Guatemala trip

Tijuana – Chetumal
We entered Guatemala through the back-door - Chetumal in the state of Quintana Roo, on the border with Belize. We discovered a lively little city that boasts one of the great museums on Maya culture which put us right into the past and present world of the Maya.

Chetumal - Belize City

on a rickety bus, that arrived a couple of hours late because it had broken down on the road and had had to wait for a replacement vehicle. Belize City is the run-down capital of the country of Belize (total population 700,000 mostly black people speaking a Creole language difficult if not impossible to understand.) Belize City offers little of the “natural wonders” so many people are raving about; those are to be found at the coast where a few resorts have sprung up. At the Mexico-Belize border everybody had to get off the bus for passport inspection and Customs. Interesting fact: Mexicans work in Belize because the pay is better!

Belize City – Flores

Again by bus, not quite as bad as the former one, but bad enough for a trip of five hours. At the border with Guatemala, again – everybody off the bus for passport inspection and to change Dollars into Quetzals. In the meantime, it was dark and the bus driver was getting nervous – apparently, he did not like to drive after dark being afraid of possible attacks.
Though we arrived late in Flores, we found a very nice hotel with a room that looked out on the lake and the hotel accepted credit cards (most hotels don’t). Dinner nearby at the Luna restaurant, and much to our surprise the owner was a German, well, a Bavarian married to a Spaniard. They had been in Guatemala for 11 years and were apparently quite successful.
Flores to Tikal and back to Flores

Excursion to Tikal, the ruins of the former Maya capital. The park is an enormous jungle-like expanse so that the monuments are often hidden behind a curtain of trees and bushes. At the entrance, there are a few stores with Mayan handiwork and artifacts, but no hawkers are allowed in the park, so that apart from monkeys and birds, the only noise you hear is your own voice.
Back to Flores by van into which the owner/driver had packed 15 or 16 passengers which made for a very “touching” ride.

Flores – Chiquimula - Copan

This was a seven-hour ride on one of the so-called chicken buses (and indeed there were live chickens stored on top of the vehicle), that made a stop only when the driver deemed it expedient, and only then so that he could have his cigarette. Requests from the passengers, one of whom was Jose, to stop for a natural emergency were ignored and it happened that Jose had gotten off, but the bus started again. Only at Sigrid’s indignant protests did the driver slow down and Jose made it onto the bus again.

We had had our seats reserved and did get them. However, the bus was oversold – for 45 available seats, the owner/driver had sold more than 60 tickets, and there were people – adults and kids - that were standing in the aisle and between the seats during all those seven hours. Sigrid was particularly incensed about the way the “bosses” were treating their own people, no consideration whatsoever for pregnant women or women carrying toddlers. Upon arrival – finally – at Chiquimula, a small town near the border with Honduras, it was dark, the bus had left us at a curbside downtown, indeed very much downtown; a couple of no confidence-inspiring taxis were asking astronomical prices to drive us to a hotel. So while debating what to do a police jeep approached, and to our surprise and relief they invited us into their car and drove us to a nearby decent hotel. (When we told a Guatemalan this story, he crossed himself adding that he would never have gotten into that police car.) Indeed, we found that people are still traumatized by their recent violent history.

Early next morning, the young man from the hotel guided us through the throngs at the local produce market towards a minibus that would get us, hopefully, to the border which it eventually did. Another wait at the border for yet another minivan to get us to the town of Copan Ruinas, where we arrived at about 11 in the morning, starving and finally getting our morning coffee and something to eat.

After having settled down in the hotel, we took a tuc-tuc to the archaeological park of Copan where we were greeted at the entrance by a bunch of strikingly colored, noisy macaws. As in the case of Tikal, the park is off-limits for hawkers so that it is possible to see the many monuments and stelae without any disturbance. Mention should be made of the excellent museum attached to the park.

We found the ubiquitous tuc-tucs in the smaller towns of Guatemala to be an excellent alternative to the normal taxi service – a cheap, quick and easy way to get around. HHH
Copan to Guatemala City

For once, we had procured seats on a luxury bus for the six-hour trip to Guatemala City. Even the border crossing was hassle-free, since the bus steward took care of the formalities. By the way, on the bus we met a German family – the husband/father being a development aid officer of the German government. They had been in various Latin American countries for the last 20 years, and Guatemala was their last venture. We visited them in Panajachel later on.
We had arrived, again, after dark. A taxi drove us to a nearby hotel where we got a very nice room, but no dinner – the restaurant was closed for the holiday (December 24). Even the pizza parlors were closed.

