maya bee and lord chocolate

we finally left poptun on friday, on the right bus later that day. i attempted in the meantime to beat josh again at table tennis back at finca ixobel, and got him to about 21-19 which was my best effort. i then had to go and throw myself in the lake again to cool down, and again got attacked by the reeds. all getting a bit groundhog day. we then sat in hammocks, read books..........

got to our accommodation in flores on friday night, switched on the light and the fan and immediately there was a power cut. went and sweated out on the balcony and watched lightning circling around the lake. there are loads of dry storms out here, due to the humidity i guess, it´s brilliant watching the lightning and we have spent many hours trying to get good photos of it so far. flores is a little town on the edge of lake itza, in northern guatemala, el peten, the same state we were in when in poptun. this state is a 3rd of the whole of guatemala, but only 3% of the population live here. after sweating for a bit longer, and thankfully getting electricity back we went out and had dinner, and practised our crap spanish on another hapless guatemalan waiter. i think my spanish is actually getting worse weirdly, or maybe it´s just that at first i picked up quite a few new words and phrases and now i´ve lost the ability to progress beyond that so i feel a bit stuck. my small brush with the past tense the other day gave me renewed hope but since then i´ve not had to use it. i have enrolled on a 3 week spanish school on the other side of this same lake in a few weeks so am very excited about that - i get around 6 hours of lessons a day, and also get to help in the rainforest community projects and maybe make shampoo from local leaves, but perhaps i dreamt that bit. will let you know. (website if you want to check it out is http://www.ecobioitza.org/escuela/home.html)

saturday
went to visit tikal, an ancient mayan ruin site. very interesting. we had a great local guide called alquilino, which in italian means the eagle apparently, and he was indeed quite predatory, and touchy-feely. but very knowledgeable so all that was excused. it was nice to learn lots of new facts as you may have noticed they have been somewhat lacking recently. the mayans were around for ages, from around 3000bc to 1690s ad i think. they had queens as well as kings, very forward thinking and gender equality minded. they built pyramids, but not as burial chambers like the egyptians, theirs are solid, and they buried people nearby. the 9 large steps of their pyramids represent the 9 layers of their underworld. they had 13 layers of actual world apparently. they did human and bird sacrifices too, though not any more. the mayans had a heiroglyphic style writing system, but the spanish conquistadors destroyed all the maya literature apart from around 3 books which are in various places around the world depending who discovered them. so nobody knows exactly why the civilization died out or exactly when. there were some stelae (stones with inscriptions on) at tikal, from which they have been able to decipher around 50% of the meanings, but not all.

we wandered around oo-ing and ah-ing at the lovely temples and wildlife (this site is in the rain forest), and climbing up temples etc and looking at amazing views. wildlife-wise, we saw spider monkeys, howler monkeys, leaf cutter ants making their houses again, a spider in a web. this is the first time i have seen monkeys in real life, and i was pleased when alguilino said they never come down to ground level but just live at the tops of the trees. they are vegetarian, which is also nice and made me warm to them a bit more. weirdly, they weren´t dressed in human clothes drinking tea in someone´s living room, and advertising pg tips. the howler monkeys had an argument at one point, and the noise they make when arguing sounds like a tyranosaurus rex from jurrasic park. it´s very loud and scary. but they were still at the top of their trees. on the bus on the way back a puma crossed the road but i was half asleep so didn´t notice it.

we went back to a little town called el remate on the other side of the lake from flores where we were staying for the next 3 nights. it was deadly quiet, just a couple of streets by the lake, with the ubiquitous lightning. there was nothing really happening so we ventured out to find an internet for something to do. as the one we found was closed, we went to ask in a hostel over the road, and the nice lady, called rudi i think, that worked there walked us to another one off the beaten track. en route we asked her if there were any parties happening for guatemalan independence day (15th sep) in the village, and she invited us to one. this cheered us up, so we met up with her later on to go to the party. don juan picked the 3 of us up in his transit van. don juan was obviously the man to know in el remate, he had a hotel there, and was very kind and fatherly and everyone in the village knew him and said hello when we drove past. to use the title don here is a mark of big respect. we drove around the same bit of street picking various people up in the collectivo (this took some time as there is no such thing as timekeeping or punctuality in guatemala, we just sat in the taxi outside various houses until after around 5 or 10 minutes some people emerged ready for the party). there was a friend of rudi´s called jenny, and some younger boys and girls, one of whom we nicknamed chico loco as he was a bit strange. eventually we got to our first destination, a little village called cahui, away from the lake. they were showing a presentation on a big screen on the local basketball court, about global warming and its effects on the earth. the powerpoint presentation kept breaking as i guess the IT equipment wasn´t up to the job, but the children all sat quietly and respectfully watching the same bit over and over again, and waiting while the presenter tried in vain to fix it, until at one point he started singing the song himself as the soundtrack kept stopping. rudi told us that cahui doesn´t have running water due to its poverty. we were amazed and totally touched that somewhere so remote and struggling and poor itself should have time to instill in its children such a global and responsible conscience. i could have cried in fact but didn´t want to freak out our hosts.

