Losing it in Latin America

On wednesday I took a tour from Livingston which involved following a couple of local boys around the town, through the graveyard, which was as unexciting as it sounds (I mean it was really dead), and out through the surrounding local area to soak up the local ´culture.´ The only high point of this was having a small child saying ´Hola gringos´ (I don´t think he realised it was an insult but I´m sure his parents would be proud) and then watching one of the young german girls on the tour slip over in the mud and ruin her pristine skirt – you have to take your laughs where you can get them!

Then we all climbed into a hand-carved canoe for a paddle up the river. This might sound nice to you but I spent the whole time shitting it thinking we were going to roll over, and wondered where the hell we could climb out if it did as the river was lined with mangroves. Miraculously, despite how unstable we were, we made it safely, that was an experience I didn´t care to repeat. Thankfully we had a nice walk along the Caribbean beach to recover before getting to Siete Altares (seven alters) waterfalls, which was what I´d taken the tour for. However as we clapped eyes on it we soon realised it was not all it could be. There was a pool of water, but no water falling down it and I was pleased to find that Tim and Stu, two guys from England, were even more cynical about the whole experience than I was, which makes a nice change. Complimentary drinks afterwards involved sharing some bottles of barely brewed homebrew piss, so all in all it was pretty poor, but I went out in the evening with Tim and Stu and rounded the day off on a higher (!) note.

Thursday came and it was time to leave Livingston, so I sat chatting with a local rasta dude by the dock waiting for the boat. He was the soundest local I´d met in Livingston and he told me about the history of the area, the politics and the (alleged) drug smuggling yacht owners anchored out in the bay – quite an eye-opening hour of conversation that took in guns, drugs and corrupt politicians. The return journey down the Rio Dulce was quite different to the inbound journey as it was bright and sunny, and almost bumped me off the front of the boat when we hit the wake of another boat.

The following couple of days were pretty quiet, staying down in Rio Dulce struggling to get up in time to catch the bus in the morning. I finally made it at 6am on saturday and headed for Guatemala city. This city is frankly quite a polluted shithole and not somewhere to hang around. Thanks to a nice man named Omar and his brother-in-law they gave me a ride across town to find the bus to Antigua. If it wasn´t for them I think I´d still be lost in Guatemala City, or worse! Omar found me the right chicken bus so I bid farewell and headed to Antigua to a soundtrack of the drivers favourite mambolatinogabba tunes, which made the knee in my face rather more bearable.

I knew we´d hit Antigua as soon as we came round the corner, it´s such a beautiful spanish colonial town you can´t help but love it. I found the hostel, met some people and went out to have drinks watching the sunset over the volcanoes, followed by food and then beers in an Irish bar, as you do when in Guatemala. I think I´ll settle here for a while 🙂

The fun of sharing a dorm room wears thin at 3:30am when people are noisily getting up to take a bus to Tikal, Guatemalas most important and famous Mayan ruins. Everyone staying in Flores goes to Tikal, it´s just the done thing. So me being me had to go against the grain and NOT go to Tikal. I´m just not up for seeing any more ruins right now, and as for leaving at 3:30am to see the sun rise over the site? Well you can imagine my reaction to that idea. Still, off they go for this spiritual experience of a lifetime (!) only to find it´s so misty they can´t see the sun, and when you reach the top of the temple ready for dawn you find it already crowded with other people who´ve read the same thing in the Lonely Planet. From what I heard, the spiritual experience is somewhat lessened when you´re surrounded by hoards of jabbering tourists tucking into their picnics. I likened it to sitting at the top of the temple in Palenque, enjoying the view, only to have three septics arrive at the top and shout out “Holy crap dude, that´s awweeeesome!!”

So when I finally got up and had breakfast (respectable time of day of course), I packed up and joined Ivan, a guy I´d met the previous night, for the journey down to Rio Dulce. We took a tuk-tuk down to the bus station, bought our tickets and waited for it to leave. While watching the music TV channel in the bus station I had my first dose of xmas fever, with a dodgy posturing glam rock band that sat around having a huge feast draped in girls and wearing santa hats with their leathers, singing a rock version of jingle bells in spanish. It is 2005 isn´t it?!

We got on the bus to find the back seats taken by a group of suspect individuals with fixed expressions. Half an hour into the journey we stopped at a parrot sanctuary with an attached restaurant. The restaurant had a large tank with an even larger boa constrictor out front, presumably to discourage difficult customers. This is where the ticket guy from the bus gets up and forcibly removes the suspect guys from the back and takes them to the front of the restaurant next to the snake. I don´t know what fate awaited them or what they did to deserve it, but I think it might have something to do with them being made of brightly coloured paper with stick on faces. I´m not sure what they put in the coffee round here but it´s having quite an effect on my sanity…

The journey takes us through many small dustbowl villages of no significant note, until we stop at one for a while as the bus driver hops out to go to the bank. We are left looking across the road to where a large brute of a man trains his dog on a chain to fight the other dog chained to the post. He seemed rather pleased to have a bus load of people as an audience and continued to throw the dogs together to develop their killer instinct. Eventually he tires of this and gets in his pickup truck, reverses over the dogs food bowl and drives off. If he´d only hung around I would have invited him over for dinner. Bastard!

Back on the road the villages give way to open countryside, with hills cleared for cattle grazing, and just as the hypnotic motion of the bus and the rolling countryside sends me off to sleep, I wake with a start to find we´re in Rio Dulce. The town is just another dustbowl nowhere but crucially it´s sat beside the beautiful lake Izabel and the Rio Dulce river which feeds into it from the carribean sea. I leave Ivan at this point as he´s staying here and, avoiding the bus stop hawkers, make my way down to the dock by the river to catch the last boat (las trancha) up to Livingston.

The boat leaves just as the sun is setting and we set off at full speed up the mist-shrouded river surrounded by the silhouettes of the trees and mangroves on either side, reminds me of ´Nam! The ride takes an hour and as we progress it gets really dark and we take the canyon in pitch black – sometimes you have to take a leap of faith and hope you come out the other side. The occassional flash of lightning in the distance is the only light at times but eventually we come out the other side to arrive in Livingstone, set on the carribean coast. I found somewhere to stay and went out and met up with James and Corrine again.

After food we went to a reggae bar promising live music only to find it pretty empty. I buy a rum and coke and hand over a 100 Quetzales note. He pours me a dribble of rum with the coke and charges me Q25 – what a rip off! I ask for more rum and wait for the change (cambio). The barman motions for me to wait as they don´t have change for the Q100 note. I sit with James and Corrine and as the place fills up the ´band´ takes to the stage. The band is playing traditional Garifuna music like in Hopkins (Belize), but while they play one guy gets up to shut the toilet door to block out the light, another wanders off stage somewhere and the rest are left to bang their drums and a tourtise shell! Now don´t get me wrong, I may well have enjoyed the music if it wasn´t for the nagging feeling that my change was never going to arrive. I sat there seething at being ripped off while thinking “Where´s my fucking cambio you bastard” as only a pissed-off gringo with a poor grasp of spanish can. When the barman eventually comes over with the fucking cambio he gives me Q60 and a pat on the back that says to me, well done for taking this Q40 rip-off so well gringo – do come again.

Ah well, tomorrow´s another day.