This is your stomach speaking, we will be experiencing some slight turbulence...

For the past few weeks the state of my stomach has ranged from “experiencing some slight turbulence” to “a raging inferno where the forces of good and evil seek mutual annihilation.”  I hope I’m now emerging from that storm and returning to the land of regularity.  But, in two weeks I’ve learned not to let my hopes get too high.

True today my digestive system is working like… well like a system should, but it’s taken so long to get to this point and I’m not really sure what cured me.  I’ve tried a variety of treatments from “ignore it ‘til it goes away” to high-powered antibiotics to Mayan natural medicine remedies to fasting and still I couldn’t string three days of normalcy together.

Part of the way I dealt with my mutinous stomach was simply to avoid letting it get in my way. I managed not to miss any class because of my troubles and I even did a full moon climb to the top of Volcán Santa Maria Friday.  Doing a moonlight hike is hard enough because generally at 4 a.m. one would be sleeping rather than climbing a 12,380-foot volcano, but add to that the fact that I had only eaten one meal all day and hadn’t been able to hold it down and that makes for a challenging hike.

The thought in the back of head that was further egging me one was that the last time I wanted to do the full moon hike up Santa Maria I had also been plighted with diarrhea and that time I let my stomach get the best of me.  I didn’t want to let that happen again.  So after a day characterized by sleep punctuated only by trips to the baño, I joined the group headed to the volcano that towers over Xela.

We bused to the base of the mountain and at 1 a.m. began our ascent.  Juan and Rudy our guides told us that we would take the climb slowly and take plenty of breaks but in my state I felt like I was pushing myself to the breaking point of my endurance until the sweet respites would could when I could throw my weary malnourished sweat-drenched body down on the side of the mountain and let my heaving lungs try to suck in enough thin mountain air to appease my thumping heart.

Anyhow, dramatics aside, I made it to the top with the rest of the group.  It was 5 a.m. so we had to wait an hour in the cold, cold wind before the sun finally got its lazy ass up.  Five of us huddled together under blankets to fight the cold.  I fell asleep and when I awoke it was light out.  I feared I had missed the sunrise but, as it turned out, it was so cloudy that morning that there had been no sunrise to miss.

Clouds.  All of our horizons were blanketed with that white fluffy stuff.  We looked to the north were Santiaguito, the fiery little counterpart to the sleeping bigger brother, should have been spitting up bright lava and saw only cumulous.  We looked to the east where we should have been able to see morning sun dancing off Lago Atitlán but to no avail.  To the south we might have seen all of Xela stretching out below us.  When we looked to the west we received our slight consolation: Volcán Tajamulco peaking out above the clouds.

We cheered ourselves up by drinking hot chocolate, playing hacky sack and admiring the clouds, which, although they were blocking anything else we might have seen, were beautiful in their own right.

On the way down we encountered a flood of indigenous people headed up the mountain.  Some were in the midst of chanting spirituals other were sprinting up in athletic garb.  Counterintuitive as it might seem, climbing down the volcano was in some ways harder than climbing up because our legs were starting to suffer from the wear and tear even if our lungs were having an easier time.

It was noon before we finally returned to Xela and I was so hungry and I didn’t even worry about my stomach issues but instead devoured my lunch of gravy, beef and tamales ravenously.  Maybe the time when the will to satiate petty hunger is greater than the will to avoid gastronomical disaster is the very time when diarrhea finally has been defeated, because I feel that my body was so starved for nourishment Saturday that my stomach just had to cooperate.  And cooperate it has.  I hope it continues.