Central American Travels 2003

Fever in Antigua
The Guatemalan city of Antigua is stunningly beautiful. After flying in from Atlanta, which was stunningly drab, Antigua is a picture postcard of Spanish colonial architecture. Bright painted houses support terracotta tiles and hide pretty patios. Cobblestone streets thread towards a main plaza flanked by artisan shops and a snowy white cathedral.

I booked a week of Spanish lessons, rented a room and fell into a daily routine, spending my free afternoons exploring the city. A substantial tourist scene bubbles under the surface and the old Mayan ladies are never far away with their 'nice prices' and 'special deals just for you' . You can buy all sorts of textiles and accessories. They're cheap and they're mostly stripey. The tourist scene can get a little tiresome; there's only so many times you can politely decline the purchase of a carved wooden sun god without wishing to shove it where the sun don't shine. But away from the centre, the tourists thin out and volcanoes loom ominously around the fringes of town. Antigua also sits above capricious plates and has twice been destroyed by earthquakes. Tremors are common and one night I was juddered awake as I lay in bed.

I found dusty plazas where I could sit and read away the afternoons, and restaurants where admitting to being vegetarian wasn't met with a blow to the head. The Hare Krishna restaurant did accompany my tofu burger with the Thompson Twins greatest hits, but that was the only punishment I received.

After twenty hours of intense one to one lessons of Spanish, I came away with a horrible fever that kept me bedridden for a couple of days. I was freezing under half a dozen blankets, then sweating with all the windows open. At least the hours I spent in the bathroom gave me an opportunity to practice my irregular verbs.

Fever or not, I decided to get the bus to Honduras to visit Copan. In the premiership of Mayan sites, Copan occupies a champions league position. Despite the indirect route I took to get to Central America, the romance of lost cities in the jungle was the whole purpose of this trip.

I can trace my fascination back to a renowned academic and definitive intellectual source; Tintin. When I was about ten years old I started collecting Herge's Tintin books. I read them all, but the ones I returned to time and again were the stories of Tintin in the Americas. The colourful drawings of towering, steeped temples, fearsome indigenous people and storylines about solar eclipses and ancient curses made a strong impression on a young Gregory. It wasn't long before girls reared their pretty heads and ruined jungle cities took a backseat. But I got there in the end.

Copan was one of the Maya world's big cities and hit its peak between the 6th and 8th centuries AD, a time when the Mayan race as a whole was also in its prime. Its downfall arrived when a neigbouring city invaded and Copan's great ruler, Eighteen Rabbit was beheaded (presumably due to a silly name cull). Copan obviously didn't give credence to the warning and elected Smoke Monkey as his successor, but the city's star was now on the wane.

In sweltering heat I tramped up the sheer stone steps of the acropolis temple. I gazed over the ball court, which in Mayan times was a literal game of life an death, the losers had their hearts ripped out as offerings to the gods. This 'game' personifies the Maya, they developed a calendar which accurately predicted lunar cycles and they were professors of calculus, yet they never came up with the wheel. They established the number zero a thousand years before it was used in Europe, yet human life was regarded as cheap and sacrifices were on a grand scale. The Maya believed that their gods required blood letting as a kind of mortgage payment for living on the earth and the young males would scrape their genitals with stingray spines to appease them. Oddly, one of the Mayan gods is a spitting image of Matthew Kelly.

Through the tail end of my fever, the giant carved monoliths seemed blurred in the heat haze. I was half expecting Captain Haddock to appear, sucking on his pipe. I went back to my hotel. In a cage on the balcony outside my room was a parrot. "Hola" I said as I walked past. "Hola" it replied and gave me a wolf whistle. I closed the blinds to the outside world and slept for a long time.

Wandering Without Aim
It took a while but my fever eventually subsided and I ditched the dry biscuits for more interesting food. I appeared to be in Honduras, so headed to the mountains for some recuperation. I spent a week trundling around the mountain villages on the local chicken buses. To travel anywhere in Latin America you can't avoid taking the chicken bus. It's a generic term for any local bus where the person sitting next to you could be friend or fowl. In a previous incarnation the chicken bus was a US school bus. Once they've been destroyed by the youth of America, they're shipped south, given a psychedelic paint job and live out their retirement creaking around Central America.

I stayed in pretty towns with names like Santa Rosa and Gracias. Back in Copan I hiked south from the village and into the green hills. I passed farmers returning home from the fields dressed in straw stetsons and carrying rusty machetes. I was heading for a small Maya ceremonial site known as Los Sapos (The Toads). I was waylaid by half a dozen Swedish hippies. One stoned fool even spoke with a Jamaican patois through his blond dreads:

"Wat bring you to Honduras, man?"
"Mayan ruins. You?"
"Da weed."

