guatemala

i think i´m felling in love with xela (it happened last week).
after just one day i was all into this fine guatemalan city...it´s native and mountainous around the edges, plain central american chaos throughout the thick outer core, with a creamy european filling in the center. everywhere you look there´s something beautiful or interesting...and not so touristy either. the lighting in this city looks like it was laid out by a hollywood lighting designer. women roam the streets in beautiful skirts and colorful clothes, looking more beautiful than ...
there are alot of foreigners here, but they´re all studying spanish, so the locals know they ain´t looking to spend a ton of money. it´s real, if not slightly upscale, guatemala.

merry christmas. what went on back there?
i was out in el remate, on the shore of lago petén itza. it´s a huge lake, and some of the towns near it are polluting it enough that you wouldn´t want to swim there...but here in el remate it´s plenty clean and a gorgeous temperature and highly swimmable. the hotel i stayed at had a windsurfboard (minus the sail) which i could borrow to go paddle out away from the shore a bit to get some perspective on the town, and to enjoy some quiet and a rare moment of being totally alone. i didn´t expect to do alot of "chilling at the beach" on this trip, i´m not seeking out the relaxing places...i feel like more than that i want to look for interesting cultural situations - but there are so many gorgeous places, and the people there are really nice, and it just seems to happen that once again i´m in a beautiful place and it´s pretty relaxing in spite of myself.
it might have something to do with hooking up with other people for travelling. most of them appear to be a bit more into chilling than me. i am ready to meet someone who´s doing something really adventurous and inspiring and going beyond the comfortable confines of our trusted lonely planet guidebook that binds us all together.

welcome to el petén,
where the busses are smaller,
the jungle thicker,
and the mosquitos, thankfully, seem to be on vacation.

some images from the first two weeks...


todos santos gangs - not so scary just yet.

todos santos, where i lived for 8 days

"si, hoy es un buen dia para pasear. cuando uno se muere, no va a pasear."

that´s a little saying i like, which i´ve heard from 3 or 4 people in the last two days while i´m out walking. it means "yes, today is a good day for walking. when you die, you won´t be able to do much walking."

yesterday i.

with directions from two reputable sources in my mind, i hopped on the 6am bus out of town, just to get a ride up to the top of the hill. todos santos, where i´m spending a week studying spanish, is in a deep valley in the largest mountain range in guatemala. it´s got some elevation, but i´m not sure what it might be. maybe 7 or 8 thousand feet. here in todos santos, we got a small central part of town, one main street, and lots of outlying groups of houses - tiny little villages unto themselves, called aldeas. from the aldea at the top, la ventosa, i was heading up to a high point called la torre. (there´s a u.n. radio tower up there broadcasting lord only knows back and forth accross guatemala.

at the top i met the guy who runs the tower. he lives in la ventosa and does the one hour walking commute, with his twenty sheep, each day. i gave him some of my sandwich and he invited me in for a coffee. (not the guatemalan special roast that you get at starbucks...just some lovely instant stuff.) it only took about twenty minutes to chop up some kindling, get the fire going, and cook it up in the beat up blackened pot.

"YO SOY EL CHINGON"

i can make you
a bracelet, anklet, or longer thinglet
all with your (his/her) name on it
in 15 minutes, because
YO SOY EL CHINGON
it says so on the windshield of my ride

and if you thought NO FEAR was macho
well, I AM THE SHIT
makes NO FEAR look like
half-assed twelve year old braggadocio
and DIOS ES AMOR
the sissy efforts of a marin county fortysomething
on his way home from sunday morning dance meditation