The Traveling Tiger--Guatemala

In transit

2005-05-13T19:09:00.000-07:00

Just a quick note to let y'all know I'm not dead, I'm in transit. Fishing, snorkeling, etc. was a blast--once I get home I'll give ya the scoop!

Tien

P.S. I caught my barracuda!

Inca ruins, the Blue Hole

2005-05-11T16:50:00.000-07:00

Today, Patrick (my guide) and I went off to see Xunantunich, the second-largest Inca ruin in Belize. It's not one of the big Inca sites--Tikal, 2.5 hours away in Guatemala, is supposedly much more impressive--but it was damn impressive nonetheless. One massive stone temple, at least 4 stories high, a large courtyard, and several partially excavated smaller structures. The scale was amazing--I hadn't envisioned such a giant mass of stone. Now I really, really want to see the "big" Inca ruins. It's too bad I won't get a chance on this trip. (Life is too damn short, dammit.)

I'm amazed by the engineering, especially since the bottom layers appear to be haphazardly arranged bits of rock. I wouldn't have expected it to hold up under the enormous weight of the upper layers. It must have been damn, damn impressive when it was first built...the estimates are that it was built in 800 AD and abandoned by 1100 AD. I have a hard time imagining anything that old. Angkor Wat was incredible and beautiful (and very well-preserved), but it only dates back about 600 years. 600 years I can imagine, but a thousand?

Anyway, verbal descriptions can't do justice to the place, so I'm going to post photos once I get back. But to really "get" it, you have to go there yourself...the sheer scale of the place is hard to feel from a photo. I got vertigo several times on the way up (especially since it was a narrow staircase with no handrails).

And this is a minor ruin.

Now I must see Chichen Itsa...and the other great Mayan sites...aack! Life is so short. But I still must see them before I die. And the Great Pyramids, and...

Here's a link to a webpage about Xunantunich.

We had an interesting moment on the way over to Xunantunich. I got to go on a hand-cranked ferry. The road crosses a small river, and a small wooden ferry takes the car and passengers across. The ferry is not paddled or motor-driven, however; there are cables running across the river, and a small winch is used to pull the ferry along the cables. I tried cranking it (traveling tigresses must stick their paws into everything) and it was surprisingly easy. I conned the ferryman into letting me crank it all the way across. (He probably thought I was nuts, but it was fun.)

As I was getting ready to board the ferry, Patrick suddenly said, "Hey! You want to take a photo of that iguana over there?" I looked over, and damn! there was a GIANT iguana standing not ten feet from me. Unfortunately, as I got the camera out, he lumbered off the grass and climbed lazily up a tree, whereupon I noticed another enormous iguana in the same tree--on the same branch. Two iguanas on one branch created a little iguanajam, and I snapped a photo.

(I am becoming darkly suspicious of all trees. Even the most innocuous-looking one could be secretly harboring iguanas...! I am scanning them all as I pass.)

At any rate, we made it up and over the ferry to the ruins. I asked Patrick about a lot of trees on the way--he pointed out several that had edible fruits, and I tried one--tart, a little astringent, but not bad at all, though there was only about 1/16" of fruit over a giant seed. There was also an intriguing tree called "Monkey's Ear", which had giant brown seed pods in the shape of a flat curl (thus the name "Monkey's Ear"), and beautiful black-and-red-striped seeds inside that I've seen in local jewelry. Patrick said there was a close relative of this tree with hypothermic properties. If you rub the seeds, they get really hot--hot enough to burn. The local kids used to have fun suckering each other into touching the seeds (dropping them down people's shirts, etc.).

On our way back from the ruins, we stopped by a butterfly-rearing house, where the guy apologized and said he only had four or five species right now, as it was the worst possible season for butterflies. (We're now near the end of an exceptionally long dry season, and the hot dry weather is forcing many species into hibernation.) He had some beautiful blue morphos, though, and giant owl butterflies. I asked him how they got their name, and he picked one up, gently opened its wings, and showed me an owl's face! Two big brown "eyes" on the underside made the owl's eyes, and the fat bottom half of the body made a perfect owl's beak. I took a photo, which I will post later.

He also showed me their butterfly-rearing center--how they collect the eggs, hatch out the caterpillars, and rear them to the chrysalis stage, at which point they put them in the butterfly house. This is not a commercial butterfly farm--they're breeding them strictly as an educational display. (I was a bit disappointed, as I had been hoping to buy a few butterflies as paperweights, etc.) I was fascinated by the whole thing--I hadn't realized there were so many species of butterfly in Belize. The morpho larvae were particularly beautiful--bold shades of yellow and maroon. The owl-butterfly caterpillars looked like giant green slugs--but kinda cute in their own way.

The last stop on the trip was the Blue Hole. It's a tiny lagoon set in lush jungle--a clear, shallow sandy slope (with six-inch fish darting about) leads gradually down into a deep blue swimming-hole lined with limestone formations. It's wonderful for swimming--especially after a hot day among the ruins. I spent at least twenty minutes frolicking in the water, chasing the tiny sandy fish, and sitting on a crinkly piece of limestone, gazing down into the blue water.

(It was SO nice to be able to bathe in fresh water. The drought here has been so bad that I've been taking very spare showers--just enough to wet down and rinse off. Being able to soak in fresh water and get clean--really clean--was wonderful.)

Tomorrow Patrick and I are going fishing and snorkeling--he promised Tricia (my landlady) fish for dinner, and I want to catch and eat a barracuda. Tonight, Tricia went out looking for breadfruit for me (I was curious about it and wanted to try some)--once I get back, I'll find out whether she succeeded.

Conch are also very common in the waters around here, and we're going to try getting some...Patrick assures me that conch soup is very tasty, and he wants to take a photo of me diving for one. LOL! I'll be happy if I can just catch a barracuda.

Oh, and there are reputedly 30-40 pound grouper in them there waters, too.

I'm still debating what to do about Friday. I don't have to be at the Belize City airport until around 3pm, but the only bus out of Hopkins leaves at 7am. I'm highly tempted to wait a little later, then bribe Tricia into hitchhiking to Dangriga with me. I've never tried hitchhiking before, and think it would be cool to try. (Almost everyone hitchhikes around here, because there are so few buses.) But I'd rather not try it on my own (especially since I don't understand the protocols yet), so I think I'll try conning her into coming with me. A "hitchhiker's guide", if you will--but, alas, only to Dangriga, not the galaxy. ;-)

From Dangriga I plan to fly to Belize City, then to Guatemala, then home. I've already achieved my primary goal, which is to get a really stunning tan, the kind to make all my once-and-future coworkers jealous. And have a great time, of course.

Tien

Iguanas, and the river

2005-05-10T18:11:00.000-07:00

I have turned into a crazed iguana stalker.

Iguanas, you see, live in trees. I had never realized this before, having only seen them in terrariums, and, hilariously, once in a kiddie wading pool at the International Reptile Breeders' Association show in San Diego...there were dozens of baby iguanas skittering around the bottom of the wading pool, and enthusiastic six-year-olds would lean precariously over the edge of the pool, waiting for an unsuspecting baby iguana to come within reach, then teeter over the edge, grab, and come up with a baby iguana. I had never before seen "bobbing for iguanas", but I think it would make great Halloween entertainment.

...uh, where was I?

Right. I was on the river, in a boat, and Patrick, my guide, suddenly pointed thirty feet up into a tree and said, "Look! An iguana!" I looked up, couldn't see a damn thing, followed his pointing finger, still couldn't see anything, and FINALLY, just as we were going by, saw it: a giant male iguana, at least four or five feet long, draped insouciantly over a branch, complacently happy in his iguana-hood.

I was floored. Iguanas can climb trees! They live thirty feet off the ground! They don't spend all their time in terrariums! And man, that was one honkin' big iguana.

After that, I started looking for iguanas as we floated downriver. I couldn't see any, couldn't see any, couldn't see any (even with Patrick pointing them out), and then...hey! Is that an IGUANA??

Sure enough, I'd spotted a big old male sunning himself in a tree. After that I started scanning every passing tree, and found a total of five iguanas. And now I know: iguanas DO grow on trees. LOL

We saw quite a bit of wildlife on the river trip. My crocodile hopes were dashed (apparently the crocs weren't croc'ing today), but we saw blue heron, yellow flycatchers, plover, a hawk and two vultures. And then there was the magical moment when Patrick cried out, "Look! You see that toucan flying over there?" And by God, there WAS a toucan there. I'd never seen one outside the zoo.

We also saw a parrot fly by. I'd seen parrots in the wild once before, in Rewalsar/Tsol Pema, India, in a surreal moment: I was standing at the top of a ridge, in a bamboo forest wreathed in fog, and saw many blunt-headed, green birds flying by. It took me a moment to realize that yes, I was standing there, at the top of the world, watching parrots fly by.

This was like that, except on the river. It was a lovely parrot, too, green with a red head. I love the way parrots fly--they have a distinctly bullet-shaped profile, very cool.

The vegetation along the river was also varied. I am fascinated by mango trees--they grew wild along the river, and Patrick told me there were twenty or thirty varieties of mango at least. I of course must try every single variety--especially a particularly beautiful purple-blue mango that leaned out far over the water--but unfortunately, most of them weren't ripe yet. It's just the beginning of mango season.

There were also wild cashews growing along the river! I hadn't realized that cashews are native to Belize, but they apparently are...I recognized the distinctive fruit immediately. I was tempted to ask Patrick to come in a little closer so I could pick a couple of cashew apples, but remembered in time that the flavor is, well, not too good.

We saw breadfruit trees--"like potato, but better", and a tree fruit called wild grape that tastes like blueberries. Patrick informed me that iguana was called "bamboo chicken" locally, and that both iguana and iguana eggs were tasty, but they weren't eaten anymore. There were a few other edible foods whose names I can't remember.

(If it sounds like I was obsessed with food, I was. It was nearly sundown, and I hadn't eaten since breakfast.)

I am fascinated with the number of wild fruit trees here. In the U.S., there aren't many fruit trees growing wild--if it's a fruit tree, odds are it was planted and odds are it's a specially bred variety. Along the river bank, they grow lushly, and seemingly without premeditation.

There were plenty of other trees along the river, probably the most photogenic being the mangroves. They rise up out of the water on their elevated roots, and have long, bean-like fruits which drop off into the water and float--often for amazingly long distances--until they find a new spot to sprout in. There were also emery trees, mahogany, and ceiba trees (which are the national tree of Guatemala).