after this, it was time for dancing, which we didn´t partake in as the only people who were dancing were half our age at least, and much better dancers than we could ever dream of being. they must learn it here, or it´s just part of their culture, like salsa and spanish people. it wasn´t that it was very complex dancing, just that they were so elegant and cool. we would have looked very stupid, for so many reasons. lots of local boys came over saying quiere bailar (do you want to dance) to us, and one of don juan´s friends called ugo just would not stop asking us to dance, and i felt really rude saying no for the 100th time, but it was the best thing to do, plus he was fairly drunk and dancing on the spot constantly. rudi warned us against lots of the men that came over, she said really it was only safe to dance with either don juan or ugo. we then left that party, and went off in the collectivo to find another one, which we did in another little town called ixlu. this one was a bit more happening, and jenny found a man to dance with. it is very very traditional over here, even the young people, even when drunk. they only dance in couples, there was no groups of either just boys or just girls dancing, the girls basically wait until they are asked. there is no drunken snogging or fighting, it´s all very civilized and well behaved. at one point chico loco was in a bit of a ruckus with some other chicos locos, but it died down without any trouble at all. don juan said it was because he´d been drinking. we wondered what they´d think if they went to central london on a saturday night and saw what happens to english people when they´ve been drinking... ugo had disappeared by this point, probably he´d danced himself into the ground somewhere. jenny was not impressed with her boy she´d been dancing with, and rudi had danced with a boy who seemed to be about 12. we got in the collectivo again, and don juan dropped us off back in el remate. it was all good fun, and really interesting to see some guatemalan nightlife and really kind of them to take us along.

sunday
we left el remate as we wanted to be a bit nearer the independence day action in flores. this is to celebrate independence from spain on 15 sep 1821. we found a nice hostel in the centre of town and lay around reading books and sweating and trying to cool down by drinking smoothies. i read a book about guatemala, see appendix 1 for what i learnt. we wandered around in the evening looking at the celebrations in the town. lots of traditional costumes, dancing, hula hooping, little bands playing, general festivity. i tried to take a subtle photo of the hula hoop troupe waiting to do their thing, but they spotted me and started posing and loving it, which was really funny. i´m never sure about taking photos over here as sometimes they really don´t approve, especially if it´s of children, as there are urban myths of western travellers trying to kidnap guatemalan children for selling on etc, so it was reassuring that they seemed to actually love having their photos taken. maybe only on festive occassions though. we watched some lightning over the lake, and there was a huge storm, complete with thunder and rain, well in to the night.

monday
is today. we are lying around, sweating, drinking smoothies. ventured out to find a cash machine, but it didn´t work, then we gave up as it is too humid to do anything above the call of duty. abi has gone to lie down to try and recover. i´m going to read my book, memoirs of a geisha, going well so far.

appendix 1
facts i learnt from reading a really good book about guatemala yesterday:
around 40% of current guatemala is maya, the other 60% something called ladino, which is often a mixture of some mayan race anyway, but is more what they would call ´pure´guatemalan. the maya are still racially discriminated against, and given the worst jobs, and paid the least money. 80% of guatemala lives in poverty, and of that, 66% in extreme poverty. 2% of the population own 60% of the land here. guatemala has a history of very corrupt leadership, often supported by the usa who monopolized most of the land here for growing bananas for the united fruits company from the 1940s onwards, and kept the mayan race very oppressed. they had a civil war for 36 years from 1960 to 1996 roughly, which involved left wing guerilla movements rising up again the right wing military government. the worst of this was in 1982 when general rios montt was in power and ordered a ´scorched earth policy´which basically involved wiping out entire villages in the remote parts of guatemala to prevent more guerilla groups revolting, but in reality often just wiped out villages of non-political mayans. he was overthrown eventually, and there have been more enlightened leaders since then who have tried to clear up the human rights´atrocities and bring the perpetrators to justice, often unsuccesfully though. eventually the u.n got involved, and some peace accords were made and the country is now trying to sort itself out. there is 70% illiteracy and not many children make it to high school. domestic violence is the norm, there is no gender equality to speak of (weirdly as the ancient mayans seemed to be quite into it), they get married young, around 17, and there is a strong sense of family and community here and often a few families live together in one house and share all the responsibilities. generally the men go out and work and the women look after the house and the children, and also go to sell handicrafts and food in the markets or towns nearby. this is more the mayan people, the other more well off guatemalans may have jobs in towns and cities as lawyers, business men etc etc. despite their violent and unstable past, the people are generally very friendly and welcoming, and hopeful to make things better in their country.

i thought my brain had melted in the heat so it´s reassuring i have remembered all those facts. while i´m on a roll, here is appendix 2, the inca trail speech i did all those weeks ago:

mis queridos portadores
estoy hablando por todos nosotros
muchas gracias por llevar nuestras bolsas por todo el camino inca, y gracias por toda la comida deliciosa y el agua caliente para lavarnos y el te por las mananas
fueron la motivacion para nosotros por sus sonrisas y aplausas, y recuerden que los amamos
nosotros recordamos vuestros nombres, espero que sus nombres estan correctos

and recorded here for posterity are all their names:
marco (head chef), ronald (sous-chef), juvenal (head porter), claudio (waiter), martin, amilcar, benito, isidro, edilberto, eduardo, felipe, wilfredo, balerio, calletano, eber, elmer, francisco, florentino, amilcar, elder, juan, juan, justino, cecilio, paulicarpio, isidoro.

we sang cecilia by simon and garfunkel whenever cecilio appeared. benito was easy to recognise as he had a cool moustache. as was martin as he was very smiley. it was quite hard to get the names right after my speech as it was in the dark and i had been using my not very foolproof method of recognising them by their trousers or shoes or what hat they were wearing... but victor was standing behind me and whispered any names that i couldn´t remember, so everything went ok.