El Petén, Tuesday 6 June
Eugenio has taken a few days’ holiday to ride with me north through the Peten. Yesterday we visited Morales, where I bought a horseman’s leather gaiter to protect my right leg. Both Eugenio and the storekeeper advised that I would look peculiar wearing only one gaiter. A fat old man with a white beard riding a small bike across the Americas is peculiar. A gaiter won’t improve my image.
I chose to travel in the rainy season. I have been blessed with greenery even in the wastelands of the Texas panhandle. Now Eugenio and I are staying with an eccentric French conservationist, Santiago Billy, on the eastern littoral of Lake Petén Itzá. Clouds rise from thick forest on the far shore in layers of greys that range from almost white to almost black. The waters reflect the layers and we watch, from the small palapa at the end of Santiago’s jetty, rain squalls chase each other across the forest before joining forces in a solid curtain that shatters the calm of the lake and thrashes the surface into silver foam. You can keep your days of endless sun. This is glory.
Flores is the capital of the Peten and occupies a small island at the south end of the lake. Some twenty-five years have passed since my last visit. I stayed at the one hotel in town. I was directed to the one restaurant, where I ate a lake fish grilled over coals. The fish was sprinkled with finely chopped garlic and served on a bed of rice. It was delicious.
The lake rises and falls. No one knows why. When I was first here, the level was some six feet higher than it is now. The two roads that connected the Peten with the rest of Guatemala would have been rough-going for a Centurion tank. I saw no other foreigners in the two nights I stayed and explored the narrow streets after a day among the Maya pyramids and temples of Tikal.
Now the roads are smooth tarmac. Foreigners and forasteros (Guatemalan people from outside the Petén) have transformed the semi-abandoned town of my memories. This new Flores reminds me of the newly discovered Ibiza of the mid-sixties, with boutiques and restaurants and cafés and small hotels on every block. The single-storey buildings are freshly painted in a pleasing medley of pastel colours; the cobbled streets are newly patched and alive with visitors and NGOs.
Rather than staying in Flores, Eugenio and I are visiting with a friend, Santiago, at the far end of the lake at El Romate.
Santiago’s hotel, Mon Ami, is more suitable for the young and for those who speak French or Spanish and are interested by the region’s nature and ecology. Swimming in the lake is a delight denied me by the leg. However, to sit at the end of Santiago’s jetty and admire the sunsets, drink a cold beer or piña colada, and eat one of those admirable fish for dinner is sufficient pleasure.
Today’s politics fascinate me as much as the history of Guatemala – not the history of history books but scraps to be sewn together. I suspect that these are the interests of most mature travellers. We tend to be more curious than many young travellers. We have little desire to sprawl on the beach. We are too old to surf or clamber over glaciers. We walk a while but not too far. Then we want to sit in the shade and listen to the peoples of the countries through which we pass and learn of their lives.
Lago Petén Itzá, Wednesday 7 June
Today Santiago attends a breakfast meeting in Flores with the minister of agriculture. My burns look ugly and Santiago insists that I accompany him to a clinic. The doctor orders me to return in three days. Meanwhile I am to rest: no alcohol, no dancing, no sex. I quote Santiago. I am not listening. I am hypnotised by a huge hypodermic and an immense bottle of antibiotics, together with pills and dressings and creams with which I must medicate and anoint myself.
The injection of antibiotics leaves me with a large throbbing bump in the butt. Sitting is a pain. Meanwhile Anita and Nora, Santiago’s staff, search the forest and return with baskets of leaves and roots. They infuse their finds in hot water and insist I bathe the burns. They are small commanding women. They cook, clean and do the laundry. Disobedience would be foolish. I do jungle by day and pharma at night.
Eugenio and I had intended to ride a huge loop. My wretched leg has frustrated us and Eugenio returns to the Rio Dulce.
Lago Petén Itzá, Thursday 8 June
For the past few days I have been pursued by a middle-aged hen. Today the hen slinks into my room while Nora collects my laundry. I discover the hen on my bed. She has laid an egg.
Meanwhile the war between pharma and brujería – witchcraft – continues.
Lago Petén Itzá, Friday 9 June
Yesterday it rained hard all day and through the night. The lake has risen fifteen centimetres. The lake is approximately fifty kilometres long by four kilometres wide. At breakfast, I ask Santiago, a graduate of one of France’s prestigious Grandes Ecoles, how many tons the rise represents.