The hotel was located next to the American Embassy, and we discovered to our amazement that a good dozen guests (Americans, one Indian, one Israeli) were there waiting to take their newly adopted Guatemalan child home. Without going into details here, let me just state that the adoption procedure is arduous and lengthy. Those adoptive parents were, by the way, the last ones since a new law in Guatemala was putting a stop to adoption of Guatemalan babies by foreigners.

A friend in Tecate had given us the names and telephone numbers of relatives in Guatemala City. So we called them with greetings from Tecate, and much to our surprise and joy they offered to drive us to Antigua the next morning.

Guatemala City to Antigua

It was a beautiful one-hour ride, first through the center of Guatemala City and then the nice road to Antigua, Guatemala’s crown jewel – lunch in a former 17th century Benedictine convent, the hotel - another edifice going back to colonial times, the cobblestone streets, more churches and convents and secular buildings left by the Spaniards, and of course, the renowned textiles of the Maya people – bursts of color and imagination.

It was really in Antigua that we got into closer contact with the Maya population. More about them at the end of this travelogue.

After two delightful days in Antigua, we continued to
Chichicastenango

Again in an overbooked van, but the people are so accommodating that the driver does not even have to ask to move a bit, they are squeezing into the rows of the vehicle as best as they can.
Everybody who knows something about Guatemala, knows about Chichicastenango, the largest open-air market of Maya products – textiles, jade, silver, earthenware and the occasional butcher and bakery. Unfortunately, it seemed to us and especially to Jose who had visited years ago, that Chichi is fast becoming a tourist trap. Apart from the two white churches that border the market plaza and that still seem to belong entirely to the indigenous population, it was selling, selling, selling, and bargaining, and insistence that you buy.

We had briefly stopped at the Hotel Santo Tomas – another old convent, I suppose – for a coffee and were gratified that the lady owner of the hotel stopped by and sat down for a little chat. She had been in the business for about 30 years, and was very pessimistic about the future of the Maya population. They breed like rabbits, and since their life span is getting longer, the population is growing at alarming rates. Any effort by the Government to make their lives better through education and health care, is little when faced with the enormity of the problems involved – her opinion!

To Panajachel and Lago Atitlan

We found our van at the stipulated time, but it had the greatest difficulty to leave because of a huge traffic jam. But we finally made it and then started a breath-taking trip to Panajachel – a many-curved country road up in the mountains. The buses raced each other, trying to outdo each other, passing each other at great speed so that the next waiting passenger would be theirs. Definitely not a ride for the faint-hearted. It would seem amazing that there are not more road accidents (or maybe there are indeed), also given the lamentable condition of the vehicles. But we made it to Panajachel and were happy to find a nice hotel in the center of town (but no credit cards!).

Panajachel is a small town on Lake Atitlan, the deepest lake in Central America, volcanic in origin with three volcanoes on its Southern flank, and renowned as one of the most beautiful lakes in the world. Furthermore, it is surrounded by small towns and villages of the Maya people.
The town consists more or less of Main Street lined with kiosks and small eateries. It is a stop-over for the young rucksack crowd on their way into the interior of the Maya world. And it was not more than a stop-over for us, before taking a day-long excursion by boat to visit four Maya villages. Apart from the sheer beauty of the lake, the villages that we visited seemed a world apart. Of course, the population catered to the tourists, but it was still their world, their churches, their customs and traditions and their dress code. We witnessed a mourners’ procession complete with music and ritual, and we talked to our young tuc-tuc driver – 17 years, married, one child, living with his in-laws, who had never set foot outside his village.
In the middle of Guatemala, in this little town with a funny name, we visited with the German family that we had met on the bus. The table was set for Kaffee und Kuchen, an incongruous image for us who had just had a close look at the Maya and their world.

Panajachel – Quetzaltenango

Again by chicken bus that stopped frequently to pick up the odd waiting passenger, being careful not to let a competitor pass you. Chela, as the town is called by the Guatemalans, is an industrial town without much character, and we actually left a day earlier than we had planned.

Chela - Tapachula

in Chiapas, Mexico - it felt almost like home to us. What Tijuana or Laredo are for Mexican migration towards the United States, Tapachula is the border town in Mexico that Guatemalan migrants aim to reach. But contrary to the US-Mexican border which is heavily watched and secured, it is fairly easy to reach Mexico from Guatemala – just cross the border river wading or by boat, nobody will stop you. The trouble and the dangers start only when having reached Mexico, but that is quite another story.