Sadly, we saw no crocs and no manatee, but I was so thrilled about the toucan (and the iguanas!) that I wasn't too disappointed. And the iguanas looked so cool while sunning themselves on branches. Henceforth I shall check every passing tree for iguanas. :-)

Tomorrow I'm going out to see some Inca ruins and a lagoon called the Blue Hole; Thursday, we go out fishing and snorkeling. Friday, I head (regretfully) home.

Tien

More on sand dollars

2005-05-10T11:26:00.000-07:00

This is fascinating. Sand dollars are actually very flat sea urchins (weird, eh?). The rough "hairs" are actually miniature spines (sea urchin spines), and they have little tube feet they use to walk around and keep from getting buried. The hole in the center is a very powerful mouth, and the five little "doves" that fall out of broken sand dollars are teeth. The five gills make up the five-petaled "flower" on the top of a sand dollar.

Most sand dollars live about 30-40 feet under the ocean, in the subtidal region (so you have to dive to see them). They're quite abundant at that depth, though. It's quite unusual for them to be so shallow (here they're only 2-3 feet underwater), but there isn't much tidal variation here, and the slopes are long and gradual, so they get water all the time. They either feed by moving around on their little tube feet and eating whatever's underneath them, or by sticking themselves vertically in the sand so water washes through them. The little "grooves" in live sand dollars are actually feeding areas, where food gets trapped in mucus and moved along to the mouth by little cilia.

Now I have to go find another sand dollar and take a closer look at it. I'd love to dissect one, but that would be kinda rude. (I might do it anyway, but curiosity isn't a very good excuse for taking a critter apart, IMO. If it isn't hurting me and I don't want to eat it, I'd rather live and let live.)

However, I think someone brought a live (now dead) sand dollar to the inn yesterday--I may ask them if I can dissect it, since it's there anyway.

At any rate, I'm sure that's way more than you ever wanted to know about sand dollars, but dang, they're cool.

Today the waters are a bit rough, so I'm going out on a river tour in an hour or two. I'm torn about what to do over the next few days--there's snorkeling/fishing, but there's also an Inca ruin and a very beautiful lagoon (the "Blue Hole") that would be another good day trip. Either would be $150 for the day, which is a big chunk of change, not sure I can really afford that and the river trip. I may ask the guide if he can bring it down a little for the two-day package. Or I may just soak up the cost; I'm only going to be in Belize once, and I fly home (actually, to Guatemala) on Friday.

If I can find someone else to go along, of course, it'll be cheaper. Even one other person would bring the cost down a lot.

Anyway, I'm off to prep for the river trip...

Tien

Diving, and sand dollars

2005-05-09T13:36:00.000-07:00

Went diving this morning. The reef is GORGEOUS--lots of coral everywhere, moray eels, bright yellow-and-blue fish that flash as they swim by, schools of tiny electric blue fish. Sea fans, purple tube-like coral, brain coral, big lobsters with wavy antennae, small coral shrimp, and eagle rays flapping by. Awesome, awesome experience. (The Similan Islands were a little nicer, but this is still incredible.)

That said, I wasn't in much shape to appreciate most of it, as I spent a good chunk of my time concentrating on not drowning. I hadn't been diving for two years, so little details like breathing through your respirator, clearing your face mask, etc. were a bit rusty. At one point, when my mask flooded, I nearly panicked completely--almost started gulping water before I remembered I could clear my respirator and breathe through it. Two or three (very long) minutes later, I finally remembered how to clear my face mask. After that I managed to enjoy the rest of the dive.

Unfortunately, on surfacing I ran into more trouble--couldn't catch my breath, and was gasping rapidly by the time they got me onto the boat. My lungs hadn't fully recovered by the time of the next dive, so I missed it, staying on the boat (alas--they saw a bunch of eagle rays!). And then, to top it all off, I got severely seasick on the way back. There's a great irony in throwing up *just* as the boat is docking. I think I must have offended the sea gods or something.

To recover from all that unpleasantness, I decided to go wade in the ocean for awhile--which is delightful: blood-warm, gentle waves lapping at you, shallows that slope very gradually out to sea. And sand dollars. Lots of sand dollars.

This is how you hunt sand dollars: you go wading out until you find a mud flat (i.e. not sand), then shuffle your feet along the mud as you frolic in the water. Eventually, your foot hits something flat, round, and hard, you reach down (getting knocked over by a couple waves on the way), and you pick up a sand dollar.

This is not a bleached, nice white sand dollar. It's a live sand dollar, kelp-green, covered with bristly green "hairs", and usually sporting a couple tiny, translucent crabs clinging to the bottom. It feels rough when you pick it up, but they don't bite or sting or anything.

So what do you do with one, once you find it? Well, you can dry it out and bleach it, or you can etch it with muriatic acid to produce a very beautiful geometric pattern (natural to the sand dollar), and you can then paint it. I collected three sand dollars in short order--mostly because they were so much fun to hunt for. But, on further reflection, I decided that they probably needed to be sand dollars much more than I needed them to be ornamental kitsch, and released them back into the ocean. (I don't have a huge problem with killing a creature for food, but I think it's *extremely* rude to kill some poor critter just to get a souvenir that will wind up in a dusty box somewhere. If it were something I'd deeply treasure, I might reconsider.)

I suppose it was a bit disrespectful of me to play sand dollar frisbee while returning them to the water--but dang, it was fun. They do fly quite nicely, and it got them further out to sea. I was tempted to try skipping one, but enough is enough. (Besides, I'm lousy at that kind of thing.)

So now, having encountered a real live sand dollar, I must look up everything I can find about sand dollars. I know almost nothing about them--how they manage to stay on the bottom, how they keep from getting covered, what do they eat/what eats them, can they move on their own? and all the other interesting things about the critters. I had never really thought about them before, having only seen them as pretty shells, but now my curiosity's been piqued. It's always different meeting something in living color--live sand dollars are WAY more interesting than bleached shells.

And I'm definitely going to look for more of them (it's such a thrill when your questing foot meets one), but strictly on a catch-and-release basis. They are SUCH cool critters.

(One of the beautiful things about travel is that it makes you look at old things in new ways...I had never really thought about sand dollars before!)

Anyway, given today's excitement, I think I'm going to skip diving tomorrow. If the weather is nice, I'll probably go on a fishing/snorkeling tour with a private guide, and if the weather is not so nice, I'll probably go on a river tour. Fishing/snorkeling gives me the opportunity to catch and eat my own barracuda, which would be kinda cool, and see a lot of marine life while snorkeling (hopefully with less histrionics than diving). The river tour sounds equally nice--float down the river, lots of animals (including crocodiles!), lots of interesting plants. My private guide has led tours for the local high-end resorts for nine or ten years, and is now freelancing, so he knows a lot about the local ecosystem, animals, etc. I'm really looking forward to it.

I'm not sure what happened while I was diving. I had the flu up until a week or so ago, so it's possible it was affecting my lungs--or I might have gone too deep for a first dive. If anyone knows about those symptoms when diving, please post a comment and let me know. I may try diving again near the end of the week--this time, with Dramamine. I really do enjoy diving, but not when seasick/having breathing problems.

Tien

P.S. Still no armadillo. *sigh* I wonder if I could con my guide into taking me armadillo-hunting? It would be pretty cool to see a wild armadillo...

In Hopkins

2005-05-08T14:35:00.000-07:00

Just a short note to say that I made it to Hopkins, a sleepy little town near Dangria, in the central coast of Belize, and am going diving tomorrow. I plan to dive for the next three days, then move on to San Ignacio in western Belize--but haven't really decided yet. I may well decide to spend the next week here.

To my delight, I have discovered that one can (occasionally) get armadillo around here, and am trying to lay my hands on some. I've had the innkeeper put in a request with a guy who goes hunting a lot. I guess the town is too small to support an armadillo farm. LOL

I'm also trying to find a guide who is willing to show me around the Jaguar Reef Reserve, which is a wildlife preserve wherein I will probably not see jaguars, but lots of other cool stuff.

Oh, and I may take up windsurfing.

Tien

Bus ride to Belize City

2005-05-07T07:14:00.000-07:00

Sometimes it seems like all of Belize is burning.

As I rode the bus from Punta Gorda to Belize City, every few miles we would pass another fire. Charred stumps, withering branches, a small bush crumpling slowly into flames--and everywhere the char, seared earth and dying coconut palms. Even at night, plumes of white smoke rise into the sky, illuminated by the eerie orange glow of the flames. Everywhere, the air smells of woodsmoke.

This is slash-and-burn agriculture at its worst, and I feel only vaguely reassured that Belize is an environmental "success story": 36% of the country is set aside as nature preserve, and it is considered one of the best-preserved countries in Central America. If this is the *best*, what are the other places like? I try to picture the great fire, 5 acres a day in Belize burning into a desolation of white ash, and it boggles my mind. And to think of the 2.7 MILLION acres of Amazonian rainforest burned every year...it's too much to imagine. I see acres and acres of jungle, crumpling slowly into flames as the ashy landscape expands, and the fire burns, and burns, and burns.

I am still amazed that Belize is considered an environmental success. I can't imagine what the other places are like.

Tien

The Cashew Festival

2005-05-07T19:14:00.000-07:00

I'll apologize in advance if I'm a little incoherent today. After last night's roach episode, I did eventually get to sleep, but under the circumstances slept rather less well than usual, and I'm still a bit frazzled. (I have been trying to convince myself that a roach is simply a beetle, and a two-inch beetle crawling over you isn't anything to panic over, it's merely annoying. I have thus far completely failed. Beetles I can deal with. But roaches are roaches, and no matter how hard I flex it, I just can't convince myself they're anything else.)

Anyway, I managed to catch the bus up to Crooked Tree (pop. 800) today, and made it to the festival without incident. It's a pretty small operation--fifteen or twenty stalls, a live band, some minor prizes--but what it lacks in size it more than makes up for in diversity. You can buy all kinds of cashew products--fudge, cookies, jam, syrup, and wine. The last three are made from the cashew apple--the fruit, not the nut.

Cashews are nearly unique in the botanical world in having the seed outside the fruit. A cashew has a fleshy fruit, the cashew apple, and at the bottom dangles the cashew nut (inside shell and hull). The nut is easy to twist off the end of the cashew apple--it's only cursorily attached. The nut has some rather nasty irritants associated with the outer shell (this is why some people are allergic to cashews), which are removed during the shelling process.

