human barbeque

middle-aged comment warning - weather update - it´s absolutely chucking it down here today, a good thing as it´s been very humid for the last few days. we feel this is blogworthy as it has been a big topic of conversation, almost as much as it would be in england.

here are today´s non-weather related updates on the last few days

as there has been a disappointing response rate to the competition, we are not revealing the answer yet. clever marketing technique to make sure you keep reading... talking of which i finally finished a book i bought in buenos aires, the beautiful and damned by f scott fitzgerald. it´s quite a good read, in the sense that it´s easy and readable, but nothing much more than that. i´ve now started memoirs of a geisha, it was a close call between that and the yehudi menuhin biography. i tried to sell my finished book back to the book exchange, they offered me 5 quetzals, which is around 33.3p, so i have just left it in the hostel games room. which incidentally doesn´t have any games in it unless you class beanbags and a selection of crap dvds, and the odd american on his laptop. there could be an interesting game in all of that actually. any ideas anyone?

tuesday morning we did a city tour, through antigua tours, owned by elizabeth bell, who is currently on sabbatical due to writing another book about antigua. i only mention this seemingly boring fact because she seems to be quite ubiquitous in antigua and has written many books about it, and also a few colouring books, so it was very exciting to meet her to buy our tickets. she was quite stern in fact and very officious and kept muttering about needing to finish her book. a man called alex actually did the tour, he´s from here, but is american and austrian. he was possibly the most knowledgeable tour guide we´ve had yet, he has a masters in mayan anthropology, and the amount of information he told us was so overwhelming that i only managed to throw about 3 questions back at him. i wonder if somebody had forewarned him about me. i was literally stunned and spent the rest of the afternoon trying to write down all my new knowledge. here´s a few facts for now-

*the main source of income here is guatemalans going to work in usa and wiring money back to their families via western union. after that it´s tourism, then i think coffee and sugar exports
*the word cuadra, meaning block, literally means quarter, as the colonial houses they built were so large as they couldn´t build higher than one storey due to earthquake proofing necessity, that one block consisted of 4 of these massive houses
*if you see a mayan (indigenous person) praying in the main cathedral to jesus, it´s not because he has been successfully converted to catholicism, rather that he is praying to the god of earthquakes, via jesus as a sort of sacrifice. the jesus figures here are therefore sometimes a lot more bloody than you would find elsewhere to make the religion more understandable over here as they used to do a lot of blood offerings. very like the merge between the andean religion and catholicism that we learnt about in peru, like putting a guinea pig on the picture of the last supper in the cathedral in cuzco
*life expentancy here is 80-90 years, and it has gone from being the 150th most desirable country to live in (out of 163 countries in the world), to in the top 50 in the past 5 years
*there was a large earthquake in antigua in 1976. the most damage to buildings from earthquakes are from ongoing minor tremors, rather than the actual bigger earthquakes. there are 2 types of earthquakes, one from side to side (which he said is like drinking 2 bottles of wine and then trying to go for a jog), and ones that go up and down, which are much more dangerous

this is merely a fragment of his knowledge. he said generally guatemala is getting much more modernised and the because of the influx of tourism, the parents can afford to keep their children in school which means they have more chance to earn more money in future, which is a very good thing. guatemala has a very bloody history of civil war, and death squads, and the usual central-south american corruption. one of the recent mayors (or presidents, i can´t remember), embezzled around 200 million dollars, and they can´t extradite him as they don´t know where he is. but things are changing, and politicians are becoming more accountable and transparent. (not literally, that would be weird).

we met a fellow english girl on the tour and hung out with her that evening for dinner, which was nice, as me and abi have descended to just insulting each other now that we don´t have to keep up the appearance that we are polite and normal and friends with each other. we have run out of conversation, sometimes it descends to me asking things like would you rather be a bus or a car? or a lake or a volcano? so fresh blood was very much appreciated. her name is charis and she´s travelling round for a few months before going back to london to find a new job. we found a place for dinner and ate nice food, and then massively overpaid as we got confused about tipping, and had to ask for it all back and then re-sort it out. the waitress didn´t seem to mind, though she had pocketed our overpayment, so must have been quite gutted when we asked for it back. we went to a bar next called monoloco (crazy monkey), and drank a few mojitos. a really strange couple joined us, and some strange boys bought us another mojito, but it didn´t have any alcohol in it, so we asked for some rum, but they wouldn´t give us any for free. we left in disgust.

wednesday me and abi went on a tour of a local coffee plantation. during this tour abi invented a coffee bean dance, to be premiered on our next night out. it´s quite simple but effective in summoning up the essence of the coffee bean. again, we learnt a lot of things about a hitherto unknown subject, coffee production. to summarise
*coffee beans are actually red
*when you squash them, 2 little beans appear out of each seed
*these go through a massively long drying and de-layering process, and finally get sorted by size and quality etc, and then get put in bags by a magic machine
*one of the sorting machines was called oliver the gravity separator
*coffee plants have white flowers on
*on their plantation they use 2 different types of coffee plant, one of which needs to be grown under the shade of a tree, which is from australia
*they graft the 2 coffee plants together when they are arround 8 months old then re-plant the hybrid plants out in the fields
*the school year is planned around the coffee picking season, so the children can spend their holidays earning money with their family. coffee picking season is from around november to march, and is all done by hand, hard work
*coffee grown higher up is more tasty
*coffee has 4 times as much anti-oxidant than green tea, and prevents certain types of cancer
*the bits inside the factory reminded me of the richard scarry how does it work book with all the really good diagrams of cross sections of like a timber mill
*abi saw a snake running off through the coffee field, it was yellow and black. actually ab are you sure it wasn´t a bee? or somebody wearing a bee-coloured hat (jen..?)

