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

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.