The Blue Monkey Review

At Lago de Atitlan I stayed in Panajachel. No surprise there--lots of tourists stay there. Yesterday, walking through the streets I happened onto a couple more tourists, Nate and Todd who had hiked up Pacaya with me. We talked together for about an hour and exchanged important travel information. Like, what times the ferries run (when the boatman gets enough passengers), where are you likely to get assaulted, and what is the medication routine for various antibiotics. Important stuff.

We also talked about hard local people work. Hard labor in the fields, selling to tourists, ferrying passengers, fishing--it's going on all around. A driver told me that a good return for a day of working a field is 30 quetzals. That's about 4 bucks. People everywhere here are working just about every moment they are visible to the tourists, i.e. those of us who aren't working.

And, if it was not sufficiently evident that life for most people here is hard, you see people carrying things. In any group of several Mayan people, someone, and often everyone, will have a bundle to bear. The Mayan loadbearing folkway has a fairly clear gender stamp to it. And, while I'm sure there is a limited range of options to this kind of thing for pre-industrial people, I'm guessing their burden-bearning reaches deep into the past.

Let me note here that no culture in the Americas made practical use of the wheel. Mayans had tiny wheeled vehicles, apparently toys. Michael Coe speculates they might have used a wheel-like turn device for pottery. But for transportation, Mayan, Nahuatl, and Quechua all alike had relied on putting one foot in front of another. Only the Quechua domesticated a beast of burden, the alpaca, that could take loads up and down the slopes of the Andes. As far as that goes, a wheeled vehicle would have offered little advantage in the volatile landscape of the Andes.

The same might be said about the highland region of Mayan culture. It's not that far from Guatemala City to Panjachel as the quetzal flies, but the road goes over several mountain passes. Imagine the worst part of the Pennsylvania turnpike, the part from the last tunnel heading west to Donegal. Now imagine it with higher mountains, roads subjected to the occasional hurricane, and villages choked with traffic. It takes four hours even in ideal conditions.

But further north, in the Central (El Petén more or less) and Northern (Yucatan Peninsula) regions of Mayan culture, the terrain is fairly flat. And as I've already noted earlier, the Mayan could make excellent roads. So a wheeled vehicle would have offered real advantages over the transport of cargo on skids or on the human back. But then, and still now, huge parcels move from place to place on human backs or heads--usually male backs and female heads.

Obviously you see people carrying things just the way you would see them carrying those same things around Greensburg or Niksic--under their arms, slung over the should. Babies are universally carried by their young mothers in pouches made of blankets that are secured in front. But for very large bundles that aren't on board a truck, you will often see that it moves because a man is bent over under it. The load is anchored to his head with a band and a roped running back around the bottom of the bundle to secure it. Men carry loads of corn larger than they are. I saw a man carrying three (or, honest, it might have been four) bags of cement this way. It's no wonder that older men often end up with back problems.

Older women end up with neck problems. Although occasionally you will see a woman carrying a load on her back, it's almost impossible to drive down the road in the highlands without seeing women carrying bundles on their heads. Today I saw a woman make a circle with a piece of cloth and place it on her head for the platform. Then, with the help of a girl she hoisted a large basket onto her head. Once she felt that it balanced she took her hand away and walked off at a normal pace. At times I've seen women balancing items on their heads with no apparent platform, and believe me, I got as close as I could to inspect. How heavy do these loads get? I don't know, but I've seen women carrying fairly good loads of firewood this way.

Children mix the two types of carrying techniques. But, it's clear that even from an early age that the gendered load-bearing is taking hold.

Posted by at 7:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Lago de Atitlan sits in a valley surrounded by mountains, of which the highest are volcanoes. The view across the lake, any time of the day, is spectacular. The lake is in the Guatemalan highlands, 3 or 4 hours from Guatemala City, and as you approach it you see the villages becoming almost entirely Mayan. Women here almost all wear the traditional, oolorful skirts and blouses, many with the distinctive headgear of their locale. You hear Mayan spoken on the street. Spanish serves as the second language for the boatmen, children, vendors, and passersby.

