On Valentine’s Day we returned from our long excursion, a nine-day trek across Guatemala to take in the major sights. The long excursion is the hinge in the two phases of our program. Our five weeks of intensive one-on-one tutoring is over and on the sixteenth we started taking university courses. We are continuing with one-on-one tutoring but for fewer hours each week. We also do four hours of volunteer work each week. We have been busy so it was nice to have a vacation before we started our new schedule.
Leaving Friday, we stopped in Guatemala City for dinner at Frida’s, a gimmicky Mexican restaurant. My chicken mole didn’t do the unibrowed artist justice. We stayed at Holiday Inn and felt quite like a bit of home skin-grafted onto face of Guate.
Saturday we woke up early and headed to Flores. After quite a trek, we arrived in a beautiful island town surrounded by a greenish blue lake. It felt like paradise. The first night, we ate at Raices, a restaurant/discoteca adjacent to our hotel. We started with a group of dozen or so and ended up with almost all 23 of us. This created quite a headache for the wait staff, especially when trying to figure out the bill. Apparently, their solution was to try to charge us twice for many of our purchases. We in the first group thought we had settled its bill and we left while a second group stayed to enjoy more cheap drinks. When the second group received their bill, they found many of our purchases were on their bill. Jordan and I returned to try to figure out from whence these mysterious charges had reared their ugly heads and we frustrated the meseros enough with our half-ass Spanish that they just struck the contended items from the bill. Peeved as we were—being that Raices was one of two discotecas in town—we returned later to get our dance on.
The police ended up combing Raices that night, but they generally ignored the gringos. Still the fuzz killed the mood enough that we left for Adictos, the other discoteca in town. Adictos was even more en fuego than Raices so we were happy for the change. People we met were very friendly, whether that be Guatemaltecos eager to grind with gringas, a chica by the bar with an appetite for gringos, or the college students happy to shoot the shit by the beach after closing time.
Jordan and I ended the night by jumping in the pool (actually Ellory pushed Jordan in) and then we scampered around the hotel waking up our friends.
The next day we had no activities scheduled so we wandered around Flores a bit and took a tour of a Mayan site in the jungle. Monday we went to Tikal and saw the famed Mayan city. We scaled pyramids and saw some wildlife like leafcutter ants and howler monkeys along the way. I was impressed with the sheer scale of the ruined city. It was a 20-minute walk between the north pyramid and the central acropolis. More impressive is the fact that recently archaeologists have discovered the ruins of another ruined city, called Mirador, that dwarfs even Tikal.
Tuesday, we went to another Mayan cite, Yaxhá which hasn’t been as thoroughly excavated as Tikal but was situated on a nature reserve. We got an even closer to howler monkeys and heard a lengthy howling match between groups of monkeys.
Wednesday we took a bus to Coban. Since we already had to get up to eat breakfast at 7:45, Kate, Ellory, Shannon, Laura and I decided to get up a bit earlier at 5:45 so we could see the sunrise over the lake. We met in the lobby and headed towards the east side of the island. Noticing a glow on the eastern horizon as we walked, we decided to sprint the rest of the waterfront lest we miss the sunrise. When we arrived we realized we hadn’t missed it and we sat for twenty minutes watching the sky turn from dark purple, to a hazy blue glow, to white that tinted to orange before a brilliant yellow orb peaked out above the tree line and oozed its orange-golden blood on the canvass of the sky. When sun became too bright to stare into, we slowly reluctantly realized it was time to leave or the very least avert our eyes. We walked back to the hotel, grabbed a frizbee and killed the rest of the time until breakfast in the central park.
Once we hit the road, we were nervous because we knew that we had to take a less than dependable ferry across a river and if that ferry wasn’t running we would have to take a five hour detour. When we got to the river we surprised to find that it was little more than a creek. At perhaps fifty meters in width we were curious why they didn’t build a bridge across such a measly river. We would never let a river, especially so wimpy, go untamed in the states and we foreignness of this country felt particularly strong crossing the river.