I await an answer.
We drive around the lake in Santiago’s pickup. The road cuts off a narrow inlet near the far end of the lake. The inlet is some four hundred metres long and is dammed by the road, beneath which runs a single conduit. With less room to expand, the inlet has risen one and a half metres above the main body of the lake. A giant whirlpool swirls above the entry to the conduit. Foam gushes thirty metres from the exit of the conduit. All that unharnessed energy – what is the pressure?
Such questions interest an old man.
Lago Petén Itzá, Sunday 11 June
Both Nora and Anita, Santiago’s resident herbalists, have Sundays free. They are replaced by Maria, five foot one when stretched and aged sixty-five. A fine bone structure suggests a youthful beauty confirmed by a niece who drops by to assist in preparing breakfast. Maria is no slouch in the war against modern medicine. One glance at my leg and she is off to the jungle. First comes aloe slime, followed by a poultice of a long leaf that I don’t recognise (does it grow only in shadow and on the tombs of deceased witches?). Horror of horrors, my leg turns blue. I must visit the doctor tomorrow. How to hide this indelible evidence of witchcraft competition?
Santiago is the brujas’ accomplice.
I hope he will be caught and burnt at the stake.
Meanwhile he and I (and my blue leg) take the truck and go hunting for a pig.
This is a bloody tale. Vegetarians should read no further. The idea was mine. Tonight is full moon. The sky is clear. This is no time for skulking in a hammock. Avante!
Santiago is not only Guatemala’s pre-eminent conservationist. He is also famous as the discoverer of the most important Maya site in the Peten jungle since the uncovering of Tikal. Today our prey is a young Pig.
I am an expert on the Hispanic American variety. I once spent an entire Christmas Eve in Cuba hunting down an illegal pig. Nervous of authority, the illegal pig was on the move. We finally ran it to earth at six in the evening. We were in a Moskvich. A close friend, Carlito, was my companion. Rum was the fuel of our investigation.
Santiago doesn’t drink.
A lechón – a piglet – would be perfect. We intend barbecuing it whole over charcoal. Santiago, confident, telephones a dinner invitation to the director of the Peten’s protected areas and his family.
First we explore El Remate, where we are offered the runt of a litter reared on a refuse heap that is ninety per cent plastic bottle. Two further pigs are too big. We return on the lake road and meet with a farmer dressed for Sunday in a spotless white straw Stetson, polished boots, clean jeans and a flowered shirt. His wife owns two pigs. Santiago and he discuss neighbours and what effect the full moon will have on the weather. We then follow the gentleman up a jungle path. His wife appears, driving two pigs. One is russet, the other more a rose pink. They possess fine straight backs and rounded rear ends. I am the expert. I select the russet and am quoted twenty-five dollars.
I am about to negotiate.
Santiago murmurs, ‘The man shot two neighbours last year over a boundary dispute.’
End of negotiation. And I pay a further three dollars to the wife for slaughtering and stripping the pig of its bristle.
We have soy sauce, honey, unlimited garlic, chilli, concentrate of tomato, both limes and lemons. We search the village tiendas for fresh ginger. A gullible young French couple watches as we light the charcoal in a half-drum. The French are concerned primarily by the price and availability of marijuana. They display no interest in nature or in the great Maya ruins. However, the pig fascinates them. From where did we get it?
From the road, Santiago answers: ‘In Guatemala, any animal straying onto the road becomes public property.’
I contribute the important detail that Sunday is a good day for catching pigs in the road as the owners are in church.
Further details develop: that Santiago chased and caught the pig and that I hit it over the head with a rock.
The French girl asks what sort of rock.
I am stumped as to why this should be important.
‘A round rock,’ Santiago explains. ‘A pointed rock would have made the pig bleed and mess up the back of the truck.’
Later we overhear the couple discuss our hunt over their smoke. They seem impressed at our expertise rather than doubtful of either our morality or our veracity.
The young woman asks Anita for further details. Anita accuses me of boasting: yes, I had hit the pig on the head with a rock, but I had only stunned it. Santiago, schooled in the ways of the jungle, had done the actual killing with his machete.
Earlier in the week Santiago had told them of my family’s four-generation commitment to the manufacture of plastic boots. The Frenchman asks me the mark of boot. I explain that my family are merely manufacturers and imprint the boots (an advantage of plastic) with the mark of the importers. Later the Frenchman overhears me speak of a past visit to Guatemala and asks whether I was here on business. I admit my family’s contract to supply plastic boots to the Guatemalan army.