I took the 8:30 launch (it left at nine when we had enough passengers) to Santiago Atitlan, 20 minutes away over the lake. Within minutes, seconds, of disembarking I had a guide and new best friend, Jacobo, 15 years old and working to support a mother and younger brother. In the course of the morning we talked quite a bit. He proved very informative, and at times translated what was going on around us.

My primary destination was the shrive of Maximon. The route took us through the marketplace, filling quickly with commerce and color as women vendors and crowds of women shoppers came for the day's work. We passed a man surrounded by shoppers who had spread a mat on the ground to display his stock of medicinal herbs and plants. "You don't need to check into a clinic," he was saying in Spanish, "you can use..." as he showed how to mix the concoction.

Maximon is the principle saint or god (depeding on your p.o.v.) of the Mayan people, revered and/or worshipped throughout Guatemala. He apparently combines the charisma of several Mayan gods with the questionable charm of Pedro Alvarado (brutal conquistador of Central America) and Judas Iscariot. Each year his image moves, carried by one of the cofradia who devote themselves to his service. There are ten houses in the town, so Maximon makes a circuit in ten years among the cofradia. The chief man of the house, presumaby the head of his cofradia, makes a room available where the faithful can pray for miracles. Offerings of rum and tobacco, or money, help elicit Maximon's help.

Tourists make their visits, too, of course, for a small fee. I think each member of the group that arrived before me spent about enough time to take a picture. I stayed a good deal longer, watching the men who cared for the image. Jacobo and I stayed long enough that we were offered seats (though, fortunately no food).

The room istelf is quite small, maybe 10x10 feet, with benches, a table, the image in front of the table, and along one wall two images of Jesus--one on the cross (though covered with flowers) and one in a coffin. The image itself is about three feet tall, a wooden mask wearing two cowoy hats and a skil cravat, and draped with silk scarves. When not drinking guarro (aided by two of the caretakers) Maximon has a cigar in hiw mouth. Buster Browns poke out from beneath the silken scarves.

Men came and went, with five about the smallest number present, and nine about the most. One woman appeared at the doorway, and one of the men told her to bring more food. The men's job was to eat the food, drink, gossip. One of the faithful came to pray, and lit candles in front of Maximon and also poured out part of his guarro onto the concrete floor. The head of the house also came in for a while. These men are sometimes reputed to be shamans, though I can't say anything about that. Often the heads of cofradia have to spend large sums to support the rituals of their groups. It's an honor and a burden.

We saw more of the town, including two of the 20 evangelical churches in town. Jacobo told me there were many "cristianos" in town, and that those who left the Catholic church usually also left their devotion to Maximon behind (but, sometimes they need something, Jacobo told me, and so turn to Maximon).

Leaving on the same launch with me was a fisherman, a true son of the soil, or lake, I guess. In a good night's work he can pull in 100 lbs of fish, he told me. His boat is a caylluca (I'm guessing on the spelling), a common enough craft here. It looks like an Indian canoe carved out of one log but with large, flat boards along the sides. The single oar has a long handle, so you can use it standing if need be. We both turned back to our own thoughts though these were interrupted when his cell phone rang.

Posted by at 3:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

My arrangements for the trip to Volcan Pacaya had cost so little that I wondered just how minimal they might be. Would I be picked up in someone´s old Datsun, drive the hour and a half to the volcanoe park, and then shown where the path up the volcano began? When the van finally arrived at 6:30 in the morning, I was a little relieved to see I wouldn´t be touring the volcano alone. In fact, the van was built to carry 12 people comfortably, but managed to seat 15. I hadn´t had what I would call a good night´s sleep, and felt a little dodgy otherwise. So, I quickly saw that the hard part of the day would be surviving the trip to the volcano.

