Trespassing on Farmland (a.k.a. Backpacking)

Guidebooks, on a trip like this one, are like friends, trusted advisors whose dog-eared pages are eventually all but memorized.  That's true even if the guidebook's author is sort of a dork, not the sort of guy you'd actually like for an advisor, a Guatemala-born American dude with a penchant for boutique hotels and fancy cocktails and a subtle but persistent fear of the outdoors, of street food, and of poor Guatemalan people.  Our guy for this Guatemalan portion of our trip, one Al Argueta, might have been okay in small doses, but after more than a month of traveling with him, I can't wait to say goodbye.  I'm looking forward to hanging out instead with the Honduras guidebook author, who from what I can already tell is a livelier, more adventurous, more outdoorsy type of guy.  Unlike our buddy Al, who I think writes about nature purely from hearsay he gathered while sipping mojitos in a lounge in Guatemala City, the Honduras fellow seems to have actually done the hiking he writes about.  

That's all a long way to say that perhaps we shouldn't have planned a backpacking trip based on a single sentence Al wrote about how there was a hiking guide of the Ixil region available for sale in a town called Santa Maria Nebaj, from which it was safe to set out trekking alone.  From this scant information, we drove way up into the mountains to Nebaj, stopping at a famous open-air market in Chichicastenango where we almost got blown up by errant fireworks, and headed to the spot from which we believed we would purchase the rumored "trekking guide."  

Just like a topo map, except totally different.

Without looking up from their facebook pages, the girls in the office of the place that supposed had this guide told us such a thing didn't exist.  Hmm.  We had driven sort of a long way to get here, with this thought of backpacking through the countryside to little villages that roads didn't reach.  The absence of any map made that plan a little tougher.  But actually, we did have a map of sorts, in the form of some pictures we took of the wall of the office.

We got our packs up and set out over a pass from Nebaj to a town called Acul.  We began in the furthest corner of the paved portion of Nebaj, on a dirt road that started past little shops and then farms and then farmland.  Before too long, the road narrowed and headed pretty much straight up the mountain.  There is no such thing as a switchback on a trail built purely as the quickest way from one town to the next.

Nebaj in the distance.

 On this stretch of road, as on the rest of the hiking trip, the only other people we saw were carrying huge, impossible loads of firewood.  Backbreaking loads, carried sometimes by whole families, with little kids carrying quite respectable loads for their size.  These folks looked at us like we were crazy, carrying loads up, not down the mountain, and for sport.  Still, they always greeted us crazy gringos with genuine smiles.

After a couple of hours, we came to a sort of saddle through which the trail passed.  It was pasture land, green and welcoming, flat and calm and beautiful, with oak and pine mixed throughout.  We had started in the afternoon, so we considered stopping early for the night in this beautiful place.  Alas, there wasn't any water, and I rejected Chuck's suggestion that we just be thirsty all night (and skip coffee the following morning!  forget it), and we pressed on for Acul, which came into dramatic view as the trail turned steeply downhill.

Lena thinks we are the slowest things alive.

Darkness was starting to fall, so we sought refuge at a working dairy farm that we had seen from across the valley and that we thought we remembered our buddy Al mentioning as a place with rooms for rent.  The people there said we could camp for free, and later on they even made us a dinner.  A definite improvement over the freeze dried things we had with us.

Don't judge.  It's adorable.

At the farm, Lena continued her descent into total streetdogdom by rolling gleefully in fresh cow manure, something she never used to do.  Gross.  We had thought Lena was civilized, but it turns out she's totally just a dog.  Chuck found a hose and washed her off, and within minutes she did it again.  Bah.  So: Another bath, an hour of silent treatment, and a banishment to the vestibule of the tent.  But at least she still had her sleeping bag.

The next day, we sat and enjoyed the view, somewhat guiltily eating breakfast while the farm buzzed with workers.

Even Lena was being productive.

Then we set off, thinking we would walk to a place called Las Mejades and then make it a loop back to Nebaj.  Shockingly, Las Mejades was not on our awesome, comprehensive map, so we did some asking.  The first person we asked, the grandmother at the farm, said it was impossible to walk that far.  She said it took three hours by car and advised us to return to Nebaj.  The next person likewise said it was too far.  We almost gave up, but Chuck really remembered seeing something online about a three-day loop trek like this, so we asked one more guy.  He pointed to a mountain and said Las Mejades was three kilometers away.  Someone else said a six hour walk.  Someone else said four.  (Pretty standard stuff, really, in a place where most directions are just, "directo, directo!" regardless of whether there are in fact turns involved.)  It was still early, so we decided to go for it, and we once again headed up a little dirt road between farms.

Pretty soon the trail started to roughen.  There were climbs through barbed wire, that kind of thing.  A guy on horseback told us the trail was really bad up ahead.  "You can go that way," he said, "but you're going to pay for it."  Okay, whatever.  Chuck and I are pretty tough, and Lena never gets tired.  

But after a few hours, things really began to deteriorate.  We started describing certain areas as "trail-y" -- that is, sort of resembling a trail (but more likely a cow path).  We were clambering straight up a mountain toward what we thought had to be the pass between Acul and the mythical Las Mejades.  We ran into a few farmers early on, but as we got higher and higher the place became totally deserted save a handful of wells from which we pumped water.  The trail-y-ness of the whole place got more and more suspect, but we were continuing toward our pass, from which point we were sure we'd be able to see Las Mejades.  

Finally, late in the afternoon, we reached the peak.  We had been picturing something like the last saddle, a camper's paradise full of flat, grassy tent spots.  Instead, there was a wasteland of logged forest treated with weedkiller, an almost hellish spot that was very nearly impassible.  

Determined to see the next valley, we clambered slowly over fallen logs and brush, and eventually we were rewarded with a view of what may or may not have been Las Mejades.

A view of Las Mejades, maybe.

Unfortunately, there was no trail down, and the last water we had seen was a cow well back on the other side of the deathtrap logging area, and we weren't sure if it was Las Mejades at all.  We wavered for a while while Chuck tried to open the valve on a mysterious pipe on the mountaintop.  

Eventually, we did the wise thing and turned around -- heart breaking, doing that -- and returned to the Acul side of the ridge, and to the cow water.  We filled up and began looking for a place to pitch the tent.  And there simply wasn't one.  This mountain was way too steep for a two-person tent.  We kept looking, and the sun started going down.  And we kept looking, and descending, and making the likelihood of pushing on for Las Mejades the following day slimmer with every several hundred feet we descended.  

About halfway back down the mountain, and just as darkness fell, we finally found a tiny but almost flat spot for the tent.  We made camp, made dinner, made a little fire, and crashed early.  I think it was the first night in a week that the loud sound of street dogs fighting didn't fill our ears all night.  (I almost missed it.) 

When we eventually returned to civilization, the people we came across were shocked, totally shocked, by the fact that we had willingly (and eagerly) hiking up a mountain, for fun.  They were shocked, totally and completely shocked, by the fact that we had slept in the woods at night.  And, although the hiking was great and the trek really fun overall, I'll admit that there's also something sort of weird and dissatisfying about camping in an area as poverty-stricken as the Ixil Triangle.  People are truly struggling to survive.  Their day-to-day is hard, and something doesn't feel quite right about doing recreation-type things in such a place.  That said, we're already drooling over the descriptions of the forests and hiking our new and more worthy guidebook advisor promises we'll find in Honduras.

Next up, maybe: Van Food (or, a series of pictures of Chuck snarfing tacos and chuchitos from various stands)