The French are headed north to Mexico. I am tempted to point them in the direction of the smoker-surfer, he with proof of seven-foot green aliens buried beneath Central America’s pyramids. I could add that the aliens were discovered wearing plastic boots. This is a time of Franco-American strife. Guiding the young French couple into a spiritual alliance with a North American would be a good deed.
The pig is delicious. Judgement is in the eating. Our guests eat three servings each. I sit at the table, content, and enjoy the conversation.
What have I learnt over the past few days in which my leg has been a battle ground for the forces of modern medicine and the selva, the jungle?
I have talked with men and women at small restaurants and at internet cafés and at water-stops on the road to Flores and in Flores. Violence is their one concern. No wonder. The newspaper today gives police statistics for Guatemala City: 1200 armed assaults on city buses between January and 1 June – twenty drivers killed.
People talk of the need for a strong man to combat endemic violence.
General Molina is mentioned (I note in today’s paper that he has resigned his present position – the better to campaign for the presidency). Others warn that generals have little respect for human rights, that their attitude to human eradication is also general. I consider that shudderingly explicit expression used in the United States, ‘wasting’ – not as in wasting human resources but in laying waste.
I have learnt that mountain and forest make difficult the tracking by radar of small aircraft and that airstrips on haciendas in the Petén are the refuelling stops for drug flights to the US. Permission is necessary for raids on private property. Applying for permission for a raid outpaces email in warning the narco-traffickers.
I have been told that small farmers are reluctant to improve their farms for fear that a narco-trafficker will make an offer that would be suicidal to refuse … and that, in earlier times, in the years of the clandestine war, army officers made the offers that could not be refused. Some of those officers are now the narco-traffickers.
I am told that narco-traffickers will pay the commander of a military airstrip half a million dollars for its use – the alternative is the killing of the commander’s family. The wife of my informant argues that there is a third, and more common, alternative: that the commander negotiates a higher price. In Guatemala, everything is open to negotiation.
Lago Petén Itzá, Monday 12 June
I have attempted to scrub the blue evidence of brujería from my wounds. I recall a somewhat similar situation in the Ogaden desert in my youth. My leg swelled. It became a liquid-stuffed balloon. A North American Seventh Day Adventist manning a medical mission was the nearest doctor, 500 miles south on the banks of the Wabe Shebelle river. I reported my predicament and my destination over the radio to my department. I drove across a desert of red dust. The doctor was on patrol. He would return the following afternoon. A young blonde Seventh Day Adventist nurse examined my leg. She prayed for my soul at the dinner table and proffered cold root beer from an immense refrigerator.
My men had pitched camp across the river from the mission. I awoke to find the leg back to normal. Doubts had been cast over the radio as to the seriousness of my infirmity. I was suspected of driving 500 miles merely to an assignation. Now the nurse risked damnation in the eyes of her fellow missionaries.
The nurse and I spent the forenoon beating the leg with wet knotted towels. We achieved a slight swelling round the knee.
These are my memories as Santiago drops me at the clinic.
Blue is unpopular.
The doctor growls.
A tough, square, sadistic nurse, she who wielded the hypodermic, scrubs the scabs from my burns with sulphuric acid (judged by the pain). Bandages are applied, not to cure but to ward off further interference. I am told that I can travel – fast, is the implication, fast out of reach of the jungle witches.
It is healing.
Your guess is as good as mine as to which treatment has been most efficacious.
Across the Petén, Tuesday 13 June
Santiago has insisted on accompanying me. His monster Honda trail bike would be insulted by association with my 125. Santiago will ride his sixteen-year-old daughter’s Suzuki 125.
I summon Santiago at a quarter past seven from the virginal purity of his brand-new king-size bed and inner-sprung mattress (purchased yesterday). Santiago appears at half past. Facially he resembles Jack Nicholson. This morning he resembles Jack Nicholson on a bad day playing Jack Nicholson on a very bad day. To look this ravaged is an achievement given that Santiago hasn’t had a drink in two years.
We leave at half past eight.
Santiago looks better under a full-face helmet.