The cashew apple looks a bit like a small, somewhat withered yellow bell pepper. It's hollow inside, like the pepper, but is soft and juicy, with a stringy interior. It is not going to win any awards for flavor--when I bit into one I found it astringent, and oddly musky-tasting--but it is sweet, and quite juicy.

Regarding cashew wine, the less said the better. Actually, some of the cashew wines are moderately drinkable (as Paul Simon famously said, "all right in a limited sort of a way, for an off night"), but Napa isn't exactly quaking in its boots. I'm bringing one small bottle home with me; if you want to delve further into its secrets, get in touch with me once I return.

I did see one very unusual thing while I was there, though: one of the band members was playing a "drum" composed of three tortoise shells! He had the three dangling from a belt attached to his waist, and played them just as you would any other drum. It was astonishing the different range of sounds he produced--hollow clicking sounds, deeper-throated knocking noises, depending on which tortoise he was playing and where on the scutes he was drumming. I got a photo which i'll post once I get back. I was fascinated, and spent half an hour watching and listening to him.

I should mention that Belize is musically a very gifted nation, with a wide variety of instruments and a strong music tradition. I am unfortunately a complete musical illiterate, so I can't give you an adequate description--but if you are a music junkie, come to Belize. It's basically a Caribbean rhythm, but with variations.

I did have one very bizarre moment today, musically speaking. The DJ was playing a song over and over which was hauntingly familiar, but which I couldn't place. It drove me crazy for several repetitions, then I suddenly recognized it as "Father Abraham", a British nursery rhyme I'd learned from a pair of British nannies one drunken night in Laos. It's rather like the Hokey-Pokey, and goes

"Father Abraham
Had seven sons
Seven sons had Father Abraham
And they never laughed
And they never cried
All they did was go like this:"

followed by waving about whatever random body part is indicated for that verse (adding body parts cumulatively as you go).

If you try to imagine a bunch of Westerners in backwater Laos, dining with a hilltribe so isolated that children have never seen white people, singing "Father Abraham" and waving their arms and legs drunkenly about while the Lao whisky goes around yet another time, well...that was THAT evening. I'll never forget the British nannies who taught it to us, either. Mary Poppins would have had a heart attack--tattoos, body piercings, drinking and swearing. These weren't no namby-pamby prim-and-proper nannies--these were punk nannies.

At any rate, just as I realized that the tune was "Father Abraham", it dawned on me that the refrain was "Scooby-Doo, we love you". I THINK someone was trying to mix the Scooby-Doo theme with "Father Abraham".

The mind reels.

Fortunately, most Belizean music isn't like that--it's a refreshing, original Caribbean mix that's very enjoyable, even to the musically illiterate ear.

I unfortunately missed the cashew-processing demonstration, which is happening tomorrow--I had been hoping to see how they remove the irritating oils and extract the cashew. It was great to taste the cashew apple, though.

Speaking of tastes, I finally got my hands on gibnut today! Gibnut is an animal generally described as "a 60-pound rat" (I thik technically it's an agouti), and is one of the "interesting" foods native to Belize. I had almost resigned myself to not finding it, as it's a wild game animal and thus not on most restaurant menus, but found it in a stall at the festival. It has an interesting flavor...I had it barbequed, and the taste and texture were very similar to slow-cooked pork ribs, but with an odd, soapy flavor. Maybe a bit like cilantro, but without the "green" flavor. On Tien's exotic scale, it tasted better than rat, scorpion, mealworms, and moth pupae, but not as good as dog or grasshopper. (I'm still sorry I didn't try bat. *sigh* Everyone makes mistakes.)

However, I can now say that I've eaten a R.O.U.S. (Rodent of Unusual Size), which is certainly something. Together with the cashew apple, it's been a pretty adventurous day.

Off to bed (perchance to catch up on non-roach-infested sleep)--

Tien

The power of the pocketbook

2005-05-07T07:29:00.000-07:00

I arrived in Belize City at 8pm last night, well after dark, and took a taxi straight to the guesthouse. It turned out to be a ratpit, but as I was only going to be there one night, and one does not wander around Belize City after dark, I resigned myself to the wind blowing through the stuck-open window, the people on the verandah blowing smoke into my room and talking loudly next to my window, and the light streaming in from the hallway. I pulled out my silk sleep-sack (I don't know where these rat-pits get their sheets--coarse, rough, AND worn to pieces), stuck in earplugs, and tossed and turned, trying to get to sleep.

Then I felt a rustling, and looked up. A giant, two-inch roach had just scuttled across my body, and was regarding me curiously from atop my shoulder.

I leaped out of the bed with a yell, grabbed a book, and went after that roach in a flurry of wild swipes. I missed, and it skittered away.

Well, that was THAT. I hastily gathered my bags, ran downstairs, and fled. Traveling tigresses are intrepid, but even I have my limits--I am NOT sharing my bed with roaches. I found a high-end hotel in the guidebook, and at 11pm, I made it to the Princess Hotel, a hotel-cum-casino that would do Club Med proud. I paid a princely sum for it ($96 U.S., or $10/hour for every hour I spent there), but was it worth it? Hell, yeah. I could sleep in the assurance that no roaches would be peeking over my shoulder.

So now I've spent more for one night's accommodation than I did for the entire previous WEEK of hotel stays, but at least I and my clothes are roach-free. Egad.

Anyway, I'm headed up to Crooked Tree for the Cashew Festival, and am hoping to make it OUT of Belize City today and down to Dangriga and diving, but it seems likely I'll have to spend another day in Belize City. Grump.

Tien

Well, I'll be darned.

2005-05-06T13:07:00.000-07:00

I did meet with Belize's Minister for Agriculture and Fisheries today. (He's also the area representative for Toledo district.)

I had just about dismissed the whole thing as the made-up story of a delusional old man (he'd be neither the first nor the last such person I've met), but he turned up this morning with the guy himself! (I will never, EVER doubt my improbability field again.) I was totally not expecting this visit, and in fact was sitting quietly at the breakfast table carving myself a new set of double-pointed bamboo knitting needles when they arrived. One does not normally receive high government officials covered in wood shavings, but life is full of new and novel experiences. (Besides which, he was in shorts and a T-shirt anyway, so it wasn't exactly a formal meeting.)

It was interesting hearing what he had to say on tourism and development in Belize--he's certainly well aware of the issues w/r/t tourism in the Toledo district. One interesting thing he said was about the villages. Yesterday, while touring the cacao plantations, Greg had mentioned that the government was issuing land grants of 30 acres to anyone who applied. I had wondered why they were doing a homestead act, but it turns out to be an environmental issue. The indigenous people are doing tremendous damage to the environment using traditional slash-and-burn practices (yesterday's devastation being an example), and it's estimated that they're burning 5 acres a DAY in Toledo District. When a given plot of land is exhausted, they move on to the next one (which is traditional for slash and burn). The government is trying to get the villagers to stop their nomadic (and very destructive) lifestyle, and towards that end is offering each of them ownership of 30 acres. The hope is that they'll stay put on that land, and not move on to burn more.

They're also doing projects to help them grow beans and rice. I asked why not cacao, since it's so profitable, and he said it's because of the organic farming requirements--it requires a lot of compost to keep the land fertile, and the farmers haven't been willing to apply the compost. (Greg, the cacao guy, brings them sacks of compost in his pickup, but they still have to haul it all the way to the field--which may be a long way--and spread it.) So after a few years, the soil is no longer fertile, and then they run into trouble with disease etc. They're working on convincing the farmers that organic farming is much more than "don't add chemicals".

Anyway, the net of the conversation was that Chet's ideas were too grandiose (which was obvious to me as a project manager), he needed to start smaller, BUT if he was able to come up with funding, the minister of agriculture etc. would ask the prime minister to match the funding. Which is a great opportunity, of course. I told Chet that if he put together a really solid project proposal, with a mission statement and precise detail on exactly what he planned to do, what budget he proposed, and so on, I'd see what I could do about getting him funded. (He claims only to need a small amount of money, about $30K--I think the actual bill would be much more, frankly.)

I'd guess that the odds of my actually receiving a good, solid proposal are probably about 2% (Chet is not the most organized person in the world), but stranger things have been known to happen, and I think his ideas vis-a-vis cultural and environmental preservation would be great to implement. I'm not getting any further involved until I get a solid proposal, though--if they can't get their act together enough to write a good proposal, there's no way they'll be able to implement it once funded. So that's my test; we'll see what happens.

I'm boarding an express bus to Belize City in about half an hour; it takes about four hours to get there, so I'll arrive about 7pm. Tomorrow I'll do a day trip up to Crooked Tree for the Cashew Festival--which I expect to be interesting--and then I'll head south to Hopkins (a little town near Dangriga), and spend a couple days diving. After that, I've been advised to go to San Ignacio (in Western Belize) and play around a couple of days--there are horseback tours into the jungle, a major Inca ruin, and several wildlife preserves to visit.

By the way, as you may have guessed from earlier hints, I've started my latest travel shawl. It will be an orange, brown, and gold striped silk shawl, which I intend to call "Tiger Lily". And started on hand-carved bamboo needles, too. :-)

Tien

Cacao

2005-05-05T14:18:00.000-07:00

Thank you, AIDS Lifecycle, for transforming my relationship with sweat.

Once upon a time, I regarded sweat as dirty, icky, and generally to be avoided. Then I signed up for the AIDS Ride, and started training. 2,000 miles of cycling later, I finished up in LA, weary, windburned, and triumphant--and with a rock-solid understanding of sweat. You get damp for awhile. That's all.

And may I say, it has been VERY damp lately.

I got in this morning at 7am, having escaped the Mayan village (very boring), and turned up at the Toledo Cacao Growers' Association at the crack of 8am. There I met my guide, Greg (a Qeq'chi Mayan), who was an agricultural extension agent and would take me along on his rounds. I hopped into his green Ford Ranger, and we were off.

Cacao is a relatively new crop in the area. It wasn't grown at all until maybe twenty years ago, when Hershey set up shop in the region. They didn't offer a whole lot more than farmers could make planting corn and beans, so not many farmers planted it. Then, out of nowhere, Hershey's pulled out--shut down their processing plant--and the farmers had nowhere to sell their crop. So they formed a growers' association, and, with the help of a few Peace Corps volunteers, found Green & Black. In exchange for a promise to grow organic, Green & Black guarantees to buy all the cacao they produce for 85 cents a pound. At roughly 900 pounds per acre, this comes out to just over $750 an acre, a much much better return than either corn or beans. Many farmers are now switching to cacao.

