Antigua :: Guatemala
Firmly back in the 3rd world.
Places: Flores, Tikal, Rio Dolce, Livingston & Antigua.
Coolest thing I did: Saw the sunrise over Tikal. Even worth the 3am start.
Coolest thing I didn´t know: There were a people of Carib (ie black) descent living in Venezuela before Columbus hit the Americas. Still haven't found someone to tell me how they reckon they got there.
I was a little skeptical about seeing yet more Mayan ruins but leaving the daddy of them all, Tikal, until last now seems to have been a good idea. It's kind of like 3 Palenques' all stuck together and having had so little of it restored makes it feel all the more special. After a 3 am start I was sitting on top of the tallest temple with about 60 of my new closest friends to watch the sun rise over the mist shrouded tree tops with the silhouettes of the other large temples just poking through the roof of the jungle canopy that covers the site. You get the growls of howler monkeys and see toucans, just like the ones on the Fruitloops box flittering about in front of you. You also get the bonus of not having to share it with hundreds of picnicking locals or 40+ degrees and 100% humidity like you would if you went at lunch time.
As mentioned, Tikal, due to it´s location in a much poorer country than Mexico has not had much of the jungle cleared from it, nor have any but the main temples been uncovered and restored. The tallest, Temple IV was cleared and rebuilt in the 1960s and due to neglect during the various right wing military dicatorships since has already been reclaimed by the jungle. They've only re-cleared the top 1/4 since and it's pretty cool to just see the stone peak of it poking through the grass and vines. It's the most Indina Jones ruins I've seen on this trip. Great stuff.
While Tikal is undoubtedly why everyone is in the area, the nearby town of Flores where I was based was also a nice place to hang out after a hard day of climbing pyramids in the jungle. It's a tiny place on an island in the middle of a lake that's only joined to the mainland by a half km long causeway. It's a nice place to swim in the lake, have a siesta in a hammock or have a Gallo (that's the Cerveza of choice here) while you watch the sun go down. After all that sunning myself like a lizard in Belize I deserved the rest, after all.
My next movement had me skirting the edge of the Belize border to the very short point where Guatemala touches the Gulf of Mexico, a little town called Rio Dolce, whose biggest claim to fame is being at the end of the longest concrete bridge in Central America. However, I ended up staying at in a bunch of cabins off the main river up in the jungle that could only be reached by boat. That was well worth it. You could take little canoes out and go swiming in the main river or simply sit around drinking beer in hammocks. Ended up playing way too much "Arsehole". The only down side is my room somehow had become home to a small colony of bats who were too scared to leave during the day but would quite happily dive bomb my mosquito net all night when the sun went down. Ah well, you pay for nature then you should get it, warts and all I suppose.
The reason most people come to Rio Dolce is to do a boat trip up the river to Livingston, the port where the river flows into the Gulf. It's a winding trip through limestone cliffs covered in jungle, and skirted by lillypads and bird life. You stop on the way to drink milk out of coconuts and swim in thermal springs (of dubious value when it´s 35 degrees, but still a novelty) and the like. Lots of people do it one way, mostly those who came to Livingston by sea from Belize or Honduras and want to get to the less remote Rio Dolce but I found doing the return trip over a whole day meant you got to do the whole thing at a slower pace and see a bit more.
Livingston itself is not very well connected to the rest of the country and as a result has harboured a black culture that's pretty alien to the rest of the country. The GarÃfuna are the only people who were living on the Gulf Coast before Columbus who were not Mesoamericans but they are obviously of African origin somehow. No one seems to know exactly when or how they got there but they do insist they are not descended from the slaves that spread out from the British colonies to places like Belize. We ended up buying lunch for one older guy who regaled us with his stories of travel around the world playing Caribbean music and gave us his opinion (as most old men do) about what was wrong with the country.
I decided to not cross into Honduras to see yet more ruins (I'm pretty happy about that at the moment) so I decided to do one last hellish day of bus travel for the country and go pretty much all the way from the Gulf to the Pacific in one day. I find the bus travel slow as hell, often cramped on surplus American school buses with seats designed for 10 year olds, not lanky bastards like me but very, very colourful. You don't really need to buy food because people keep selling you mango or cakes through the window of the bus at pretty much every stop. The scenery through the highlands of the middle of the country is rather nice (not quite as good as middle Mexico, but still worth a look) the illusion that the country is all very pretty isn't shattered until 15km from the middle of Guatemala City.
Guate (as they call it) pretty much has no redeeming features. It has that texture of exposed concrete, rust and grime that coats all third world cities, but there is a general undertone of menace throughout the whole place that you just didn't get in Mexico City. If you city has soldiers on the streets then there's a good sign that something's wrong. I see why tourists stay away in droves and was quite glad to only be swapping buses. The only downside is the place is total chaos and I had to cross the whole thing to get to a school bus (quite often refered to as chicken buses due to their common cargo of livestock) to the much nicer Antigua. Not somthing I plan on repeating.
If you've ever been to one of those pretty little European villages like Chesky Krumlov that has been totally warped by the Lonley Planet Effect then you'll know what to expect of Antigua. The businesses down any street go Hostel, Internet Cafe, Tour Agency, Spanish language school, Hostel,... and you get the feeling that someone once wrote it was a nice, low key place to stay and learn Spanish and it's become a self fulfilling prophecy. It's a spectacular looking place, all colonial, cobbled streets with three volcanos towering over it so you can see the draw, but it does feel a little bit like a safe option.
The town is also full of a breed I'm seeing more and more since I got into Guatemala, the poverty fetishist. I'm feeling a bit outnumbered by the young Westerners learning Spanish here for two months before going off to help weave baskets in the mountains or save the turtles or something. They're easy to spot, as they're usually covered in Indian bands or wearing blankets and generally trying to hide the fact they speak English. Interesting bunch to talk to, but you do get the feeling they're a bit like the people I met working in kibbutzim in Israel, ie everyone's doing it but not 100% sure why. I guess it's somewhere between guilt and looking good on the entrance papers for Yale.
I'm not sure why people reckon I´m a bit cynical....