We head for Santa Anna and San Francisco, where Santiago circles the square before halting at a charming thatched cottage set in a large garden (what North Americans call a ‘yard’). The owner is a nurse. She is the mother of six daughters, each more beautiful than the last (so attests Santiago, who yearns after them). The mother serves coffee and cookies and recounts that two daughters have married Canadian missionaries. The fourth or fifth appears from town. She is beautiful – although less beautiful than the mother at the same age. This is my judgement on being shown a framed photograph of the mother’s wedding. The mother purrs and exchanges Bible quotations with her daughter, who sits on the arm of her mother’s armchair and threads her mother’s curls between slender fingers. Yearn on, Santiago. Your loves (even if you could concentrate on a single daughter or remember how many daughters there are or which daughter is which) will remain unrequited.
Courtship in this family is done with the Bible.
However, we do see a jaguar cross the road. Not the full-size version: an onza – Feli’s yagouaroundi.
In Santiago’s company, I have seen a mountain fox and squirrels, watched and listened to howler monkeys, and spotted a vast variety of birds. Now we speed towards the river that marks the Petén’s southern boundary.
The rains have been fierce over the past weeks. We hit diversions where the tarmac road has been swept away or eroded. At Sayaxche the river is in flood. The ferry is on the far side. The crew are eating breakfast or lunch or a mid-morning snack. An impatient truck driver pointlessly beats a tattoo on his klaxon.
Santiago and I park outside a thatched-roofed comedor. Paul Theroux writes that he hates the use of foreign words in travel writing. I know of no English word for comedor. A comedor is not grand enough to be a restaurant; nor is it a café. It is a place where you eat. This comedor is typical. Plank walls are waist-high, leaving a gap below the low eaves for light to enter. It has a rough unpainted concrete floor, plastic chairs, tables with plastic tops, an upright cold cupboard and a kitchen in the back that would give a health inspector a heart attack.
We drink good coffee. I eat eggs and refried black beans topped with cheese and chilli sauce. Santiago orders steak.
The ferry is a flat-topped barge pushed by an outboard-powered launch lashed alongside. Three trucks, a car and six bikes make a full load. The water is thick with earth washed down from hillsides denuded of their forest cover. We watch a little anxiously as the current sweeps the ferry broadside.
Beyond the river we cross rich ranch land. One vast spread is the property of a narco-trafficker; fences are neat, farm roads in good repair, cattle in prime condition.
Chiec is little more than a truck-stop with a service station and a new hotel. We are off the tourist track and pay less than ten dollars each for clean air-conditioned rooms with bath. The rooms open to a first-floor veranda overlooking the car park. Giant concrete mushrooms and real palm trees and acacias and an immense cedar tree shade a swimming pool. A waterslide plummets through hollow concrete tree trunks.
Chicken noodle soup is out of a packet. Santiago gnaws the better end of a bad steak. The bill is three dollars. We remount and head back twenty kilometres to the cavern system of Candelaria.
Entrance to the caverns is on the right of the road when heading towards the Petén. Santiago met this morning on the road with a Frenchman, Daniel Dreux. Daniel is a member of the group that first explored the caves some thirty years ago. The caves were known to the local Maya – thus explored rather than discovered.
Daniel has built a hotel at the caverns. A large concrete road sign promotes the caves as being a community project financed by USAID, a gift from the people of the United States of America. Small symbols advertise the facilities: toy car, knife and fork, bed.
Santiago leads down a narrow gravel road. The road twists and turns for a kilometre. The gravel ends and we slither on rutted mud. Finally we face a near-vertical ascent. Santiago roars to the top. I fail halfway. Santiago scrambles down what is a mud slide rather than a road and helps me turn the bike across the slope and hitch it onto its stand. I am irritated – and a little frightened.
We climb the slide. A narrow serpentine path leads down the mountain. Much of it is stone steps. My leg hurts. I curse whatever lying son-of-a-bitch marked the road sign with a toy car. A mule would find the track tough.
Santiago cheers me with a promise of cold beer. A French hotel must have cold beer.
The path debouches onto a lawn that hasn’t been cut in a month. A few huts promise discomfort. A Maya woman conducts us to a visitors’ centre.
Posters describe the caverns as the site of Maya rituals. The posters carry the insignia of USAID.
There are no French.
The woman has never heard of the French.
There is no cold beer.
Santiago wishes to visit the caverns. I wish to climb slowly back up the mountain, retrieve the Honda and ride carefully back to the main road. I want to reach the highway before nightfall and before rain turns the track into a quagmire. I know my capabilities. Crawling around caves in the dark while being devoured by mosquitoes is a negative.
