around the world in 180 days

Yeah, so we didn´t climb the volcano today, even though we both wanted to. Anna is sick. She was up all night going to the bathroom and, even though she felt fine otherwise, we decided that it´d be pretty stupid to go climbing a volcano with diarrhea.

We still had to get up at 4 in the morning to tell the guide that we weren´t going to be able to go. We´re pretty typical Minnesotans, not the sort of people that want to make a fuss about anything, so we figured I´d just go out and meet the guide, explain the situation and that would be that. Quick, quiet and easy.

Sure.

First off, we discovered that we probably should have mentioned to Chona that we´d be leaving in the middle of the night. Chona has a nice house that surrounded by a thick stone wall with a heavy metal gate, which was locked and deadbolted. Easy enough, right? Undo the deadbolt and out you go.

Nope. The deadbolt takes a key, even from the inside. Still, the door had a little peephole that you could open and talk through that I figured would probably work. Anna came out and we looked for the key, but no luck. We didn´t want to wake anyone inside the house, so we just decided to use the peephole, which would have worked . . .

if it hadn´t been for the dog. Chona´s dog apparently sleeps outside the gate at night, as another measure to scare off anyone that might want to break in. As soon as the guide came walking up, the dog went nuts, started barking and making all kinds of noise. Great.

I´m standing there on the other side of the wall, hearing this dog barking and wondering if the person on the other side is our guide. I was expecting a man with a truck, but this person was on foot. Is this the guide or isn´t it? I can´t see him through the peephole, so I have no idea.

As I´m about to ask him to come to the peephole so I can see him and talk to him, he rings the doorbell. Pretty sure he´s the guide now. I walk over and talk to him, explain that my wife is sick in broken Spanish, problemo es stomacho, es malo, when Chona comes walking out. Great. We didn´t want to bother anyone and we managed to wake up everyone in the house. And on a Sunday morning no less.

The guide was kind enough to go get one of the other hikers who was bilingual and we worked the situation out. I felt bad because she said they might not be able afford the trip without us and gave them 100 Quetzals. I don´t know why anymore. It´s not like Anna wanted to be sick. It´s not like we didn´t want to go. We set up the damn trip.

By this point, Anna and I were both pretty embarassed and just wanted to go back to sleep. Chona, however, was concerned about Anna´s problemo es stomacho and kindly made her some of the most awful tasting tea I´ve ever come across. She told Anna it was going to taste bad before she gave it to her, but it´s hard to prepare for something as bad as that tea was. It seemed to help, though.

Anna has spent much of the rest of the day sleeping and pooping. I´ve been in and out, getting her gatorade and soda crackers, making sure she´s got everything she needs and leaving her alone so she can sleep. I´m going to grab some gatorade and go back as soon as I´m done typing this, but the last time I was there, she seemed to be on the mend. I can only hope. It seems like a fairly run of the mill case of traveler´s diarrhea, but I´ve already told her that we´re going to the Clinica if she isn´t better tomorrow and she´s taking a Cipro if she isn´t better this afternoon. The last thing she needs is to be sick for our flight on Wednesday.

Anyway, I´d better get back. I will try to post again ASAP about Anna´s condition, but I wouldn´t worry. She´ll be up and back at it later today, I bet. Things like this run their course pretty quickly.

adios!

            I could go on and on (you know I could), but tonight I must rest. Tomorrow we climb the Vulcán Atitlan.

            I´m tired tonight and have a bit of a headache, so for once, I´ll keep things short. We went to Panajachel today, which is across Lake Atitlan from San Lucas. Ana, Bartola, Anna and I went and we wandered around in the market there for about an hour. Before we went, we were talking with Tono in the mission and he told us Panajachel was full of white people. He wasn´t kidding. I think I saw more white people in 5 mins there than I have in the whole week. It seemed like a pretty typical market type place, a place where tourists go to buy cheap crap that was probably made in China or Laos or somewhere like that. They put ¨Guatemala¨on it and charge you 50 Quetzals and the tourists eat it up. Of course, 50 Quetzals is like 8 bucks, so it´s still not a bad deal. It just ain´t authentic.

