Ashlanders in Guatemala
We wound into the hills towards Antigua with the full moon rising above the lights of sprawling Guatemala City below. It took an hour to get through the rush hour traffic surrounded by colorfully painted old buses belching fumes with people hanging on inside and outside.
To us this was an adventure, not a vacation. Truly Guatemala is not where you go to stay in tony hotels and sit on the beach. Expect to speak enough Spanish to get around since this country has not yet been turned into a Disneyland for Americans. The country is just emerging from 35 years of civil war. It has the fastest growing population in the Western Hemisphere, struggling infrastructure, and high rates of illiteracy, infant mortality, poverty and violent crime. Pollution and litter are a huge problem. Plastic is a plague in the developing world. Plastic bags and plastic bottles are growing in heaps everywhere, even on the tops of volcanoes (no kidding). But the travelers do come anyway, young backpackers from all over the world and tour groups from Europe and Japan. We met people from Chile, Israel, Turkey, Holland, Germany, and Italy, to name a few. The Euro is stronger than the dollar making for affordable world travel, and lots of it.
One feels here the press of two cultures. The jungles hold the magnificent ruins of a Mayan civilization that disappeared long before the Spanish came. Fernando Cortez sent his ruthless lieutenant Pedro Alvarado to conquer the descendents of the Maya. These "people of the maize" became the forced labor who built the monumental Spanish architecture in Central America.
The population centers today are in the highlands above 4,000 feet beneath a garland of perfectly conical volcanoes stretching from El Salvador to Mexico. Here the Earth is geologically active with several volcanoes erupting daily. The Spanish built their churches and government palaces and the earthquakes knocked them down. They would rebuild them, but in time the earthquakes would strike again. The last major quake in this cycle killed 20,000 people in 1976. The resulting colonial ruins of Antigua, standing and fallen, are a spectacular comment on the folly and determination of us humans.
Tikal — The Fall of Civilization
Arriba del mundo (top of the world)! As the morning light filtered in, we looked east across the immense rain forest of the Guatemalan lowland and a howler monkey rumbled his unearthly warning to the day. At over 200 feet, Temple IV in Tikal is by some accounts the tallest of Mayan structures. Up here we are above the tree canopy. Only the massive stone combs of the other large pyramids rise before us in the mist.
The humidity, heat and sweat, and the damp jungle canopy above, kept us dripping. In the early mornings we could walk through the jungle for a long time without seeing another human. Bands of coatis, raccoon-like creatures, crossed the path in front of us. Foxes let us approach. Spider monkeys moved through the canopy directly above. There were toucans and parrots and great flocks of other colorful noisy birds.
One is struck with wonder about what these Mayans were thinking when they built these monuments. The great pyramids here are all that remains of the thousands of stone structures that were built over many centuries in Tikal. The magnificence of this city state would have rivaled Rome and Greece in their time. Only fragmentary hieroglyphics tell the stories of their great kings. We understand their complex numeric and highly accurate astronomical calendar systems. They were Stone Age agricultural people without metal tools, or the wheel, or even domesticated beasts of burden. All this was wrought by hand.
Over a thousand years ago they suddenly abandoned Tikal and the other great Mayan cities from the Yucatan to Honduras. We don't fully know why. Their distant Mayan descendents maintained some of the customs and knowledge of that period, but the historical picture is fuzzy. The experts who unearthed these structures from tree covered mounds in the jungle offer various theories. Perhaps war, drought and overpopulation all contributed to the collapse of this lost world.
The Highland Maya
We set out on the Pan American Highway in a van full of mostly American twenty-somethings. Further on, we hoped into a smaller van full of local Mayans going to town for market day. At one point there were 25 people in a van meant to carry 12, sitting six across and standing stooped by the door. The van climbed into the cloud forest, at times slowing to a couple of miles an hour. We turned down into a chasm through hair pin corners dropping 1,000 feet before climbing up the other side and on to Chichicastenango.
The Sunday market at "Chichi" fills the square and the streets around with textiles, crafts, food, and every sort of goods. This has been a central market town forever. On one end of the plaza, native religious leaders swing incense on the steps of the Catholic church, filling it with smoke before the Sunday service.
We spent a week at a Spanish language school and lived with a local family in the bustling city of Quetzalatenango. The locals call it by the Maya name Xela (pronounced shela). At almost 8,000 feet, Xela was cold in January. Hardly anyone has indoor heat. With curving narrow streets and hills, it has a flavor of San Francisco's North Beach area. It is an international place with a liberal population and tolerant attitudes. Young people from around the world are in language schools and serving as volunteers in neighboring pueblos. One of the teachers in our school took a couple of us to the top of 12,700 foot Volcano Santa Maria. From there we could look down into the crater of the smaller volcano Santiaguito that was erupting as we watched.
Lake Atitlan
Atitlan is a 12 mile long lake at 5,000 feet above sea level that is geologically similar to our own Crater Lake, a water filled remnant of a huge volcano that blew its top long ago. Around the rim the steep slopes drop a thousand feet into the lake. The deep blue reminds us of Tahoe. Outboard launches cross the lake to the city of Santiago Atitlan, nestled into a lagoon beneath three volcanoes rising out of the lake to over 10,000 feet.
In October 2005 Hurricane Stan swept across Central America and Santiago suffered the worst disaster in the region. The pressure of population had moved people in the barrio up the slopes of the volcano. A rainfall deluge with the hurricane unleashed a mudslide that poured across the town burying hundreds of people and destroying scores of houses. The international humanitarian response continues today with health care and education volunteers and a great rebuilding process that we could see everywhere.
The Maya in this region fought the final battles against the conquistadors. More recently, they led the way in standing up to the genocide of the military dictatorships in the early 1980's. The military was targeting community leaders and sometimes randomly massacring villages. Sadly American intervention and CIA meddling supported the bad guys.
In those dark times, people would sleep in Santiago's 16th century parish church for protection from the military. A priest from Oklahoma named Stanley Rother harbored the villagers. For that he was murdered in his study by right wing death squads in 1981. There is a plaque to his memory in the church that reads in Spanish, "There is no greater love for man than to die for his friends". After another massacre in 1990 the people of Santiago rose up together and marched on the military barracks demanding that the army leave their town. This started a wave of similar movements across the country and contributed to the shaky peace accord that is holding today.
Clearly the Hollywood depiction of the Maya as sacrificial killers says more about us than it does about them. Who are we to judge the Maya? Today we still provide advisers and funding to right wing death squads in Columbia doing exactly what was done in Guatemala. The threat of terrorism, or communism, or drugs is a cover for other agendas that creates this suffering.
We found a guide named Salvador with one glass eye who took us up Cerro de Oro (hill of gold). Local mass transit (standing in the back of a pickup) took us to the trailhead. On the way up we walked among groves of coffee plants in the shade of a hardwood forest. At the top, Salvador led us to a shamanistic ritual site beneath a natural stone obelisk. Standing on a rock outcrop overlooking the deep blue lake, something in the courage of these people kindles my own resolve to fight on with the battles we face back home in Ashland and the wider world. Shaking my fist into the air, I shouted above the lake "Pedro Alvarado, conquista de Guatemala" while Salvador laughed heartily.