It was and I did. The climb up Pacaya took another hour and a half, and it costs some work. But, any equal amount of time on the Inca trail would have required much more work. Since I´d had several enjoyable hours the night before lying awake thinking about my dinner, I also had time to wonder how dangerous this trip might be. Every bit of travel information that I read before coming to Guatemala warned about crime. And, amazingly, one of the places where armed robberies have happened frequently is on the trails of volcano parks. Later in the day I asked one of the drivers about that and he said there had not been an assault for eight years in the Pacaya park. I can see why. We had our own armed escort. I finally had direct benefit from the proliferation of pump shotguns here.

You walk through mixed farm land and jungle. Local people grow corn and beans here, though on the way there I noticed quite a few coffee plantings. As you go farther, jungle takes over. This isn´t the same lush rainforest found in Peten, but thick enough, and both warm and humid. Finally, though, you walk suddenly beyond the treeline into an area dominated by the cone of the volcano.

We couldn´t hike up to the caldera because it was visibly cracking below and who knew when a big chunk would head down the mountain with hikers along for the ride. Pacaya is active, and currently putting out an impressive quota a lava. What we could see from our vantage was a field of lava, some already cooling, but some actively running yellow and red, and at times breaking into flame. This paid me back for all the lost sleep and crazy van ride. And I would have been proud to show the pictures from there as a special memory of that trip. But then I saw our guide literally running along the rim of the slope we stood on and heading over the edge.

The guide, José, did not seem to have the same duties as most guides, that is, informing you about flora, fauna, and geophysical activity. Instead, he often seemed like the one odd character in any medium sized group who keeps pushing the limits, trying to find the craziest things to do, trying to get everyone else into trouble. There´s always someone like that. Usually, though, it isn´t the leader. José´s job seemed to boil down to getting us out onto the lava field.

We probably spent about 40 minutes out on the lava lake. How dangerous was this? Hard to say. When lava cools it shrinks, of course, but seems to loose mass inside. So everywhere we walked had formed from a cooling liquid into a hollowed out solid. Every once in a while a foot went through the surface of the bed. And I don´t think I will surprise anyone by saying that lava is jagged. Think of a kulm bank (or slag heap) but with all the bits of slag attached. And new. And sharp. A couple of our guys did fall and came back up with some cuts. The footing, in addition to sometimes caving in under you, was also tricky because the lava lake did not cool off evenly. It was more like the choppy water that Peter had a chance, briefly, to walk on. Imagine roiled water with streams going eerywhich way, and large waves or swells in places, all frozen in place. Plus, when I say that the surface had cooled, that´s relative. You could touch most of the places where we walked. But there were also places where you could pour out water and make water vapor. The one real concern that I had was that my nylon pants might start melting. How close did we get to the actual lava flow? You can see the pictures.

Posted by at 5:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I had misgivings about paying for special transportation from Guatemala City to Antigua. What´s next? Taking a tour bus? But Steve, who shared the ride with me, told me that friends of his had taken one of the chicken busses to Panajachel and that the bus had been stopped, passengers told to lie down, and then their baggage was rifled. I didn´t feel bad anymore. Plus, our driver´s name was Elvis, so how could I have afforded to miss that?

The weather continued sunny and perfect until early afternoon. I had plenty of time to check in, wander around and get lost, and finally fine the Parque Central, the Ayuntamiento and other official buildings in the center of Antigua. The city had served as the capital of most of Central America under the Spanish. Time and a few earthquakes have left their marks. Still, the city has plenty of color and interest. It looks like a city in Latin America, which is gratifying, but it also offers plenty of comfort for travelers.

About 1 P.M. I had finished making arrangements for a volcano trek and was trying to figure out where to eat when a middle-aged man co-occupied the ledge in front of the administrative building where I had perched. Antonio turned out to be a Spanish teacher, who gave private lessons (¨I used to work for a school, but then I opened my eyes and realized that I was making money for someone else.¨) He gave me a few pointers as we talked (Spain ¨se hizo rico¨ NOT ¨se puso rico¨), but these didn´t really intrude on a very cordial talk (Spain came up because he was complaining about Spanish immigrants and mocking thei Castillian accent).

