Journey to the Ixil

I left Coban on Boxing Day from the bus terminal shown here in one of the minibuses to Uspantan. As usual, there were about 30 people jam packed into the bus, and very little room to put my legs.

Part of the way the road was very bad, and there were regular warnings of landslides, and parts of the road had fallen away, or had huge boulders we needed to skirt around. There were warnings not to take this route after dark.

The scenery — what I could see of it anyway — was amazing, with green mountains and deep valleys. After Uspantan, and on another minibus, the road was greatly improved and has recently been built with a hard top, but even still there were parts of the road covered with debris from landslides.

I was exhausted from the bus ordeal when I arrived in Nebaj, and checked into a good hotel that had excellent hot water and clean sheets. I found the organization that runs the Spanish language courses I intend to take next week and signed up. The package I took includes room and two meals a day in the home of a local family.

Nebaj is a town in the Ixil Triangle, a heavily indigenous area that was especially targeted by the military governments in the civil war of the 1980s. Ixil is one of the many local Mayan languages. Many people here speak it as their first language, though the family I’m staying with are Ladinos, a term that tends to describe people of mixed race who have been totally assimilated into Hispanic culture and speak Spanish as their first language.

Feliz Navidad

I spent a quiet Christmas just relaxing and reading, as many places were shut down and services closed, so it wasn’t really possible to go anywhere except on foot.

I had hoped to make a few phone calls home, and the Internet cafe at my hotel actually has Skype installed, but their microphones don’t work properly so it would have been a one-way conversation with me doing all the listening.

I took the pictures here last night on Christmas Eve in Coban’s central square. After that, thousands of firecrackers burst all into the night. I was awakened by a series of bangs around 1 a.m. I tried to get into the Christmas spirit by watching It’s a Wonderful Life dubbed into Spanish, but somehow Jimmy Stewart speaking with a different voice and in Spanish just wasn’t the same.

If I can get tours tomorrow to a couple places in this area that I’d like to visit, I’ll stay another day. Otherwise, I’m off tomorrow by chicken bus to Nebaj, a Mayan town where I hope to spend a bit of time and hopefully study some Spanish and do some hiking.

Christmas shopping Guatemala style

The central market is just a block from my hotel in Coban, and there’s a lot of action there on Christmas Eve.

There are sellers of toys for children, of flowers, clothes, and tables with mountains of firecrackers. The firecrackers here are huge and no doubt would be banned in Canada — there’s enough of them to start a small regional war, and I hear them banging quite often.

I took a number of pictures — some surreptiously of the general action, and some posed, like the one of the lady selling flowers, who took off her jacket for the picture. At one bookstore where I tried to find a map, the young sales women asked me to take a picture of them, so I did, as did several other people in the street. I then went to a place that does instant digital pictures and got some 4 X 6 prints to give to the people who posed. They were thrilled, and one little girl (about 10) gave me a hug, and “Gracias. Feliz Navidad.”

Speaking of which, the song Feliz Navidad plays everywhere, as do a number of other Christmas songs. It’s been strange hearing them sung or played in different styles in different places — the reggae Christmas carols in Belize, and now various Latin styles here.

The main square has a Christmas tree that I’ve pictured below, sponsored by Gallo (rooster) Beer.

My hotel is like a museum

I decided that rather than face another day on the dreaded chicken buses, I would spend a couple more nights, including Christmas, in Coban. My hotel here is very interesting. It´s one of the oldest buildings in Coban and was a former nunnery. Like many old Guatemalan buildings, it has a simple wall on the front that comes right to the street, but inside everything is built around a courtyard with trees and flowers.

Around the courtyard and outside the rooms are all kinds of historic artifacts. My hotel is like a museum.

The room is pretty basic, but it does have hottish water, which is nice, as it gets quite cool here in the mountains. Like a spring or fall day at home.

