The Wormlips Scrapbook

You know those consumer warnings on packaging — “Remove cap before use” and that sort of thing? Those are there because of people like me. My map of Guatemala should have come with a disclaimer: “Not for use near open flame.”

While sitting at my desk drinking tea, I lit a blue candle (I hear it represents clarity of thought) that I bought from the Hermano Pedro people. I was marking my route on the map, and had gotten the pen as far as Guatemala City when I saw the flames. Just like Virginia City in Bonanza.

Next time you decide to set a map on fire, make sure it’s not lightly coated with plastic. I can attest that it doesn’t feel great when it’s seared onto four of your fingers.

Anyhow …

Got up early and moseyed around the hotel with my camera while I waited for the shuttle. Here are pix, including one of the swimming pool.

Hotel el Recreo is overpriced. My “cheap” room was over twice the cost of the equivalent at Las Marías, and the instant I lay upon the crumbling foam last night, my backbone greeted the plywood in far too familiar a manner. However, a hot water shower this morning was welcome and I enjoyed the hammock out front till the shuttle drove up.

Once again I was the last person to be picked up. This time the van was crammed only with local Maya — nary a tourist — and the only seat was in the very back of the van next to an old man (“old” in Guatemala meaning he probably had only ten years on me) who was a bit daft and experiencing intestinal problems. We careened around sharp corners, stopping frequently to take on people who were standing by the side of the road.

The ride made me realize how uptight I am. No one gets close to me without my express, written consent. Touch me and I leap. It’s different here. Perhaps out of necessity, people are entirely comfortable being smooshed into total strangers, skin on skin. One guy sat on another’s lap. Four people jammed onto the rear seat with me, one with her head casually tucked under my arm. I rode like that, compressed to half my normal width, for an hour and a half till we reached Cobán.

I managed to suppress mounting anxiety about the day’s logistics: how would I find my way from Cobán to Antigua? But I had no trouble finding the next van. I’ve learned that if you sit up front with the driver, you’re forced to speak more Spanish, so that’s what I did. Today, Hector was our driver for the next six hours.

I’m so glad I have kids. Otherwise I’d have nothing to talk about to break the ice. Probably twenty times now, a driver has initiated this conversation: do you have niños, where is your esposo, how old are your niños, why don’t you have an esposo? This time, tired of that last question when Hector asked, I shrugged: “I don’t know.” But Hector persisted: “Porqué no se … Why don’t you know?” From then on I pretended to sleep, and then dozed for real, despite the radio blaring Mexican rap interspersed at regular intervals with the station’s inexplicable tagline, “Ohhhhh-so-SEX-eeeee.”

Midway to Antigua we pulled over at a fast-food place, and lo and behold there was my old friend Cesár (the driver two days ago), stopped with his van full of people headed in the opposite direction. We sat and chatted for a while. He taught me the word for “bats”: murciélagos. Hector snapped our picture. I look like a quarterback. Or John Lithgow.

In heavy traffic in Guatemala City, vendors weave between the cars selling sunglasses, tomatoes, roses, air fresheners and Shriner-colored feather-dusters. We passed a big building with a sign identifying it as La Universidad Infantíl. Hector recommended I check out to the Guatemalan crooner Ricardo Arjona. And Yo-Nenny: we drove by a storefront with the sign “Papanicolau Ultrasound” — Greeks in Guatemala!

That’s it for now. Tomorrow’s my last full day in Guatemala. I’m not thrilled about that.

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Las Marías makes the best coffee in Central America. I rounded out my morning cup with a PB&J sandwich and a pack of M&Ms.

On the front porch I met up with three jóvenes and our guía for a tour of Las Marías’ private cave called K’an Ba. Since it’s not commercial it has no lights or stalactites named after Disney characters. The cave is actually a channel for a river, so I decided against bringing my camera. (My other camera, the one that takes movies, is really most sincerely dead.) But here’s a picture of the cave’s mouth.