at the end we tried some of their coffee, it was really nice. i was quite hungry, so i politely asked a fellow tour attendee (german) if i could please have his complementary biscuit (as well as my own which i had eaten in one second) as it didn´t look like he was going to eat it. he let me have the biscuit and didn´t seem to think this made me a weirdo for asking. result. while we were finishing the tour we heard a loud noise, and then saw a helicopter, and then some rich looking people eating lunch. it turned out this was the wife of the plantation owner, senor roberto dalton, so we figured they must have flown in on the helicopter. perhaps from a different type of plantation in columbia we speculated......

we had lunch with our new friend charis, and her new friend will. we went to a really nice cafe on the square where we had previously over eaten some cake to the point of it nearly being another ritta sport moment. then we went on a tourist police accompanied walk to cerro de la cruz, a big cross on a hillside above the town which is a good viewpoint. you aren´t supposed to go there alone as it´s been the site of muggings etc. the tourist police were really sweet, and i asked them a few pertinent questions en route. we saw a few men with machetes, but i think they´re for farming or something, rather than tourist attacking. it was all very uneventful anyway, apart from i saw a few flies who had really big eyes, but they wouldn´t stay still enough for a photo, which was disappointing. after this we went for another coffee and some cake, much needed after walking for an hour wouldn´t you agree mum?

evening was dinner, a pub, a taxi ride home, for some reason we sang all the way there much to the taxi driver´s bemusement, but hopefully also amusement.

today, thursday, we were up early for a volcano trip. in hindsight this was fun.. our guide erwin, that may or may not have been his name, but we´ll call him that, took us on a camino loco, very steep and under bits of barbed wire and then ´skiing´down fresh lava scree. this involved basically flinging yourself down a really steep hill of volcanic rock, trying not to fall over. apparently this is fun in guatemala. then up the actual proper bit of volcano, (the first bit is through trees and greenery and proper paths and fields, as any normal hike should be). after a while, erwin pointed to some lava from 7 months ago, wow we all said, that´s recent, and duly took photos. great. then the terrain became very rocky and crunchy and precarious, but we figured all must be fine. then he pointed out some lava fall from ayer - yesterday! blimey we thought, not sure how we feel about that... but i suppose we should take a photo. then we carried on, and lo and behold there we were about 1 inch away from flowing molten lava. it was flowing unnervingly fast, and looking up to the top of the volcano we could see lots more bits of lava here and there smoking away nonchalantly, and lots of smoke coming out of the actual top of the mountain. to our other side we were encased in one of guatemala´s many clouds, so it was all quite surreal. our legs were actually burning from the heat, the soles of our feet through walking shoes and socks were getting scarily hot, and our guide was busy lighting a cigarette from the flowing lava. none of these facts made me feel at ease. a few dogs wandered around, sunning themselves on the edges of the lava flow. i have to admit, i did actually freak out a bit, and went into panic mode and started heading back the way we´d come, with a couple of dogs for security. nobody else seemed the slightest bit bothered at the blatant danger we were in and were merrily videoing the lava and posing for photos with burning sticks lit from it, and generally having a lovely time. abi absorbed some of my panic waves but generally in all things is more level-headed and sensible so didn´t descend into full on freak out mode. in hindsight i suppose it was an interesting experience, though not one i will ever ever repeat. the volcano last erupted in 2000 properly, and before that in 1998. you could see it splurged all down the valley, it had covered a small village, but no deaths as they obviously have volcano prediction technology here, which i should have taken some comfort in, but didn´t.

another postscript to the volcano escapade was that in our little group we had 1 really nice man from barcelona, he looked like a postman so i called him il postino, not to his face though. and 5 absolutely horrendous brats travelling in their university holiday, spending all their parents trust fund money and talking about their chalets and apartments in london yet bartering the price of a horse ride down from 120 quetzals to 100 (around 1 pound 50), who if they had fallen into the lava as an offering to the god of fire, would have been spat out again for being of no useful substance whatsoever. it depressed us to be in such close proximity to people of such foreign values and attitudes, who believe the world and everything on it is for their entertainment alone and consequently who live in total oblivion as to the existence and feelings of anyone else. they see guatemala as somewhere they can get a good price on a 5 star hotel and don´t consider any of the reasons behind why this is. after our depression, we came round to the view that to take a positive from a negative, as all good buddhists should do, we should be glad that we aren´t equally oblivious and are at least vaguely humane and aware of our surroundings and trying to learn about the country we are visiting rather than just travel blindly through it.

anway, still alive if slightly frazzled, back in antigua, hopefully the rain will have slowed down that vicous lava flow. my eyes are starting to fall out of my head from looking for this long at a computer screen. reminds me of being at work ha. actually that´s not that funny sorry. better go now, we leave antigua tomorrow for a weekend jaunt to lake atitlan, back on sunday for one night then on to somewhere else which i can´t remember right now due to having some hot lava stuck in my molten brain cells...

adios xx