What is it about September? Back-to-school time seems to have been permanently imprinted on my mind. So it was that we found ourselves back in school, back in Antigua. PHOTO SCHOOLROOM

Yes, I know, according to the blog we haven’t been to Antigua yet! But soon…
In fact we came up for a few days in August to scout around. Antigua is a place every tourist is expected to go, and a goodly number seem to fall in love with the city. We liked it fine, but it’s a city of walls, and you’re left wondering what’s going on behind them. Also, you wonder where exactly you are, since, despite their personalities, few walls sport street signs. Coming to school here was a good way to explore a little further.

So, you might wonder, if we had trouble finding our way around a city laid out in a grid with prominent volcanoes to the south and west and a distinctly different hill to the north, why would we further overload our mental capacities by attending language school?

Mainly, so it’s so we don’t travel in a bubble. I can get by in Spanish in a very rough and inelegant manner, but the Guatemalans are too polite to correct me even when I ask them to. Doug wants to understand Spanish better too. Quite an language school industry has grown up around the clear and neutral Guatemalan accent in all the tourist destinations, but especially in Antigua. Despite the various learning aids on the boat we just weren’t progressing well on our own.

We picked a school with large and meticulously landscaped gardens behind its gate, and really nice accommodations, San Jose El Viejo. The tranquility of our little ‘resort’, the two-minute commute, the fountains, the pool, …I could really get used to this kind of upgrade to my life!PHOTO VIEW FROM OUR CASITA

Doug’s teacher had the patience of Job, he announced, and, ‘she can write upside down!’ Mine had been dealing with people like me for at least half her life, and knew that her job was as much to break bad habits as to cement in some new stuff.

It was humbling to realize just how many bad habits I have. Neither of us expected miracles, especially in 32.5 hours of study in a week. The aging memory thing …Well, I don’t think my memory is that bad. It’s just that I have to learn new packing techniques. So that’s what I did all week. That, and try to slow myself down for quality production rather than quantity plus hand-waving. I might even be having a little glimmer of understanding of how my grandfather came to be the slow and (overly) precise man he was when he was about the age I am now.
PHOTO VIEW FROM CLASSROOM
Did I actually master the past and present tenses? How much of my new vocabulary will make a second appearance? Time will tell. I sure did enjoy my little vacation, though.
PHOTO SCHOOL SEAL ON DIPLOMA
If anyone reading this is looking for a recommendation, I would recommend everything about this school.

PLAIN HEAD
We spent several rewarding hours at the twin museums on the campus of Francisco Marroquin University, Zona 10, a half hour walk from our hotel in Guatemala City.

The Ixmel is full of textiles, looms, weavings, old photos, etc, curated in a modern style which I liked a lot. Also, some lovely ‘primitive’ paintings from an early 20th century Guatemalan artist whose grandchild could be drawing many of the same scenes today. And, some sophisticated watercolor portraits done by a British woman who I think had a coffee plantation in the hills.

After this, no photos were allowed in the textile museum- fragile colors. Lo siento.

In the Ixmel, you’ll start to realize just what you’re seeing when you look at Mayan women on the street. What I see is an astonishing number of women all wearing the same thing, a voluminously pleated modest skirt plus a blouse, and an overblouse of a lacy material, which strikes me as modesty made practical in a tropical climate. Inland I also saw huipil, which is a different kind of blouse with much embroidery (once done by hand, now more machine embroidered) around the neckline.
Considering the heat, and the need to breast-feed, and the lack of sanitary facilities, I guess it’s a reasonable rig, even though it looks like more cloth than necessary, and hot.

What I hadn’t fully appreciated before Ixmel was the individuality of the fabrics and the embroidery. Each locale has something special, and for someone who can read the signs (which might be every Guatemalan) there’s a wealth of information being conveyed. Also, I hadn’t considered the apron as a fashion accessory, but you’ll regularly see tucked and ruffled aprons on the streets of the city.

There are plenty of women in traditional dress, but others, including men, and youth, wear the 21st century uniform. A side note about clothing: one of the places you can buy clothes is at a ropa americana. Sometimes there’s a storefront, but often you’ll see being sold in the back of a truck, on a tarp on the ground, or maybe even on hangers, what looks like the overflow, like what goes to Goodwill, Salvation Army and Frenchy’s. Not being a size 1 chica, it’s where I’d shop if I needed something, which thankfully I don’t.
Here, if you care to dig, you’ll find larger-than-Mayan sizes and sometimes better quality- at least it was originally. I see lots of people, especially men, wearing ‘ropa americana’ t-shirts, without a care about the logo. Howard’s Plumbing, Palm Beach Polo Club, it seems that Guatemala is downstream from every t-shirt ever printed. Sometimes it works: a cute little girl in a pink shirt with sequins reading “Precious”. And sometimes it doesn’t: a skinny older man whose t-shirt read: “Nobody Knows I’m Really a Lesbian”.

