How good is my Spanish these days? Well, here’s how good it is.

I was sitting on a bar stool, waiting for Doug, lip-reading the paper (Diario), and drinking a licuado, when a man came up behind me and asked the lady behind the bar for ‘el papel’. Guiltily, I closed the newspaper and pushed it toward him.
He looked at it, and me, a little sadly I thought, then at her. She handed him a roll of toilet paper and he went into the men’s room.

A few seconds passed while I worked out what had transpired, then I began to chuckle. The bartender and the other customer exchanged a discreet few quiet words. I held up the Diario and said, in Spanish something like “i ingles, esta se llama el papel”. Only then did they begin to laugh.

Later, another man came up to me. He told me I had a voice like Vicky Carr. I asked ‘is Vicky Carr young and beautiful?” (no subjunctive for me). No, he said, she is like us. But he liked her because she had a beautiful voice and she sings English and Spanish both without an accent.

Best I can say for myself is that I laugh without an accent.

I had been walking three times a week with Kim, but she’s away now, so now I go by myself. On the road by 5:30 AM-it’s light but hasn’t been for long, and home, primed for the day, just before 7. It’s the best time of day.

My route is a road whose main purpose is to service the crude oil pipeline that runs alongside it, and maybe to supply the village of La Esmerelda, which is bounded by the river, the road and the marina.

There are more animals than people abroad at this, the rooster hour; also some very handsome chickens, pig families, even ducks, if it’s been raining and their stream is flowing, and flocks of turkeys. Dogs sometimes appear in gangs, but they are sickly or juvenile two-faced bullies, most of these dogs, just the kind I’m not sure how to meet. Doug suggested I pick up some stones; it works! The mere bending over to pick them up is something the dogs have seen before, and not liked. They don’t even know that I throw like a girl.

At the very end of La Esmerelda there’s a house I always like to surreptitiously examine. It’s a place with the ‘wrong side of the tracks’ written all over, and no proper sanitation facilities either. There’s often a blazing cooking fire visible through the cracks in the board siding, bringing the pre-daybreak temperature well over 100 already. Luxury would be an outside cooking shelter and an enclosed outhouse separate from the well.

Does the woman of the house step from her hammock every morning eager to build that blazing fire? Or does she imagine another life – one that doesn’t require such heat so early in service of so many people, for so long. Cultural expectations may vary. She might be wondering why I’m by myself, moving so fast in this climate and what my family is eating since I’m not there to make the tortillas.

The road is packed dirt road full of rounded river stones from kidney- to head-sized. Or rather, it’s a stone road, with dirt infill. There are a number of hills I can never quite remember to count, but they’re nicely arranged, as if laid out by cross-trainer software.

Beyond the village, the rubber plantation begins. The ranks of trees look old and well-established, as they stretch off into the distance. Some mornings are redolent with the not-altogether-pleasant scent of fresh-tapped rubber.

One little valley has been cleared, roughly, and planted with corn. There are a few areas of streams and ponds where the original vegetation remains. Here is where you’ll see some nice butterflies and Bird-of-Paradise.

Then comes another plantation with different trees. We’ve identified these as gmolina, and believe it’s being grown for pulp, or possibly lumber – more details to follow.

The gmolina gradually gives way to fairly recently cleared pasture land, sometimes with cows and/or horses, but mostly empty save for a few small birds.

The river Seja marks our usual stopping point, where we comment on how low the water levels are and how the rainy season never really got going. Occasionally we go all the way to ‘the crossroads’ where we often see men with machetes sitting patiently waiting, ?for a ride?

And the pipeline marches on, 275 miles long (so said my source, but now I think it might be kilometers), it starts in the far north of Guatemala, near the border with Mexico and its Tabasco oil fields, in a jungle and wetland area that was rebel-active in the civil war, which slowed down hydro-carbon resource development. In fact, under this rock are more sordid details about World Bank funding and hasty/sloppy environmental assessments which encouraged oil drilling in a rain forest.

According to http://www.quetzalnet.com/Trad_Inv.html#4

Guatemala has four sedimentary basins located in the north, south and eastern sections of the country, all with potential hydrocarbon reserves: southern Peten, northern Peten, Amatique and the Pacific. Exploration to date indicates the existence of both large and small fields, with recoverable reserves of between 20 and 30 million barrels of petroleum of varying API gravity, from heavy crude to medium and light grade.
Approximately 65% of Guatemala is covered by sedimentary rock, indicating the probability of finding oil in almost anywhere in the country.