(By the way, you can read more about Green & Black on their website, http://www.greenandblacks.com/

We drove first to Greg's cacao plantation. We drove through a freshly tilled field, which would grow rice later, then walked through a second field and along a narrow, winding jungle path to reach his cacao plantation. It was a blazing hot day, and I was sweating buckets before we'd gone 100 yards.

(People here assure me that this is as hot as it gets in Belize, and that it will cool down in a week or two. Unfortunately this doesn't do me much good, but I'm glad they don't have to live in this year-round.)

Finally we arrived at the farm, and I got my first glimpse of a real live cacao tree! They are small trees with enormous leaves, pointed ovals maybe a foot long, and stand maybe fifteen feet in height--the perfect understory tree. I spotted the cacao pods immediately--like elongated acorn squash, they were deeply ribbed and football-shaped, and hung directly from the trunk (no branches)--this is true for many other jungle trees, e.g. the calabash tree. (For the pedantic, this is called cauliflory.) I rushed right up and examined the trunks and branches--inconspicuous, delicate, cream-colored flowers presaged greater harvests to come.

(I was so thrilled I nearly did a little happy dance on the spot. The only other cacao trees I've seen were two tiny little ones in Hawaii, fifteen feet away through a fence--highly unsatisfying.)

We tromped through more of the farm, fallen cacao leaves crunching underfoot, as Greg pointed out tree after tree and gave me a running monologue on cacao management. He showed me how to prune them, how to tell if the pods are ripe, and how to identify the major cacao pests. He pointed out criollo and trinitario pods for me--criollo round and smooth, trinitario deeply ribbed.

(There are two main kinds of cacao: criollo, which has delicate flavor overtones but not much "body", and forastero, which has lots of chocolate impact, produces more than criollo, and has good disease-resistance. Good-quality chocolates will contain some criollo beans for the subtle flavors, but one wouldn't want to make a chocolate with only criollo beans, because you need the stronger flavors of forastero. Trinitario, which Greg also showed me, is a hybrid between criollo and forastero.)

Finally, we stopped in front of another tree, and Greg asked me if I wanted to try some. Of course!! So he twisted a ripe pod off the trunk, and smashed it against the trunk. It cracked open to reveal a grapelike cluster of soft white drupes, big seeds surrounded by pulpy, slippery, cream-colored flesh. I popped a few in my mouth: tangy, sweet, exotic--much like fresh lychee. The seeds were big, like giant fava beans, and the flesh clung tenaciously to them, so one could only suck at the slippery seeds. Nonetheless, it was delicious. Greg gave me another pod to take home.

As we were passing through the trees on the way back, I suddenly pointed and said, "Hey! Is that a vanilla orchid??" And, sure enough, there one was! I ran up and took a good look--a rather nondescript vine with fleshy oval leaves. It didn't appear to run all the way down the trunk, but I couldn't tell for sure. I'd love to know if it's a ground orchid, or an epiphytic (tree-dwelling) one. No beans on this one, unfortunately. Greg said they weren't grown around here commercially, but wild ones weren't uncommon, and promised to look out for other vines.

Next we set out to look at one of his farmers' nurseries. Cacao trees are planted in little black bags of rice hull compost; it takes two weeks for the seeds to sprout, rising up out of the compost like a giant, soil-encrusted bean atop a sturdy green stem. The crinkly beans split open to reveal the first soft, tiny leaves, and in six or seven weeks the trees are about a foot tall, with a profusion of little branches. At the age of one year, they're transplanted into the fields. At the age of three, they bear their first crop, and at five, they're in full production.

As we tromped on through a young cacao plantation, I smelled smoke nearby. Greg and I went over to investigate, and through a thin screen of jungle I spotted a plain of ash! It was still smoking in places, and Greg warned me to be careful of hidden embers, since I was wearing sandals. I stepped out, onto the moonscape.

It was like a scene out of nightmare: half-burned palm fronds and blackened branches stuck up from the white ashes of scorched earth, and plumes of smoke still rose from several areas. Heat waves rose from the ground, and the scent of woodsmoke clung to my clothes and hair. For several hundred yards in every direction, the soil was covered in white ash, and only burnt-out shells punctuated the landscape. I nervously examined my Tevas, to make sure they weren't melting.

This was slash-and-burn agriculture.

In slash-and-burn, the jungle is first cut down, with machete and axe, and left to dry for several weeks. Then, fires are set, and the brush burns down to the ground, leaving only ash. The ash is tilled into the ground to enrich it, and the cleared land is planted--for several years, until it is exhausted. Then the farmer slashes and burns another plot of land, and leaves the first piece to recover.

This particular piece of land was being cleared for a cacao plantation, and I suppose the slash-and-burn method does make a great deal of sense for clearing jungle. It doesn't pay to haul the brush away, and burning the area is quicker than composting and waiting several years for the greenery to rot: you get the same nutrients a lot faster. Nonetheless, it was startling to step, in one instant, from full, vibrantly healthy jungle to lifeless moonscape.

After this field, we went to several other nurseries and farms, and Greg inspected the young trees for disease and non-organic practices. He told me that some farmers get impatient with using rice-hull compost (which needs to be hauled laboriously into the fields) and try to sneak in chemical fertilizers, but that one could easily spot it by examining the leaves on the trees. Green & Black is a certified organic chocolate, so one of his jobs as an agricultural extension agent is to make sure that the farmers are complying. He also teaches workshops several times a week, and warns farmers about pests and disease. He's been growing cacao himself for fifteen years.

As we were passing through yet another jungle path, Greg stopped abruptly and said, "Vanilla! Can you smell it?" We stopped on the path, and sure enough, a sweet, floral smell drifted through the branches. We tromped through the jungle for awhile looking for it (Greg cutting away branches and vines with his pruning shears), but couldn't find it. We did, however, find a cohune, which is a big palm tree with incredibly long fronds (used in roof thatching). The cohune bears long, datelike clusters of tiny coconuts, and Greg twisted down a few of them. Later, one of the farmers would split one open for me, and I ate the nut inside--it tasted like a cross between coconut and Brazil nut, and was very good. (I still have a couple more, and am trying to figure out how to get into them. I may have to buy a machete. Mmmm...machetes.)

After that and a trip to a rosewood-carver, we finished up for the day, and I came back to the Cacao Growers' Association, where I bought two and a half pounds of fermented, but unshelled and unroasted, beans. They don't taste like chocolate; they have a slightly chocolatey, slightly winey flavor from the fermentation. I plan to take them home, roast them, and grind them up with cloves, orange peel, and other spices, Mayan-style, for my own teas and chocolates. (They've already been inspected for export, and I plan to roast them anyway, so I'm not especially worried about bringing in pests. I do plan to be careful, though.)

Still considering what to do tomorrow morning, but think I may take the 3pm express bus from Punta Gorda to Belize City. It's either that or fly. (The traveling tigress is not even considering 6 hours in a rickety ancient schoolbus stopping every few miles--twelve hours on one in Vietnam, stuck next to a snorting pig, has convinced me to avoid such travel for the rest of my life.) The owner of this cybercafe has recommended a good, friendly, not-too-expensive guesthouse in Belize City, and I plan to stay there tomorrow night before striking out to Crooked Tree (and the Cashew Festival) in the morning.

I think my strategy after the Cashew Festival will be to go down to Dangriga and do several days' diving, then come back to Belize City and do several day-trips around the area. I'm trying very hard to stay away from the tourist traps of San Pedro and Placencia--I find heavily touristed areas to be more or less identical the world over (think Cancun), and I'd really like someplace quieter. I've been very happy with Punta Gorda. I'm hoping Dangriga will be less touristy than some of the other places.

Tien

Cacao and culture

2005-05-04T10:04:00.000-07:00

I may be meeting with Belize's Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries tomorrow.

No, really. (I never kid about the truly bizarre.) Chet, the guy I was talking with about his planned ecotourism project, is meeting with the guy tomorrow or Friday, and has asked me to come along if I can, presumably to lend him some kind of credibility. Needless to say, I'm not going to say no: at the very least, it'll be an interesting way to spend an afternoon. I've been warned that Chet is full of plans that never quite happen, so I'm not investing a whole lot of time in it, but how often does a tourist get to meet with a country's minister of agriculture and fisheries? So I must poke my long feline nose (well, okay, short and stubby feline nose) into this and see what happens. Traveling tigers are ever-curious.

But that's the secondary news. The best news is: I'm going to a cacao farm tomorrow! The folks at the Toledo Cacao Grower's Association set me up--I'll be going out at 8am for a half-day tour. They're currently harvesting and fermenting the cacao, so I'll get to see all the parts of the process.

I'm also leaving in about an hour to spend the night in one of the Mayan villages--San Antonio, where they do a lot of handicrafts and someone can presumably teach me. I'm hoping to luck into a weaver. I'll be coming back tomorrow morning and heading straight out to the cacao growers, so you may not hear from me for a day and a half or so, but trust me: it'll be worth it.

I went down to the market this morning (which, honestly, is pretty tiny) and picked up some fruit, and also some kind of jungle fruit that looks like a very odd longan. I was intrigued by it, and asked the vendor what it was. " ", she said.

Okay, ask a silly question. (I mean, someone walks up to you and asks what an apple is, what are you going to say? "An apple." If they haven't got any idea what an apple is, they'll go away none the wiser, much as I did.)

So, of course, I had to buy some and try them. So I shelled it out of its papery shell--it looked like a palm fruit (not a date) and gingerly tried it. It was fibrous, a tiny thin layer over a very large nut, with the taste and texture of glue. I spat it out, but it took a long time to get the pasty mess out of my mouth afterwards. I asked Chet what it was, later, and he said it was some kind of jungle fruit--one sucks the thin layer of fruit off the very big nut. I sincerely hope I got an unripe one, because I can't imagine anyone paying money to eat glue.

(Well, at least I tried it.)

Speaking of food, it turns out that they do eat the paca here, which they call "gibnut" and which has been described to me as an R.O.U.S.--a rat-like critter that weighs about sixty pounds. Must see if I can get my hands on some. Must try new and bizarre foods (preferably not tasting like glue).

Today I also bought a rosewood bowl from a guy for $37--it's burlwood, very pretty, and finished to a fine polish. Heavy, too. Rosewood is a very dense, fine-grained wood, so it's beautiful.