Popul Voh Museum is artifacts from various ruins throughout the country. You can pay 15Q extra and take pictures. Doug frowned (“there’s nothing worse than a tourist with a camera” is his view), but I paid, happily (the camera has a better memory than I do) and here’s a little of what I saw.

The Popul Vuh Museum is named after a book, one of the few to survive, which describes the Mayan myth of creation. The collection was once private and is noted for its pre-Columbian (that’s Before Christopher Columbus to me!) funerary art and its bowls and vessels.
Pictured below is a photo of a reproduction of part of another of the very few surviving Mayan manuscripts, the Dresden Codex. This is an example of the source material upon which our current knowledge is based.

“The Dresden Codex contains astronomical tables of outstanding accuracy. It is most famous for its Lunar Series and Venus table…The Dresden Codex contains predictions for agriculturally-favorable timing[citation needed]. It has information on rainy seasons, floods, illness and medicine. It also seems to show conjunctions of constellations, planets and the Moon.”

Wikipedia

I liked all the funerary ‘urns’, though they did seem rather small.

But what really struck me was the small sculptures and the busts, perhaps because they were so personably captioned. It was like looking at a centuries-old photo album. At last I felt like I was peeking into Mayan daily life.

For instance, here are little heads displaying the variety of hairstyles available, indicating, according to the caption, an interest in fashion. I can relate!

Effigies emphasized feminine charm and sensuality and point out that young goddesses played important mythological roles. The one on the left particularly, I can see in that kind of function. She might be 14, on the streets of Fronteras, or Birmingham, Alabama.

The youths, male variety, of the nobility, were strenuously educated in the arts and writing, cults of the gods and military arts. These guys look like they’re just hanging out on the corner though, as surely those youths also did.

Here’s a warrior (not a Warrior), wearing cotton armor, carrying square shield and mace. They often wear masks and helmets decorated with animals, said the sign. In fact, in some cases, the warrior’s victims were flayed, which is to say skinned, and their ‘features’ worn as a mask. What a reminder!
WARRIOR
Musicians, players of the drums, turtle carapaces, rattles and trumpets, were an important part of many ceremonies, including sacrifices. This is a pretty terrible picture, admittedly, but you can see the guy on the right is the drummer in this band. The odd colors are interesting to me, but not desirable photographically, since they apparently indicate ‘noise’.

The abuelas, “aged women”(!), were important in domestic and religious life too, as midwives, and in myth, where the heroes were often orphans raised by their grandmother. I guess their warrior fathers didn’t make it home.

Large noses and crossed eyes were considered attractive.

Mainly what I learned at the museum is that, when (okay, if) our culture, like that of the Mayans, mysteriously disappears as a result of environmental degradation and greedy heedless behavior, our successors might have a museum much like this one, same captions, but slightly different illustrations. Let’s see, Vogue magazine, Forest Lawn, silicon breast implants, …

Hope you enjoyed the tour!

for more pictures look at
www.maya-archaeology.org/museums/popolvuh/popolvuhpictures.php –

Edited 18 Sept.

I love to lie (or is that lay?) in bed a few minutes each morning with my ears wide open. Our boarding plank creaks. Early outboards head out the creek. Some mornings it rains. This morning precipitation was so light that the awning barely spoke. The night watchman makes his final rounds, and if it’s Julio, I can hear him pop the shells out of his gun right before he leaves.

Bird song is what I most like to hear. It’s cheery and perky and insinuates itself so sweetly into my waning dreams. But I’m getting used to the howler monkeys who live in the jungle across the river and start their day well before sunrise. photo courtesy of npr

A lovely lullaby their call is not, although doubtless it’s music, or at least data, to their own ears. Thanks to an enlarged bone, the hypoid, near their vocal chords, they rank as one of the world’s loudest animals, with a range of 3 miles, says the Guinness Book of World Records.

Supposedly they’re calling to check in with other groups of howlers at dawn and dusk. As folivores, they inhabit and ingest the jungle canopy; it’s a low-energy food supply, so maybe they watch their spacing as well as check in on the daily net.

Howler monkeys to me sound like a slow-motion wreck, or like a terribly sick and suffering someone. Paradigm shift: better to celebrate them as what they are: the thrilling sound of a tropical jungle large enough to support them.

Would you like to listen? Click here.

Like the sound? It’s available as a ringtone. You might not have any trouble deciding whose calls to assign this sound to.