The “tuberia” continues under the Rio Dulce and on to the Caribbean seaport of Puerto Barrios, where I think it is refined. Guatemala is the only Central American country that produces oil, and it still needs to import substantial amounts.

Perenco is a European-owned conglomerate.

Those men with machetes sometimes materialize to trim the vegetation that grows under the ‘tubo’. The pipe shows signs of inspection and painting, and we see the occasional boat drill with towed containment booms on the river. Other pipeline regulars I meet, or at least wave at, are the rubber cutters, and a man we call ‘El Guapo’, the handsome. He speeds past, usually in a jeep or ATV, always wearing a white cowboy hat, and waves with an economical gesture.

Recently there have been other marina users of the pipeline road, later in the morning, but by then, it’s a different road. Friendly women, men with paddles moving towards the rio, the kids who go to school (there are those who don’t)all progress down the lane in their heartbreakingly clean clothes, wet combed hair, the scent of soap in their wake. “Buenas dias”, a shy smile; as I clump on past, wishing the world weren’t so complicated.

We took a little bus excursion for an overnight at El Estor, a small town on the north shore at the far end of Lago Izabal. You could take your own boat up the lake but most people don’t – one security incident (theft) even a while back puts people off a place for years.
HPHOT MAP OF LAGO IZABAL

We were curious, having heard that originally this was a location where the Spanish stored treasure. When? What treasure? Where did it come from? How did it get down the narrow river gorges without being picked off? Lago Izabal was also how the coffee plantations in the highland state of Alta Verapaz connected to coastal shipping before trains and trucks arrived.

Nobody knows nuttin’about the Spanish- might be one of those stories that gets passed along because it sounds interesting and we want to believe it.

The next story about El Estor is its name: The Store, said Spanish style. This is true; the building still exists and is in fact the hotel, Vista del Lago, where we stayed, in a very small and basic room. A train line to carry coffee from the Highlands to Puerto Barrios on the coast passed this way starting sometime in the 1800s and The Store, started in the 1850s by two British gentlemen, was the only source for European goods for miles around. How many people wanted European goods? I can’t even imagine.

Eventually a highway was built south of the lake and El Estor slipped back into near oblivion.

Things get active again in the 1960s when a high grade of nickel was discovered nearby. A Canadian company, via its Guatemalan subsidiary, put money into the town, building the roads and a town square, a hospital (now finally being restored for use), housing and schools, even a golf course for the employees.

Their plant stood a couple miles outside of town. It’s still there under its tall smokestack, fenced off and guarded, looking like it could swing into some kind of action shortly.

Various technical and transportation difficulties shut it down in 1977, “much to the relief of the locals who had witnessed the decimation of the surrounding forests and rivers” says Shelagh McNally in Pocket Adventures Guatemala.

Our host at the hotel had been employed at the mine in its prime. He was happy to take us out there and tried to explain how the plant had been operated; neither of our language skills were sophisticated enough for some of the discussion. Apparently, they needed to generate a lot of electricity and eventually the price of diesel fuel for the power plant contributed to their demise.

What looks even clearer in El Estor than in our ‘home town’ of Fronteras is that many many people, maybe 80-90 percent? are the indigenous Mayan, K’iche’. Reading further into Shelagh McNally’s book, I learned that land rights have been and continue to be of ongoing concern in this area. There was an infamous massacre here in 1978, 100 people gunned down by the Guatemalan army. Amnesty International came through in 1999 after a prominent human rights activist went, and stayed, missing. And in recent years, the Guatemalan military has violently evicted Mayan communities living on land the government preferred to transfer to international corporations.

Although there was successful community resistance to keep international oil drilling out of the lake, efforts to promote conservation and preservation in the area, which is quite near the extensive valley of the Rio Polochic BioReserve, are also fairly low-key.
PHOTO AMIGOS DE LAGO IZABAL

Since the nickel mine isn’t running, and there aren’t really any signs of a fishing industry, or a cattle industry, or much commercial agriculture, except on a very small scale, it’s hard to say what makes the money go round.

