally find the regular mail place, but they don't have any boxes we could use to pack our stuff in. Next door, at the Dispensa Familiar (kind of a cheap supermarket), they had a pile of boxes as high as my shoulder - but we were only allowed to take *one*. Go figure. So we took our box back to the post office, and tore it into pieces and wrapped each bundle of stuff in pieces of cardboard and packing tape (and now we're hurrying because the volcano walk leaves soon), and wrote the addresses on them, and took them up to the counter. Where the lady tells us we have to unwrap them so she can see what's in them. She watched us wrap them from a few feet away!! It took at least 30 minutes!!! Anyhow, the packages got totally covered in stamps and sent off, and we hope they arrive!!!

We dashed off to our volcano walk. The woman at the tourist office told us to follow another woman to our bus. We followed her a few blocks, and she stopped at a little tienda and went inside. Another woman came out, and told us to follow her. She dropped us off on a street corner, and told us to follow another guy. We thought we were in a James Bond movie!! But we got to the bus, and drove to the volcano, and the pictures say it all here. It was HOT!!!! I thought I was going to get cooked by the lava.

Finca Ixobel and amoebas

Ah, little animals that you just didn't see running around on your plate. YUM. Amoebas. We think we came home with more that a suntan from our school trip to the beach. Eating with the Guatemaltecos we were reassured that dive restaurant was better than it looked. And the food was tasty....

Neither of have felt 100% for the last couple of weeks, and in Poptun, decided to get it checked out. This would prove to be my first clinic visit on a dirt road. Here, you first go to the lab and get whatever test you think the doctor might want, and take those results to the doctor. The lab was quite something! There was a box growing something purple, and when she pulled out a spatula had to blow dust off the box. What the lacked in 'lab protocol' however, they gained in speed and efficiency. 20 quetzales and ten minutes later we were certifiably amoeba'ed. Our next stop was the doctor, finding one not in the field took a bit of time, but within an hour we were leaving the pharmacy. Both of us laughing about what Shelly would think as when we told the doc Kim had similar symptoms he just told us to buy 2x the medicines! (and why are drugs so expensive in N.America!??)

We spent a couple of days at a wonderful farm and have recuperated fully. I would highly recommend Finca Ixobel in Poptun if youre heading south of Tikal.

Uaxactun bike ride

After spending all day enjoying the ruins of Tikal, I (Douglas) got on my bike to try and reach Uaxactun, a village 23 km north of Tikal. The guy at the gate couldn't quite understand why I wanted to *ride* their, especially as the bus was right behind me. Now the fact that there is bus service to this village is truly amazing. I actually stayed ahead of it for most of the way, navigating 1/2 meter ruts in the mud road and would consider it a pretty good *mountain* bike ride. During the hot afternoon on my way out there the jungle was quite and my uneasiness was quickly displaced with a bit of exercise. (I unfortunately came within 1km of the village and the not so touristy ruins, but was running out of time to get back to watch the sun set again from the temple in Tikal with Kim.) The trip home, was a very different story. The sun was now coming in at a more acute angle, and everything was glowing green, a truly spectacular light. The jungle was also waking up from its nap and the birds started to make quite a racket. Then I spotted a group of spider monkeys in the trees next to the road. Now there's two types of spider monkeys, the ones that are used to tourists, and the kind that aren't. These were the later, and upon seeing me began screeching and shaking the branches and piling three high and waving all there appendages around. It was an amazing sight! They even did that monkey thing of scratching under (and up and down) their arms. WOW. Pressing on, I heard something running through trees, even Jim M. woulda been impressed at how fast that made me go!

Tikal!

wow! it´s been a whirlwind week. we drove all over guatemala - antigua, then all the way north to Tikal and the mayan ruins, and are now headed for poptun, on our way to Honduras. We´ve had adventures mailing packages, climbing volcanoes, taking dirt roads that were so bad we only went 100 miles in 8 hours of driving, seeing parrots and toucans at the mayan ruins, getting screamed at by packs of spider monkeys, having the heat and humidity of the peten melt our brains. whew. more later. here are a few pictures...

here is a map of guatemala...

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.