Cobán

The guidebook described Sayaxché as a "lawless frontier town" overrun with members of Mexican drug cartels and "best avoided" except as seen from the car window during a drive from Flores to Cobán.  What neither the guidebook nor the map told  us, though, was that the highway would grind to a halt on one side of a very wide river, turning into a large dirt parking lot.

Eventually, we figured out there was a ferry across the river, costing about $0.30.  So we waited our turn, buying coconuts and spicy peanuts from vendors and enjoying our view of the lawless town across the river.  Then - on the ferry, through town on the other side, and on our way to Cobán.

First in line.

This seems safe.

Cobán, unlike Sayaxché, got fine treatment from our guidebook.  Not so much from the media, which mis-translated a late 2010 police crackdown on members of the Mexican drug cartel Zeta as a "state of seige," frightening tourists away probably in greater numbers, and at least for far longer, than necessary.  Of course, the Zetas apparently did drive around town in December 2010 in armoured vehicles with grenade launchers, intimidating cops and pretty much  having their way with the city, but that was then.  Now, Cobán is a really charming, lively, vibrant city on a hill surrounded by pine forests.  (There is some dispute as to whether the police crackdown worked or whether the Zetas successfully paid off the police, but in either event, it's now a relatively peaceful and really beautiful place.)

Cobán is famous for it's coffee, which truly is delicious.  Weirdly, there are a lot of Guatemalans with German names in the area.  Apparently, the German population was offensive to the United States during WWII, and the U.S. government successfully petitioned Guatemala to kick Germans out.  But a certain German influence remains, including in the name of one of Cobán's most famous coffee farms.

In the center of the city is a protected old-growth pine forest.  Lena and I went for a run one morning, dashing madly through the insane market toward the park.  Quite a sight, I'm sure.  Me: ridiculous, tall, and blond-headed.  Lena: ridiculous, shiny, on a leash (!), and oddly-marked.  And we were running.  A complete spectacle.  

And then we broke into the dark  of the forest, where ferns grew and paths wound up and down and past a little lagoon.  

One one side of the park, overlooking the city, sits a little white cathedral whose broad white steps lead back down to the bustling city center, where on the main square a woman sells the very finest empanadas we have ever tasted.   

We slept in Cobán in the parking lot of a rather fancy hotel, protected by our very own guard (with shotgun).  We couldn't quite figure out why the hotel would let us park the muddy, silly rattlevan in front of their reception office, but they seemed to enjoy having resident hobos out front.  

Safest camping ever.

On our way out of town, we stopped at a peaceful orchid nursery called Vivero Veracruz, which covered a few acres of land on a hilltop overlooking the city.  The old caretaker came out to show us around.  He explained that there were more than 400 types of orchids there, from the miniature to the huge and everything between, including the national flowers of Guatemala and Belize.  Some of the plants were 30 years old, and the guide was justifiably proud of his work.      

 

And somehow, between drinking gourmet coffee, jogging in the pine forest, visiting orchid farms, and eating delicious local food, we entirely forgot to get assaulted by drug gangs.

Next up, maybe: How the Gringos Ruined Christmas.

Swimming Hole Win

Semuc Champey is one of the Guatemala destinations you can't miss.  It's on the tourist chain and even though every backpacker worth their hostel history does it, you should too.  It's a limestone land bridge where the Cahabòn River violently plummets underground and emerges 300 meters later.  Above that cave rests a stunning set of pools formed like stairsteps of limestone deposits for your swimming pleasure.

We took the trip from our camp, a rather nice hostel called El Retiro.  The shuttle to the pools 9 km away was a truck with an open bed and it's not the first of these we've ridden so we knew it would be rough one, but I must admit to being nervous when I saw that the truck was aligned with the Decepticons. 

The ride was rough and long but when we got there, the pools were absolutely amazing (and no sign of Megatron).   We walked upstream of the pools and found the part where the river drops below ground.  Below this point, it's a quiet and serene environment and above it, it's a raging whitewater river. 

I took the picture to the right while standing on the land bridge, the river is dropping into a hole beneath my feet. 

There was a guide on hand in this section that took us around to see the river drop into the earth.  I suppose one too many tourists slipped and went for an all-too exciting and unexpected ride so they had to assign someone to stop them.    He told Beth that it was possible to kayak the section that drops underground but I don't see how. (I guess it's also possible that Beth's Spanish turned impossible into possible but I doubt that, she's killing the Spanish lately.)  I wouldn't want to drop into that cave on a kayak or anything else.

