El Mirador trip for Semana Santa

Semana Santa, Holy Week before Easter, is a big deal in Guatemala. Bigger than Christmas I would say. Most of the week is given as vacation and everyone takes advantage to visit family and go to the lakes, rivers, oceans, and water parks since it is also the hottest time of year being right before the rainy season starts. The public buses are crazy-crowded and thefts increase dramatically. So this year a group of us Peace Corps volunteers decided to go do a five day hike in the jungle to Mayan ruins of El Mirador in the northernmost part of Guatemala in the department of Petén. Getting up to Flores from El Chol presented some challenges as it’s about a 12 hour trip on five buses from El Chol to Rabinal, to Salamá, to El Rancho (essentially a filthy truck stop where we waited for over an hour for a bus in blazing mid-day heat eating ripe mangos and inhaling only pure black exhaust from all the traffic and observing the prostitutes coming out of the bars as full buses passed and wouldn’t let us on), to Rio Hondo, where we scored seats on a bus coming from El Salvador up to Flores. We stayed at a cute Hostel and left early the next morning for our jungle trek.

So we got a local guide from the community of Carmelita which is an aldea of the municipality of San Andrés, Petén to take us on the hike. We hiked two days in to the ruins, spent a day checking them out, and hiked two days out. We had mules with us that carried our food, water, packs, and supplies. The walk itself was tough but manageable since it is almost entirely flat and shaded most of the way. We walked between 5 and 7 hours a day at a good pace for a total of an estimated 70 miles or 110 km over the five days. (No one was really sure of the mileage, the guide didn’t really know, and the guys we ran into with GPS only took start and end points rather than the path taken).

We slept in tents on the ground with a sheet as bedding and our arms as pillows. We ate a lot of white bread and canned tuna en route but at camp ate lots of eggs and beans and other delicious camping foods such as spaghetti and vegetable stew. Breakfast was a delicious one cup meal of instant coffee, sugar, powdered milk, Nesquick, and cornflakes all mixed together. Snacks were all the fresh fruits in season such as mangos, watermelon, cantaloupe, and pineapple. Fortunately we avoided the scorpions, pumas, and the deadly poisonous snakes whose bites have no cure. The ticks were another story and I picked off a total of six from my body that were in the process of burrowing in – supposedly there is no Lyme disease here though. We saw lots of monkeys (and heard more of the howler monkeys), cool spiders, geckos, and birds like toucans.

The ruins themselves were cool, but after having been to Tikal which is highly excavated, El Mirador was perhaps cooler in concept than in actual viewing. El Mirador is a whole ancient Mayan city from around the time of Christ which consists of a bunch of “complexes” and different temples and towers but are barely excavated and mostly look like piles of rocks still covered with vegetation. The cool part is that they were “discovered” less than 30 years ago and it is a hotbed of archeological excavation and research. It’s cool to think that you are climbing all over ancient uncovered temples. There were places where we got the guards to lift tarps to uncover newly found original wall carvings. There is scaffolding on various structures and all the stuff of the archeologists. It’s special that we got to go because we imagine that within a couple decades there will be significant excavation and the site will be accessible by vehicle and commercialized like Tikal.

Of the four nights we were out there, I was on top of a tower of a ruin for every single sunset (and one sunrise). It is quite breathtaking sitting atop an ancient temple above the canopy of the jungle taking in the views of the intense greenery and seeing other ruins poking out of the trees in the distance and on the horizon as the light changes and the sun plays with the clouds. You can see all the way to Tikal and other structures scattered about the region. We were there at the ruins on the exact night of the full moon so that was quite impressive so see as well. There was also a buzz about it being a very special night in the Mayan calendar when some stars aligned with the temples like every 12 years or something but never quite got the full story on that, but we were all waiting for something crazy to happen as we watched the moon rise and fill the sky.