Julio, our guide who is Q’eqchi’ Maya, gave each of us a slender candle and the instruction to step into the water, which immediately started to get deep. “Just wait till it gets to your nuts,” called the guy in front of us. Even nutless I found it extremely cold. Seconds later we were neck-deep and doing our first one-handed swim, candles aloft, through winding four-foot-wide corridors. In the bowels of the black cave we waded through rapids, climbed a slippery, handmade ladder next to a fifteen-foot waterfall, slid down mud banks and scrambled over jumbles of rocks. It was a blast.

In the lead, Julio kept belting out strange chants and whoops. I don’t know if it was in fun or for a more mystical reason, but the other three joined in. At one point the guy with nuts crouched down and started to sway around the cave floor on all fours like Gollum in Lord of the Rings. We paused at a bank of clay where Julio dug out a fistful and gave each of us a little. In flickering light I shaped a most excellent mud pig and set it on a subterranean altar with objects that others had made. I noticed an odd sensation, almost as though someone was throwing globs of clay at me over and over. It was Julio. I got him back. Next thing I knew, everyone was decorating themselves with clay designs.

It’s important when in a rocky cave to know your derecha from your izquierda. If I had, I would have understood the commands about where to swim and thus avoided smashing my knee on a submerged rock. I’m glad there aren’t sharks in this water or they would have coming galloping, as sharks are wont to do.

The grand finale of our gruta (aka cueva) adventure was a two-kilometer float down the cold, green Rio Cahabón, into which the water from K’an Ba feeds. As Julio and I drifted we used Spanish to teach each other words in our respective languages. My mouth didn’t want to cooperate on the gutturals and mid-syllable pauses of Mayan language, and he chuckled at my attempts.

For variety, I had a quick PB&J sandwich for lunch, followed by a pack of M&Ms, and then started hiking across the river and up the hill to Semuc Champey. It is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever, ever seen. I kept gasping in disbelief as I approached the shelves of emerald pools. My pictures can’t even begin to capture the magic of the place; you’ll have to take my word for it.

At first glance, this stretch looks simply like a wide, slow spot in the river. Water tiptoes downhill in demure little steps. But there’s more than meets the eye. Unseen until you go a few hundred meters upriver, a frightening volume of water plunges into a hole and runs unseen under the pools until it bursts out the other end. Not a good place to slip. Some people haven’t lived to regret it. The first picture shows the view looking upriver, and the second facing the other way, into the hole.

So the pools on top aren’t fed by so much by the river proper as by creeks running down the canyon walls.

A sixty-something park employee named Antonio offered to guide me to a good viewpoint. There, I sat entranced by the water for a while until I heard him ask in Spanish, “How much did your watch cost?” Though startled, I mumbled out a solid preschool-level reply: “My watch? How much it costs? It was my father’s. When he died my mother gives it to me.” Aren’t you impressed with my fluency? And I’m getting better at working around words I don’t know. Unable to summon the word for “breath” I came up with “wind from the mouth.” “News” became “things in the newspaper.”

Here’s a panoramic view of Semuc Champey from the mirador, access to which required a grueling half-hour climb, as you can imagine. While struggling up the wet slope, left knee cracking and right Achilles tendon aching with every step, I realized I’d better do more trips like this while I still can.

I hiked back to Las Marías, gathered my things and hung out near the side of the tiny road, waiting for a truck on which to grab a ride to Lanquín. I ate M&Ms while I waited.

A naked boy about eight years old walked past me, a bright red jug of water on his shoulder. An hour later a truck appeared, and I climbed in back with two local guys. They stood, I sat, and we all bounced our way to Lanquín. I tried to snap pictures of the amazing scenery, without success.

The truck dumped me in town and I walked a quarter mile down the road, dropped my stuff at a hotel and ran to the Grutas de Lanquín further down the road.

You have to get to the caves before closing time at 6:00 if you want to see the mass exodus of bats at dusk. With minutes to spare, I settled onto a bat-guano coated ledge inside the narrow mouth of the cave.

Right on schedule, a smattering of bats (a battering of smats?) flew within a foot of my face, and then a score, and then hundreds. My camera didn’t want to cooperate but I fooled it into taking these.