             We set up a trip up the Volcano today, for Sunday. We leave at 4 in the morning and hike all day. Vulcán Atitlan is about 13,000 feet tall and (as Father Greg said) is all uphill until you get to the top, and then it drops off pretty quickly. I´ve kind of been feeling a little sick today, so I hope whatever is bothering me today is long gone by Sunday. I´ll go anyway, but 13,000 feet is a hell of a climb and I´d prefer to be in good shape for it.
 

That is enough.
 

Goodnight!

            Another beautiful day has passed in San Lucas and the language barrier that we were so worried about earlier in the week isn´t such a big deal anymore. I guess we both knew we´d learn, but it sure didn´t seem like we would on Sunday night when we got here. We can actually understand some of the conversations and can even hold our own, albeit simple, ones.

             This morning, we went to a small piece of land that Ana owns and picked coffee. It was fun. We cleared the bushes completely, even though there were lots of green ones, because Ana said that once she left, there would be no one else to pick them. We finished clearing her little square of land by about 1 pm, and then her nephew brought the coffee down to a man at the bottom of the hill who buys coffee from people and resells it (at a profit, of course) to people from other towns. Ana listened to what he offered, and was not impressed. He gave us a low bid because of the green fruit and because he probably figured that we had no where else to sell it. Instead, we brought the coffee back to Bartola´s house and sorted out the green ones. When they sold it sorted, they got a much better price.

             Not much else to say about today. We spent the rest of it in typical Guatemala fashion; relaxed, in no hurry, eating when the food is ready and sleeping when it is dark. This country is wonderful, and it makes me sad that there is so much social injustice and that the political situation is so messed up. I was reading more about it today, and the dictator who seized power in 1982 in a military coup is still in power today, in practice, if not in name. I guess there is a joke about that here that says that in conversations between the current president and the former dictator, the president always gets the last word: ¨Yes, General.¨

             The party he is a part of, the FRG, is a conservative party that represents the elite, the business interests and generally defends the status quo. Guatemala has had a heavily stratified society since the Spanish conquistadors invaded in the 1500´s and the FRG defends this: the Spanish descendents on top, the mixed blood in the middle and the ethnic Mayans on the bottom. It seems like, just like in the US, the indigenous people really get shit on here. Half the country is all about it, because they´re on top, taking an unfair share of the country´s wealth. The other half, the Mayans, do what they can, but money is, always has been and always will be a very powerful weapon. Without it, the Mayans don´t have a lot of options. Is it fair? No. But capitalism isn´t about fairness, now is it?
 

Enough.
 

Goodnight.

            We are learning spanish poco a poco, which means bit by bit. This is my favorite spanish phrase because it almost always makes people smile, and, as two people have told me, it is a sort of philosophy of life. Everything in life is poco a poco, bit by bit, and it is a good way to approach tasks that might otherwise seem overwhelming: poco a poco.

             Today Ana had a big party with many of her family members. She paid for all the food and Anna and I went to the market (which was much smaller today) and picked up all the food. Ana´s sisters and nieces cooked all the food and everyone, a good chunk of a huge Guatemalan family, ate it. They have the best guacemole here, by far. I suppose it has something to do with the fresh, tree-ripened avacados.

            All of the food here is delicious. We eat traditional ethnic Mayan food with Ana´s family. There´s a lot of rice and beans and tortillas, which are smaller and thicker than the tortillas you´re probably thinking of, but everything is wonderful.

            I´m delighted at how welcoming Ana´s family is of us, two Americans who speak less Spanish between the two of us than Anita, Bartola´s 2 year old granddaughter.They think we´re crazy, I´m sure, and they probably make fun of us, but they´re generous and friendly and genuinely interested in us.

            Tomorrow we go to pick coffee with Ana. It should be a good time. We´re trying to decide if we want to go to Tikal, which is a huge site of Mayan ruins. It´s supposed to beautiful and the mission will set us up with a package deal tha includes lodging, airfare and a meal, but it´s $200 each. We´ve talked to people who have been there and they say it´s gigantic and beautiful and totally worth the price, but we´d sort of be blowing our budget on our first stop. Is this a precedent we want to set? Will we find an excuse to blow our budget everywhere we go? We want to make sure we get our full 6 months. I´m leaning toward just going, but there are a lot of other things to consider as well, like how Ana feels about it. I don´t think she´d care, but it´s tough to tell sometimes. Ana is fluent in english, but sometimes it can be hard to understand her, and this has nothing to do with the words she speaks or her accent. Oh well. These are good dilemmas, as far as that goes. If we could all have problems such as these, right?
 