Antonio had an educated viewpoint on Guatemala´s present circumstances. Thirty years of war in the late 20th century took a heavy toll here. Even now, though, the class system locks the country into a severe disparity in wealth. ¨We have the rich,¨ said Antonio, ¨and the poor, the seriously poor, and the poor at greatest extremity of suffering.¨ His analysis can´t surprise anyone familiar with Latin American history. The gaping distance between those who have and those who don´t makes for glaring injustices even in relatively successful countries like Mexico. It makes a mockery of democracy, a word that Antonio pronounced with quotation marks.

But in addition to the corrupt political system, Guatemala also suffers from a conservative social system among the indigenous. Antonio certainly revealed nothing but respect for the Maya people, and shared my hope for the preservation of their culture. But, ¨the families have many children and the parents see no value in education. They want the children to help, and then they send the boys to work in their early teens and the girls to marriage.¨ And, if a program emerges to spread family planning, ¨the church says NO! It´s against morality.” Antonio didn´t see much to choose between Catholic and evangelical churches. As we say in Guatemala, he told me, “militar y cura, comida segura.”

Later in the afternoon I sat down with a testimony to Guatemala´s struggles. The central park here has plenty of vendors and children offering shoeshines. It reminds me of Cusco, except that the children are not as aggressive. One little boy asked if I wanted a shine. This might have seem superfluous since my boots are not black (the only polish color available) and, as I pointed out, ¨they aren´t made of leather.¨ Orlando, age 8, sat down anyway and we talked a little. “Tu mucho dinero?¨he asked. I assured him that wasn´t the case, but he ignored that and asked if I would buy him some shoes. Okay, so I´m not very smart. I gave him some money. Then he asked if tomorrow I would buy him a ball. I said probably not.

Posted by at 8:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Although I could have flown back to Guatemala City after my trip to Tikal, I arranged to spend one night in Santa Elena, just across a short causeway from Flores. I've wanted to visit Flores for months, as soon as I read about it in a history of the Maya. But I didn't know that it was Flores I wanted to see. It stands on what had been Tayasal, the "last capital of the Maya" according to Museo Popol Vuh.

The Spanish conquest of the New World went along more like a bad marriage, with periods of rapid progress (deterioration from the inigenous point of view) and long stretches of slow encroachment. Considering the size of their empire in the Americas, relatively few Spanish made the trip there to lend a hand. They always depended upon indigenous as collaborators, and in many areas the local people held out. The Pueblo in the North of New Spain came under the rule of cross and crown in the 17th century, then rebeled and had to be reintegrated into the empire..

Accorind to Michael Coe, the Maya held out longer than any other indigenous people, at least any other under direct pressure from Spanish civil and religious authorities. Mayan lords borkered deals witht the Spanish and resisted conquest even against the brutal Pedro Alvarado. The last area that came under control was the lowlands of Guatemala, El Peten, and the last Mayan city was Tayasal.

Tayasal requires some explanation. It certainly belonged to the Mayan culture, but the Itza people who lived there had assimilated to Mayan culture in the centuries after the classic period. This group had first migrated north, giving the Itza to Chichen Itza, and exercised influence over a large area--one of the few "empires" in the Mayan experience. But even post-classic cities eventually declined, and people migrated to other areas. One group of Itza made its way to El Peten, to the lake where they built an island city.

Much of the classic culture disappeared by the post-classic period (ca. 900-1524). Priests apparently lost the knowledge that allowed them to make the long-count calendar calculations. Glyph writing fell into disuse. The stone and pottery art will still impress, but the cities of the period lack much of grandeur. Still, the culture persisted along with some form of the social and economic system that marked Mayan culture.

How long did they hold out? Remarkably, they persisted into the 17th century. They resisted military pressure from the Spanish governor of the region, and when friars visited in 1695 the king of Tayasal flatly rejected Christianity. Finally in 1696 to 97 Martin de Ursua led the military expedition that laid siege of Tayasal and brought down the last Mayan city.