There is a similar land bridge in Florida where the Santa Fe River goes underground for a mile or two. It's a lot more tranquil than this one though.  The river just ends in a gentle whirlpool and emerges in a calm spring later.  During a huge flood one year, I canoed this land section with my buddy Michael.  We were some of only about 10 people to do it that year, and it was a hundred year flood.

Land bridges like this have been significant as actual bridges over rivers for native peoples.  The one in Florida was a Seminole Indian land crossing and cultural center.  This one has been pretty significant to the Mayans for a very long time (insert actual fact here future Chuck).  The Semuc Champey held a lot of spiritual significance which I would guess is on account of the mind-blowing beauty of the whole thing, but I haven't really done my homework for this post.   

We checked out the pools first but it was a little chilly in the jungle so instead of diving in, we worked up a heat by hiking pretty much straight up the canyon for an elevated view of the pools. Wow.   

Behind and to the left of Beth's head there you can see way down to the pools. I cropped myself out of that picture because I was hot and felt the need to get all caveman and go shirtless in the wet jungle.  I spare you the hairy chested result.  You're welcome, folks.  

The way the pools are structured is pretty interesting and if I had stopped to (try to) read any of the signs, I'd probably be able to tell you something cool about how the water deposits lime at the point where it starts to cascade over into the next pool and becomes more oxygenated.  That area builds up into these walls that contain the pools.  But since I didn't read the signs, you'll have to either google it or be satisfied with that big guess I worked up for ya.  

In this pic on the left, you can see these little walls that form and create the pools.

The pools were cool and clear.  I brought my mask and snorkel with me and could see many little fish under the falls.  They were curious and came to see if I was delicious but I wasn't.  Two women swam in the same pools who apparently were delicious because they said that the fish bit them and one even drew blood.  The cute little fish didn't look like piranha so I didn't believe them. I'm suspicious of hippy backpackers trying to make themselves out all delicious on account of their wholesome karma positive diet.

With the mask I could see that underwater, some of the falls were significantly undercut. Some could even be called caves that extended a few meters in.  I thought  that there might be some monsters in the caves because they were kinda dark but I didn't see any.  I did see some monstrous crabs that were very grumpy when I overturned their house/rocks.

We hiked out and looked for a local bus back to town.  It was Friday which is a bad day for buses so we waited around for a while and were interesting to some little kids who thought we were weird and worth watching even though we wouldn't buy their chocolate.  

While waiting for the bus, Beth struck up a conversation with a guy on the bridge waiting for the same bus.  I listened to some of it but only caught bits and pieces of their long talk about life, work and I think maybe something about shrimp and green neck ties (this part of the conversation was a little hazy for me).

I really need to work harder on my Spanish.

Jungle Things

I'm running a little behind on blogging, so here's a quickie from the town of Lanquin.  

Tikal

A while ago (a week?  more?  where are we? what month is it?), we went to Tikal, and it was amazing.  A fun wait for the bus, discussing narcotraficantes and the failure of Guatemala's tourism organization with the guy in the bus ticket office, and then a quick ride from Flores to Tikal.  

The national park of Tikal itself is huge -- something like 25 miles by 25 miles -- and even the archaeological portion is big.  Some temples and ruins are kilometers from one another.

The scenary is almost as spectacular as the ruins, with dense jungle completely surrounding the more remote trails.  We saw monkeys and got chased hard by mosquitoes at a near-run for perhaps a mile on a deserted foothpath.

The thing about Tikal is that it's impossible to photograph.  It's so big.  The best I can do is this, a photo taken from one of the temples (more than 200 feet high), looking at several of the other temples.

In between are other ruins and raised footpaths, and even the distance you can see is but a fraction of the entire city.

Some of the ruins are better excavated than others.  

In my mind, it's a tough call whether Palenque or Tikal is the best set of Mayan ruins we've seen, but they'd both be tough to beat.

Jungle

Chuck wrote about our arrival at the closed lodge way out in the middle of nowhere down a dirt road to an even further type of nowhere.  So that scene has been set. We were camping in the van in the parking lot of an otherwise empty lodge.  And the next morning, we decided to take a hike.  The lodge caretaker warned us we would need a guide, though it really wasn't that far.  Once again, something about snakes, etc. etc.  But the trail looked fine, so we set out on our own.