So I´ll spend a quiet Christmas on my own, but there´s lots of celebration around me in the streets, so I´ll be able to participate in that.

Transportation madness – Guatemala style

Guatemala is one of the hardest countries in the Americas to travel any great distance. It’s very cheap, but the level of comfort is abysmal. For most trips, if the choice exists, it’s between a rundown chicken bus that used to be a Bluebird school bus absolutely crammed with people, or a minibus that is absolutely crammed too. Both stop everywhere to pick up and discharge passengers. The main difference is that the chicken bus is bigger and the minibus goes slightly faster. Guatemalans are very small people, and travel spaces are designed accordingly.

I spent yesterday and today experiencing Guatemala’s transportation system close-up, and will do the same tomorrow. Yesterday I got up at around 5:30 a.m. hoping to catch the sunrise at Tikal. Unfortunately, it had been raining and was still cloudy so there was no sunrise. I did visit the ruin site when it opened at 6 a.m., and it was a great time to see and hear birds and other animals, and to see the temples before the crowds arrived. I was quite exhausted from walking a great distance and climbing up and down temples on an empty stomach with no coffee when I decided to finish up.

My timing was good — as I was leaving it started to rain, and it rained the rest of the day. This was the first significant rain of my trip — there had only been a few small bursts of rain in Belize to cool things off between periods of hot sun.

I got a minibus with a group of young tourists who were going to Flores, the main tourist town near Tikal, but I got out at Santa Elena and caught another minibus going to Sayaxche, a small town to the south. My goal was to shorten today’s trip by getting as far as I could yesterday.

Sayaxche is an interesting little town on the banks of a river where there is no bridge for the main highway. At the river, there are narrow wooden passenger boats and a car ferry across. I got a hotel with a large shared balcony overlooking the river and the boats crossing back and forth. It was interesting watching the action as I relaxed at the hotel and the sun went down, but the noise from boats wakened me during the night. Sometimes the boats were jammed with passengers standing and with no evidence of life preservers. It appears Guatemala has no safety standards for boats.

On the hotel balcony was a cage with my favorite kind of bird, a scarlet macaw. He looked so confined I was tempted to release him, but the hotel people might not have been too happy if I’d done that.

Today I was also up at 5:15 a.m. to catch a chicken bus headed for Coban. I expected the ride to be about four hours as it was under 100 km, but partway through I learned it would actually take eight hours. I was holding my bags as I didn’t want to let them out of my sight in all the madness of people getting on and off, and the bus got fuller and fuller and fuller. About 4 1/2 hours into the trip my cramped legs were killing me and I couldn’t take it anymore so I got off in a town in the middle of nowhere to recover for a while.

Continuing on, I rode a minibus the rest of the way. It was also extremely crowded and uncomfortable, but at least I was able to secure my bag on the roof. They stopped everywhere to let people on and off, constantly trying to squeeze in more people so that there were close to 30 people at one time and it was hard to breathe. Despite the constant stopping and starting, they actually drove quickly on the narrow mountain roads. Suddenly, a cow ran out in front of the bus, and the driver momentarily lost control as he tried to avoid hitting the cow. The cow slammed into the side right next to where I was sitting. It was a hard bang. The driver regained control and drove on without stopping. I don’t know if the cow was fatally hit or not, but sometime later the driver inspected the vehicle and noticed only minor dents.

At last I arrived exhausted in Coban, where I am staying in a fascinating hotel that used to be a centuries old nunnery. It is built around a courtyard with trees and flowers, and there are all kinds of historic artifacts and masks from the area.

I’m not sure if I’ll stay here another day, or continue on to my destination of Nebaj. It depends, I guess, on whether I feel ready tomorrow to endure another day of Guatemalan transportation.

Images of Tikal

Across the border

Today was a day of travelling, finished off with watching the sunset over the jungle from atop a Mayan temple, the second highest pre–Columbian structure in the Americas, at the ancient city of Tikal.