Los Sapos was a hilltop site, deep in the tobacco fields. Rocks had been chiseled by ancient hands into lifelike toads. Carved eyes stared as if ready to pounce. Down below in the valley, the sun dropped behind jagged peaks and a curl of smoke twisted and dissolved in the dusk. Honduras was a quite beautiful country.

In town crowds of locals were gathered around the entrances to local shops. On tiny, flickering TV screens, Baghdad went up in flames. I was watching the scene with an American paramedic. He said, "Tony Blair and George Bush are kicking ass!" I felt a little ashamed to be English. I knew little about Honduras before I came, only that they had started a war with El Salvador thirty years ago over a game of football. Even that seemed a sounder pretext than the bombing of Iraq.

I crossed back into Guatemala and flew to Flores in the northern jungle. There was a huge hole in the outside wall of my hotel room. I rang reception and told them. "Air conditioning" the lady said. I eventually changed to a room on the sixth floor. "Nice view" she said. It was, but the elevator was out of action and I guess this was her revenge.

The next morning I left town at 5am, walked for half an hour through the jungle and then scaled a steep, stone temple up rickety narrow ladders. This was Tikal, the grandest, most elegant of all the ancient ruins in Meso-America. The jungle canopy was broken only by the roof combs of these gigantic temples. I felt exhilarated watching howler monkeys screaming in the trees in the thin, gray skies of the dawn. Tikal's pyramids are aligned with the solstices and represent the Mayan's fascination with astronomy. The Mayan astronomers plotted the orbit of Venus to an accuracy not bettered until the advent of computers. They also predicted eclipse cycles hundreds of years into the future. The Mayan calendar consists of two interlocking wheels, one representing the solar year and another of 260 days based on a recurring theme around the Mayan gods. It is more complicated than long division, but what it does say is that the current world will end on November 21st 2012. Scarily close and annoyingly half way through the football season.

The previous day at Tikal, an American tourist on spring vacation had slipped by security and illegally spent the night camped atop Temple IV, the tallest structure in the ancient city. He woke up in the dark, forgot where he was and fell hundreds of feet to the jungle floor. The Mayans didn't build their pyramids to function as backpacker hotels. The walls are steep, so sacrificial blood could flow down the stone tiers. Tikal was a haunting, magical city, but even a thousand years after it was abandoned, you still had to watch yourself. The tourist died on the way to hospital. I headed east, over the border and into Belize.

Belize is an oddity in Central America. The Spanish conquistadors weren't really interested in the country as it didn't contain gold and its offshore reef was hazardous and patrolled by pirates. The British stepped in, brought slaves of African descent in from St Vincent and only granted independence twenty years ago. The legacy is an English speaking country, about the size of Wales, with a flavour of the Caribbean. Buses blast out the musical crimes of Bob Marley and the supermarkets stock tins of rasta pasta. In San Ignacio I went caving; swimming across underground streams and climbing into stalactite decorated chambers, full of Mayan ceremonial offerings. The skeletons of a thirteen-year-old boy and sixteen-year old girl lay next to the obsidian axes that ended their lives. The Mayans didn't ground teenagers, they sacrificed them.

I took the Hummingbird Highway to the Caribbean coast. The further south I traveled the more houses there were without roofs; the more bendier the trees. There is a simple reason for this; Belize is hurricane country. In the coastal town of Placencia, the first two hotels I picked from the guidebook didn't exist; the victims of hurricanes Mitch and Iris, respectively. I eventually found a complete one, although the owner, Lucille, said it had narrowly survived Hurricane Keith. I suppressed a giggle. If ever there was a non-threatening hurricane it had to be Keith. Hurricane is a Mayan word, but Keith could only be British. Belize was full of these linguistic idiosyncrasies.

My cabin was made of driftwood and sat upon slender stilts over the beach. From the porch I could see the warm Caribbean sea washing gently against the sandy shore. I lay on my bed and looked at the ceiling. A lizard ran across followed by the biggest cockroach in the world. Except it wasn't the biggest, because the one behind it was even larger and looked as if it was carrying surface to air missiles. I knocked at Lucille's house and woke her from a slumbering siesta. Lucille reminded me of the housekeeper in the old Tom & Jerry cartoons and spoke in the same sing-song Caribbean lilt, "Wat is wrong wit you? Wat you tink dey gonna do, eat you? Huh?" I must have looked pretty pathetic because she followed me back armed with weapons of mass insect destruction and liberated my room.