Francisco, Savior of Gringos

Five minutes later, a dude named Francisco showed up and refused to take no for an answer.  Either these guys really thought we were dumb gringos, or we really were, for refusing a guide.  Anyway, we couldn't really keep fighting it, so Francisco led the way.  We felt incredibly stupid being guided on a hike.  I mean, Chuck had his machete!  Come on.

My outdoorswoman ego died a painful death.


The hike, though, was good.  A number of times, we crossed the wild, rushing river on log-bridges. (Lena thought it was the worst thing she'd ever had to do.)

 

And then we arrived, after a little climbing, at the point at which the river exits its cave pathways.  A calm, deep pool used by Mayans for centuries as a sacred site.

Normally, we could have dipped in, but the heavy rains might have made that a bit dramatic on this particular day, since the pool flowed immediately into a charging, frothing beast of a river.

Bath time?

Lena's favorite bridge

But all in all, it was a fun time for the foolish gringos after all.

Living Fences

I've been kind of obsessed with these living fences that we've seen throughout our trip.  They're basically just fence posts that are actually planted in the ground and that continue to grow while sitting there being fence posts.  The problem for normal fence posts is that they tend to go away after a while.  Wood posts rot or get eaten by termites, metal fence posts rust away and concrete posts last a long time, but are pretty expensive.  What a lot of people do here is use live fence posts which just keep growing and don't rot.  

It looks like most of them start out as a regular barbed-wire fences with conventional posts and are then supplemented with live fence posts.  They use different types of trees or shrub plants but I've seen what is apparently Gliricidia sepium which is pretty commonly used.  It has advantage for fences.  The sap doesn't rust or damage the barbed wire or nails, it's useful as foliage for livestock, produces good firewood and I think the best is that when you cut it back, it grows a bunch of new fence posts.  They start off by cutting some good length posts and just stabbing them in the ground and attaching the barbed-wire to them.  When they come back later, each fence post has sprouted about 5 or 6 new posts which get stabbed in and attached between the older ones.  These grow and so on.  If you didn't stop replanting them, you could end up with a very closely spaced fence that would be strong even years later when all your barbed wire was rusted away.  

This one above is pretty freshly pruned back and you can see that there are various thickness from newly sprouted posts to wise old ones.  

This one is really bushy and ready to be pruned, creating a bunch more posts.  

Here you can see what happens years later as the tree grows and surrounds the barbed-wire. Cool huh?   

These remind me of the living bridges that the Meghalaya of Northern India have been building (some for over 500 years!). The construction and maintenance of the bridges is passed down from generation to generation.  

Image not ours - I'm not sure who to attribute it to. 

 I love so many things about these fences.  The fact that they think ahead and plan for these strong fences in the future instead of just replacing the posts as they rot is great.  They have so many uses.  They also look pretty good.  

Up in our face...

We received a warning before we left Arizona by a guy from Nicaragua who filled our propane tank.  He said that while we were travelling around Central America, people would always be "gettin' up in your face...helping you."  He said we could ignore all the warnings - the only thing we'd have to worry about would be an excess of nice people being friendly and helping us out. So far, he's been right. Still, I'm not quite used to it yet.

I generally assume the best in people but while travelling in strange (to me) places, it's hard not to be just a little paranoid.  It's good too, I suppose, to be wary and prepared for bad things to happen.  I look around, maintain situational awareness, and try to predict who might be up to no good and when and where danger or even a little scam lurks.  You're not an easy target if you know when you're an easy target. I'm not constantly paranoid and suspicious, mostly just cautious and aware. One of the great pleasures has been consistently finding out that my predictions or concerns are wrong.

*****

In Santa Elena, we couldn't find a place to fill our propane anywhere.  We were asking at the gas station and really struggling with the complicated directions that several people were giving us.  They were mostly complicated because of the pesky fact of being from multiple people in Spanish that was tricky even for Beth, but also complicated because they were actually complicated directions.  The lot of us were getting frustrated when the cabbie who rolled up, proud of his good English, jumped in to help.  Uh oh. He started talking about us following someone to the propane place and that's when my "scam alert" flag went up.  It's not uncommon to pay a cab to follow them through a city.  Especially if you'll get lost otherwise and especially in sketchy places where if you do get lost, bad things might happen.  It's also not uncommon to be asked if you need various guiding, directions, translations, and other help (for money) when you don't need it at all.  So I was probably already putting on my no-gracias face when I figured out that the cabbie didn't want our money to take us there, he was trying to tell us that the driver of the mini-bus was offering it for free.  A reverse scam - follow the super nice bus driver!  