On impulse, I asked the guy if he could make something custom for me. He said yes, and what did I want? So I asked him to make me two rosewood drop spindles, each about 1-2" in diameter, with carvings in the center of the whorl. He wouldn't set a price on it immediately--he said it depended on how long it took to make it--but said it would be reasonable. I doubt it's going to be super-expensive, and it would be lovely to have a rosewood drop spindle as a souvenir of my Central American travels. It can go with my Akha drop spindle and the silver spindles from Thailand.

What can I say? Other people collect souvenirs, I collect travel spindles.

Anyway, the bus is about to leave for San Antonio, so I'd best go wait for it. I'll post back in a day or two, after the Mayan village and the cacao farm.

Tien

P.S. Vanilla DOES grow here! I spotted what looked like a vanilla orchid growing up the side of the house, and dangitall, I was RIGHT! I'm very pleased with myself, especially since I'd never seen a real live vanilla plant before--only drawings.

There's also a cacao tree back behind the house, with a fruit growing off it--I was going to take a photo of it, then realized that I'd probably get to see plenty of cacao fruit at the plantation.

I forgot to mention that the cacao produced here is purchased by Green & Black as part of their eco-friendly organic chocolate production system...they produce an organic chocolate bar that is sold in quite a few gourmet shops (including Trader Joe's, I think) and is quite edible. This is really cool--I had never thought much about organic eco-chocolates (I mean, it seems like everything's organic eco-xxxx these days), but it makes a real difference actually coming out here and seeing it. One never really thinks of one's food choices as genuinely affecting others' lives, but here it makes a big difference to the villagers. Before Green & Black appeared, they never harvested cacao because the low prices made it not worth the effort--but now, they're planting as much as they can get, because they're guaranteed a fair price for all they can produce. Which, in turn, helps the local culture by giving them economic alternatives. So that's a great thing.

It's great getting to see the benefits, tangibly, of a "green" food product. It's very different from reading about it in companies' "see how PC we are" brochures.

Belize

2005-05-02T22:34:00.000-07:00

May 2, 2005

Belize is a tiny little country, about the size of Massachusetts, nestled between the southeast end of Mexico and the northeastern border of Guatemala. About a quarter of the 250,000 people living here live in the biggest city, Belize City--making it about the size of Mountain View.

In other words, it's a really, really, really small country.

Belize City itself is nothing much to speak of, looking mostly like a very rundown beach town--quaint wooden houses with the boards bleached like driftwood, balconies rickety and falling down, rot everywhere. It's not quite an abandoned beach town, because people clearly live there, but there are at least thirty years of rot and failed maintenance running around the town. I didn't think much of it, and was glad to get away.

I had planned to pick up a swimsuit and some doxycycline (antimalarial) and then hop a bus to Punta Gorda, but quickly discovered that today was a national holiday and all businesses were closed. Also that I'd already missed the bus to Punta Gorda. The taxi driver suggested that the plane to Punta Gorda had not yet departed, and perhaps I could catch that. So, I hopped over to the municipal airport.

The airport wasn't quite what I'd been expecting. They took my credit card and gave me a ticket. Then I looked around noticed my pack had disappeared, and panicked completely, thinking someone had taken it. (I had just come from Guatemala City, where anything not nailed down will vanish instantly.) I spent the next minute kicking myself for being such an incredible IDIOT as to let my pack out of my sight for one second, and then realized that it was safely under a counter. The baggage guy had very helpfully come over while I was buying my ticket, and put it with the rest of the bags. I relaxed, settled in to wait, about three hours, for my flight to leave.

(One of the things I like about Third World travel is that you spend a lot of time waiting, with nothing particular to do. This probably sounds bizarre, but it's not like waiting for a bus at home, where you have twenty things you planned to have done that day. Instead, you get pleasant time to think, to reflect on your journey and your life, and not worry about missing anything, because nothing you do will make the bus come faster.)

As I was boarding the plane (a Cessna 60 Caravan), I realized I'd forgotten to present my boarding pass. I fumbled through for my ticket, then realized I didn't have a boarding pass, but the gate attendant waved me on. "Oh! I forgot to give you a boarding pass. Well, never mind."

The plane itself was a tiny little propeller plane, with room for just twelve passengers, and the pilot right up in front--more like a car than an airplane. There were only three of us, so even the tiny plane was mostly empty. Two men loaded the luggage--four battered old bags, a sack of onions, and a giant bag of green peppers. As the airplane taxiied down the bumpy, gravelly, ancient runway, the wing struts creaked alarmingly, but we made it up into the air, and I gasped with delight. Below me spread all of Belize.

We flew for about fifteen minutes, then landed at Dangriga, the third-biggest city in Belize, about twenty miles away. We came down over the treetops--big trees covered with yellow bloom popped out like goldenrod, and delicate, purple-blossomed trees grew like orchid lichen. Feathery tufts of coconut palm punctuated the green canopy. Then I saw the runway, and blanched. It wasn't run-down, it was ancient.

But, improbably, we made it down with a thump and a rusty squeal. The pilot waved at the terminal, but no one was boarding, so we were off again.

The wonderful thing about flying in a private plane is that you can see everything. It's not like being in a jet plane, where you're too high up to make out the detail--this was more like an aerial tour of Belize. My map had come to life--the green coastline, the squiggly caracoles of rivers, the purple shadows of the giant barrier reef looming through the turquoise water.

Fifteen minutes later, we stopped in Placencia, where stubbly mangroves rose up from the water on their elevated roots, looking for all the world like the Sorcerer's Apprentice brooms from Fantasia. I kept expecting them to get up and walk away. We rose up again, turned sharply--I thought the pilot was circling to look at two wildfires sending up giant plumes of smoke a few miles away--but then we landed five miles away, at the Savannah Forest Station, to drop off our last remaining passenger. I was alone in the plane.

Twelve minutes later, the plane came down with a bump. I had arrived in Punta Gorda, 80 miles south of Belize City. I had traveled two-thirds the length of the country in just under an hour, including four stops along the way.

I am forever amazed by the tiny scale of Belize. In Guatemala, it takes forever to get anywhere--it took my bus four hours to get to Quetzaltenango, which is not too far from Guatemala City. In Belize, you can drive from one end of the country to another in about eight hours.

So anyway, I'm now in Punta Gorda, and staying in a place that's pretty basic but not too bad. My friend Herve, who is an eminently civilized person, would probably die on sight upon seeing my room--peg-board ceiling sagging, ancient two-inch mattress with paper-thin sheets, broken window covered with torn mosquito mesh, rusty old fan and no air conditioning--but, fortunately for both of us, he's not here. (I'm really quite fond of him, and would hate to see him die in such an untimely manner--so useless, and so unnecesssary.) The showers are cold, and the water sporadic--yesterday the shower was only a trickle, today they got enough water to turn it on again--but for a cabin out in the back-country, it's not at all bad, and it's only $11/night. After I fixed the mosquito netting with the duct tape I brought along (oh yes, the traveling tigress is prepared for everything), it was just fine.

Tomorrow I'm going off into the Mayan villages, and will probably spend the night there, so I may not be able to write for a day or so. I'm sure I'll be having adventures, though. :-)

Tien

P.S. Cacao IS grown around here!! I'm heading down to the local cacao grower's association as soon as I finish writing this email. Hot dog! I hope I can get to see it being grown, processed, etc.

Looking ahead to Belize...

2005-05-01T18:27:00.000-07:00

An AIDS Lifecycle lesson I should have remembered: Drink before you're thirsty, and eat before you're hungry.

I collapsed as soon as I got to the airport hotel, and spent a couple hours in a hazy state before it dawned on me that this wasn't normal. I knew I'd been dehydrated in Antigua (which is so damn hot the sweat just pours out of you), but thought I'd gotten enough water--but something was definitely wrong. So I ate half a Power Bar out of my first-aid kit, which gave me enough energy to stagger downstairs and ask the women at the guesthouse to make me some food. At this point it dawned on me that I'd only eaten twice in the last 48 hours.

Anyway, I think I was severely dehydrated, suffering from an electrolyte imbalance, and seriously underfed, but four hours later, I'm back on the road to feeling like a real human being. It'll probably take me a day or two to get fully rehydrated, but I'm no longer falling over, and that's a good thing.

Lesson for future: remember to eat and drink.

Now I'm looking ahead to Belize, and it promises to be exciting. There are four really interesting things going on in Belize. The first is the Punta Gorda ecotourism association, which offers a chance to stay in Mayan villages (and make hot chocolate from cacao beans!). It's in southern Belize, at the very bottom of the country. The best part is that the villages are traditional but all have English as a second language, meaning it's quite possible to talk to them about handicrafts, food, etc.

(Chocolate, as most of my friends know, is my second obsession--I love making chocolates, keep 30-40 pounds of Valrhona on hand as a matter of course, taste any top chocolate I can get my hands on, and have a library of books on cacao and chocolate (not to mention making about 30 pounds of truffles every Thanksgiving). However, I've only seen a cacao tree once, at a distance, in Hawaii. One of the things I very much wanted out of this trip was the chance to see cacao where it naturally grows--it is a Central/South American tree, after all! It doesn't grow in the Guatemalan highlands, but apparently it does grow in Belize. I'd LOVE to get to see a cacao tree up close, see how it's harvested, and learn more about how the Mayans prepare chocolate.)

The second cool thing in Belize is the Cashew Festival, held in Crooked Tree (population 600) the first weekend in May, which celebrates all things cashew--cashew juice, cashew butter, roasted cashews, etc. I just happen to be in Belize that weekend, and it sounds like fun, and I've never eaten a cashew apple (the fruit from which the cashew hangs), so I'm rearranging my travel plans to see if I can go to it. Check out this writer's view of it.

The third thing is, of course, the diving--the barrier reef off Belize is the biggest in the Western Hemisphere, and the variety of marine life is stunning. I plan to do at least 3-4 days of diving.

Last, but definitely not least, is the wildlife. A huge chunk of Belize is set aside as a nature reserve, and the flora and fauna are diverse and abundant--the Crooked Tree Reserve is said to be one of the best bird-watching places in the world. Definitely want to take some time for hiking.

So I'm considering what to do. At the moment, the most likely route seems to be to arrive in Belize City, spend half a day there, then run down to Punta Gorda (a five hour bus ride) to check out the Mayan villages. I would prefer to start out with diving, but I'm still recovering from the flu. Maybe in a few days.