We arrived in Coban, the coffee town the Germans built. We proceeded to find a taqueria where we could score some cheap Mexican food. There wasn’t much to the town as far as tourists would be concerned. We tried to take a tour of a coffee farm, but it was too late in the afternoon. Coban is not renowned for its nightlife and we stayed in the hotel, which had the finest accommodations in town (there wasn’t much competition), and played ping pong and took advantage of free internet access. The hotel felt like our sanctuary in a crime-ridden slum.
The next morning, we boarded a minibus and headed to Semuc Champey, a remote set of waterfalls that is said to be one of the most beautiful sites in Guatemala. During the three hour bus ride, we decided to play deaf karoke, a game in which performers cranks up their Ipods to full blast and screams their lungs out to a song of their choice. Performers are completely deaf to other people’s reaction and also quite unaware whether they are hitting any of the notes. The spectators don’t get to enjoy the accompanying instruments of the song, but they have quite enough entertainment watching someone butcher their favorite song. We heard a hilarious rendition of “Piano Man,” witnessed a Pocahantas duet and had a “Sweet Caroline” sing-a-long. We also managed to overlook the fact that the bus driver was very frustrated with having such a raucous group of passengers. At one point he turned the radio up really loud and sang a long, but we didn’t get the hint.
We arrived in Semuc and the bus driver was likely very happy to be rid of us. We got suited up and jumped into the river from a tree swing. I managed to belly flop on my attempt, but it was still exhilarating. We continued toward the waterfalls but when we reached the bridge across the river, we decided to jump in again. At about 10 meters above the water, the bridge took a bit of courage to leap from. When my turn came up I psyched myself enough to jump but found that I still had to wait for what seemed like five seconds but was probably only one to hit the water.
As, we continued towards the waterfalls on a trail that snaked along the river, the rapids grew stronger and we knew we didn’t have far to go. The roar of the rushing water grew louder and louder until finally we could see the main waterfall. What makes Semuc unique is that above the main waterfall, the river trickles down in a series of small waterfalls. It looked like the river went down a staircase before finally bursting over a cliff. It was beautiful. But we hadn’t seen it all. We continued upstream until we came to a place when the river plummeted into a cave and surged on underground. I really have no idea exactly how the river twists and contorts to traverse the limestone formations impeding its progress in beautiful fashion at Semuc, but I know it emerges from them and continues on as a single body toward the sea. I’m glad the river chose the path it did and not a smoother but less spectacular one.
Our hotel that night was a mile from the waterfalls but leagues away from anything else. Suffice to say, we ate and drank at the hotel there being to restaurants or bars anyway near. We also made a birthday cake of candy bars for Markie who officially turned twenty-one when the clock struck midnight. There is something about being deep in the wilderness that encouraged us to get rather smashed and pretend we were in the rowdiest discoteca around when we were on a deck dancing to jock jams medleys. Unfortunately, they turned off their generator at 10 p.m. and we resigned ourselves to a bon fire and the dock and the stars brightly shining above since the electricity was no more.
Friday, we headed into the caves near the waterfalls armed with headlamps and candles. An underground river ran through the caves and for some sections we had to wade and others we had to swim. My friend Laura “Wilderness” Wildenborg gives tours of caves for her summer job and she was her element and shared her extensive knowledge with novice spelunkers like myself. We entered several different rooms and passed through the corridors and ladders between them. At one point, we climbed up a rope ladder with a waterfall splashing down on top of us. Our farthest exploration was a big room with several table-shaped stalagmite formations. They had us extinguish our lights and observe a moment of silence in the darkness in a Mayan custom. On the way back, we passed down a hole with a waterfall glowing through it like a vertical waterslide (a.k.a. a goonie).
We headed back to Coban in the afternoon and had dinner together in the hotel to celebrate Markie’s birthday. Laura and Ellory presented her with a tiny plastic champagne bottle and a short story that went with it explaining that bottle was a traveling gift and she should pass it on to the next in our group to have a birthday.
Saturday we ate breakfast in the hotel and started our ten-hour journey back to Xela. The landscape changed before us as we passed through several of Guatemala’s 23 different biospheres. Mountains, forests, plains and volcanoes melted before our eyes until we were back in the highland city which we call home.