I pause for breath twice on the climb. I traverse the slope on the Honda with the timidity of a novice skier on ice. I ride with care and regain the highway. Santiago will be at least an hour. I ride down the road and discover a second concrete sign promoting the caverns. This sign is emblazoned with the logo of the European Union. The symbols are identical to those on the USAID sign: toy car, knife and fork, bed. At least the US financed a track. Here there is only a grass path.
An elderly man tells me that Don Daniel is at the hotel. The hotel is through the trees. ‘Park at the farm,’ the old man instructs and points to a house on a small hill. I ride up the drive and find a Guatemalan woman feeding chickens.
‘Yes, indeed,’ she tells me. ‘Don Daniel is at the hotel. You may leave your motor bicycle here. Parking is five quetzales.’
I ride back to the USAID sign. A minibus unloads a man in his thirties, clean jeans and boots, a clean shirt, briefcase. He is of the community and asks whether I have visited the caverns. I reply that the road defeated me, that the car symbol on the sign is deceitful.
I retort that the only parking is on a mud slope. ‘The caverns belong to the community?’ I ask.
‘Yes,’ he says.
‘Then why does the sign bare the symbol of USAID rather than the flag of Guatemala?’
‘The United States paid for the development,’ he says.
‘A gift to the community?’
‘Yes, a gift.’
‘Should givers of gifts boast of their generosity?’
He looks up at the sign.
‘Or is the development an advertisement for the United States?’
He is uncomfortable. He thinks a while. ‘It is publicity for the Americans.’
‘And the posters in the visitors’ centre. That’s a great deal of publicity. At least they should have finished the road.’
‘We would have more visitors if the road was finished.’
I agree. ‘Were many of the community killed during the clandestine war?’
My change of direction confuses him. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Yes, many were killed.’
‘By the army?’
‘Yes, by the army and by the police.’
‘The guns and ammunition – were they marked as gifts of the people of the United States of America?’
Before he can answer, Santiago roars up the track.
Santiago introduces himself. He and the man discuss the cavern system. There are two entrances. Don Daniel has a hotel at the second entrance. The caves are on the community’s land. Don Daniel has stolen their land.
Santiago attempts to play the peacemaker. ‘The quarrel must damage tourism.’ And to me: ‘We are in a war zone.’
We ride down the road to visit the opposing army.
We park at the farmhouse, cross the road and slither down a grass slope to a path. Within the jungle, the verges of the path are planted with medicinal plants. We reach a bridge and a wooden bower with seats and a notice requesting that visitors remove their footwear. We follow a wooden walkway to thatched buildings. There is a restaurant. The cook is an indigenous woman in traditional dress and blouse. Her hair is bound in a pigtail.
A slim French youth serves cold beer.
Two Frenchmen join us. Don Daniel is in his mid-sixties, tall, heavily built. Jacques is lighter, younger, curly hair turning grey.
Daniel tells us that a syndicate from the US wanted to buy the hotel. Daniel refused. A few months passed and USAID began financing the rival project. The community had no previous interest in the caverns. It is an American conspiracy.
Santiago mentions land titles. Daniel storms off down the wood walkway.
Jacques leads us to a river that springs from a cave. The water runs for perhaps thirty metres before disappearing into the mouth of another cavern. A boat can follow the river through caverns for thirty kilometres.
Jacques shows us the rooms and bungalows. Taste is impeccable. The jungle is beautiful. And yet …
None of the rooms has a private bathroom. To pee, you have to walk down a path. At night? Losing your slippers, stubbing your toes … snakes, scorpions. No, not for the elderly. However, this is only the beginning.
There is a dark and heavy feel to the place. The atmosphere is French colonial: Indochina circa 1930: a turgid drama of overcomplicated loves and deceits shot in dark sepia.
Most disturbing is a small school for Maya children.
To Cobán, Wednesday 14 June
Santiago is a good friend and has been a great host. He must return to his hotel, Mon Ami. I head towards Cobán. Dawn, and mist clings to magnificent trees. I am at one with the Honda. I marvel at the precise positioning of the seat to suit a man of my exact proportions. I revel in rediscovering the joyous enthusiasm of my youth. I swoop into curves. The motor responds instantly.