So obviously backpacking there is nowhere to bathe yourself, but at the spots where we camped there was a swamp where you can get a bucket of brown water to make an attempt at it. After a long day walking in the jungle heat, I felt it quite necessary to make that attempt to at least remove a a layer of the dirt and salt that had built up on my skin. So I went with a friend and he kept watch in the other direction on the path while I stripped down and was there buck naked in the clearing in the forest splashing water on myself. All of a sudden a single file line of like seven Guatemalan guys appeared from the opposite direction of the forest from a path we hadn’t noticed. It was an awkward moment as I quickly grabbed my towel and stood there with it around me while they passed. Amazingly they said nothing and didn’t bother me in the least bit. We had a good laugh about it.
We talked with our guide and the assistant about the effect of this ecotourism project on their community. They have been receiving trainings from the government about how to interact with tourists, first aid, etc. to improve the project. There is controversy as to whether the park and protected area will stay in the hands of the government, or if it will be privatized. Would the protection of the forest be better and more efficiently enforced with a private entity? Would it take the jobs of the local guides away? The community is also divided between those that work a logging/rubber extraction/tourism cooperative and those that independently have organized themselves into groups that work together to guide the treks. It is interesting that since the ruins are a two day walk from the nearest community, the majority of the people that live there have never been to see the ruins. Driving to get to the community you pass vast deforested areas logged for the timber industry and burned expanses making room for agriculture. Effects on global warming, anyone?

There were 11 of us Peace Corps volunteers in our group along with a couple upper class kids from the capital, a guy from the Basque Country in Spain, and a Canadian guy. It was cool having the time to talk to everyone as I learned all about the autonomy and independence movement in the Basque Country, what it’s like to have body guards and live the rich life in Guatemala. It was also nice to have the chance to talk to fellow volunteers in depth about grad school, research interests, international development critiques, and future career and job possibilities since we are all leaving this year and starting to think about next steps.

Upon getting back to Flores from the trip we bought 50 giant ripe yummy mangos for 45 Quetzales (around 5 bucks) among the 15 of us to celebrate getting back. Eating whole mangos in a bus is a tricky business. You have to take of the peel with your teeth, eat the flesh while juice runs down your chin and arms and then suck the rest of the stringy fruit off the pit which then leaves your front teeth with mangos strings attractively hanging out and requiring flossing. It’s messy but oh-so-worth it. Flores is actually an island town in the middle of a lake, so when we got into town we all jumped into the lake for the most refreshing dip I’ve had in my whole life, since that swamp water rinse didn’t really do the trick.

Traveling back home on Saturday before Easter was a bit tricky since everyone is on vacation, including many bus drivers. We left Flores super early and were trying to get back to El Chol that same day, but it turned out to be impossible and so had to stay a night in Antigua. I was super frustrated, but it actually turned out to be really cool since Antigua is the most famous place in Central America for Semana Santa because of the elaborate processions including thousands of people that take place with impressive “carpets” made on the streets with colored sand, sawdust, and pine branches. Even though we had to pay quadruple to stay at the hostel we always stay at, we were super lucky to find a place to sleep. We got to see a night procession pass through the central park in front of the cathedral that was all lit up. Every person in the massive crowd was holding a candle and the air was thick and hazy with all the incense that was being burned. We watched the statues of Mary and Jesus pass by on giant wooden platforms that sway side to side being carried by gloved people wearing identical hooded purple robes. It is a very impressive display of religious devotion. At the hostel we enjoyed hot showers, ordering Domino’s pizza and applying exfoliating face masks. I spent Easter Sunday en route back to El Chol. The bus driver that I had called to ensure that he was working, evidently changed his mind and didn’t leave so we were facing the prospect of waiting in San Juan for five hours hoping that another bus would leave in the afternoon when luck struck us and a guy that my friend knows from her site drove by and gave us a ride back the 2 ½ hours to my site. Back to work on Monday with tons of stuff to do in the Women’s Office…