into the wild part 3: fire and cobblestone

here is part 3 of the me and bert road trip. sorry it's getting a bit confusing going back and forth between real time blog writing and catching up with what happened last month. hope you can cope with the desultory nature of all this. this blog update is much more concise than previous ones too, as i was panicking at how much i had to catch up on and wrote it in a big rush without going in to lots of detail. perhaps this is preferable though?

holy week in antigua, friday 3rd april to saturday 11th april
we arrived in antigua where i had spent a week last year with abi so dedicated blog readers will already know all about it. it’s not like real guatemala here, ie it’s safe, policed, clean, you can buy all sorts of things that you can’t get anywhere else in this part of the world, for example we bought a coffee press, a guitar and a world atlas, which were all things we had been looking for along the way. it is really beautiful and cobbly and there are also loads of coffee shops and a few cinemas showing independent and other films. it is surrounded by 3 volcanoes which you can see clearly on clear days, both are dead except for pacaya which you may remember me and abi climbed up last year and i freaked right out. more to come on that later. anyway i am going to write a summary of the week’s events now in no particular order (in an attempt to inject some randomness to the blog and veer away from the obsessive compulsive disorder i seem to have acquired in ordering everything in strict date order).

so this week basically we watched loads of holy week processions, and inhaled enough incense to file a lawsuit against the city and the catholic religion for damaging our lungs. the way the processions work is that you sign up to a brotherhood and give them your height and you are then assigned a turn number and a shoulder number. the processions start from any of the many churches in the city and involve statues of jesus (or mary for the girls to carry) being taken out from their usual place in the churches and placed on custom built floats, made of wood and with little indents which is where the carriers’ shoulders go. the floats are then carried around the city streets for the next 12, 14, 16 hours or so. jesus is always looking to the right, so we always tried to be standing in his line of vision so he would see us and we would get more points for heaven. after a while though we weren’t too bothered about whether or not he saw us, as we were busy looking for a nice place to have a chocolate brownie and to avoid the crowds. some say the act of being a carrier in the processions is meant to be a penance to remind you of the suffering of jesus and to go through some of that suffering yourself. another theory is that it isn’t so much a penance as just a time for reflection and inner thought about yourself and others and how you can live a better life etc. whatever the actual reasoning is i imagine it is quite an experience as these floats look very heavy, i think the main thing you’d be thinking is shit this is hard work i wonder when the next corner is so i can hand over to my replacement carrier, i hope they haven’t got stuck in traffic. at either side of the float are boys or girls (depending if it’s a jesus or mary float) flinging incense around the place, and people with sticks to hold up the low electricity cables so that the whole procession including jesus or mary doesn’t get fried. there is a man/woman at the front of the float not really carrying it but leading it along, apparently this is a vip type role in the whole proceedings. there is also someone holding up a stick with a number in it, which is the turn number – like i said you are assigned a turn number, ie on each turn of the parade’s journey through the city the turn number on the big stick changes, and you know the start time and the route so you can pretty much figure out where you’ll need to be and when. your shoulder number is which bit of the float you are at. we saw a few shoulders that must have been measured wrongly as they were way too high compared to the other carriers, which obviously makes it very tricky for them. behind the processions goes a marching brass band with timpani and a small woodwind section. in true this-part-of-the-world style, none of the music is in tune, the ‘musicians’ are kind of smartly dressed but mostly have baseball caps on and usually are on their mobile phones in the gaps between playing. not sure what jesus and mary would be thinking, maybe turning in their graves. though i don’t think jesus technically has a grave to turn in as he’s risen from it, isn’t that what all this easter celebration is about? [mum i know you’ll be groaning at my utter lack of religious knowledge and/or common sense at this point. i will ask bert to find the relevant part in his bible and read it to me as a penance.] anyway, the brass band are paid for their trouble, and actually it must be fairly taxing going round and round the streets for that long playing your melancholy religious-thought-inducing music. all that incense can’t be good for those clarinets and sousaphones either.