At least that’s the gist of what I’ve learned by Googling around, in particular from
http://books.google.com/books?id=x7CtmPL5DMQC&pg=PA235&lpg=PA235&dq=history+of+El+Estor&source=bl&ots=2F26N63lRh&sig=2ZfwhUd9vZEkjm5F04JB4WtdDWs&hl=en&ei=MJTOSqyVJsnR8Qax0sCBBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1#v=onepage&q=history%20of%20El%20Estor&f=false
and
http://www.pbase.com/image/78083476
http://www.inriodulce.com/links/ElEstor.html

The orderly grid of streets, broad, with curbs and sidewalks, give El Estor a dignity unlike the usual bustling but ramshackle feel of other Guatemalan towns. I’m nearly certain that we were the only tourists in town, and after we’d been up two or three blocks, and over four more, everyone knew us as well.

We did our best to entertain them: taking pictures in a surprisingly well-stocked music store,
checking out an aguardiente (firewater, as in grain alcohol!) joint, watching cayugas get loaded (not with firewater!) for trips to even smaller villages somewhere.
We drank street-vendor drinks out of plastic bags, and a chocolate licuado made with Nesquick that was pretty good. We checked out a small eco-resort, visited the nickel mine, ate something delicious smokily cooked over an oil drum, and slept in our tiny lake view cabin.
Next day, as we had a tipico (refried beans, plantains, eggs, bit of cheese, tortillas, fresh juice) breakfast at a cafe overlooking the square, we tried to give part of it to a young boy, in neat clean clothes but clearly hungry, who had been watching us intently. The waitress intervened to stop us, ‘on principle’, the principle of not having their customers hit upon, I guess.

These folks were waiting for the bank to open. The line stretched half a block already and was still there when we left town an hour later. I went off to buy some Rio Polochic rice (sorry to report, it’s undistinguished) and then we boarded the bus, clambering over the bundle of plastic plumbing pipe in the aisle (no chickens), towards Boqueron.

Boqueron is a canyon/gorge of the Rio Sauce, along the north shore of Lago Izabal. It’s a quite beautiful place, which is living in my memory, since I didn’t want to carry anything that couldn’t get wet. So, instead, here’s a link a pair of photos taken by a man with hundreds of lovely pictures, many of people, from the entire country. I gather he was here as an observer during the exhumation of gravesites from the 36-year civil war. http://www.flickr.com/photos/mimundo/sets/72157603295975186/ Boqueron is at the end of this series.

You get off the bus, and will be instantly met by someone who wants to paddle you upstream. The family that lives closest seems to have the concession; We were paddled upstream in a wooden dugout cayuca with literally two knuckles-worth of freeboard. I did meet one Frenchman who said no one was home when he arrived so he just took a boat and paddled himself. OOOh, I said, you French can do things like that.

We gringoes left our packs in their house/tiny tienda, and changed out of our wet stuff when we got back so we didn’t have to ride back soaking wet on the bus.

So let me just describe = what? Cliff walls loaded with plants, narrow clean fresh water river littered with jumbles of boulders. Central Casting sent a large electric blue butterfly and set design provided sunny blue skies.You can jump in the river and clumsily walk your way further upstream if you stay in the shallower water closer to the side. You could spend a couple hours there, especially if you had a picnic lunch.

I liked it.

Our man Miguel had five children. He had a little occasional work building the highway that was being paved literally outside his door, but tourism was down, times were tight, and he asked if he could come work on the boat with us.

The esteemed city of ‘La Muy Noble y Muy Leal Ciudad de Santiago de los Caballeros de Guatemala’, now known as Antigua, but once the capital of Guatemala, has an interesting history. The Spanish, after being pushed out of one town by Indian unrest, and down the slopes of the Agua Volcano by a mudslide, established a third city in this location, below the Agua Volcano, the Fuego Volcano and one other whose name isn’t so easy to remember, here in 1543.

PHOTO VOLCANO

I can’t really do better than to quote/paraphrase the Lonely Planet guide on the subject.

Antigua was once the epicenter of power throughout Central America. During the 17th and 18th centuries little expense was spared on the city’s magnificent architecture, despite the fact that the ground rumbled ominously and regularly. Schools, hospitals, churches and monasteries sprung up, rivaled in magnificence only by the houses of the upper clergy and the politically connected.

