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

Yes, there’s been a huge gap in the blog, I just can’t seem to find much unique and interesting to write about from the ‘burbs of Washington DC. Nevertheless, it was a great two months of seeing my wonderful family and friends, and the good folks at Weichert Realtors even give me my desk back for a spell so that I could do my damage at attempting to eek my way over the poverty line and into a respectable tax bracket.

But I made another quick escape and here I am again in Guatemala with a new crop of students for three months traipsing through Guatemala, Costa Rica, and Honduras with LEAPNow. I got my incredible co-leader Nate back and instead of the traveling caravan of 14 like last time, this time we are an intimate family of 6, which creates a very different dynamic…so far a great one. I must confess that at times it feels strange and as though I’m being unfaithful to my first stellar crew of students from last semester, but they have since gone on to other things like working with whales in the Canary Islands, working as a dive master in Australia, a few are traveling together in South America, and several are hitting the books at university. I do miss them and remember them often, but my four new students are rock stars in their own right. Armen, standup comedian from LA; snowboard instructor Amanda from Minnesota; Johnny from LA, future Harvard grad whose parents created the Fresh Prince of Bel-air; and artist Jessica from Colorado who used to have her own talk show on NPR. I think it’s safe to say that my students are way smarter and way cooler than I ever was at 18…or perhaps ever will be.

We’ve just wrapped up a four-day orientation at Finca Ixobel in the jungle Peten region of Guatemala. The landscape here is exactly as you would imagine out of tropical storybook fantasies…lush green splendor everywhere. In between orientation sessions about healthy group dynamics and how to avoid spending the majority of the trip on the toilet, we went caving/swimming through an underground river cave (not a life jacket or hard hat to be found as we traversed some pretty dangerous ground…safety precautions don’t so much exist here), went into town and saw a funky local parade and bought ingredients from the market to whip up our own guacamole, and had a movie night watching Borat, a very culturally relevant and enriching film.

Now we’re in the middle of two weeks of Spanish school in a small, tranquilo village on the banks of Lago Peten. I live in what can accurately be described as a large shack with running water…sometimes. My family has a dog named “Espot” (Spanish for “Spot”) and there are the cutest little rabbits that live on the back patio. I inquired in hushed tones (so that the rabbits wouldn’t hear) if the rabbits were pets or for eating, as the later is usually the case with other housebound wildlife like chickens and pigs. Happily, I will not be enjoying rabbit stew for dinner anytime soon. The same cannot be said for the pig with whom Amanda has been sharing a courtyard at her homestay. She woke up this morning to find it hung neatly (as neat as a carcass can be) on hooks around the house in preparation to go to market, having somehow blissfully slept through the massacre that had just ensued outside her bedroom door. She promptly informed her homestay family that she was a vegetarian (not true).

Nate chilaxing on the boat to San Andres

Armen doing a swan dive...

So apparently George W. and Lady Laura were in Guatemala a few days ago. Had no idea until my homestay family told me, to give you an idea of how isolated I am from current events. We watched the highlights on TV that night, the triumphant entry, Bush kissing Mayan babies, carrying boxes of produce in a factory, the Bushes and the Guatemalan President and his wife walking together in awkward silence as neither speaks the others’ language. The people here like to joke that after his visit, all of Guatemala’s problems will be solved.

We just went to a Guatemalan zoo where a lizard fell on me from a tree and attempted to dive down the front of my shirt and a baby leopard projectile peed on me from inside his cage. Bad karma?

On a happier note, I’ve got a decent base tan going on and I couldn’t tell you what day it is to save my life.

Rolling into Antigua always feels like coming home of sorts. I've come and gone from this place so many times, but the excitement I feel when I experience the jolt of the cobblestone streets beneath the bus wheels and the lights of Central Park has never diminished. I met a great couple from New Zealand, Shane and Sarah, on the seven hour bus ride from Copan, Honduras...they're at the tail-end of a one-year honeymoon around the world. We scope out some digs and, as it's late in the evening, the only viable option ends up being the very place in Antigua I swore I would never return...the memory of being awoken suddenly by the sensation of six little cockroach legs scurrying across my bare shoulder in the middle of the night when I was staying there two years ago is still vivid. C'est la vie.

We located my dear old friend Rusty and his girlfriend Christy and headed to my old haunt Cafe No Se. I wasn't there long before the owner John thrusts a guitar in my hands and it was just like old times. We also had a visit from Eminem's protege, a white kid from Denmark who rocked the original rhymes like I couldn't believe. As I stood in the crowded little space, a cerveza in hand, good old friends to my left, some new ones to my right, the thump of the standup bass backing up Nick's wicked-clever rhymes, I had to smile...it's always good to be back here, at least for a little while.

The good times in Antigua continue...front-row seats to a concert featuring a Buena Vista Social Club original from Havana, Cuba. The dancing was fierce, the music exquisite.