I spent two days in the blistering sun and end this e-mail pretty much as I started it, lying in a darkened room with a wet towel over my head. I had some factor 15 sun block with me but should have taken the hint from the local shop that sold only factor 30 and 45. I guess I'll never learn.

Mayans, Hippies & Lunatics
In the early sixteenth century, the highlands of Guatemala were the heartland of the Maya civilisation. For 1500 years the only conflicts they fought were local squabbles with neighbouring villages. The Spanish arrived in 1523 and changed their way of life forever. They put to the sword those they couldn't forcibly convert to catholicism and anyone still standing had to contend with old world diseases in the new world. Smallpox and TB ravaged their immune systems and millions died.

After independence from Spanish rule three hundred years later, the Maya were given no respite as a new ruling class descended from the conquistadors simply viewed the people of the highlands as a cheap and expendable labour force. If constant oppression wasn't enough, hundreds of thousands were killed or 'disappeared' in the recent civil war. For five hundred years the Maya of the highlands have been relentlessly persecuted. And if all that wasn't enough, these villages are also home to hundreds of hippies.

What keeps the Maya here and, at the same time, attracts the spaced out gringos is the natural landscape; perfect to photograph and ideal for growing marijuana. The hippy epicentre is Lago de Atitlan, an incredibly picturesque lake, walled in by a chain of volcanoes. The lake itself is a collapsed volcano cone, or an energy vortex depending on if you believe in science or silliness.

Small boats bounce across the lake linking trade across the villages and ferrying the hippies between holistic healing temples and meditation classes. The locals dress in hand woven shawls and stylish pyjama trousers, colours identifying their village ancestry. The hippies look as if they've sailed straight from Woodstock.

I hired a horse and rode around the crater, staying in a number of villages. Each had a slightly different local flavour and a particular sub-culture of hippies. One was for those with an interest in Buddhism, another for those searching for their inner child. Without the patience to sit and chant 'Om' and having sent my inner child to an inner children's home, I kept away from these places. The most disappointing aspect of this set-up is that there is the lack of interaction between the communities; the hippies regard the Maya as ancient dudes and the Maya just think them fools.

What stops them fighting each other (a fight the hippies would obviously lose) is the incredible landscape. I stayed in a couple of places described in my guidebook as 'bohemian retreats'. In each, there would be a circle of stoned gringos sitting together. One would be playing a battered guitar, another would be armed with a pair of tom-toms. At least three people would be asleep and another meditating. One person would be giggling uncontrollably at the word 'flip-flop'. Empty tubes of`Pringles would litter the ground. Conversations would go:

Hippy 1: "Hey man, how's it going? Where you, like, from?"
Me: "England."

Pause

Hippy 2: "Where you from, man?"
Me: "England."

Longer Pause

Hippy 1: "Whereabouts in Denmark do you live?"

It was amusing at first but conversations with people with no short term memory soon become tedious. It wasn't just young gringos either. There were those who had lived here since the sixties with shiny bald heads and weedy grey ponytails. They all had that thousand yard stare that comes from either fighting in Vietnam or smoking grass for thirty years. There was one guy who wore a full length patterned brown poncho and had laughable amounts of facial hair. He looked like Moses!

Strangely, the hippies didn't point and laugh at me as much as I did at them. I caught a glance of myself in a shop window one day; sandals, cotton trousers, ethnic shirt, jade necklace and god knows when I last shaved. By a process of laid back osmosis, I was becoming one of them.

Yet despite all this nonsense, something made me hang around. Perhaps it was the vegetarian restaurants or the bar that had a 'Hippy Hour' or, hey, maybe it was even the energy vortex, but the lake did have a magnetic quality that was a little irresistible. I began to peer under the surface of the tourist scene and in the old parts of the villages, a different, unchanged way of life was evident. One afternoon I caught a lift in the back of a pick-up truck (the horse was being MOT'd) to a tiny hamlet high on the volcano. There must have been a dozen people of all ages crushed together; kids, parents, chickens and baggage. The women wore elaborate shawls and skirts decorated in all the shades of the rainbow. The men wore bright pantaloons, stitched in a riot of primary colours. I looked out through a mass of kaleidoscopic bodies. As we drove down to the plaza, my cap flew off and by a stroke of luck I instinctively threw out a hand and caught it. This was met with laughter. The woman to my right tapped my shoulder and made to throw her baby off the truck. A child picked up a chicken and feinted to launch it into the road. I almost felt as if I had crossed the local / tourist divide. Then we came to a halt and I had to pay double the local fare. Parity was restored!