I pull into a tiny comedor to wait out a rain storm. A seven-year-old beauty serves a bowl of coriander-flavoured chicken soup. She is the only member of her family comfortable in Spanish. I ask why she isn’t at school.
Because boys attend her school in the mornings, and girls in the afternoon.
Being a pompous old man, I warn her of the importance of education. Only education will free her from service to a man.
I play lion games with her younger siblings: big roar and they flee giggling, only to creep back for a repeat performance.
I played the same game with my own children.
My younger sons enjoy the same music and wear the same clothes as the sons of my Hispanic friends. Our sons have similar concerns and anxieties and preoccupations. We, their parents, have similar concerns and anxieties and preoccupations.
Although travelling, I am on familiar territory.
We are always on familiar territory, all of us. Yet we divide ourselves from this reality by erecting fake barriers and boundaries of nationality and race and religion.
Cobán, Thursday 15 June
I am evilly treated with divine comfort. I am staying with friends on their finca some kilometres outside Cobán. I awake to a sunrise of blushed gold filtered through white curtains. I hobble to my bathroom. The bath was rescued from an old house. It is vast and softly curved. It sits in a bow window. The taps are solid brass. Water gushes hot from the hot tap and cold from the cold tap. A brick path passes beneath the window. Above the path rises a vertical bank of red soil fringed at the crest with grass. Dew on the grass reflects the early rays of the sun. The grass appears to be licked by flames that dance rose and gold on the cliff edge.
My spectacles lie on the edge of the bath. I reach for my book. Tap-tap. Tap-tap.
I peek over my book and am confronted by a small bird with a yellow breast. The bird pecks at the window. Its wings whirr as it climbs the glass. Its strength saps and it slithers down to the window ledge. Please, I whisper, please don’t harm yourself. But the damage is done. Guilt invades me. I am responsible for the bird’s desire for self-destruction.
The bird perches on the thick shoot of a bromeliad and peers in at me (or at its reflection). Depart, I plead. The glass is too thick or my powers of thought transference are dysfunctional this early in the morning. Or the bird is really dumb. Or sadistic. It is deliberately fracturing the basking bliss of this, my first hot bath in two months of travel. I hate the bird.
And I hate my hosts for steeping me in such wonderful comfort.
They know I must move on and that I am moving on into the unknown and that quitting such safety and such beauty and such friendship will be tearful.
Cobán, Friday 16 June
Guatemala is inundated with missionaries, mostly from the US. My favourite is the Church of God. Other churches are the church of whom? The Devil? Or perhaps the Federal Reserve? We have Baptists and Anabaptists, Evangelicals, Seventh Day Adventists … and then, of course, those pale-faced Mormon lads in their tasteless ties. Today the feast of San Juan is celebrated in the village above which my hosts have their farm. Marcio and Ashley are vague as to which San Juan. Not that it matters. There is a big parade, men and women dressed in their best – men mostly in white shirts and dark trousers, women in long woven skirts and white blouses. Food stalls line the main street and a Ferris wheel turns slowly. We eat at a table in a front garden. The stall is in aid of damaged local children. The food is the traditional feast-day food of the area – rich turkey broth with a turkey leg or thigh and a chunk of smoked beef.
The Mormons sneak in.
Mormons are always white and are always pale. Are they scared of the sun? Or scared of being mistaken for the people they have come to save? And why always two of them? One is more than sufficient. Are they scared? Or do they need to watch each other so neither does a runner with the collection box?
I watch as they approach the elderly lady collecting the dinner money. They sidle. Maybe that comes with unlimited rejections. The lady sends them packing. They slink back, sneak-thieves on the prowl for a victim. Table to table. None of these people, indigenous or near-indigenous, is wealthy. They spend their spare cash on their own sick. These pink rats’ attempts at nibbling are obscene.
However, Guatemalans are polite.
Back home, Native Americans, those whose great-grandparents survived slaughter by these Mormons’ great-granddaddies, might shoot an arrow up their butts. And the inner-city slums of the US are too dangerous for sweet white kids in ties.
Cobán, Saturday 17 June
Over these past days I have been cherished by my hosts, Ashley and Marcio: hot baths, breakfast, being driven into town where I spend the day at an internet café run by two kindly sisters. The sisters allow me to set up my laptop at a vacant desk where it stays throughout my visit to Cobán. They remain patient when I miss the step down into their bathroom, slam the handbasin off the wall and end with my head in the lavatory bowl.