If birdsong soothes me, what might a howler monkey find relaxing? Funny you should ask, because just the other day I read about a study wherein scientists recorded both alarm sounds and easy-going sounds of cotton-topped tamarins, another vocal monkey species. A cellist then ‘translated’ the calls into ‘cello-ese’, sped the tape up to monkey-chirp speed, and played it to their (captive) tamarin audience. I wasn’t surprised to learn that the alarm-based recordings alarmed and the easy-listening soothed the tamarins. Probably the same with gangsta rap.
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/06/AR2009090601990_2.html)

Wikipedia’s listing says:
Guatemalan Black Howler (alouatta pigra) males are larger than those of any other Central American monkey species. On average, males weigh 11.4 kg (25 lb) and females weigh 6.4 kg (14 lb). The body is between 521 and 639 mm (20.5 and 25.2 in) in length, excluding tail. The tail is between 590 and 690 mm (23 and 27 in) long…Lifespan can be 15-20 years.

As with other species, the majority of the Guatemalan
Black Howler’s day is spent resting. Eating makes up about a quarter of
the day, moving about 10% of the day, and the remainder of the day is
spent in socializing and other activities.

One activity reported in Tikal was particularly striking.
HOWLER DEFECATING SIGN Doug went out of his way to get out from under the ones we saw there. I just kept my eyes open and my mouth shut, and the monkeys brachiated on by.

Of course, howler monkeys are considered an endangered species, but apparently not critically so just yet. Somewhere I read that these monkeys are too ill-tempered to make good pets. Loss of habitat is an issue, of course. Being used as food is also a problem for these monkeys, but I have been asking around and can’t find anyone at least in the Rio Dulce area who has ever participated in monkey killing or eating (or will admit to it).
This poor soul was one of a troupe trapped in a concrete jungle near the airport runway at the Aurora Zoo in Guatemala City. I mean concrete jungle literally – all of the things, with the possible exception of the tree in this picture= that look natural, like bamboo or wood, even rock, aren’t. They’re concrete, artistically done, and we can probably guess the reason. The sponsors who support the zoo, like Bimbo Bread, Pepsi, and Purina, well, they’re not in the zoo business. But that’s another story.

Once I learned that they had some private rooms, and that I wouldn’t have to sleep in a dorm or bunk bed with snorers and farters with whom I was unacquainted, I was all in favor of a night at the youth hostel in Flores. It’s been years – decades – since I stayed in such a place, so I guess it qualifies as a remote nation, one as curious as Chad or China. There aren’t many people under 40 or even 50 in our circles on the Rio Dulce, which is a sad thing to admit!

As a ‘coming of age’ birthday present – I was 18 or 19 -my parents gave me a Eurailpass and a cheap round-trip ticket to Luxembourg. I left the next week and spent a couple months on the move, with not a backpack but a knapsack, before returning for my last year of college. It was a most formative experience, and I was glad to see that there are still so many young people on a similar quest now.

Los Amigos, the hostel, is in the center of town of Flores, which itself is a smallish island in a lake, connected to the mainland by a causeway. Whatever Mayan facilities once existed here were destroyed by the Spanish hundreds of years ago. The locals themselves are in the process of destroying the streets, replacing the cobblestones with interlocking pavers which will be wonderful, in another year or so.

Beyond the foyer it was a pleasant surprise to find a large courtyard as well as second story rooms and rooftop palapas. Banana trees, vines and flowers, even fresh-hatched quail in lieu of the customary chickens. Artists with a vivid palette and great sense of humor had made their marks throughout.

Our compact room with cordovan-colored walls, navy-blue sheets, electric fan and window to the courtyard cost a whopping $10. There were two kinds of dorm room, maybe half a dozen private rooms, and also hammock-sleeping spaces under a roof upstairs, which might have cost $2 per night. So you can see that Guatemala on $5 a day might be as do-able as Europe on $5 a day was years ago. Which is to say, barely. Still, the folks in the cheap seats are having just as much fun as in the front row.

Like a cat on a windowsill, I parked myself and my book in a hammock in a leafy little nook upwind of the parrot and just inside the rainshower drip line and dozily listened to the conversations around me. This is an active and vibrant hostel, lots of coming and going.

I love listening to non-native English speakers using English as their common language.Young men sharing shopping tips, young women telling young men how to hitch-hike, that sort of stuff.

Several were going back to school in the fall, but several others were between jobs, or just travelling. A three-generation family was there, including a little girl who loved being pushed on the swing, and an older woman with luggage so big I wondered if she was shipping herself. A Belgian quartet arrived carrying a trumpet and something like an organ keyboard powered by blowing through a tube. They played for us all afternoon, and later that night they played at the Flores central plaza to a smallish but receptive audience of Guatemalans, who sent little girls in party dresses to drop Quetzales into their hat.

I got a kick out of the equipment the backpackers carried. The packs themselves look so much more sleek, organized than mine, and clean and new. One woman showed me her two favorite items – a silky sheet-sleeping bag liner, and a miracle towel (never wet, never dirty, never smelly!) made of miracle fiber. That sounds great – it’s a challenge to get a towel dry before it festers.