Leaving one set of stoned tourists, I headed further into the hills where three years ago a Japanese tourist was (literally) stoned to death. This was Todos Santos, a village high in the mountains, away from the hippy catchment area and as remote as any place I've been to. This is a place notorious among travellers as justice is controlled by vigilante groups 'inspired' by evangelical preachers and many foreigners are too scared (or sensible) to come. I had been advised by several people to avoid the place but as an incentive for travel, contrariness is a great justification. The poor Japanese tourist was spotted taking a photo of a child and deemed a satanic baby stealer. The locals cornered him and his guide and killed them with rocks.

This is a remote place in a sheer valley with its own language, culture and idiosyncrasies. The valley is home to the M'am; a people who still use the Tzolkin, a 260 day Mayan almanac rather than the Christian calendar. As the sun drops behind the mountain ridge, a fog rolls in, enhancing the mystery of the village. Saturday was market day and anarchy regined. I witnessed some spectacular drunkenness. Men with blood splattered noses were throwing punches indiscrimanately while their girlfriends screamed abuse in their ears or fought cat fights of their own. Even Romford on a Friday night couldn't match this. I swerved around the fights and stepped over those who were sleeping in the road. Next door to my $3 a night hotel (which doubled as a brothel after dark) was the jail. Built onto the street with mud bricks and caged iron cell windows, the inebriated prisoners traded insults with passers by. Above the village was an ancient Maya pyramid littered with animal sacrifices. Todos Santos was like a village from the middle ages and I had a fantastic weekend.

Sometimes in Guatemala, the landscape masked the fact that this is a dirt poor country. It is a country of stunning natural backdrops; lakes, volcanoes, jungle, it has it all. The indigenous people still cling to traditions and dress that date back two millennium. Yet these very people are the ones who have lost the most. The arrival of the Spanish in Guatemala began the process that turned the new world into the third world. The descendents of the Maya people have the lowest life expectancy in the western hemisphere, but their dignity (Todos Santos excepted!) is something that can't be supressed (and something the hippies will never have). It was a short chicken bus journey to the border and I was already missing Guatemala as I crossed into Mexico.

Mexico
It was only after I paid my $10 visa registration fee at the Mexican border and was back on the bus that I translated the big capital letters on the visa: IMPORTANT - THIS FORM IS FREE. Mexico is notorious for bureaucracy & backhanders and it is not a country in a hurry. I went to cash a traveller's cheque in a bank. I joined the back of a huge snake of people, shuffling slowly to the front. Only two windows were open, although one of them was staffed by a kid of about eighteen who wore a steep learning curve expression. I watched the other bank teller in action. He kept leaning over and borrowing a pen from his young colleague and then handing it back after each transaction. One pen, two staff, many customers.

In the forty-five minutes it took to make the front of the queue, I worked out a number of efficiency measures that would speed up the process. I would propose a one man - one pen working environment and confine cigarette breaks to periods when less than one hundred customers are tapping their feet impatiently. Deodorant would also be compulsory.

For Semana Santa (Easter week), I headed to San Cristobal de las Casas. This town shot into the news in 1994 when the the revolutionary Zapatista army took over the town to launch a manifesto aimed at empowering the impoverished local Mayan population. The Mexican army drove them out again, but the seeds of rebellion were sown. A decade on, the town has cashed in on the revolutionaries. You can buy Zapatista pizzas and tiny dolls of the enigmatic leaders as tourism clings to history's coat-tails. On Good Friday I attended my first crucifixion. Fortunately, it was only a re-enactment, but the crowds crushed in to see it anyway. A struggling PA system played crackly dirges and the whole affair was performed with great dignity in the sweltering heat. Many Maya were present. With their pre-Hispanic idols and ancient beliefs you can sometimes forget Latin America is a catholic stronghold. A crucifixion is a good reminder.

Good Friday turned into Bad Saturday as West Ham lost to Bolton. Only Mexican wine was helping me get through the relegation struggle. I headed north into the Yucatan peninsula stopping in the city of Campeche (or Lord Sun Sheep Tick as the Maya delightfully knew it). My hotel was once a Spanish colonial mansion. There were traces of former glory diminished by nineteenth century tiling and art deco furniture. My room was the old scullery. I visited a number of ruins on the peninsula; Tonina, Palenque, Edzna, Uxmal, Tulum, Chichen Itza. The Maya never had imperial ambitions and intercity feuding ensured there was little co-operation between population centres. One thousand years on from the Maya collapse, the result is a collection of ruined cities, each with its own unique identity. Uniformity of architecture can be found solely in the overall design; a central plaza, pyramid temple and ball court. Despite proximity, each is as different as London is to Barcelona.