1697? Michael Coe encouraged his readers to imagine the implications. Here stood the last of the great stone age civilizations, Coe wrote, still carrying on blood sacrifice to their gods while Harvard students worried over Calvinist theology. It's easy to extend this. Did the kings of Tayasal still draw blood from their penises to please the gods while John Locke was writing his treatises on civil government? Did priests still cut out the hearts of sacrificial victims while Isaac Newton was sorting out the law of universal attraction? When was the last juego de pelota, the distinctive ball game that Mayans played on into the years of the conquest?

In the event, Flores turned out to be kind of a disappointment. The island is tiny. I made a slow circuit of it in about 20 minutes. My only adventure there involved not finding an automatic teller and having to pay for a beer with my Visa card. From my in-depth survey, it appears that most of the business on the island consists of hotels, bar/cafe/restaurants, and travel agencies providing tours to Tikal and hikes to anywhere. Later I hired a launch to take a tour of the lake (the launch seats 24, but the 16 year old boatman, Aristides, had only me to keep under control). The Tayasal people clearly made a living from fishing and probably from trade. The thick jungle that surrounds the lake must have helped keep European civilization at bay.

My homage to Tayasal ended well, though. I finally found an ATM in Santa Elena (after several false starts) and also met Kea and Marissa, who were having the same trouble finding a machine that worked. They were both young women (Candadian and American respectively) traveling on a very short shoestring. I treated them to beers, and they appreciated the relative opulence of Hotel Esplendido where I stayed.

It's fairly consistent that when I meet other tourists (and recall, these are non-tour tourists) they turn out be really good people. They value other cultures and diversity, recognize the need for more cooperation to help people in poor countries, respect the environment, and also respect the local people they meet. We had a great time discussing common interests. Kea had an amazing story about staying for a couple of weeks in Havana at the end of three months in Cuba. Some former (?) IRA activists happened to be holding a reunion in the same hotel and drank the hotel out of all its beer. Everyone who wanted to drink had to go looking for it in other bars.

Both Kea and Marissa are still making their way through college, and both have interesting career ideas. Neither one is likely to become a stock broker or a Christian conservative. They just need more time to have the influence they deserver. Maybe the next Tayasal will fare better.

Posted by at 8:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The trip to Tikal should have turned into a disaster, a slugfest with bad karma, good intentions gone haywire. It began with my rolling out of bed at four in the morning with about that many hours of real sleep. Everything went like clockwork from that point, which meant I arrived at the airport way early and with no breakfast. And, while I tried to piece together the most important meal of the day over the next three hours, I also spent the time waiting for and taking the flight on Tikal Jets.

I'd hoped to take in the landscape as we flew, to see how the highlands near Guatemala City turn into the lowlands of El Petén, the largest department in Guatemala. Clouds obscured the ground, however, soon after we took off and only as we landed did we break through the cloud cover. Then I could see jungle everywhere but occasionally broken by long, straight roads. El Peten, unlike the Yucatan, is hilly, though some of those hills include the 250 arecheological sites in the region.

Jose, the guide, found me pretty quickly at the airport, and we set off in an ugly drizzle for the hour's trip to Tikal. The road passes through dense forest. I've seen at least one map that classifies this region as tropical rainforest, and that seems to fit. Along the way we saw plenty of pigs and horses, gifts of the Spanish to the Americas, and the small fields where farmers scratch out a living here. Chicle, the chewy ingredient in chewing gum, used to be a major export. We tried some at a stop along the way. It tasted like nothing in particular, but had the dense chewiness of a piece of gum chewed out of all its flavor. Now artificial ingredients have replaced chicle, so it has only left its name on an American brand and in the Spanish word for chewing gum.

We also passed quite a few evangelical churches. In fact, as we went on, I noticed only evangelical churches, and no Catholic ones at all. The evangelicals have built sturdy buildings, and pretty big ones too. They stand out in these villages where most buildings are the two room thatched huts where the local Maya live. And they are colorful--orange, purple, yellow--with colorful names like Tabernaculo Agua Viva. I aksed Jose about this and he said that in the region evangelical churches claimed half the population.