Buenos Nochas!

            Children are the same everywhere. All children love to play, they all love attention and they all love games. Pablo and David, the sons of Bartola, who is Ana´s sister-in-law, are no different. Anna and I spent the afternoon and much of the evening today playing games with these two and, after dinner, their cousins. We started with cards (war, the easiest game we could think of( and moved to soccer (pelota, espanol for ball( and hide and seek and on and on.
            Bartola´s husband left Guatemala for the US and now lives in LA without papers. He left thinking he´d strike it rich and now Bartola is alone (if you an call it that( with her eight children, the two boys and six girls, making a living selling tortillas and chipitas (??). Bartola is a strong woman, as are all of the women we´ve met here–we saw here carrying a bundle of firewood on her head, and lugging groceries through the market like it was nothing. She speaks no English and we speak poquito espanól, but you can tell that she takes her husband´s absence with a sort of fierce determination. She has her children, and they are enough.

             We went with Bartola and Ana to the market this morning, which was amazing. It was like something out of a movie, people everywhere, small stands selling almost everything under the sun: dried peppers, dried minnows, live crabs, soap, detergent, hand woven cloth, butchered chickens, even street dogs having sex (ok, that wasn´t for sale).

 It was amazing—I only wish I´d brought my minidisk recorder and captured some of the sounds of the market. It was exotic and familiar at the same time. Crowds seem to be the same the world over as well, but perhaps that´s a bit premature.

             Apparently street dogs ae quite a problem in San Lucas ad Guatemala in general. They´re everywhere, eating garbage, pooping in the street, fighting and I guess biting anyone young enough or stupid enough to get too close (read: foreigners). Two years ago, the city of San Lucas Toliman tried to institute a program to poison the dogs, as there´s no money to sterilize them, but the government of Guatemala forbade it when an animal rights group lodged a protest. I guess at first glance, it does seem cruel to poison dogs that live in the street just because they have no owners, but there are literally thousands of them in San Lucas, probably almost as many as there are people. Every one of these dogs craps in the street and every time it rains, their crap is washed down into the lake. This would be disgusting at any rate, but what makes it really awful and unsanitary is that the lake is the town´s water source. That animal rights group was only looking out for the dogs of San Lucas, but in doing so, they ignored the people of San Lucas.

             All the water we drink here is bottled. Every house has a large container, sort of like those coolers you sometimes see in offices (they use the same bottles, but don´t have the fancy bottom part), and everyone drinks out of that. The water from the tap is from the lake, is not clorinated and is unsafe to drink. We wash in it, but that´s it, and after washing, we use hand sanitizer—everyone does.

             We met father Greg today, the head honcho at the mission. He is a very nice older man who is full of stories. I hope we have an opportunity to talk with him some more. He´s a great storyteller.
 

Enough is enough.
 

Goodnight.

            Ana and Chona went to Guatemala City today, so we spent the day with the other Americanos at the mission. Ana gave us directions to the church last night and they were simple, but we still had trouble figuring out where to go. We found the church just fine, but the Americanos were another story. We asked a woman who was in the square in front of the church, and she tried to sell us food at here friend´s (or relative´s) business. She was friendly, but she sure gave us the hard sell.

             Everyone here is friendly. When you walk down the street, every one says Hola, or Buenas Dias—everyone is an exaggeration, but it happens often enough that it feels like that.

             This morning, we went on a tour of the mission work with the med students from West Virginia we picked up in Antigua yesterday. Andreas was our guide and he spoke only Spanish. There were two girls with us who were conversational, though, and they translated. Andreas took us to the women´s center the mission is building, which was up in the hills above San Lucas. Construction is very different in Guatemala than the uS, but I´ll get to that more later.

