Digging Ditches

We spent two weeks in the small, dusty town of Cofradia, Honduras working at this wonderful bilingual school called BECA that provides affordable bilingual education. The words "affordable bilingual education" are rarely found together in the same sentence. Being bilingual is one of the most viable ways to a better future for most of today's Central American kids, but usually it is reserved for society's elite. The school was started several years ago through a partnership of some community members and an American woman. Every year, a new team of volunteer English teachers come down and teach for a year and live in the community getting paid zilch, pretty phenomenal people. We passed through here on our last trip, so it was cool to get to catch up with the folks we'd spent time with in November.

With some of the volunteer English teachers

Our days were spent helping out in classrooms and digging a 10-foot sewage hole for the new bathrooms for the kindergartners. Glamorous, right? Local ranch hands would mossy on by and were quite amused at the site of gringos in their country with shovels in hand performing hard labor under the blazing sun. The irony was not lost on them, either.




My new nickname is "Susie Snacks" (as I'm always snacking) and my students have almost convinced me to open up my own line of snack food by the same name. A business idea to ponder.

We took a weekend trip to this spectacular 150 foot waterfalls, actually hiked down INTO them (deafening and borderline painful with the power of the water coming down) and got to hang inside them for a bit. Never seen anything like it.

Another highlight of this portion of the trip is being 45 minutes away from San Pedro Sula, Honduras, the site of a most excellent mega-mall that we affectionately call "America". Shiney marble floors, vaulted ceilings, a massive food court with every fast food option imagineable, the works. Malls, which I usually loath, never looked so good after two months of blissful hippie simplicity and non-materialism. It's nice to be a good old consumer every once in awhile :).

Hitching a ride to the airport in Don Max's rad truck.

One of the more hilarious signs I've come across in Central America (and there have been many). "We sell firewood, popsicles, sugar water, and rabbits."

Nicaragua

Border crossing from Costa Rica to Nicaragua

We had a week of free travel where the students decide when and where we go, and they chose to spend the week chillaxing in Nicaragua. Easily overlooked, Nicaragua for me comes in a close second to Guatemala in its natural and man-made beauty, and historical and political interest quotient, was glad to get to head back. We headed first to Leon where the big item on the agenda was volcano boarding (literally surfing down a volcano through volcanic ash like you were snowboarding), only it didn't happen as the only tour was booked for the next two days and we had to be on our way. Bummer.

On to Granada, the oldest city in Central America...it's easy to see the vestiges of Spanish colonialism here.

Drinks the park

Gorgeous central park fountain by night

We stopped in at one of my favorite spots The Monkey Hut for a night, a beautiful spot on azure blue crater lake Apoyo.

Lago Apoyo from the Monkey Hut

Armen makes a friend

Rats, Sharks, and Sea Turtles

Last week was spent kicking it on a turtle preserve on a remote beach on Costa Rica's Caribbean coast. Our days were passed lazing in hammocks with the occassional beach soccer game with the locals and our nights were spent taking 3-hour shifts patroling the beach for massive endangered leatherback turtles coming ashore to lay their eggs before heading back into the depths. Lots of downtime...I came armed with an iPod chock-full of the mighty triumvirate of Lost, The Office, and Family Guy, my guilty pleasures, to help pass the quiet nights sans electriciy. God bless the video iPod.

Jessica living The Life

So the turtles...these amazing creatures can live upwards of 150 years and average 4 to 5 feet and lay 60 t0 120 eggs the size of golf balls. They face a bit of a battle against nature as well as humans...poaching became a big issue in years past (and still present). Turtle eggs fetch a pretty penny here as they're believed to have natural aphrodisiac effects, about $40 for a batch from one turtle, which is a good night's salary for these local folks. And if the poachers don't get them first, their nests oftentimes don't even survive in the wild from being washed away by the tide or eaten by natural predators. And even if the babies do get to the point of hatching and making it out to sea, about 1 in 1,000 make it to adulthood; the sharks are big fans of these cute little guys. So Costa Rica has recently become quite pro-active in protecting them and helping them bolster their ranks, which means snatching the eggs from the mama after they're laid and relocating them to a hatchery where they can be monitored and protected until they hatch.