We followed him for miles. Through several turns, stops to pick up and drop off passengers, markets, traffic snarls, and past fewer and fewer buildings out of town.  Briefly, I even considered the impossible scam hidden in this maze of following.  Then he slowed down, honked and pointed to the propane station.  He and several passengers waved us off and continued on their way.

*******

One night we camped at a nice little lake off the beaten path but in what was kind of a park or camping area. Not exactly a campground though so we asked a neighbor when he came by if it was safe and okay.  I worried that there was the potential here for the 'ole "I'll charge you money for this even though it's free and I don't even really work here" scam that I've heard of.  Nope.  He just came by on his bike with his tiny son to say hi and see if we needed anything.  Beth joked that the only thing we needed were some limes and we'd buy some if he had any, but that's about it.  We chatted with him and found out that he's the unofficial protector of the area's trees from poachers.  He came by later with a bag of limes from the neighbor.  Uh oh, how much will this cost us? Nope.  They're yours, enjoy.

*****

Later that evening towards dusk, I was trying my hand at fishing for some of the delicious white fish that are on the lake.  I have pretty limited gear and fishing skills (despite some pretty epic success with some trout in the mountains one time which makes me think I'm a fishing ninja).  I was fishing with too-heavy line, too-small hooks and insufficiently gooey white bread and cheese that wouldn't stay on my hook and that the fish didn't seem to enjoy any more than I did.   I wasn't having any luck but I like fishing, too, not just catching.  It was quiet out there but not spooky because I'm super brave and not really scared of anything, but if I were, I might have been spooked when a guy surprised me with a close-range "hola."  Uh oh.  What does he want? Where's Beth? Is this bad? Is he armed? Nope.  Armed only with fishing plans, advice and a handful of free bait for me.

It turned out to be a great interaction.  My limited Spanish (and excellent pointing and grunting skills) managed to get across that my bait sucked, and I was able to ask him what bait worked best for the famous white fish.  Without hesitation, he gave me a handful of tiny sardines, pointed out a few good spots, and corrected some pretty horrible hand-casting technique (neither of us had a pole and only one of us had hand-casting skills).  He was also kind enough not to make me feel bad when he left with his fish as I waited for a nibble.  Well, I don't think he was gloating but he was using Spanish and not my preferred pointing and grunting so I can't be sure.

*****

Yesterday, we were rolling up to this great jungle lodge we read about just as it was getting a tad later than we generally like to be on the road.  Not dark or anything, but our buffer was shrinking and that leads to a bit of a tense feeling in the rattlevan.  So when we read the closed sign next to the closed gate that was at the end of 10 miles of really rough dirt road, which was at least ten miles down the "highway" from a safe harbor, it got even tenser in the rattlevan.  The gate was right next to very small village, the entire population of which had been watching a soccer game outside on the village tv when the rattlevan ambled by.  In a place like this, the rattlevan has a few possible effects: it causes smiling and laughter, it causes mouths to go agape in confusion, or, sometimes, it causes mothers to grab their children and hide them in the folds of their skirts.  We received mostly the latter sort of reaction in this village and as we were considering opening the closed gate and breaking and entering for a place to camp, a couple of guys walked up from the village.  Uh oh.  Is this bad? We explain ourselves. One of 'em is asking us to walk with him down the road to the jungle lodge -- he says there's usually someone there and they might let us camp even though the lodge is closed. It's a dark road - we're not walking anywhere with him.  Then he realizes the gate's unlocked - we can drive down. Beth and I conference: Is this bad? Should we bolt? Is he bad? Nope.  He's just trying to help.  He was on his way down to the village church for a Sunday night party.  Instead, he rode with us down to the lodge because he knew the people there and they might think it was weird if we just went down by ourselves.  He said he'd ride on top of the rattlevan, surely because he didn't want to make us uncomfortable by riding inside.  We rolled up to a well lit, nicely furnished lodge in the jungle with all the amenities you could ask for and an absolutely safe and comfortable atmosphere. He introduced us and made sure all was well before walking back to the village.

*****

None of these people was exactly up in our faces while helping us out like the guy filling our tank warned us about but you could say that. Friendliness is about the only thing we've seen so far.  We've yet to get a sketchy feeling anywhere out here that turned out to be anything but an abundance of caution or a bit of paranoia.  (It wouldn't matter much though anyway, because I pretty much never get scared or sketched out by anything.)