Also attended The Burning of the Devil (La Quema del Diablo) with Shane and Sarah...the annual burning of a plastic devil every December 7th. Not quite clear on its origins, something about burning away your sins before Christmas or something, felt a bit like Guy Faulks day in England. Eh, great fun nonetheless. Do note the Esso (Exxon) station just a few feet away in the background, and another one just to the left that you can't see in the photo. I love that they choose to hold this ceremony which involves massive amounts of gasoline and a bonfire precisely in the one area in town hemmed in by gas stations. I love Guatemala.

I hear Christmas caroles in the air and Christmas lights everywhere and I swear they're playing a practical joke as I stroll around town in a tanktop and flip-flops. And the money seems to be flowing through my fingers like water these days. It's the first time in several months that I've actually been financing myself...gone are the days of writing everything off on the LEAPNow bill!

Antigua By Night

And then there were two...

I did the 3 hour slog by bus to San Pedro Sula and rendezvoused with Liesl at the hotel, who had flown ahead with the rest of the group. She's my lone last crewmember who is sticking around to study Spanish in Copan for a couple more weeks. Our first act was to find an agreeable spot for dinner and to take back our God-given right to a beer whenever we please. (Um, did I ever mention that these past three months have been completely alcohol-free?) We then met up with some of the volunteer teachers from BECA where we had volunteered several weeks before who happened to be in town. The Bohemian wine bar turned into a poetry reading as the night wore on...Latin Lovers waxing eloquent about unrequited love and Latina vixens...good times. Round midnight Liesl and I headed back to our hotel, encountering on the way a 10-piece mariachi band in the street serenading a newly engaged young lady named Jeni on the otherwise deserted streets.

There it is ladies and gentlemen...Susie and Liesl's first beer in three months...a monumental occasion.

14 empty beer bottles honoring our missing comrades. It was hard putting them all down, but somebody had to do it. It was for the kids. (And if anyone actually believes for a second that I can put away that much booze, you don't know me very well. I'm as light-weight as they come.)

We blew out of San Pedro as soon as we could the next morning and headed to Copan, where I will leave Liesl to study Spanish and I will head to Antigua. We roll into Copan and not 10 minutes after arriving are shown into a dorm room and happen upon Joel the Aussie who we'd hung out with quite a bit the past week on the other side of the country in Utila. (I know I should be used to it by now, but it never ceases to surprise me what a small world Central America quickly becomes.) Joel was attempting a nap at 5pm in the evening, I think he'd previously had a rough night, but we managed to convince him to abandon that plan to go drink beer in the park instead, a very classy backpacker thing to do. Still giddy as a schoolgirl to be able to crack open a brewski whenever I want, tee-hee. :)

We had dinner with my old friend Carlos Castejon who I met back in 2003 when I used to live in Antigua. He runs a great tourist gig to his family's finca outside of Copan (if anyone is ever passing through, you must check it out! www.fincaelcisne.com).

I bid Lovely Liesl goodbye the next morning...onward to Antigua...

The Long Way Home

A week of scuba diving in Utila off the costa of Honduras has come and gone and all of a sudden our last night was upon us. We splurged on hotel rooms with cable TV and ridiculously amazing hot showers (first in several weeks) for our last night together in La Ceiba. Also splurged on a nice dinner and shared absolutely hilarious and clever 20-years-from-now prophecies that we had done for each other with equally clever gag-gifts. We wrapped up the evening crammed into one of the hotel rooms and Pat and I did our last sing along..."Closer to Fine" and "Rock Me Baby Like a Wagon Wheel" were of course on the repertoire, bringing the trip full circle from our first night at Earthlodge overlooking Antigua and her volcanos, lazing in hammocks and passing around the guitar.

With Alison at the farewell fest

The next day we arrived at the airport in plenty of time to make their 3pm flight (I was staying behind) only to find that the plane was actually leaving at 1:30 and was in the process of final boarding. Fantastic. So no time for long goodbyes, and just like that, I bid a tearful farewell to this truly exceptional group of people who had been my family for the past three months...Alison, Cakki, Nick, Ada, Liesl, Mariana, Flora, Devin, Peter, Jessie, Hope, and Patrick, and my fearless co-leader Nate. I hugged and waved goodbye, they hurried through the security line and suddenly they were gone.

I sat down on an airport bench and absorbed the strange silence, let a surge of melancholy wash over me, and wondered what the heck to do with myself now. There were no per diems to hand out, no doctors visits with students to determine what in the heck that strange rash is about, no group dinner to attend, no budget close-out to do, no endangered turtles to save. What now?

Nate, my fearless co-leader.

Alone again, I stoically strapped on my pack, headed out of the airport, and hiked out to the dusty highway to catch a cab to the bus station. I quickly hailed a cab and hopped in. And in an act that seemed nothing short of perfectly choreographed, I roll down my window, look to my right and the prop plane carrying my crew rises up next to me out of nowhere in stride with my taxi for a moment before shooting ahead into the clouds. They were a fantastic group of people and it was a phenomenal experience and I have no doubt I'll see many of them again.

So I decided months ago not to fly home with the rest of the group to take advantage of more time in my favorite part of the globe while I was here anyway. My loose plan is to take the long way home through Mexico, stopping in Antigua and Lake Atitlan to visit friends and recharge. So the show goes on...