On turtle patrol with Johnny and Jessica at some ungodly hour of the night

Although we enjoyed oceanfront digs, swimming was not much part of our daily activity due to the very shark-infested waters we shared our beach with. There were several reports of sightings alarmingly close to shore while we were there, which quickly cured me of my need to take a refreshing dip. And a word about the oceanfront digs -- really a crude shack we shared with ROUSs (Rodents Of Unusual Size for the Princess Bride ignorant) that came to visit every night. I like to think I have a high threshold for such things, but I did almost lose it the other night when I left for my three-hour turtle patrol in the middle of the night and came back to fresh rat poop on my BED. Not cool.

It was sweltering hot and thank God that coconuts abounded in this virgin tropical paradise, we kept ourselves cool gorging on cocolocos, or rather straight up coconut milk drunk straight out of the coconut with a straw. The group got really good at cracking open coconuts with a machete by the end of the week.

Cocoloco party

Hiking in to the beachfront camp

We've lost one of our ranks, Amanda, who decided to take the independent travel route and split off from the group to do her own thing for a few weeks. We were sad to see her go!

Ommmmm...

So this past week was spent on gorgeous Lake Atitlan, the part of the trip where we practice yoga every morning and meditate in the lotus position, looking out our third eye and chanting "ommmm" for hours on end in a huge wooden temple shaped like a pyramid, complete with incense, candles, and a guru with long black hair wearing flowly white robes. It's another world. Not your everyday experience and not for everyone, but it's one of my favorite parts of the trip. Balancing chakras, reading auras, lucid dreams, holistic medicine, and astral travel are all normal breakfast conversation around these parts. Welcome to San Marcos and The Piramides Meditation Centre. You have to see this place to believe it. In the past 20 years, this tiny little indigenous lakeside town as become a veritable hippie Mecca. People from all over the world have settled here to soak in the energy of this place and do spiritual exploration. They actually claim that San Marcos holds a unique energy and vibration due to energy meridians crossing at this very spot on the planet or something or other.

Who knows? But I do feel something special when I'm here. San Marcos is one of my favorite spots on earth. I started coming here on weekends every chance I could when I was a teacher in Antigua in 2003, usually by myself with nothing but a book and a single change of cloths, and with no other agenda than to soak in the energy of this place, read, eat great vegetarian food, and not talk to a soul, surrendering to my closet hermit inclinations.

Particularly interesting is that San Marcos is a random hippie Mecca against the backdrop of a intensely evangelical indigenous village. The two very distinct communities co-exist quite peacefully for the most part. However, the numerous churches around here have taken to broadcasting their daily services over loud-speakers that canvas the entire valley with competing congregations of a capella singers with excruciatingly poor pitch, piercing the otherwise exceedingly peaceful atmosphere several times a day. I guess a place can't be perfect.

I got to see my friend Nicola from England who was part of the fantastic group of people Nate and I met here on our first trip and have stayed in touch with since then. Nicola loves San Marcos so much she stuck around and now calls it home.

The Lovely Nicola

We absorbed a couple other members into our group this week, Nate's friend Tom and my old friend Neil who came to check out what all the fuss was about the Pyramids as well. Great having them along.

I ended up doing another show at this great venue in town, Blind Lemon's, a repeat gig from when we passed through here last October, lights, sound system and all, which is a rare thing around these parts. We packed the place out again and it goes down as another great memory. The owner of Blind Lemon's, Carlos Funk (whose "real" name is Charlie Smith or something mundane like that) pulled out his bass and accompanied me for a bit, very fun.

Doing my thing with Carlos

We even had a surprise guest appearance from Pieter and Chris at the show (courtesy of Nicola), our good buds from the last time we were here...in the form of a blown-up color photo taken at the last show.

Actual publicity for the show, funny.


The boys of the San Marcos dock, loading the lancha

A local fisherman on Lake Atitlan.