But otherwise, we were pretty much out of it, conversationally. Not that no one would talk to us – they would, if we started it. Otherwise, we were nearly invisible, or irrelevant. Fine by me! I never went too far out of my way to chat up someone older than my mother either, and only recently do I wonder what I might have missed. That’s one of the reasons I’m here, to make up for lost time.

The kitchen at Los Amigos is vegetarian and it puts out great food at great prices, worth going for even if you’re not staying there. An avocado licuado, sugar added, is nearly a meal in itself. (Somewhere I read that Antiguans have a nickname based on the extreme availability of avocados in their diet). Tough to fit the country’s best vegetable lasagne in afterwards, not to mention the brownie.

The staff is friendly and hardworking, which is good because a few things haven’t changed about youth. They’re not always tidy, and they still think they’re invulnerable. Mainly I was disappointed to see how many smokers there were in this educated and advantaged group of people. It was hard to find fresh air in the courtyard at times. Do these Europeans and Australians think they’re immune?

But I hope that I was as clued-up and tuned-in to the world when I was that age (and a smoker) as those kids around the table at Los Amigos while I was there.

Any questions?

Overheard: Australian lad says to American: “They want you to put your toilet paper in the bin.” American: “In the bed? That doesn’t sound right.”

this photo courtesy of dleiva at flickr

I’m pretty sure this place, YaXha, will be at the top of my favorite ruins list no matter how many I end up visiting. A knowledgeable local sent us here. Our guide at Tikal reminded us that the 2005 TV series, Survivor Guatemala was filmed at YaXha, and that he was featured on Day 25, or was it 27. It’s also in the area preserved as part of the Mayan Biosphere, although I was sorry to see a bulldozer flattening everything, possibly for cattle pasture, right up to the perimeter.

Getting to YaXha from Tikal via public transportation (collectivo) was looking complicated, time-consuming and not without hassle, so we ended up in a taxi-van straightaway. After 75 kms, 11 of which were up a side road, we were glad we did. From our ‘eco-lodge’ it was another 45 minutes of walking up the hill to the site. Chak, the lodge’s black Lab, who was well-known at the admission gate (“un perro muy noble”), proudly showed us the way. But when we got to the actual ruins, we found that he was ‘our’ dog, but not allowed in (he might chase monkeys!) So we scrounged a piece of rope, tied him outside the bathrooms and collected him on the way home.

YaXha is atop a hill between two lakes, the green one and the blue one, from whence it derives its name. In its time, it was connected by road (and, sometimes, political alliance) to Tikal and to other ruins even further in the jungle (which of course wasn’t necessarily jungle then), and to other small unexcavated sites around the lakes. With maybe 40,000 people and 500 structures, it might have lacked Tikal’s cosmopolitan flavor, but it does have, to my mind, the superior location.

I read somewhere that the restoration is only two years old, and privately funded by Deutschebank. Can’t say if this is why there were reader boards about the architecture, with pictures of what each area might have looked like and small explanations about cultural matters, helpful even in Spanish.

The stairways are so nicely built, with rounded handrails, framed edges, plugged screws and consistently even treads, that when we got to the top of Temple 216 – the big one in the North Acropolis with the east-west view – we commented to the guard. He replied that some of the tourists were “muy gorda”- very fat.

In fact each area had a guard/docent who was willing, even eager (it was a quiet day and not each guard brought a transistor radio!) to talk, although maybe not particularly knowledgeable. They changed areas every 8 days, from the top of the temple to the ballcourt to the viewing stand in the treetops with the monkeys. Some days there are a hundred tourists, other days ten – you can’t say the place is overrun!

Another point in YaXha’s favor was that a lot of the undergrowth had been cleared, leaving big canopy trees with open spaces between them for that most comforting of landscapes, the feeling of shelter without claustrophobia.

Plus when the monkeys swing through, they’re easier to see.

The ‘eco-lodge’ El Sombrero, on the lakefront beneath YaXha, is the only place to stay for miles, but it’s nice, so no hardship.

The owner was away, we were the only guests, and even the staff left after dinner so we had the hotel, and probably the lake and the ruins, to ourselves, except for a couple dogs.
I thought how nice a swim in the lake would be; the ‘danger of crocodiles’ sign was one thing, but a huge crocodile skull on the ledge put teeth into the sign, you could say.

All the drinking water comes from the lake too, ‘filtered’.

We were offered a ride back down the 11 km road to the highway, one at a time on the back of a motorcycle, but decided to walk instead. And before too too long we’d hitched the ride in the back of a pickup with a couple guys on their way somewhere with bowls of soaked corn. They were glad to know we had appreciated YaXha, but said we really should go to Naranja, 25 km past YaXha. That, they said, is ‘el capital del jungle’.