all this and i haven’t even talked about the carpets yet. these carpets remind me of that bit in the film of seven years in tibet where the chinese governors go to tibet to talk to the dalai lama and they walk over the intricate mosaic carpet that the tibetan monks are making on the floor, to make the point that they don’t respect the tibetan buddhist traditions. the carpets the monks make get destroyed immediately anyway by the monks as some sort of comment on the fact that nothing in real life can be as perfect as the buddha himself i think. anyway – back to catholocisim - basically if you live in antigua and your house is on the route of any of the processions you spend the 10 hours before the procession is due to pass by your house making a carpet outside on the cobblestones. and yes that does mean that if a procession is due to come past at noon for example then you get up and start making your carpet in the middle of the night. it’s crazy. the carpets are made from sawdust, every carpenter and lumber mill in the whole of guatemala saves up their sawdust for this event and sells what he doesn’t personally use for his own carpet if he is lucky enough to be on a jesus or mary route that year. the sawdust is finely chipped, not big huge sawdust chips you’d put in horses stables, and it is dyed bright colours. you can design your carpet however you like, there are no rules, except perhaps no advertising, though we did see one with a football team’s logo on it. other common construction materials are pine needles, flowers, vegetables including lettuces, radishes, cabbage leaves, beans, and entire mini sculptures of churches and houses and/or jesus/mary scenes. usually there is a layer of sawdust coloured sawdust that makes the base of the carpet on top of which stencils are placed and other colours of sawdust are sprinkled through a sieve to make pretty patterns. the carpets can be any shape you like, obviously rectangular is most fitting as streets are rectangular, but you can have circles or cross shapes etc. you can write things on them too, lots of them had the initials jhs which i couldn’t figure out what it means, and never got round to asking any of the carpet makers, i guess it’s jesus h something, perhaps jesus hijo sagrado? anyway, he’ll be turning again in his non-existent grave, sorry jesus h.s. the carpets were constantly being watered by one of the family members, with a hose from their house, i’m not sure if this was to keep the ingredients alive or to make it more shiny and aesthetically pleasing or maybe it’s easier to put the sawdust down on other sawdust if it’s a bit damp. the whole family gets involved in the making of the carpets, the teenagers get the bulk of the work as they’re big and strong, and they love it, there’s no skulking off to play football or go down the pub, they get right into it. the little kids love it too and we saw a lot of them carefully arranging flowers or lettuce leaves with their parents’ help. the grandfather generation oversee the whole thing, or help water it. so the carpets are finished and that very minute the procession comes along and walks all over them, destroying the last 10 hours’ worth of hard painstaking back-breaking work in one fell swoop, in as long as it takes to say jesus h christ the carpet is all gone, carpet after carpet after carpet. then when the second coming (ie the smaller mary procession) has come past and walked on the remnants of the carpet, a little mini bulldozer appears and men with brushes sweep up the holy vestiges of sawdust and cabbages and put them all in the bin. bystanders can take bits and pieces of the ex-carpet if they feel that way inclined. i suppose if you were really hungry you could help yourself to a bit of trampled lettuce.