Now we've bid Guatemala farewell and just landed in Costa Rica. We head out tomorrow for a week working with endangered leatherback turtles, helping protect their eggs as they come up out of the ocean onto the beach to lay their eggs. Sounds pretty romantic, but in reality it means a lot of downtime in a really isolated place during the day and four hour shifts patrolling the beach back and forth, back and forth in the in middle of the night. Eh, not my most favorite part of the trip, but here we go. Then off to Nicaragua for a week of free travel!

Lahar

lahar (lä'här') n.

1. A wet mass of volcanic fragments flowing rapidly downhill. Lahars usually contain ash, breccia, and boulders mixed with rainwater or with river or lake water displaced by the lava flow associated with the volcano.
2. An avalanche of volcanic water and mud down the slopes of a volcano.
3. A destructive mudflow on the slopes of a volcano usually brought on by massive amounts of rain.

I would like to amend the statement proffered in my last blog, that in Guatemala when you see an erupting volcano, you go towards it instead of away from it and no one will try and stop you. I have officially experienced an exception to that rule.

A couple days ago our crew embarked on a popular two-day trek to one of Guatemala’s most active volcanoes, Santiaguito. As the volcano is far too active to summit, we camp at the base, the culmination being waking up in the middle of the night after the clouds have cleared to watch the fireworks show above as Santiaguito erupts every 20-30 minutes. If only we'd made it to base camp.

At the beginning of the seven-hour hike to our camp, we crossed over a frighteningly deep gorge that our guide Deek told us was formed 20 years ago by a massive lahar that ripped through the valley (see definition above). To give you an idea of its power, the lahar’s warpath tore straight through a church that still stands, now in two parts, on either bank of the gorge. (see photo below)



A few hours hiking through the grasslands, then uphill into thick, thick jungle towards Santiaguito. The skies began to open up after stopping for lunch. More thick jungle, more rain, more uphill. Finally only an hour to go, the skies were dumping buckets, we were exhausted and very ready to arrive at base camp and change into dry clothes. Still under cover of jungle, we couldn’t yet see the volcano, but started hearing short explosions every few minutes, informed by our guide Deek that it was the volcano doing its thing.

The rain continued beating down on us, and the uphill path we were scaling started looking more like a small waterfall at times. (And this is where I have to admit, I did kind of imagine I was Kate out of a scene from Lost, desperately tramping through the jungle in search of a secret hatch or running from the bad guys. Alas, Matthew Fox was nowhere to be found.) As we got closer to our destination at the base of the volcano, the intermittent bursts from the volcano changed to steady rumbling and eventually I could feel the ground vibrating beneath me. The bursts from the volcano seemed normal enough, but was this normal?

We finally approached a clearing at the ledge of the 50-foot gorge that separated us from Guatemala's most active volcano in the not-too-far-off distance, our first peek at Santiaguito. Deek was at the front of the group surveying the scene as we one-by-one gathered at the ledge before making the final 30-minute hike up the edge of the gorge to base camp. As I approached the clearing, I peered across the gorge and could see several small landslides tumbling down the steep terrain just across from us. Hmmmm. Suddenly, a usually extremely calm and collected Deek turns around and yells over the increasing rumbling and pouring ran, “Go back, go back! Go, go!” gesturing frantically with his arms and making for the trail we had just climbed up. I think the unnerving rumbling of the ground underfoot was enough to know something was not right, but especially considering Deek's usually collected manner and the new tone of urgency in his voice, none of us asked questions before turning on our heels and booking it straight down the mountain, 35 lb. backpacks and all, running on pure adrenaline.

Suddenly it didn't matter that we were exhausted and soaked to the skin. Rain was beating down harder than ever and the small trickle of water we had contended with on the way up just five minutes earlier was now a raging river that we had to basically wade through on our way down. It was a miracle there were no injuries.

We continued to hear the menacing rumbling for a good half hour as we distanced ourselves from whatever it was were were running from. We finally stopped and found out that there had been a live lahar approaching fast just around the bend in the gorge, apparently the first time in 10 years of doing these treks that a group has come upon one. Deek had seen it coming around the corner, a dark, angry cloud of mud, rocks, and water sweeping through the gorge. One of the other guides Landon had stayed behind for a few minutes out of a morbid curiosity and reported back seeing landslides from across the gorge and watched as a bizarre mixture of mud, water, ash, steam and rocks filled the 50 foot gorge in a matter of minutes, splashing up over the sides where we had just been. He said the power was unbelievable and that the ground underneath him was shaking so hard he doubted the ledge we had just been standing on moments before was still standing.