I left San Ignacio fairly early in order to make easy connections — a rickety bus to a town near the border, a beat up shared taxi to the border, and by foot over the border. Then two hours squished into a sweltering minibus with 29 other people including babies being breast fed and the driver. I got dropped off at a crossroads where I waited less than five minutes to flag down a tourist shuttle bus coming from Flores to Tikal.

It all went very smoothly despite the uncertainty of timetables, and it was a lot cheaper than the taxis from the border whose drivers wanted to charge me $60, telling me there was no other way. The moral of the story is that although many taxi drivers are honest, a lot cannot be believed if they stand to make a buck. Like the one in San Ignacio who tried to claim the buses only ran hourly on Sundays, hoping I would give up and take a taxi, when in fact buses ran on the half hour as normal.

I wanted to stay overnight in Tikal because sunset and sunrise are the most interesting times — both for the skies and for the animals that come out at dawn and dusk. The cheapest hotel said they had an unpaid reservation that they could give me if I waited 15 minutes till noon. But after paying for the room, they said it wouldn’t be ready until check-in time at 2 p.m. I didn’t plan to go to the ruins until 4 p.m. anyway, so I waited around — only to find out that the person who previously had the room they were going to give me hadn’t checked out. In the end they found me a room in a more expensive hotel and refunded my money, but it was a hassle.

There are two prices of admission to Tikal — a cheap price ($3) for Guatemalans, and an expensive price ($24) for Gringos. But I knew that if you buy a ticket after 4 p.m., they stamp your ticket for the next day, and you can still get in for the remainder of the day until closing time at 6 p.m. So I went for a couple hours in the late afternoon, knowing I can return tomorrow.
Tikal is quite large. It was a major city in its day. There are a number of tall temples, and many of them have not yet been unearthed and are still jungley mounds. What makes the place so special is the setting surrounded by jungle. Even in the day you see exotic birds like toucans, Peten turkeys, and numerous others I can’t identify. There are howler monkeys, and coatamundis. As dusk approaches, the sounds reach a pitch of crickets, birds, and other noises.

I visited a couple of the temples in the main plaza. They’ve now added wooden steps to climb one because the original stone steps were too steep and have resulted in a few fatal accidents of tourists. The other one you can’t climb at all.

After that, I hurried over to the tallest one, temple IV, which is known for its sunrises and sunsets. I was not disappointed. There were other tourists and photography enthusiasts there already, as the sun lowered in the sky. It cast orange light patterns across a couple of temples in the distance, and over top of the jungle foliage. Very dramatic.

It’s 35 minutes back to the main gate, and I knew I had to move quickly so as not to get caught in the dark. As it was, there was only a trace of light — just enough to see roots, stumps and steps on the trail as I approached the gate. The jungle sounds and animals though were amazing.
Tomorrow I’ll be up early to see more.

Journey to the Mayan underworld

Day of the Iguanas

San Ignacio is a popular tourist destination, but it’s also a real town. It’s popular not for the town itself, but because it is the starting point for a number of interesting and exciting excursions to major Mayan sites, to caves, or for tubing down rivers. Unlike the flat northern Belize, San Ignacio is hilly and is at the edge of broadleafed jungle. It’s only a very short distance from here to the Guatemalan border.

The bus took nearly three hours, and stopped every few feet to take on or let off passengers. The total distance was only around 100 km. In the bus station at Belmopan, I saw a Mennonite family, the man wearing a broad straw hat and suspenders and a beard, and his wife and girls are following in long black dresses with their heads covered in black. They were very white looking, and such a contrast to most Belizeans. There are significant Mennonite communities around here.

After checking into a hotel where I’ll stay a couple nights, I took a walk a couple kilometres out of town to the site of the old Mayan city of Cahal Pech. It was a very steep climb up a tall hill in the blazing sun, but the site itself was pleasant amidst tall tropical jungle trees. The smell of decaying leaves, sweet and almost perfumy, reminded me of Tikal, another Mayan city in Guatemala, which I hope to get to shortly.