the culmination of all this religious activity is the night of thursday and all of good friday. the processions go on all night, with a roman soldier procession on horseback which leaves one of the churches at midnight. we got up around 3am to go and watch more of this, which was interesting but ultimately quite the same as seeing it in the day apart from it’s all in the dark. we also had the added entertainment of not being able to get back into our hotel and having to sit on the doorstep from 4.30 to 5am until a brotherhood man appeared who was staying there and also had a key – perhaps only religious folk get given a hotel key. by good friday the purple hooded robes that all the brotherhood members wear have been replaced with black ones, there are foot washing ceremonies, crucifixion reenactments and more processions. in the evening we watched a particularly large one go past the end of our street, complete with masses of lung destroying incense, dissonant brass band which were quiet for this particular section, and the float this time had jesus lying down instead of standing up carrying his cross. if i knew my bible stories better i would know what was going on, i think it is because he died on good friday to rise again on easter sunday? it was quite awe inspiring this one, partly because of the amount of people both watching and participating, and the black costumes, and the silence of the band, and the size of the float and poor jesus now dead. we videod lots of the processions, but it just doesn’t capture the eeriness when you watch it back, nor the sense of occasion. as you may have noticed, i am not religious, not in the mainstream sense of the word anyway, and i am sometimes skeptical of pomp and circumstance, but i was really silenced and thought-provoked by the sheer effort and dedication and mystery involved in the whole semana santa proceedings. it was really amazing that we had ended up there in this week of all weeks, it is supposedly the main place in the whole world for easter week, other than seville in spain, but i would not like to do it again due to the busy-ness of the town and the prices of accommodation which double or triple for the week. the guidebook recommends booking 5 months in advance at least, so we had stumbled across one of the few hotels with last minute rooms left, and really at an acceptable price. plus the hotel owners were lovely and i practiced my spanish on them and their son was studying aviation which was interesting. they brought me a cup of herbal tea one morning when i was ill in bed, with what in hindsight i can diagnose as mild swine flu.

other non religious things that happened that week involved going up volcano pacaya again. bert really wanted to see the lava and barbeque some marshmallows and steaks there, so i had finally succumbed and agreed to compromise my determination to never set foot on a live volcano again. this time we didn’t get half as near to the lava, as there had been lots of seismic activity recently, including an earthquake the week before just outside antigua, and lots of little volcanic eruptions. our guide was constantly on his radio to the people that monitor the volcanic activity, which both comforted and worried me. on the way up you could hear little growls which we thought was the echo of traffic from the roads below, but i asked the guide and he said no it’s the volcano erupting. anyway we survived and in fact enjoyed ourselves, bert was upset we couldn’t get close to the lava flow but we could at least see it in the distance and videod little bits of orange rock flying out from a mini crater half way down from the actual top. the top itself was puffing out lots of smoke and making growling noises every so often. we had our binoculars which we lent to the other people in our group and everyone oohd and ahd at the lava in the distance.

we bumped into the dutch tour group again and had a nice chat with some of them. dutch people speak better english than english people. we also kept bumping into some of the nice canadian couples that had been on our volcano tour, and had nice chats with our hotel owners and the car park man where we had parked the car for the week (every car left on the street gets towed away by semana santa tow vehicles so there is room for jesus and mary to go past), so that after a few days we felt that we were in some little village where we knew everyone which was weird. it’s dangerous to assume that antigua is the real guatemala as it really isn’t, it’s a little haven of cobblestone streets with coffeeshops bookshops museums etc . my guidebook says this is how guatemala would look if the scandinvians moved in and took over for a few years, all clean and safe and no stray dogs or litter anywhere. it would be a really nice place to come for a month or so and study spanish at one of the many spanish schools and live in a little fantasy land for a while.

we ate lots of cake and brownies, drank lots of coffee, i indulged my book shop obsession in the many book shops – we bought a world atlas so we could fantasize about all the interesting places we could travel to in our as yet imaginary campervan bought with the imaginary ultralight business earnings. i also bought graham greene the power and the glory which is set in chiapas, mexico, and also 2 guatemalan books, one called i, rigoberta menchu which is written by a guatemalan mayan lady that survived the genocide of the 60s-80s, having watched her whole family get massacred, and writes about the atrocities here, and also campaigns for human rights etc, and she went on to win a nobel peace prize. the other book is called blood in the cornfields which deals with similar recent historical themes but from a non native point of view. interesting other books i looked at dealt with things like america’s involvement in central and south american history, for example the cia funded the guatemalan government’s genocide campaign against the mayan villages, and fund lots of political campaigns if that suits their needs in terms of keeping these countries suppressed, ie supporting military dictatorships. this is all very fascinating stuff and i wish i had more of a political and historical brain as i find it hard to properly understand the intricacies of international relations, but i am going to try to learn lots about it at some point.