At its peak about 1770, the city had 60,000 people, 33 churches, including a cathedral, a university, printing presses, newspaper, and a lively political and cultural scene, plus municipal water and sewer. The rumblings never stopped, however, and for a year the city was shaken by earthquakes and tremors of varying degrees until the great earthquake of July 29, 1773 destroyed the city, which had already suffered considerable damage. Two years later, the capital was transferred to Guatemala City.
Antigua was evacuated and plundered for building materials. Despite official decrees the city never emptied and by 1830 it began to grow again. Renovation of the battered buildings helped maintain the city’s colonial character, said to have been modeled on that of Seville, Spain.

The city is littered with ruins which have lain in their fallen state for centuries. Other structures have been partially rebuilt, although not to their original designs and with pillaged materials. Until the mid-twentieth century, Antigua was apparently a poor and sleepy little town. Despite being declared a national monument in 1944 and a UNESCO world heritage site in 1979, it wasn’t until the early 1990s that the city was ‘discovered’. There’s been, apparently, a lot of building since then, but you wouldn’t know it since all is required to be in ‘colonial ambiance’, so even the new places look old.

And, as LP points out, the rubbish is actually collected here, the streets cleaned, stray dogs ‘disappeared’; some electric wires even run underground.

Antigua is a town for pedestrians, sort of. The streets are severely cobbled, bone-jarring no matter what vehicle you’re in the school-bus buses, the tourist shuttles, the private cars and picops, the tuk-tuks, or bicycles. Even the colonially-ambient horse-drawn carriages may not be immune.

The pedestrians can keep their teeth, but need a second pair of eyes to deal with uneven sidewalks that are barely 36″ wide and that drop and climb for every entrance, every car or cart ramp, every water and sewer connection. So it’s not a town to wander lost in reverie. Better to stand still and gawk than to invoke too many senses at once.

Like a woman in a hijab, Antigua hides a lot of its beauty.
Many little glimpses through open gates and doorways are of a fountain, a garden, something interesting, beautiful, surprising.
PHOTO BLUE FOUNTAIN INSIDE
I felt like an architectural ogler, leering at flowered patios and shaded corridors. Plus, we were constantly lost. The numbered calles run north and south and the avenidas east and west, (or vice versa?) so it would be do-able if only there were street signs and fewer identical looking walls.
Nonetheless, Antigua is a treat because it’s so compact and so cosmopolitan, so different from other parts of Guatemala, even the modest portion we were privy to.

There are many similarities between Antigua and Annapolis: the restrictive physical layout, the time frame, the volcanic eruption/the silted harbor, the secret lives behind the sidewalk; even the population size of the geographical area is similar, and the greater cultural activity than offered in the hinterland. Also visitors descend each weekend from the capital 30 or 40 minutes away, parking their new cars in front of the high-end restaurants and hotels.

There’s a neat cemetery, San Lazaro, which is an interesting choice of names. At first I was thinking of Lazarus who rose from the dead. Then I googled it and found another San Lazaro, a healer of physical and spiritual pain, in Cuban and other traditions. The morgue is conveniently located next to the office at the entry gate. At this cemetery, for the only time ever, I found the thing I casually look for at every cemetery I visit (which is most of them!). That is, someone who died the day I was born. Jose Braulio Perez might be a person whose torch I am carrying.

Visitors to Antigua find shops, and street vendors, mainly indigenous women selling native fabrics and clothing, jewelry, folk art.
It’s a more attractive and less complicated transportation hub for visitors to the Guatemalan Highlands than the real capital, so all the tourist shuttles seem to go through. It’s the commercial center for many surrounding villages.
PHOTO MCHETESTDIt’s full of language schools, and those so inclined can do volunteer work at orphanages and indigenous settlements while they learn.

PHOTO TREES DOME VOLCANO

The ex-pat community has quite a presence here, I’ve heard. There is much more that could be said, probably should be said, about Antigua, of which I’m unaware. However, I’ve got LOTS of photos which I’ve dumped here
http://www.smugmug.com/gallery/9359930_6jL5U/1/626414976_f6JQd
so I’ll let them do the talking. I promise, someday I’ll shrink that file substantially.
Finally, no signs of life from the volcanoes or the ground, that I recognized. But days later a tsunami hit Samoa. And earthquakes killed many in Sumatra – not sure how the hope to be spared that is reflected in this cross.
PHOTO WHAT WE PRAY FOR