As it happens, there was no need for the bats to leave the cave, since all the mosquitoes they could ever want for dinner were right there on my legs. However, I didn’t know that at the time. Only an hour later in my stark room did their nasty, itchy little poison start to do its work. My remaining M&Ms did little to soothe my discomfort. Neither did the familiar sound that soon registered in my consciousness as that of another evangelical revival. If there was a God, s/he wouldn’t let mosquitoes and electric revivals happen.

What conceivable purpose can mosquito venom possibly serve?

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Palabra of the day: tumulo. It means “speed bump.”

At 8:00 a.m. I went to stand on the road to Ciudad Vieja where a million chicken buses blasted by as I awaited my ride to Cobán. Forty-five minutes later I’d just about given up and my shoulders had nearly pulled from their sockets on account of my backpack when Cesár pulled up. The van was packed and the only remaining spot was on a ridge in the front seat between Cesár and a mother-son combo. Luckily, the latter disembarked 10 minutes later, and I rode in luxury the rest of the day.

I alternately nodded off and talked to Cesár, a divorced young father whose joy is his two-year-old son, Daniel. While driving, Cesár showed me pictures on his cellphone. His Spanish was relatively easy for me to understand so we covered a lot of topics over the next seven hours. At one point a German couple asked him a question in English. To my utter amazement, he turned to me and asked for a translation. That’s a first, and probably a last.

Dropping a couple thousand feet, I think, from Antigua’s 5000-foot elevation, we entered an uncomfortably hot valley beyond Guatemala City, and then started to climb again, through lots of pretty and poor towns including San Pedro Carchá and Cojaj. A significant number of the locals speak only their native Q’eqchi’.

I wish I could find the words to describe the topography: steep folds in random patterns, sort of like sheets after a sleepless night … except — you know — much bigger. If you stripped all the flora off, it would lay out much like southeastern West Virginia, with its precipitous hollows. In fact, there are subterranean similarities as well: limestone and watery caves. Here are a few pictures that are blurry because they’re from the window of a fast-moving vehicle.

I had no idea where I’d stay that night and had no reservations. But as we approached Lanquín I overheard other passengers talking about lodging being full. Sure enough, the hotel I wanted was lleno. Cesár suggested I jump on the back of a pickup and spend the night half an hour down the road at the remote Las Marías, which I’d heard about from a guy in Costa Rica. They were reputed to have no room as well. It was a leap of faith that things would work out and that I wouldn’t have to sleep in a cave or something, but I climbed into the back of the truck, someone threw backpacks in on top of me, and we took off. At top speed we bounded along the four-wheel-drive road through even more spectacular and varied country, as the sun sunk behind the hills.

Here is Las Marías, which sure enough had room for me, and for only Q70 (less than $10). It’s set in lush forest only yards from the River Cahabón (the one I’ve been trying to raft).

At first glance the place seemed pretty funky, but it turns out they clean constantly and the stuff is just old-looking. My room was humble but adequate — a bed and a table and enough room to walk past them — and its window looks fondly out at the bathroom three feet away. When the men pee it’s deafening.

But I love it here and the staff is great. Paco, the guy in the front, has been particularly patient with my endless questions, including one about cardamom chocolate that’s made by a local women’s co-op. I don’t know from cardamom, so Paco reached under the counter and held out a tiny square that was all he had left of his bar. I tried to break off a piece but it was too hard. He motioned me to take a bite. He’s never even met me and he’s letting my mouth go on his food? I was impressed.

After dumping my stuff in my room I took a quick walk upriver.

I could see the waterfalls and pools of Semuc Champey up ahead, but it was getting dusky in the woods and figured I should return in case there were creepy people around. I checked out the mouth of the Las Marías cave, and climbed several hundred feet up to two miradores where I looked out on this and other views:

Exhausted, I ate dinner and M&Ms, pulled my bed away from all walls, and hopped in at 9:00, wishing I’d brought bug lotion. Despite light and chatter seeping through multitudinous spaces in the slapdash, clapboard walls, I fell soundly asleep.

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