The even more frightening thing was that we were an hour behind schedule given a glitch when we stopped for lunch. We should have been at base camp by that time, with an almost non-existent escape route. Still kinda gives me the heebie-jeebies to think about.

The rest of the story is not quite as exciting, we finally reached a good distance, night was falling, and we somehow found a decent place to set up camp in the middle of a mountain covered with thick jungle where there really shouldn't be much clear, flat ground. But there it was, and there we stayed for the night. No volcanic fireworks show from this camp, but I think we'd just had plenty of excitement to make up for it and didn't mind a bit.

I like to think a little life-threatening experience every once in awhile builds character. At least that's my best attempt to frame this into a "teachable moment" for the kids. Right.

Some less-eventful parts of the trek...

And on a completely different note, photos from Semana Santa...

Liquid Hot Magma and Mayan Shaman

We attempted to summit Volcan Pacaya last week, but the volcano had other plans. The usually mildly active volcano has been making up for lost time over the past few months and we had a pretty gnarly up-close-and-personal encounter with the angry beast.

This being Guatemala, when you hear about an erupting volcano, you go towards it instead of away from it, and no one will try to stop you. The landscape surrounding the cone of the volcano, which you can usually climb to the top of and look over into the crater, was completely changed from when I was last here two years ago. We got as close as we could to the top, but encountered a few live rivers of lava meandering down the cone that put a stop to our progress. I got about 10 meters from one of the rivers before having to turn back for fear that the soles of my shoes would melt right off my feet. Check out the video, kind of trippy. (Kids, do not try this at home...oh go ahead, just make sure your parents aren't looking.)

A sadistic highlight would have to be when Johnny was hot-shoting it and getting a little too close to the approaching river of lava, not noticing the glowing lava just underneath some of the recently cooled stuff, tripped, and literally burned his foot on molten hot lava. Hurt like hell, but for crying out loud, how many people can claim they burned themselves on liquid hot magma? Johnny agrees, it was well worth the pain for story rights.

We passed through my old home turf of Antigua for a few days last week, which is always fun. Semana Santa (Holy Week/Easter) is upon us and we were lucky to be in one of the world's biggest hot spots for part of the holiday.

You can find these alfombras (carpets) all over the streets of Antigua during Semana Santa. They're hand-made of all-natural materials, are veritable works of art, and only exist for a few hours before being trampled by the Semana Santa processions as they go by.

My Mayan scholar friend Ed arranged for us to have a private ceremony with a Mayan shaman while we were there. We burned incense and candles and sent prayers to Maximon, a Mayan saint who is memorialized as a wooden box draped in a robe and wearing a Stetson hat. He particularly enjoys his rum and cigarettes, you therefore pay homage to him by gifting aforementioned products...a highly suspect practice designed to feed someone else's bad habits, you might be thinking? Hey, you gotta have an open mind... :)


One of the highlights of being back in Antigua was getting to visit my friends, The Dubons. Some of you may remember hearing about this extraordinary family from when I worked as a computer teacher in Antigua in 2003 and got to work with their kids and became close with the whole family. They're part of an experimental project by an NGO, a very at-risk family that was pulled out of one of the poorest areas in Guatemala City called the dump (literally a dump where people live and make their livelihood off of forging through the trash for items of value). They are getting a leg up to attempt to start a new life, they live in a decent place, the kids are getting a good education, the single mother of five, Miriam, now has a sustainable career as a nurse. All of the kids now speak pretty good English and have a chance at sustaining a decent quality of life on their own in the future. Yonatan (my favorite :), who I met when he was just a boy of 13 is now a man of 17, is as tall as me, and has a deep voice and a girlfriend, so strange for me. He's working as a waiter at one of the best hotels in Guatemala City, which is a big deal. He actually waited on the King and Queen of Spain who were in town last week, so he's officially met more famous people than I have.

