Well, I'm back from Guatemala, officially. Naturally the first thing that happens after vigilantly keeping my hands clean and using purified water for all things oral for two weeks is that I return to the States and catch a cold. Even so, it's got me at my computer working on coloring, so I suppose I should be more thankful!

So, without further ado, a breakdown of my trip! I didn't spend all of the last two weeks in Guatemala- the first few days of my trip I spent with my folks in Florida.

October 9th

I flew from Gainesville, Florida to Miami, where I connected with a flight to Guatemala City. I was lucky for two reasons here- first, Gainesville flights to Miami only started at the beginning of the month, and there are only two flights a day. American Airlines also only has two flights a day to Guatemala City. Thus, I was lucky I didn't have to drive to Miami and I was also lucky not to have a 12-hour layover.

In Guatemala (which, in Guatemala, usually refers to the Capitol City and not the nation), I hopped into a tour van and rode to Casa Capuchinas, in Antigua. Along the way I nostalgically breathed in the telltale odor of a developing nation, exhaust fumes, and marveled at all of the activity. Having never been to Latin America before, I took the opportunity to try and practice my Spanish with the driver, a polite and affable guy named Perfecto, while translating all of the multitudinous billboards and signs we passed by. Thankfully I wouldn't have to rely on my rusty Spanish too much on the trip.

I arrived at the hotel late in the afternoon and met up with my friend Debbie, who was one of the organizers of this big trip. We had dinner at Dona Luisa's, a restaurant and bakery near Antigua's plaza. Afterwards we checked out some of the stores and scoped out the sights. The sun set early and, being a bit tired after the day's travels, we retired to the hotel and caught up on old times and new.

October 10th

I went to bed early and woke up early to the raucous, lively songs of some grackles. After a lovely "Chapin" breakfast, with refried black beans, platanos, scrambled eggs, and some fruit I met up with some of Debbie's friends from San Francisco, Peggy and Lynn, and we visited the weekend market. I learned that Antigua, apart from its architectural allure and Spanish Colonial feel, is actually really geared towards a weekend tourist crowd. It's a city of 2,000 restaurants, many of them gourmet, and any visitor will be spoiled for choice. In consideration of the tourism, most restaurants are cautious about hygiene, serving up cans of coke with straws, bottles of purified water, and ice from condensers rather than tap water. The city was very active over the weekend and mainly filled with well-to-do Guatemalans from the capitol, notably driving through town in Audis, BMWs, Mercedes', and other shiny imports that stood out from the amalgam of old cars more common in the country. There's also a wonderful weaving culture in the country, and in spite of the widespread availability of cheap Western clothing many indigenous people, most of them women, wear intricate hand-woven garb on a daily basis. Part of this is a growing cultural movement among Guatemalans of the various ethnic tribes to preserve their heritage, so even though a hand-woven shawl, shirt, or skirt costs 5-10 times more than its machine woven counterpart there is still local demand for them.

Of course, they're also very glad to sell these things to tourists, and while I think I was taken a couple of times due to my novice bargaining skills (expect to bargain regularly if you travel to Guate) I'm still pleased to have come away with some nice gifts for friends, family, and co-workers.

That night, I had a reunion dinner with some old friends and more than a few strangers. I was surprised to see a turnout of old friends I had known in Bangladesh who had made the journey from more distant callings to meet in a country we had never visited, but it was fantastic to catch up on old times and hear about old acquaintances. We also spent some time going over the plans for the trip, involving tour programs, visits to service projects, and optional day trips. All of this, of course, meant forking over our individual shares of the cash. There were some people in our group of 20 who were involved in some service projects or simply lived in country, and that handful of local experts proved vital in communicating and arranging much of the trip.

We were also informed of the nation's troubles as of late. Hurricane Agatha had swept through Guatemala not too long before we arrived, and on top of that the country had endured an unusually long rainy season. To put this in perspective, Guatemala is a country of lush highlands studded with volcanoes. Eons of volcanic ash means that it is very hard to locate bedrock in much of the country, which is coated in 15 feet or more of relatively soft, yet quite fertile dirt. In this dirt are boulders, some of them enormous, which can be mistaken for valuable bedrock. When it rains significantly, even fully forested areas have difficulty clinging to the nation's many slopes, and everywhere we went we saw evidence of recent landslides. Added to this is the problem of drainage, and whenever water comes coursing down the valleys and riverbeds they take along large quantities of dirt and deadly boulders. This sediment rich water manifests itself as a soupy kind of mud. At high speeds, it can easily carry along boulders as big as cars. At low speeds, it rises into peoples' homes and coats everything around with thick, muddy sludge.