It might surprise some readers that I'd arranged to go with a tour for this trip. Usually, I'm happy making stuff up for myself. But I took a Spanish tour, and had the fortune of being with only two other people, Walter and Gloria. It wasn't exactly a Spanish-only day--Walter and Gloria both live in L.A., but are Guatemalan by birth. Jose spoke only Spanish, and my only translation question of the day (what's the English for "cal," the substance that Maya used in the mixture they used in their roads?) had to wait until we found a guide who spoke English (as I suspected, it's lime). I was impressed by Jose's knolwedge of the region, of the Maya culture, and of the site. When Jose talked about topics I was fairly well informed about, it became clear that he really provided sound information.

By about 9 we had arrived at the park, parked, and prepared ourselves for the hike. The first thing to note is that the park is huge. Tikal was the most extensive Mayan city, as far as I know, and one of the most populous. Surveys have discovered 3500 structures there, only a small per centage of which have been excavated, let alone restored. The second thing to note is, nature went to work reclaiming the area even as Mayan people began abandoning the city, about 900 A.D. The Spanish may have stumbled across a stone building or two on their way to and from the business of subduing the local people, but they did not know a city was sitting in part of their wildnerness. The site was only identified in the 1840s. The point, though, is that most of the walk is through thick jungle, broken by areas of restoration. Many of the known temples still sit under ground and overgrowth, looking exactly like small (and not-so-small) hills.

And the last point is that the minute we stepped on the the Mayan footpath known as sacbe to begin our hike, the rain started in earnest. It continued to rain steadily for the next two or two and a half hours. In fact, steady doesn't quite do justice to this rain. It varied from a hard steady rain to a torrential downpour. Shortcut paths turned into small streams. The sacbe held up well (pretty good for 1300 year-old pavement) but in places where erosion had made holes, serious obstacles formed in our path.

We soldiered on. The only thing I can compare it to is one of those jungle movies, where people are in some desperate situation in a tropical rain forest and struggling through a torrential rain. Think of the scene from King Kong, except that our rain at Tikal was much heavier. I won't mention it again except to say that all this rain worked on me. I won't say it depressed me, but it colored my appreciation of the artifacts we saw. Taking a picture of a pyramid or stela proved very tricky, tryiing to balance my umbrella and camera and keep the camera from getting wet. Still, the place worked on us. The "acropolis," one the the plazas with two large pyramids facing each other, impressed me even with water splattering all over my pants and soaking into my socks. We climbed one of the pyramids there but could not see very far because the clouds had closed around us so tightly.

By the time "Templo IV" came into sight I was resigned to some kind of perfunctory nod to the rest of the edifices and squishing my way back to the park entrance with as much dignity and deliberation as possible. In fact, I almost passed up the opportunity to go the pyramid/temple, but Walter gave me a valuable nudge. "If you go, I'll go," he said. That's guy talk--done deal.

The first inkling that I had that this might not go into my diary as "ho-hum, another pyramid" was as we continued along and I thought we'd passed the path to take to the ascent. No, it's ahead, he told me. In other words, the temple was so large that my distance perception had been mistaken. Even now much of it is covered with earth, but it clearly pokes up above the treeline. And just about the time that Walter and I agreed to take the trip up the pyramdi, the rain stopped. Almost like someone turning off a faucet. So, as we climbed, we climbed toward a clearing sky.

When I reached the top, I'm not sure what I did. No phsyical response seemed adequate. I looked and looked. I gawked! I could see for miles and miles in every direction except in an arc of about 270 degrees. Jungle covered everything, all the way to the horizon, and the only breaks in the canopy were Mayan buildings rising above the treeline. Some of them, partially excavated, lloked like temples growing out of the ground. It's the kind of sight that big budget movies try for, but I don't know how anything could do justice to it. Certainly no photo I took will make it look the way it felt to look at it. [In fact, back at the airport, I saw a photo of the scene that covered an entire wall (!) and it didn't give anything like the same impression.]