Cahal Pech had several temples overlooking plazas, many with gnarly roots and trees growing from them. It wasn’t as spectacular as Tikal or Palenque, but was in a nice setting and made for a pleasant excursion.

On the way back, I stopped at a luxury hotel that is the site of an iguana rehabilitation project. The iguanas are in danger to because they have been hunted and their eggs are collected as a delicacy. Here they are breeding them until they are decent size to be put back in the wild, and they have a much better chance of survival if they are released when they are big enough to avoid being eaten by birds etc. A guide, Eddie, took me to see the iguanas and on the way he showed me numerous medicinal plants and trees, telling me about each. So many were known to the Mayans as having medicinal properties, but Eddie said many of the young people are not learning these traditions and are using modern pharmaceuticals instead. There are a few bush doctors around, but they are a dying breed. One tree he showed me has a similar, but worse, effect than poison ivy if you touch it and get its sap on you. To me it looked like any other tree.

I took a few pictures of the iguanas. Coincidentally, it was mating season, and the big alpha male, Gomez, was busily engaged in mating with a rather passive female. Eddie introduced me to George, another male, who is only able to breed when Gomez is similarly occupied. Otherwise Gomez doesn’t allow George to breed. George is not happy with this situation, and he is the most aggressive iguana if approached. He puffs out his neck, and may swing his tail at someone who gets too near. Eddie says this can hurt if you are struck by a flying tail. There was a separate cage filled with younger iguanas that had hatched in June and July.

Back in town I booked a tour for tomorrow. It involves exploring a cave complex known as ATM, or Actun Tunichil Muknal.

Swimming with stingrays

Today was one of those experiences to last a lifetime. I decided to go snorkeling for my first time ever. I don’t know if I could have chosen a better spot – the barrier reef in Belize is second only to the Great Barrier Reef off Australia. I took a tour with a guide, along with six other people, all European tourists, and all of whom have snorkeled before.

We took a small boat about 10 minutes out onto the water to where there’s a coral reef, and we snorkeled in three different spots: South Passage, Shark and Ray Alley, and Coral Gardens. I managed to get some prescription goggles that corrected my eyesight so I could see beautifully underwater. We also had flippers. The water was incredibly clear, and you could see very well under the sunny sky.

We anchored in a sandy area just a short distance from the coral reef, and our guide, José, led us over to the reef. The water was filled with amazing schools of colourful tropical fish that darted in and out of the coral. I never could’ve imagined there would be so many different fish species in one small area. There were plants in amazing shapes and colours rising from the reef. At one point, a green eel slithered by.

At our second spot on Shark and Ray Alley, there was a boat already stopped and tourists were swimming among the stingrays. We also anchored and swam over towards the other boat. I was amazed to see dozens of stingrays sliding just above the bottom, sometimes right below me. It was an amazing experience. The thought of Steve Irwin occurred to me, but apparently these rays are fairly accustomed to people, and the trick is to respect them and not annoy them. They are used to being fed, and they simply swam around a few feet underneath. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, we didn’t see any sharks this time, but swimming among the stingrays was an incredible experience. As we were leaving and back in the boat, we saw a huge spotted eagle ray.

At our last stop, the Coral Gardens, we anchored in shallow water and the guide just let us explore the reefs on our own. In this area the reefs came very near to the surface, but you can swim through the channels between them that were deeper and had sandy bottoms. The fish here were just incredible. Sometimes as I approached the reef, a whole school of medium-sized and multicoloured fish would dart out in front of me. There were little creatures that moved along the bottom, and others that lurked in caves. The reef was teeming with life.

This is my last day at Caye Caulker. Tomorrow I’ll catch the water taxi back to Belize city, and then the bus to San Ignacio in the jungle close to the Guatemalan border.