More important than the cherishing has been the conversation. Way back, Marcio’s family were Spanish. They had been Guatemalan for a couple of hundred years before the United States annexed California. By training, Marcio is a plant pathologist, and he has a fine collection of orchids out at the farm. However, as with many men brought up in what people call ‘the third world’, he has many accomplishments. During the clandestine war he sold everything in twenty-four hours to ransom his wife and children from guerrilleros.
Taking shelter in the United States, he earned a good living as a carpenter while attending night classes in business administration. Now he grows macadamia trees, several thousand, and Dobermans patrol within a tall fence that surrounds the house and garden. Apart from the farming, he and Ash run a hotel in Cobán, Casa d’Acuna.
The hotel is a resurrected colonial townhouse. The resurrection has been done with the same attention to detail that they have lavished on their own home. I made notes on my first visit: china doorknobs, spotless bathrooms with real hot water, fresh flowers on the tables, orchids on the patio and syrup feeders for the hummingbirds. The hotel is a partnership with staff, and the staff’s pride in their work is obvious. Rooms are reasonably priced and travellers find it an excellent base.
Marcio, Ash and I eat dinner at the hotel tonight. We are a little solemn, a little sad. Travelling is a series of goodbyes, and I leave tomorrow.
Sadness overwhelms me as I lie in bed. I think of those I will leave behind. Eugenio is a brother to me: a younger brother when we first met; now, as I enter my second childhood, an elder brother. And of course there is Santiago, fierce hunter of pigs, my present hosts Marcio and Ash, and Juan Fernando, Lucia and Eric up in Antigua.
Unable to sleep, I read Paul Theroux’s The Old Patagonian Express. I have reached page 150. Theroux is in Costa Rica and hasn’t yet met anyone he likes. Nor has he met anyone to whom he doesn’t condescend. This is a malady of travel writers. I read a dozen travel books on Latin America before departing on this journey.
However charming and amusing and well written the books, the writers seldom encounter anyone of greater education or social or financial standing. Apparently it is possible to travel through Patagonia without being aware of a city of a million inhabitants, of factories and schools and a university, of office buildings and apartment blocks serviced by elevators. No wonder those school students I talked with back in England pictured Mexicans as sweaty fat men wearing sombreros and speaking with funny accents.
Goodbye Cobán, Sunday 18 June
Breakfast is a real Sunday breakfast: fresh orange juice and fresh fruit for health; bacon, chorizo and French toast with real maple syrup from Canada for cholesterol; great coffee. I load the bike and Ash photographs Marcio and me beside the bike.
Marcio advises me of a shortcut to the tar road. I ride on good dirt for twenty kilometres. I ride slowly and smile at people and call greetings. I am rewarded with smiles and ‘good mornings’ – so different from the highlands of my first two days in Guatemala. The first fifty kilometres are coffee fincas or dairy farms. Occasionally there is a splash of colour where bougainvillea spills over a fence.
The paved highway drops in smooth curves to El Rancho, a distance of 150 kilometres. I am in tune to the road’s rhythm and am reminded, as I lean into the bends, of skiing in spring snow. This is glorious biking. I sweep though pine forest and inhale the scent of pine tar. The road drops from cool mountain air to coastal heat. At El Rancho I gas up beside two massive BMWs. The BMWs are fitted with all the kit; so are the riders (shades of Dallas, although these two are Guatemaltecos). The fitted luggage cost more than my Honda. We laugh together and shake hands and ride off in different directions – they back to their offices in the capital, me to turn south at Rio Honda towards the Honduran frontier.
Riding gives ample time for thought. I muse on the cowardice of the novelist – or my cowardice. As a novelist, I choose safety. When confronted, I have been ready always with the novelist’s excuse. ‘That was a character speaking. That wasn’t me. It’s a novel.’
Now I write fact as I perceive it; I place my own opinions before the reader; I do so from a country in which horrific violence is commonplace and where fear is as normal as eating breakfast. This is a country where the people suffered thirty-six years of a hell that historians now refer to as ‘the clandestine war’. Approximately 160 000 indigenous Guatemalans were slaughtered with the aid of US military advisers and by Guatemalan military trained at the School of the Americas in Georgia. The war was the fruit of the United Fruit Company. It was instigated by the CIA and financed by the generosity of the people of the United States of America. USAID signs are obscene. So is the moral posturing of those who financed the guerrilleros.