First order of business, though, will be picking up malaria medication. Malaria is endemic to Belize, and I should really have started taking medication two days ago, but I haven't been able to find a suitable medication in the small pharmacies I've been seeing. So, I'm buying it as soon as possible, but I'll still have to take my chances the first few days.

Oh, and if you aren't quite sure where Belize is (I wasn't sure either, until I started traveling), it's south of Mexico and east of Guatemala, just north of Honduras.

Today Guatemala, tomorrow Belize. (Have I really only been traveling for one week??)

Tien

Orchids and chocolate

2005-05-03T10:10:00.000-07:00

Belize is PAVED in orchids!

I went for a walk last night, looked up into a tree by the water, and my goodness! The rosette cups of bromeliads, the big flat leaves of orchids, crumpled yellow-and-maroon sprays of flowers COVERED the branches, and half the trunk. The tree was a bouquet of blossoms.

Then I started looking around, and realized that EVERY tree is like that. For an orchid aficionado, it's paradise.

I had never really thought about orchids before. I mean, I have about a hundred of them, and always have a blooming orchid on my desk, but I had never *thought* about orchids before. They were potted plants you bought from a nursery. Seeing them just growing, wild, was a tremendous shock.

The first time I saw an orange tree, I was just 17...I had just arrived from the East Coast for college, and one day I saw an orange tree by the post office. I rushed back to my dorm and breathlessly told my roommates, "I saw an ORANGE TREE! I saw an orange tree!!"

Well, one of them was from Arizona and the other from Southern California, so they naturally looked at me as you would a complete idiot. Umm, yes. It's an orange tree. So? The world is paved in orange trees.

"You don't understand! I'm from the East Coast! I know all about oranges, they grow in little crates in the back of the supermarket! But here they're on a TREE!"

So, that's how I feel about the orchids here. They're not potted plants! They're real live plants! They live on bark and everything!

So now I'm wandering around looking at all the trees along the way. (Not only are there orchids, there are all kinds of exciting lizards and anoles--I think I saw some kind of crested basilisk this morning.)

It's funny how often you know something, and then something happens that makes you look again, in a totally different manner, and realize that you really didn't know it at all.

I spent half the morning talking to Chet, the guy who owns my guesthouse. It all started when I mentioned I was interested in weaving and chocolate. He said, "Hey! I have a book titled Llamas, Weaving, and Organic Chocolate. You want to see it?" and we were off.

Anyway, it turns out that he's an expert in ecotourism and cultural preservation, and is working very hard on a plan to preserve the culture of the local Maya in the face of an planned highway through Punta Gorda. Right now, Punta Gorda is the end of the highway, a sleepy little backwater, where the old ways are preserved because no powerful interests care enough to push the Mayan villagers off their land. He's working on a plan to enable economic development without destroying the local culture, and has some really interesting ideas about combining ecotourism, "green" agriculture, and cultural tours for a holistic solution.

He needs seed money and a solid project manager to make the project succeed (he's more of a visionary), and I'm giving serious thought to taking it up as a project--at least, the sale and marketing of his proposed products in the United States. It combines quite a few things I'm interested in, like chocolate, spices, and handicraft. (One of the products is ground cacao mixed with spices like cloves and orange peel, which is wonderfully yummy, and I think would make a very good upscale drink for sale in cafes et al.) I've been looking for something more meaningful than high-tech for awhile, and I think this might very well be it. So I'm going to have some longer conversations with him over the next day or so, and look seriously into feasibility.

Meanwhile, the Toledo Ecotourism Association, which sets up the trips to villages, doesn't seem to be open today (people here tend to open shop whenever they feel like it, so things can be kind of sporadic). But do I care? NO! because, on Chet's advice, I went to see the Toledo Cacao Growers' Association today, and they said they'd try arranging for me to spend some time with a cacao farmer, showing me the different stages of production. He warned me that I might have to stay with the farmer overnight. Ooh, hurt me. :-)

So anyway, I'm going to have lunch, and then see what the Cacao Growers Association can do for me. If they can't get me out to the trees today, I'll take a walk, see what else is in town, and then (if there really is nothing else to do) curl up with Llamas, Weaving, and Organic Chocolate.

Hmm...I wonder if they grow vanilla here, as well?

Tien

The lost treasure of the Mayas!

2005-05-01T12:25:00.000-07:00

I have it! I have it! A COMPLETE backstrap loom!!

And all I had to do to get it was ask every single vendor in the market if she had one...! The first fifteen or so all said no, but the last one had the prize...I figured SOMEONE had to have brought their weaving along to the shop. :-)

Unlike the one I got a few days ago, this one has absolutely everything...the attachment rods, the pick, the heddles, the changing-bar, the shuttle, the beater, the belt, etc. I could pick it up right now and weave with it. (I told her I was a weaver, so she made sure I had all the pieces.) It was 350 quetzales, which is probably highway robbery, but I considered it cheap at the price. All the pieces are handmade, and quite well-used--it's a nice collector's piece. I'll have to post a photo once I have one.

Forget San Antonio...anything after this would be an anticlimax. I'm going straight to the airport hotel in Guatemala, to spend the rest of the day slavering over my new prize. Must play with toy. Must play with toy. Must play with toy.

Tien

P.S. I ran into another backpacker who said she had lots of pets in her room last night as well...except she had cockroaches lined up on the wall right next to her pillow! So I don't feel so bad about my room anymore...my roaches were well-bred, high-class roaches--they stayed in the sink and the shower!

Ah, the joy...

2005-05-01T09:07:00.000-07:00

Roaches. And mice. Yergh.

Well, I did at least get a decent night's sleep...

Off to San Antonio Agua Caliente, which is also renowned for its weaving...they do pieces like the elaborately brocaded piece I mentioned yesterday. Except it's not brocade; they're wrapping bits of weft around several strands of warp, one at a time, in what is essentially embroidery-while-weaving. The mind reels.

Fortunately, I zipped all my packs shut before I went to bed and kept the food on top of a table, so I'm pretty sure I haven't picked up any visitors. (I hope.) I'm going to make another run through the market, then head out to San Antonio, and then back to Guatemala City. I'm also hoping to find a pharmacy that has doxycycline (an antimalarial), as I should really have started taking it a day or two ago, since malaria is endemic to Belize. Unfortunately, it's not all that common a drug here, since Guatemala City/Antigua are too urban to have malaria.

And then, tomorrow, off to Belize!

Tien

In Antigua

2005-04-30T16:55:00.000-07:00

After a happily uneventful bus trip, I´ve arrived in Antigua.

Antigua, about an hour out of Guatemala City, is the Guatemalan equivalent of Bangkok´s Khao San Road--which is to say, it's paved in tourists, loud dance music, and people selling completely random stuff at overinflated prices. I think the gringos must outnumber the local people.

And what, you might ask, is a traveling tigress doing in a place like this?

Looking for textiles, of course!

I had been hoping to acquire textiles from more regions of Guatemala--Xela (Quetzaltenango) has fine weaving, but naturally reflects the work of the surrounding highlands. In particular, I had wanted a sample of some beautiful tapestry huipils which I hadn't been able to find in Xela, and the guidebook had mentioned two well-known weaving shops in Antigua, and it was right next to Guatemala City, SO...

...here I am in Antigua.

I'm being grievously overcharged for a complete rathole tonight, the sort of place where the only question is whether you use your spare lock to supplement their padlock on the rusty hasp at the door, or use it to chain your packs to the bed. (I put it on the door: anyone motivated enough to break into your room will cut open your packs, and I want to protect my stuff from the hotel staff.) About the bed there's not much question: you pull out the handy silk sleep-sheet you've been carting around for just such an occasion, because your body and those sheets are not going to meet.

However, it does fulfill my basic needs, i.e. it has a bed, a private bath, nominally hot (more like lukewarm) water, AND is the closest hotel to the bus station, from which I plan to depart for Guatemala City tomorrow. I can live with anything for one night, and I was not going to drag that second bag one meter further.

Second bag, you ask? Well, yes. I've been buying up piles of textiles, and was going to do the natural thing and mail them home, but then I remembered how subject to theft, corruption, etc. Guatemala generally is, and asked about the post office. Sure enough, the Guatemalan postal service is just as unreliable as most other services. Since I'm carting around about $400 worth of textiles (which is a small fortune here), I´m NOT going to risk them in the mail. Instead, I'll put them in luggage storage with the airport hotel when I leave for Belize.

Meanwhile, the travelingtigress is lugging around a second bag in her teeth. (And may I say, it's damn heavy. How my somewhat-more-feline relatives manage to drag around deer and such in their teeth is completely beyond me.)

Anyway, this hotel is one of the worst I've encountered in my travels--only the concrete cinderblock oven in Vietnam and the overflowing toilet in Laos were worse--but what the hell, even if the shower is made of some kind of crumbling concrete and the toilet and sink have seen many better days, and I keep looking around for roaches, I can live with it for one night, and I won't have to drag my bags over half the city. I've never understood why people make such a fuss over nice hotels anyway--you wind up paying enormous sums for a room you're only going to spend two waking hours in, so who cares?

That being said, this place is still a rathole.

Anyway, I'm here, tourists and all, and find myself rather taken aback after my time in Xela. It seems odd to see so many gringos and gringas all at once. It's like stepping out the door one day for your usual walk through the city, and suddenly finding yourself surrounded by tourists snapping photos. I find myself fiercely resenting them, and wanting them all to go away so I can have some peace and quiet. (Which is all the more ironic, since a few days ago I couldn't wait to get away from Xela.)

I have mixed feelings about having come to Antigua. I wish I'd had a few more days in Xela, to talk to Carlos (my guide) and have him show me around, and introduce me to, the people he knows. I feel that the best part of traveling is the people you meet, and to really meet a group of people takes time--to find your contacts, to have them introduce you around, and really get to know them as people, instead of the usual tourist show. I wish I weren't on a schedule...if I'd been traveling solo, truly solo, with no timeframe, I'd have stayed in Xela at least another few days, maybe a week, before leaving for Antigua. Traveling on a timeframe is the absolute pits.

Oh, to have six months to travel again...