As a result, there were serious concerns about traveling on certain roads through the highlands. With downed bridges, roads covered in landslides, and communities cut off by certain roadways literally eroding away, a lot of folks decided to decline a day trip to one of Guatemala's most gorgeous, but somewhat isolated locales: Lake Atitlan. In spite of this, and fears of another hurricane heading into central America, I locked myself into the trip to Atitlan when a driver from the tour agency confirmed that the roads were passable.

October 11th

On yet another perfectly clear and delightfully cool morning, I began to take the flattering moniker of Guatemala, "The Land of Eternal Springtime", as fact. In Antigua and all of the surrounding highland communities the temperature seldom fell below 60 and seldom rose over 80 Fahrenheit. With another hearty breakfast we set about our first tour program, still staying in Antigua for the moment. We went across town to Ciudad Vieja where we saw the ruins of the first Antigua, which was destroyed by the deceptively beautiful volcano of Agua in the 1500s. While accounts vary, the story I got was that Agua's crater is a lake, but after 40 unrelenting days of rain the enormous weight of the water in the volcano set it off, virtually obliterating the nascent town of Antigua in a colossal flood combined with an earthquake. What seems to support this story is the fact that scattered throughout town are the ruins of old Baroque churches and monasteries, arguably the strongest and most formidable structures available at the time. These ruins are exposed and, over time, have either been half-heartedly restored or simply built around.

We lunched at Dona Luisa's, then hopped on the bus again to drive to the northern slopes of the town where we toured the Bishop's palace. The first, and as far as I know only Guatemalan saint lived and worked there, as well as his predecessors, and even though the bishopric moved to the capitol city the nuns continue to maintain the palace as a residence and a museum. If you want to see some of the quirks, extravagance, and public works of the Roman Catholicism then this place is a must-see. I have to emphasize must-see, though... while they allow you to carry cameras into the museum, they don't allow you to photograph half of it, and of course the half they don't want you to snap up consists of the most popular or beautiful items. While I'm sure some of this is justified by protecting the relics, icons, and painted statuary from light radiation I'm pretty sure the greater part of this prohibition is to encourage the purchase of their convenient and accessible postcards and picture books.

We then set off for the nearby town of San Antonio Aguas Calientes, which had a good balance of the 'real' feel of Guatemalan townships and the colonial elegance of historic areas. While there was a nice little museum showcasing the wide variety of dress the indigenous peoples wear, the main showcase was an artisan's market which, at this point, I wasn't really interested in. I overpaid for a nice belt, but I admit I was getting tired of seeing all of these bright and busily patterned shawls and table runners. There seems to be a profound belief among weavers and craftsmen in Guatemala that at any given time in the world there is a woman stricken by a deep desire for table runners. By the hundreds. This is also apparently paired with the belief that every visitor to Guatemala knows this woman and would gladly pick up 10 or 20 of these things on her behalf.

Thus, every tourist with the boldness to walk around carrying a shopping bag will be rapidly and repeatedly set upon to help the Guatemalan people with their serious surplus of hand-woven goods. As much as I appreciated the beauty and craftsmanship of every piece, I found it ultimately tragic how the same variety of items reappeared over and over and over again. Here was an enormous stockpile of wonderful artisanship that went ludicrously beyond the actual demand for such goods. The prices of these goods also differed dramatically- in artisan guilds and markets, generally the prices for woven goods was stable, but in the open markets vendors would advertise a table runner for roughly $25 on Saturday at noon, but by the time the weekenders started hopping back into their cars you'd find no shortage of desperate vendors scurrying around selling the same table runners for $1 apiece!

That evening, we ate at a small restaurant in town where we had a local variant on chicken soup. The soda cans had a patina of grit on the top, and they didn't hand out straws. You didn't know if the water in the soup was purified or not, and no one could be entirely sure that the chicken was safe either. Needless to say, it was delightful. I highly recommend hazarding the small local restaurants with the plastic tables and chairs and the thumping Reggaeton stereo sets. There are pleasant culinary surprises to be found all over the country, if you've got the chutzpah to step outside your comfort zone. I should note that not one of us got sick from that night's meal.


Continued in Part II... tomorrow.