i also bought a guitar this week which i am teaching myself to play and awaiting some guitar music from mama pepinillo the virtuoso guitarist. we visited a coffee museum which was really cool and learnt that brazil is the biggest coffee producer in the world, then columbia. brazil’s coffee grows in the sun, whereas in guatemala they grow it in the shade, and at altitude, which they say makes it superior coffee. i bought a little coffee mug with a duck on it. then we went to a museum of mayan music and costumes , where a mayan lady did a brilliant tour around it for free, and she didn’t seem to mind being videod the whole time by us. we went to a place in jocotenango, the village just north of antigua, for a sauna and massage. bert said this was the best ever massage he’s had, and i have never really had a proper massage so have nothing to compare it to, but it was very good, despite the fact that the massage lady had a big moustache. a nice lady had explained to me how it works, ie here is a locker for your stuff and here’s a changing room and here’s the sauna. it was all very old school, nothing swanky at all, just bare tiled floors and walls, a bit reminiscent of my local swimming pool in sowerby bridge. everyone is just in their knickers (obviously the men and women are in different rooms), so i followed suit and got changed and locked all my stuff in the locker, and then before going to the sauna i managed to accidentally flush my locker key down the loo. oops how am i going to explain this one (and who to?) in my still very basic spanish..? i went into the sauna and shouted over to bert what had happened. he thought i was joking but i wasn’t. the other lady in my sauna happened to have lived in new york for ages and understood my anguish and piped up but had you already flushed the toilet when the key fell in? yes i said. oh no she said. i know i said. let me help you she said. so off we went and we made a makeshift glove from a plastic bag that some cups were in for the water machine, and she was going to use that but then one of the staff appeared who she had told, and she had a proper glove so she used that to delve into the toilet and lo and behold there was the key still there, it had not gone far. i thanked her profusely and went off to update bert that all was ok and we’d be able to get the stuff out of the locker again and wouldn’t need to call the fire brigade out with bolt cutters.

we went to a slide show about semana santa and asked lots of questions; we had some thai green curry; we lost our flask we’d been using for coffee; we bought a coffee press and some nice coffee beans; we went to casa santo domingo an ex convent which is now a hotel and museum complex and is very beautiful; we had an argument about what a campervan was (must have been to do with english/american lexical/semantic differences ); we got spooked out looking round old cathedral ruins one night and watching people go down into a crypt and seemingly never come out again; we went to a little park with our new rug to sit in the sun and read, the entrance fee was massively reduced for natives, so i said ‘hola, estamos guatemaltecos’ and the man laughed his head off; we tried to wash our clothes in the stone sink (pila) on the hotel roof but there was a chicken in there being plucked by the cleaning lady so we waited until the next day; we talked to a purple costumed man in the cathedral whilst we watched one of the floats leaving on people’s shoulders, him and his wife were both macro-biologists, and his wife had asked her husband to ask bert if he was a famous film star as she thought he looked like one (bert loved this); we watched into the wild, a sad and interesting film you should watch about giving up this westernized life for a life of just nature and wilderness; we thought about moving to costa rica; we played chess; we watched some super cute little mayan children do traditional dances in traditional costumes; we watched a little band play buena vista social club type music; we looked at lots of lovely handicrafts in the markets; i got a bit ill and slept a lot and deeply, and woke up in the night thinking there were 2 little ghosts on the wall but in the morning realized it was our towels hanging up on hooks.

and that was the end of our week in antigua. from here we went on to a place in the east called el castillo el felipe, on the shore of lago izabel near rio dulce, where me and abi had been before. en route to this place we had to go around guatemala city, on the ring road. this was a disaster which i will write about in the next and final installment of our road trip.