Well, anyway, I'm here in Antigua, and I've already scored one splendid piece--it's a huipil (woman's blouse) covered with colorful parrots and flowers in what looks like needlepoint, but is actually extremely detailed brocade weaving. And it's double-faced--the pattern is the same on both front and back, which takes even more skill. They do these incredibly complex weavings on the backstrap loom, because it's portable--they can't cart around a floor loom, but a backstrap loom can go anywhere, and they can work on it wherever they are. I saw a little girl working on one of those huipils, while minding the shop. Tomorrow I'll go back and try to get a photo of her, and try to buy the loom she's working on along with the part-finished piece--if I can convince her to part with it, it will be priceless for demonstrations and examples.

I'm pleased with how good my Spanish is, now--I've been getting around quite well recently, and bargaining in Spanish is coming easily and well. This afternoon I asked a couple people where to find an ATM, and had no trouble understanding their response. It's such a relief to be able to move about so easily, and such a contrast with the gringos I see on the streets. I can talk to shopkeepers, ask them where something came from, even say, "Hey, that comes from Xela, doesn't it?", and even have short conversations about the pieces on display. It's much better than where I was even a few days earlier. I love it.

Damn. I really wish I had more time here. I never should have gotten that ticket to Belize.

Well, I did buy it, and off I'll go, and I'll certainly have a great time there. But it won't be here.

Three weeks isn't long enough. Six months isn't long enough. I want to see EVERYTHING! And there are so many things I'll never get to see, try, do. Life is so damn short.

Tien

San Francisco El Alto, Cantel, and the Holy Grail

2005-04-29T20:21:00.000-07:00

Friday, April 29, 2005

Today I got up early and went off to the San Francisco El Alto market with Carlos the English speaking guide. The San Francisco El Alto market is the biggest Sunday market in Guatemala, and is particularly known for its stock sales--it's the biggest animal market in Central America.

(Hallelujah!! I have finally found the apostrophe key on the Spanish keyboard! I've been looking for it for a week now.)

The market is a tumble of stalls spreading out from the central square through much of the city--long before you reach the market itself, the streets are packed with individual stalls and vendors sitting with their wares spread out on a blanket around them. The market itself is held in the central square, with one big section for cattle sales, and a sea of tented canopies sheltering stalls selling anything from dried fish to luggage to fancy huipils (blouses). In the main square, there's a giant mound of old clothes, which Carlos explained were secondhand clothes from the U.S., very cheap.

(Where do those secondhand clothes come from? The Salvation Army, mostly, and Goodwill etc. Most of the clothes donated to charities aren´t good enough to sell in American stores, so they cherry-pick the best and sell the rest for about 30 cents a pound to distributors, who ship them down to Central America, South America, or Africa. A little piece of America, right here in Guatemala.)

The market overall wasn't very interesting (it's really more for locals than foreigners), but it did have some nice handicrafts. And the animal sales--cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys all herded together in a giant gaggle. I asked how much a cow cost, and Carlos said 600 quetzales for a young one, up to 1000 for a full-grown beast. He and his wife had sold a heifer there just last week. (They have a cow, which produces one calf a year, and turkeys, which they breed and sell at the market.)

After the San Francisco market, we moved on to the glassworks at Cantel. Here they recycle old bottles into beautiful cups, lamps, ornaments, perfume flasks, etc. We walked through the shop at the front, and then were invited into the workshop in back. It was amazing--giant piles of broken glass, sorted roughly by color, and then, through a blast of heat, the glassworks.

Three giant kilns, made of old brick, lined the back half of the room, and a bustle of Mayan craftsmen hurried across the floor, wielding long steel poles tipped with blobs of fiery orange glass. First a tiny lump on the pipe, rolled expertly on a steel forming board, then the pole raised nearly vertical, like a bugler sounding a salute, and a very little breath creating a tiny balloon. Then another rolling, to create a small round cylinder, and back to the kiln. He blew out the glass more, ballooning outward, then quickly dipped it into a mold lined with wet newspaper to create a bottle or flask form. As soon as the glass thickened, the craftsman would yank out the bottle, throw it across an old steel drum, and shape the neck deftly with calipers or a flat metal beater. It was fascinating to watch--they worked so quickly, and so deftly, that I couldn't get many photos. As soon as I picked up the camera, they were on to another step.

(It was nice being able to wander around on the work floor--in the U.S., of course, you'd never be able to get near the workers for insurance reasons, but here if you get injured, it's your problem, so you can wander around as you please.)

After the Cantel glassworks, we went on to Zunil, where I had high hopes from the guidebook's description of a textiles cooperative. The co-op itself was disappointing (low-quality goods, designed for tourist sales), but we went to see the shrine of San Simon, the "bad" saint.

San Simon is (per the guidebook) a mix of several Mayan deities blended with Catholicism, but my guide explained that San Simon had been a man who was very popular with the ladies, because he gave them medicines for all kinds of ailments. Then he did something bad--raped a young girl--and was killed for it. This distressed the women, because he had done so many good things for them, so they created a statue of him and began to bring him offerings.

Whichever story is true, San Simon is certainly an interesting figure--a drinking, smoking saint. One goes to the shrine and makes offerings of cigars, cigarettes, or rum, pouring it over the figure, or putting a lighted cigarette in his mouth; or the more abstemiously-minded can offer candles or flowers, though cigarettes and rum are supposed to be better. The shrine was dark, smoky, and hot (from all the candles), with San Simon himself seated in the shrine. One man came up, placed a cigarette between San Simon´s lips, held his hand, and murmured for a long time--a prayer, perhaps?--for a long time before departing.

I took one photo (they were 10 quetzales each, and I didn´t think I needed more than one) and we were off again.

Finally, we wound up in Xela (Quetzaltenango) again, where Carlos took me by the market so I could buy a traditional Xela huipil (which has quetzals brocaded into the weaving, and flowers down the front seams. Then we were off to another textiles shop, which Carlos said might be what I was looking for.

And there it was!! The Holy Grail. Tramas Textiles, just three blocks from my own hotel. I had lived right next to it for five days without ever knowing it was there. I walked in, and what should greet me but a backstrap loom? I almost did a little happy dance on the spot. The woman there demonstrated the loom for me, and I took lots of photos. Then I spotted a hanging on the wall that still had most of the loom pieces in it, and I asked if it was for sale. Yes, it was, and only 300 quetzales! I handed it over on the spot, and now I have most of a backstrap loom. I felt pretty good about buying it, too, because Tramas is a nonprofit co-op that helps widowed or abandoned women to earn a living, by teaching them to weave and then selling their products. (I'm headed back there tomorrow to see if I can buy a whole loom.)

After all that, I was pretty bushed, so I went home to the hotel.

Tien

Off to Antigua

2005-04-30T09:17:00.000-07:00

Just a quick note to say that my fever has FINALLY broken, and I'm no longer waking up in the middle of the night with chills, groping for the extra blanket and acetominephen. It is SO nice not to have to pop pills every few hours to stay coherent. And I have more energy, which is a good thing. (I am amused to say, though, that despite the flu I still managed to exhaust my guide yesterday. I suppose that's just natural tiger enthusiasm.) I'm going to try buying that backstrap loom now, and then I'm off to Antigua, near Guatemala City, where I hear there are even more shops with good textiles. I'm still missing a few samples, and hope to fill out my collection there. :-)

Tien

quick note

2005-04-28T12:24:00.000-07:00

Found my English-speaking guide today! and got half of the textiles tour I wanted. Going to San Francisco el Alto market tomorrow, it´s the biggest market in Guatemala. Sunday I go back out into the village to talk to more artisans (with a trilingual guide!).

Thrilled with everything, but I´m fighting off flu, and the Internet cafe is closing, so I think I´m going to go back to my hotel and fall over. More later!

Tien

Totonicapan

2005-04-28T16:13:00.000-07:00

Totonicapan: the capital of Totonicapan province. Not a particularly impressive town, but then very few towns in Guatemala are--the biggest city is Guatemala City at 300,000, and the next down is Xela (Quetzaltenango), where I´m staying. Xela has 150,000 people, and doesn´t really "feel" like a city to me. The winding alleys are nubbly with cobblestones, the houses are adobe or cinderblock (with the odd, astonishing Greek temple), and ancient buses, grinding and squealing, belch black smoke into the smoggy air as they creak past the corners.

Totonicapan is just like Xela, only smaller.

Anyway, I almost didn´t make it to Totonicapan, primarily because of my own cleverness. I was so excited at being able to ask ¿Donde es la terminal des autobuses? ("Where is the bus station?") that it didn´t occur to me to ask *which* bus station. Turns out there are three of them, and I wound up at the wrong one. Sorting all that out was very exciting and featured not one, not two, but THREE sentences in Spanish (all by myself!), but I finally made it there, about half an hour late.

(I am singularly proud of my new fluency. Admittedly, I get lost about three words into anyone´s reply, but I have now advanced to the approximate level of a Guatemalan two-year-old, which (coupled with enthusiastic and innovative sign language, pointing, etc.) enables me to do resoundingly independent things like calling a taxi, negotiating the price, and tell him where to go. Armed with that and a guidebook, my world has suddenly opened.)

Anyway, I arrived in Totonicapan at last, and what should meet me but an English-speaking guide?? I was ecstatic--I had expected a few words at most, but Carlos (the guide) spoke excellent English--he´d lived in the U.S. for nine years. Not only that, he knew all the spinning and weaving terms. O joy, o joy, o joy!

So we set off on our tour of artisan places. The first place we called was closed, but at the second, a weaver showed me his loom (a standard four-harness, four-treadle number) and how he created his patterns. It´s funny, because we think of looms as fine furniture, but they really aren´t--this one had its beams hammered crudely together, there was dust all over, harnesses dangling from old bits of nylon rope. But it worked just fine, and I took a bunch of photos.

Then Carlos took me to his village, which is a traditional Mayan village. We walked past new fields of corn, beans, and squash, planted in the Mayan way--the beans growing up the corn, and the squash tendrils running underneath--and past several concrete and adobe houses. Then, as we were passing another small cinderblock structure, the coughing roar of a generator intrigued me, and I stuck my nose in for a look. An old Mayan man and a young girl were pouring soft, wet, and enormously swollen kernels of white corn into a hopper, while lumps of soft, pasty stuff dropped out the bottom. As I watched, the girl dusted her hands, then plunged them into the doughy mass, kneading it--and then I realized, I was watching tortillas being made! The giant kernels of white corn were regular corn soaked in lime to soften it, and ground in the giant hopper; she would take the pasty mash home, and make tortillas or other stuff out of it.

(Okay, color me dumb. But I always figured you used cornmeal for tortillas, not ground corn--it was way cool to watch the process happening.)