The rest of the day? We slowly dried, climbed another pyramid, and took our time completing our tour. As the rain went away, spider monkey ventured out into the trees and the local variety of pheasant, with shocking bright colors, appeared in the forest. IN the distance, forg exercised their voices making sounds like tractor pull getting revved up. By the time we sat down to lunch, we had spent four hours in the jungle.

Posted by at 10:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Guatemala City is the largest "urban aggolomeration" in Central America, 4 million population according to one of my taxi drivers today. Even though I attempted to make my acquaintance with the city on foot, after an hour of steady walking up and down Avenida La Reforma, I found I hadn't covered very much of the city. It goes on and on.

I also failed to gain more than a shallow sense of the distinctiveness of this city. I suppose that 24 hours just doesn't suffice to provide a pinhole into a different culture. The city looks outwardly like many parts of Mexico City or Cuernavaca. I haven't stumbled on any evidence of the harsh poverty here that has placed Guatemala among the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere. Where I'm living at the moment, in the "Zona Viva" among nice restaurants and hotels, I could be in Southern California.

Except for the weather, of course. "Aprovehce la mañana!" one of my cab drivers said. "Take advantage of the morning, because it is full on winter here." When he said this my teee-shirt was mostly saturated with sweat, but his meaning was clear. We could expect rain by the afternoon, and lots of it. And that's pretty much the forecast until November.

Still, until the rain rolls in, the temperature climbs into the mild 70s, with modest humidity. On my walk, and during lunch at Claroscuro, I took stock of my few impressions. I've seen many women in traditional dress here--not so many as to make it common, but enough that they don't look like they're wearing costumes. The indigenous people tend to be short, perfectly proportioned for their size, and often quite handsome. Their enviable complexions age slowly, so I'm often frustrated at placing people by age. The woman who cleaned the floors this morning at Hotel Casa Santa Clara looked like she must have been in violation of child labor laws, and I saw one of the guards outside the Hotel Intercontinental, in full gear, who looked like he might have been 14. But, I'm sure in both cases, the people in question are older--though I have no clue how much older.

And, speaking of guards, they are everywhere! In Mexico, especially Mexico City, private security people are so common that you stop noticing them. But here, the number of guards go beyond Mexico. They tend to carry pump shotguns, and these look very business-like. Plus, the uniforms here vary quite a bit, and I'm not sure which belong to police, which to other security groups.

I also noticed many people making their living in the streets, whether standing in the avenues selling phone cards or cruising the sidewalks with offers of shoeshines, DVDs, or jewelry. But, there were far fewer children working here than in Peru, and the vendors were much less aggressive. And, of course, they can't even be compared to the Roma children in Podgorica asking for money.

My single fieldtrip today was to the Parque Arqueologico Kaminaljuyu. It really is a park, that is, a green area set off from the surrounding city. In this case, the park was established to save an arhceological site from being completely destroyed by development. As the city expanded, bulldozers leveled some of the monticulos that turned out to contain the physical remains for one of the earliest Maya centers, and apparently the dominant city in this region in Pre-Classic times (so, sometime B.C. until about 250 A.D.).

One of the workers (who carried a machete) took me into one of the two mounds that seems to have undergone extensive excavation. Although the people here built with "barro," or clay (I assume they made something like adobe), they constructed extensive buildings including pyramid temples and ballcourts. I was also gratified to see the kind of corbel arches that appear in Maya centers from much later periods (though, of course, I can't say when the arches may have been built).

While strolling through the green area (and trying to keep from getting too sunburned) I was approached by a group of young men. Although clearly students, I did wonder what they could be up to. But, I didn't have to wonder long--they asked to interview me. I stood a little dumbstruck by this, wondering if I'd understood them correctly, then said "¿Como no?" We ended up asking each other questions. They wanted to know what state in the U.S. I hailed from, and then I told them and asked if they'd heard of Pennsylvania. Astonishingly, they had not. They were all students about to complete their bacherillato, so they have university to look forward to. But when I asked them, "What's next?" one of them immediately said, "La chica." That's a local drink, made from corn, and fermentation goes into the manufacture.

Posted by at 5:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)