Erik's abrazo de oso (bear hug)

We're now in Xela doing another couple of weeks of Spanish school. The whole town has virtually shut down for Semana Santa and the streets are alive with Catholic tradition...incense, bobbling Jesus statues on procession floats followed by somber band music that sometimes makes me want to slit my wrists. Look for pix next time.

Jessica put my hair in pigtails yesterday. Perhaps "nubs" would be a more accurate term. It's my latest attempt to stave off the mullet that is quickly becoming my hairdo. I did just get mistaken for being one of the high school students by someone, that was great fun.

Armen, Johnny, Jessica, and Amanda's future album cover

Mayan Warriors, Beach Bums, and Outhouses

Another update from the wilds of Guatemala...Last weekend we hit up the majestic Mayan ruins of Tikal. We watched Mel Gibson's Apocalypto the night before just for kicks, hoping to get some good historical context. All we got were a lot of severed heads plummeting down the pyramids. We all rallied for the Tikal sunrise tour, which required waking at 2:30am, but was well worth it to experience the sounds of the jungle as it was waking up. You’ve got to check out the sounds of Tikal in the morning, the howler monkies are having a ball getting out of bed.

We've left San Andres after two weeks of Spanish school (and another vain attempt to master the subjunctive) and a great experience with the community. I was sad to leave my host family, their six rabbits who roamed the house at will, and especially my mama Isabelle who took to calling me “Susita”. The simple life agrees with me, and this was the perfect place to just sink into it, as life here was pretty basic, day-to-day, and uncomplicated. Nobody here had very much and there was certainly a collective struggle to make ends meet, yet somehow that didn't correlate with the quality of life (at least as I would define it). A nice reminder for me that happiness has very little to do with "stuff".

Doña Isabelle and the conejitos

Check out the great views...


Fellow traveler and student Gerry pulled out the poi at our farewell bonfire.


Determined to be beach bums for a spell, we hit Livingston for the weekend, Guatemala’s tiny sliver of Caribbean beachfront. We settled into my friend Rusty's new hostel, a good friend I met years ago in Argentina. Livingston is home to the Garifuna, a completely distinct and fascinating Central American subculture with their own language, customs, etc. They’re descendants of a community of shipwrecked slaves and there’s been very little mixing with the natives. Hence, they’ve preserved their distinctly West African features as well as a lot of the customs/dance/music and I swear I could have been in West Africa at times.

We adopted into our group a couple of fellow travelers, Kieran and Mike, and had a pretty near perfect day at the beach playing volleyball and being lazy, a personal favorite past-time. Also went on a river walk where the original Tarzan movie was filmed.

The bustling streets of downtown Poptun

The past four days we’ve been kicking it in the small rural town of Poptun living with families and volunteering at the local school. Living with a family in this sort of community means all bets are off when it comes to amenities and privacy. My house consisted of a kitchen area, outdoor shower and outhouse (not for the faint of heart...or stomach), and a large living area divided in half by a makeshift wall. My room was a curtained-off corner of the main living area, Nate slept on the hammock in the living area, and the parents and four kids cozied up on the three beds in the walled-off area. How’s that for a reality check when I used to complain about having to share a bedroom with my sister? But my family was so unbelievably amazing and welcoming, it was hard to mind the close quarters.

Our Poptun family

And the food. Oh, the food. The families we lived with took turns hosting us for all our meals for a day and pulled out all the stops. Seriously some of the best Guatemalan food I have ever tasted, they treated us like kings. As you can see from the photo, we’re too busy stuffing our faces to smile for the camera.

Johnny teaching English

We were there volunteering at the local elementary school, which was a community-based initiative started and run and largely financed by the community, as there are not sufficient public schools in the area. Organization for volunteering is not usually stellar for these sorts of things and we’ve found you usually have to make it up as you go along. Our students were amazing, jumping right in with English lessons, some Red Light, Green Light action, and in the absence of a proper playground, Armen served as a human jungle-gym
for most of recess.

Armen the human jungle-gym

Jessica