I travelled around without a care in the world (well apart from West Ham which was a constant concern). For two weeks I had the time of my life, constantly amazed at the restored Mayan sites and beautiful colonial metropolises. At Edzna I met a man atop a pyramid who taught me some Mayan words. A sign at the site was explicit; 'The Maya did not receive extra-terrestrial help in building their cities.' I said it seemed an unnecessary statement. He laughed, "You wouldn't believe some of the freaks we get here."

Uxmal had pyramids crawling with scaly iguanas and the air was thick with white butterflies. Palenque had a Tarzan jungle setting with a soundtrack of howler monkeys. Izamal was a colonial town painted egg yolk yellow. It had Mayan temples in the centre, a Spanish monastery, leafy plazas and skies of cloudless blue. At Valladolid I swam in a cenote, a natural limestone sinkhole dappled with sunlight. Tulum had the best location of all the Mayan sites, with a cliff top view of the Gulf of Mexico. It was prime first millennium real estate. Chichen Itza was full of daytrippers from Cancun. They were hungover and didn't give a monkeys about the Mayans. "I got home at 5am this morning and was woken up at 8am to go on this damn pyramid tour" said one goatee bearded dude.

Undoubtedly the best part of visiting these ruins is the fact that you can climb all over them. If the Maya civilisation had flourished in the US or UK, it would be a different experience. In Central America there are no guard rails or access ramps for the disabled. The Mayans never had the wheel, let alone the wheelchair. The downside is that people do fall off these pyramids and every year there are injuries and deaths. In the UK, minority groups would have a field day. In the US, there would be a scrum of lawyers camped at the foot of every crumbling pyramid.

I dipped back down into Belize for a few days to visit the post-classic Mayan city of Lamanai. I stayed at a hotel in Orange Walk Town with grounds sloping down to a river. A tiny wooden jetty extended into the water and I caught a boat to the ruins an hour downstream. Unfortunately I was sat next to an ornithologist and he kept pointing and saying excitedly, "Look a plum-tailed heron!" or "Quick, up there, a blue ponce twatter!" Despite the bird watcher, Lamanai was gorgeous; temples built onto a steep plateau above a crocodile patrolled inlet. Returning on the boat a Kiwi tourist said, "Christ, that was a great day out." He spoke for everyone, even the bird watcher.

The following day was Labour Day, a national holiday and an excuse for the locals to get legless. In the evening I sat in the hotel bar watching CNN. A rather hefty lady lurched up to my table and shouted "hey, whitey, wanna see some pussy?" I almost spat my beer across the bar and stammered, "no, no...please, no." She shrugged, staggered off and the locals roared with laughter. The place was run by an American ex-pat, "you were lucky," he said, "she doesn't always ask first."

For the last leg of the trip I hit the Yucatan shoreline, Mexico's main tourism corridor. The length of coast from Tulum to Cancun is known as the Maya Riviera and it's the country's version of the Costa del Sol. I stayed a few days in Playa del Carmen to sunbathe on the powdery white beaches. Once a fishing village of a few dozen people, it is now a 'resort town' for thousands of inebriated yankees. Historical Mexican attractions such as McDonalds and Burger King sit next to shopping malls and hard sell timeshare operators. Signs read 'Continental Breakfast' or flash 'Ladies Night' in pink neon. On the plus side, it only took five minutes to cash a traveller's cheque. I tried not to be cynical (different strokes for different folks and all that), but you couldn't even have dinner without a Mariachi band surrounding your table and blasting out Guantanamera. It was hilarious and it made me cringe and it wasn't like Mexico at all.

In a way it was an appropriate place to end; a kind of air-brushed perspective of the Maya people. On this stretch of coast you could take a Mayatours bus to the pyramid shaped Hotel Maya along the Maya Riviera. The word Maya was used simply as tourism bait. The package deal holidaymakers see only the smiling villagers on the cover of glossy brochures and not the real state of the Maya nations. Throughout the Maya region; in Guatemala, Honduras, Belize & southern Mexico, I saw these same people living in utter poverty. There's some irony in the fact that a thousand years after the collapse of the Maya world, it's these vast empty cities that draw the visitors, yet the descendents of its inhabitants are the ones begging in the streets for your spare change. I felt so sorry for these downtrodden people living in such misery. But, throughout the world, history is written by the conquerors and the Maya were always better farmers than they were fighters. The last two and a half months have been simply amazing.