Since Tapachula did not offer much to explore, we caught yet another van that ran along the “ruta del café” wishing to visit one of the coffee plantations higher up in the mountains. We did not actually get access to one of the haciendas which, today, are catering to overnight visitors, this being the last day of the year, the welcome mat had been pulled back. However, we gathered enough information about the rather interesting history of how those plantations came into being. The Mexican President Porfirio Diaz, with a view to securing the stretch of land recently incorporated into Mexico and, according to Guatemalans, “stolen” from them, invited German coffee planters to settle down in the mountains of Chiapas. That is why we have, till today, haciendas with names like Hamburgo and the restaurant Perleberg, for example. Sigrid met the young Harald Edermann, grandson of the owners of Finca Hamburgo. Asked whether he spoke German, he told her that the only sentence he knew was “Ich moechte ein Glas Wasser”. It would have been very interesting to have a talk with the Edermanns, but I guess this will have to wait until our next visit, if ever.

Tapachula – Tijuana

We arrived on time, our driver from Tecate was waiting for us – a miracle, and within an hour we were at home!

Die Maya-Bevoelkerung

Sie leben in Farben, was ganz besonders in der handwerklichen Weberei sowie auch in ihrer Kleidung (ihren Trachten) zum Ausdrck kommt. Die Menschen sind freundlich und froehlich. Doch, Armut gibt es - was wir aus unserer Sicht Armut nennen - aber wir hatten nicht den Eindruck, dass die Leute hungern; die Maerkte, von denen wir einige gesehen haben, bieten eine grosse Auswahl an Obst und Gemuese an, und lebendige Huehner haben wir mehr als einmal auf unseren Busreisen gesehen. Ob die Indianerbevoelkerng gluecklich ist, sei dahin gestellt; so lange sie nichts anderes kennen und keine Vergleiche anstellen koennen,.. ist wohl alles in bester Ordnung.

Die Mayas machen fast 60% der Bevoelkerung Guatemalas aus – ein Volk fuer sich, isoliert in abgelegenen Doerfern, viele sprechen nur ihre eigene Sprache und Spanisch duerftig. Am meisten haben mir die Kinder leid getan. Da siehst Du 4 oder 5-Jaehrige, die nicht nur Schuhe putzen wollen, sondern die auch Buendel schleppen, die fast groesser sind als sie selbst. Schule? Wir haben hier und da mit diesen Kindern geredet und sie ausgefragt; einige sagten stolz, dass sie in die Schule gehen und haben sich ueber einen (Reklame)Kugelschreiber gefreut, von denen wir ein paar mitgebracht hatten; andere wiederum gaben zu, dass sie nicht in die Schule gingen. Die Frauen, die das ambulante Gewerbe dominieren, koennen meistens weder lesen noch schreiben, aber wie eine uns lachend sagte sie koennen zaehlen.

Es gaebe noch viel zu kommentieren, wie z.B. die Maya-Hierarchie oder die Gesellschaftsordnnung. Die Frau hat keine Rechte, sie gebaert ein Kind nach dem andern, muss sich darum kuemmern, dass die Familie genug zu essen hat, aber hat kein Stimmrecht im Dorfrat, nicht einmal Zugang zu den Palabern.

Haben wir uns bedroht gefuehlt? Eigentlich nicht, obwohl wir ab und zu den lokalen Bus nehmen mussten, den sogenannten chicken bus, der ueberall haelt, um noch mehr Passagiere aufzunehmen. Eine dieser Fahrten dauerte sieben Stunden; der Bus war ueberfuellt - viele standen waehrend der ganzen Zeit, mit Babies in den Armen -, wir waren die einzigen Auslaender, aber wir hatten keine Angst, dass man uns ausrauben oder ueberfallen wuerde. Allerdings haben wir sehr aufgepasst, und sind nach Einfall der Dunkelheit schoen in unserem Hotel geblieben. In Chiquimula, wo wir bei Dunkelheit (nach eben diesen 7 Stunden) ankamen und nicht so recht wussten, wie wir ein Hotel finden wuerden, hat uns eine Polizeipatrouille in ihr Vehikel einsteigen lassen und uns in ein nahe gelegenes Hotel gebracht. Sie haben keine "Kommission" von uns erwartet, kamen aber 10 Minuten spaeter wieder am Hotel vorbei, um uns zu fragen, ob alles o.k. sei und - warum nicht – ihre Kommision vom Hotel zu kassieren.