Anyway, I took some photos of the machine--I was hoping to get a photo of the girl, too, but she skipped out of view. Guatemalan people can be sensitive about being photographed, and children are especially likely to say no, probably because of a widespread rumor that Americans kidnap Guatemalan children and cut them up as organ donors. (No, I´m not making this up. Honest.) Anyone photographing children runs the risk of being mistaken for a baby-snatcher, and in fact a Japanese tourist and his guide were lynched in Todos Santos a few years back, after panicked villagers decided he was sussing out the area for babynappers. Another woman had a very near brush a year or so ago--considering the widespread prevalence of the rumor, I´ve been actively avoiding pointing my camera at Guatemalan children. Which is a pity, because they´re so beautiful...especially the young women. But I´ll leave that to the photos...

Then my guide took me back to his house, an old adobe structure that had been standing for over 200 years. (He told me proudly that he was the fifth generation to grow up under that roof.) The roof was blackened and charred with the soot of many cooking fires, the mud crumbling away from the walls and exposing the bricks of sun-dried clay, the fireplace still in the center of the room, where it had once warmed the entire house. A battered old gas stove sat in one corner, but its real purpose wasn´t revealed until he opened the oven: a storage place for fruits, to keep them away from flies.

His wife was there, and showed me her ikat technique. (Ikat is a process whereby either the warp or weft threads are tie-dyed, creating a pattern in the final piece. It requires great skill, both to create and to weave.) She is a specialist--she ties the knots, then gives the yarn to a dyer, who in turn will give it to a weaver. (Yes, it really does take a village to create a fabric. LOL) She showed me some lovely pieces that mixed ikat with handspun brown cotton (!), woven on a backstrap loom (!), and I bought a used one for 350 quetzales, about $50. But I wasn´t floored until my guide offered me an old dishtowel to dry my hands--even the dishtowels are handwoven with beautiful, intricate patterns! I almost offered to buy the dishtowel--then I got my crazy-gringa instincts back under control. I mean, everyone knows Americans are weird, but buying up the dirty dishtowels??? But it was beautiful. I still kind of regret not buying it (or trying to).

Last on the list was a bunch of Guatemalan wooden masks, used in traditional dance...crudely carved of wood and painted in bright colors, they´re used to re-enact stories of the Conquistadores in traditional dances. I didn´t think much of them, until they turned up with a tiger mask. I owe the Traveling Tiger an apology--I told him there weren´t any tigers in Central America! They were selling the masks, and after some haggling I paid 275 quetzales for the tiger. (I am the traveling tigress, after all...must collect tiger memorabilia from every single country!)

Anyway, that was my morning...in the afternoon, I got to go shopping with my Spanish teacher, and that was a hoot. She and the other teacher blazed a path through the market, bargaining in rapid-fire Spanish with shopkeeper after shopkeeper, laughing and giggling, with two rather dazed American students scrambling behind them. It was fun watching the devastation, but I have to admit, I´m still a gringa at heart: I would have been happy to pay the extra ten quetzales and just buy it from the first vendor. Of course, that would have been cheating. LOL

My teacher also looked at my purchases from the morning, asked how much I´d paid, and blithely told me I´d been robbed--the blanket would have been 300 quetzales or less *new*, and only 100 quetzales used, so I´d paid triple the asking price, and the tiger mask was worth maybe 60 quetzales new, let alone used.

Hmm. I´ve even seen that particular tourist scam before...get a tourist out, have them meet the artisans, then sell them goods at inflated prices. Oh well...it wouldn´t be the first time I got cheated, and it certainly won´t be the last. I will think more about it next time, though.

Tomorrow is the San Francisco el Alto market, which is the biggest market in all of Guatemala. I´ve been warned that the pickpockets will steal everything that isn´t nailed down, so I´m leaving my backpack at the hotel (which would normally be a no-no) and going with just an old bag. Looking forward to seeing it...should be way cool!

Tien

P.S. I forgot to mention that I´ve come down with flu--pretty nasty, fever and chills and the lot--but am fortunately not all that congested, and it hasn´t affected my energy much. Still, trying to take it relatively easy the next few days...er, well, maybe.

Spanish school is FUN!!

2005-04-27T18:14:00.000-07:00

Just a quick note to say that Spanish school is enormous fun and I would LOVE to come back for a full eight-week immersion course...I just finished my first five hours of class and I´m already at the point of being able to carry on a conversation, albeit a highly selective one, in Spanish. I hadn´t expected it to be this enjoyable--most language classes are pretty boring--but because it´s a one-on-one class, it´s more like an extended conversation than a lesson plan. She´ll teach me one or two things, then we´ll talk about some random topic in Spanish (starting with the grammatical example), and she teaches me the missing vocabulary words as I go. This is WAY fun.

The teacher is actually quite flabbergasted by how fast I´m picking it up--"Estas como una machina!"--and I´m quite pleased as well. It helps to have both French and Latin, of course--the verb conjugations and nouns are nearly identical, and the biggest problem I´m having is pronunciation--I keep reverting to French, English, or Latin pronunciations, which is muy mala. The crash course I did on the plane over has also been very helpful--even though I only got through the first two lessons.

Anyway, I feel like the world is opening up for me, and I´m a bit sorry to be bailing on Guatemala and heading off to Belize. I´ve been told that Panajachel and Lago de Atitlan (an hour or so away) are both quite touristy, and I should be able to get an English-speaking guide there. Dang. I wish I´d known.

Tomorrow I´m going to embark on the next adventure, trying to find the bus to Totonicapan, where I will meet the guy for the textiles tour. I think I´m going to spend the rest of the night brushing up on "Where is the bus terminal?" If I´m really, really, REALLY lucky...I might even understand the answer.

LOL

Tien

"¿Donde es la terminal de autobuses?"

A nice, quiet day

2005-04-27T11:22:00.000-07:00

One of the nice things about traveling solo is that you can take a day off whenever you feel like it. Sometimes you want a little down time to sit and reflect, or just laze about. If you´re running around on a tour, there isn´t much opportunity for that, but if you´re traveling on your own, you can do whatever you like.

So I have spent most of today quietly, either in the Internet cafe or just walking around town a bit, reading a book, thinking about some things my coach/career counseler said right before I left, and generally relaxing.

People have remarked that solo travel is a lot more effort than organized tours, and this is very true. There are a lot more challenges in solo travel, and you need ingenuity and adaptability to get around. You will probably also see "less" than you would on an organized tour (as in, fewer of the touristy high points)--there´s a lot less efficiency when you have to figure out bus routes, etc. yourself, especially since you can´t know for sure when and how the buses run until you actually get there.

But there´s also the opportunity to meet many people and experience the journey in a way that you never would on an organized tour, where you´re largely insulated from the culture except during certain prepackaged activities. Yes, you can see Angkor Wat in four days on a flying tour, or spend a week in Thailand being shuttled between Bangkok and Chiang Mai. But you wouldn´t get a chance to ride in a tuktuk, make friends with the guy selling freshly barbequed skewers of chicken, pork, and beef on the street corner, live with Tibetan cave yogis, or spend four days with an Akha weaver, learning her art. There´s a special joy in spontaneous travel that I feel is true for life, too--the more you venture off the established track, the more intense the experiences you´ll have.

Not all of them will be good, of course--there´s been a lot I haven´t liked about Guatemala--but there have been a lot of unexpectedly fun things as well. Like life, you can take it either as a series of adventures, or a comfortable tour--or switch between them. I think it´s nice to have a blend, but I get enough normalcy at home. When I travel, I want adventure.

And, speaking of adventure, I´ve just bought round-trip tickets from Guatemala City to Belize. I´ll be leaving Monday, May 2, and returning Friday, May 13, just in time to catch my flight back to the U.S. (And I´m not worrying about the date, either...I´m Wiccan, and 13 is a lucky number for Wiccans. :-) )

I´m thrilled to announce that I´ll be in Belize for the annual Cashew Festival, which sounds like fun. See http://www.belizeanjourneys.com/features/cashew/newsletter.html for details. Sort of like the Gilroy Garlic Festival, I imagine, but on a smaller scale. I hope to be on ground for it, though I might already be out diving. (Ooh, hurt me. :-) )

I´m definitely going diving in Belize (it is after all one of the best diving sites in the world), and going to some of their abundant wildlife preserves. There are also some Mayan villages in rural Belize, and one or two small Mayan ruins, so who knows--I might get my Mayan experience after all. :-)

Off to language school,

Tien

Change in plans...

2005-04-26T15:34:00.000-07:00

Well, I´ve got the next three days planned out: fifteen or so hours of Spanish language class, a textiles tour with Carlos Molina, who runs some kind of Mayan weavers´project in a nearby city; a visit to the San Francisco El Alto market, which is one of the two biggest in Guatemala, and a couple of days staying with a Mayan family in between all that. That should be plenty to keep me busy through Saturday. After that, I think I´ll probably pass up through Todos Santos in the northern highlands, through Coban (which is famous for its coffee), and up to the Belize border. My various leads have mostly petered out, so it´s pretty clear I´m not going to get my conversation with a Mayan weaver--which is a pity, but oh well. Outside of that and Carlos´s textiles tour, there´s really not much else to keep me in Guatemala, and it´s pretty rough traveling, so I think I´m going to cross into Belize and spend a week or two there instead.

Belize doesn´t have a weaving tradition, but they do have fantastic ecotourism, and the biggest barrier reef in the Western Hemisphere, i.e. spectacular diving. It also has a much larger number of English speakers, which should make for easier traveling. I don´t think I´ll lose much by bailing on Guatemala--I´m not going to be able to get out to the Maya (beyond the homestay that is) and I already have a nice collection of Guatemalan textiles, and will get more at Friday´s market. (They´re not especially cheap--between $50 and $75 per handwoven skirt--but considering that each is 8 meters of handwoven cloth, that´s a very good price.)

Tomorrow´s going to be a quiet day; I´m taking the first half of the day to relax, plan my onward journey, and take a look at all these weaving books. After that I´ll be in language school until around 7pm. Thursday, on the other hand, should be a lot more interesting.

I forgot to mention that I´ve been having minor problems with the altitude. Quetzaltenango is at 10,000 feet, and I get altitude sickness starting around 7,000 feet, so I have way less stamina than usual and am crankier, prone to getting out of breath, headaches, etc. It should pass in another day or so (I hope!).

Tien