Semuc Champey and Etc.

There are several bloggers at Maya Pedal, the appropriate technology nonprofit where I am currently spending time. ¨Sometimes I just don´t feel like updating it,¨ said Dory, an Oberlin College student. ¨Then I think, who is actually reading my blog? And I realize it´s only my mom.¨

Likewise, there was a reporting of a barmaid in Montericco, at the Guatemalan coast, wearing a t-shirt that read: I don´t care about your blog. Matteo, another Pedal volunteer had a better shirt logo: ¨my mom cares about my blog!¨

I say all this becuase it`s my sister that writes to me and asks for another blogpost. She is my mom substitute here (mi quierida!), so for you Kates, here is one.

Semuc Champey is quite possibly the most bonito lugar in all of Guatemala. A winding and somewhat naseauting five hour busride from Guatemala City, first you go through the department´s capital city, Coban. Stopping in Coban for the night, we ran into a). a young british backpacker b). a friday night procession. (Jesus on the cross looking pretty ill, being carted around on a float again, down the road. For hours. See my photos from procession Antigua).

Coban is somewhat of a working class town, but tucked into a mountainous pass, and plenty warm. The guidebook said it wasn´t much of a place to stick around, though usually when the Lonely Planet says this, it means it`s a normal town and without too much tourism, which I think is a good reason to explore. The British tourist, a young guy, after trashing the Lonely Planet also remarked: ¨There´s absolutely no one here. This town is absolutely empty, isn`t it?¨ I looked around and saw a lot of people. In fact, the procession alone probably had a few hundred people in it. I realized then that he meant gringos. Weird.

The next day, a shuttle bus wound us around the mountains and onto a dirt track. All in all, 61 kilometers took 2 hours to navigate, and when we reached Lanquin, a tiny valley town on the side of a river, my ears were so stuffy that I couldn`t walk straight. The hustlers that gave us hotel information out of the bus were under the age of 15. We said we were going to El Retiro, the infamous hostel on the river bank, full of palapas (thatched roof rooms)and hammocks. The kids didn´t try to convince us out of it, which meant there wasn´t much competetion. The british tourist, an affable young guy, was with us, and when we reached El Retiro he whistled. There were white people everywhere, except for the kitchen. Just the ticket.

Coffee is widespread in the Verapaces, and grows underneath huge sheaths of green canvas, to protect it from the heat. In Lanquin (deep caves with a fresh water river running through) and Semuc Champey (crystal blue pools and roaring waterfalls that churn underground into deep, dark, scary tunnels), tourism is also huge, and trucks packed with backpackers trundle through these small towns at breakneck speed. On the way back from the pools at Semuc Champey we got a ride with a guy driving agua pura. He said work was really hard to get. He said he also was a grade school gym teacher, and that everyone had three jobs. His friend had tried to go to the states for work, but had just been deported.

At El Retiro, people were feeling pretty good. There were Dutch and American guys behind the bar, and plenty of vegetarian food. Music of the western variety pummeled through the soundsystem, and young girls in pretty traje walked through the crowd. ¨Commo tu llama?¨they`d start by asking, and soon have a giant mountain of beaded necklaces and bracelets on the table. ¨Que tu quieres?¨ If you didn´t want jewelry, you could also buy flat discs of chocolate wrapped in tinfoil for 5 Q. Sometimes you`d see the kids` mother, hanging out a few meters away, sort of hidden by a bush.

The Lonely Planet tags El Retiro as the kind of dangerous place you could easily stay at for months, taking part in various happy hours from the hammock, dipping your feet in the river and having frequently good looking foreigners slather sun screen on your body. The room we were issued looked sort of like a garage, and had exposed foundation stones jutting into the beds. The buffet dinners were dominated by Israeli travelers, and English was the international language. I sort of thought I might redub El Retiro as the dangerous kind of place where if you stayed too long, you`d be broke, and you also might have lost your ablility to interact with people from Latin America. But if we were judging from our british friends´ standards, that place was packed.

Trying to buck the insane price tag on everything from El Retiro, including the Semuc tour, we made it to Semuc Champey with a ride for 10Q each, with a group of peace corps volunteers. The pools on a Sunday were actually packed with locals, and bored looking gaurds with ropes coiled around their arms stood erect, waiting for something to happen. Howler monkeys screamed inside the woods, and people shrieked as they jumped from high rocks into the water. We watched the roaring river disapear into the rocks for awhile, and then one of the guards asked me to help him with his english homework. Maybe it was because I was in a small bathing suit. The paper he held out spelled out terms phonetically:
Guime a koke. For instance.

Hitchhiking back in the agua pura truck, we realized that we weren´t the only ones with that idea. By the end of the ride, our driver friend had packed a whole roadside village into the back, the older women carrying bundles wrapped in cloth on their heads. He was headed to an aldea, or tiny village, so he let us off, and we walked the rest of the way, stopping to buy pineapple juice and Big Cola at a roadside stand.