             After the women´s center, we visited the clinic run by the mission. It looked like a nice enough place and the med students were very interested, but it looked pretty normal to me. After that, we saw the reforestation project, where they were growing cypress trees to plant on the hillsides to prevent erosion. They also had a few coffee plants with a few beans on them. The beans are in a fruit that looks something like a small cherry and has a sweet syrup in it if you squeeze it. When the fruit is red, they harvest it, remove the pulp and let it dry in the sun. After that, the outside of the bean is removed, leaving a small green bean. This is aged for several months and then roasted to arrive at what we think of as coffee. I never knew there was so much to it.

             We also saw a resettlement area, where some ethnic Mayans were resettled after a powerful hurricane in 2005 touched off massive mudslides where they lived. The houses all said USAID on the side. It was nice to see that our tax dollars are going for something good.

             One of the girls we spent the day with today, Caroline, is from Michigan and knew quite a bit of Spanish. She´d attended a conference in Guatemala City recently that talked about the civil war and the political situation. Much of the work the mission does is focused on remedying some of the massive social injustices that were the underlying causes of the war. Andreas, our guide, told us that almost everything in Guatemala is controlled by 18 families, and the rest of the people have very little. These people own most of the land and refuse to sell it at a reasonable price. As a result, most people are in sort of sharecropper situation. One of the biggest accomplishments of the mission and Father Greg, is raising $800,000 and donating it to 1200 Mayan families so they could purchase a large plot of land to farm and call their own.

             As messed up as the politics are in the US, they are much worse in Guatemala. During the civil war, Guatemala had a dictator who oversaw massive massacres and ethnic cleansing directed at the Mayan people. This dictator is on trial, but the government is made up of his political party and keeps throwing up roadblocks to slow the trial down. This man is also running for congress, which, if he´s successful, will make him immune to prosecution. He will almost certainly be elected, because in Guatemala, you don´t vote for people, you vote for parties and, as I mentioned, this man is a member of a popular and influential party. He is a front-runner within this party and so will likely never be held accountable for overseeing genocide and mass murder. It makes me sick, and it also shows what can happen if people aren´t held accountable for their actions.

             Whew. Enough politics. In the afternoon, we worked at a construction site, building steel frames used for making rebar. In the US, this would have been done by a machine or in a factory somewhere, but in Guatemala, everything is done by hand. It means that things take much longer to build and it means that they don´t have the mechanical precision of the US, but it also means that each building has the sweat and blood of a Guatemalan in it. It was fun. I´ve enjoyed manual labor since I worked landscaping and it was nice to be out in the sun, sweating and lifting and cutting steel.

             Enough. I have gone on far too long already. There is so much to say, so much to tell about!
 

Goodnight!

We are in San Lucas, Guatemala after a long day of traveling to get here. We left the sub-zero temps in Mpls. At 5:30 this morning on an Embraerer jet. When we checked in, we forgot to ask about our frequent flyer miles, so once we reached the gate, we asked the woman working there. She looked up our names and entered our numbers and then asked us if we were on our honeymoon. When we told her we were, she upgraded us to first class. She went from being annoyed and kind of scary to the nicest person we´d seen all day (which wasn´t saying much at that point, I guess).

First class on the plane we were on wasn´t much different from coach, but the seats were bigger ad they had more leg room, which is what is really important at 5 in the morning. Anna and I both managed to snag another couple hours of sleep before we landed in Atlanta. The flight from Atlanta to Guatemala City was only about half full, so Anna and I had a row to ourselves. I still felt crammed in and when the lady in front of me reclined, I felt like she was in my lap. Guess I better suck it up and get used to it. Guatemala is a beautiful place ad its people are warm, friendly and wonderful hosts, but it is a Spanish speaking country. I do not speak Spanish and neither does Anna. She´s better off than I am, but we were both overwhelmed with trying to understand what people were and are telling us. Paul´s mother, Ana, speaks English and is kind enough to translate for us sometimes, but it´s clear that we´re expected to learn as much Spanish as we can while we are here. I´m fine with this, but my brain is not firing on all cylinders after such a long day. I think we´ll be ok in three or four days, but until we get a little more accustomed to this, we´re gong to be dealing with a steep learning curve.

Tomorrow Ana and Chona (Ana´s friend and the woman we are staying with) are travelling to Guatemala City to take care of some business, so Anna and I will be sort of on our own. We´re gong down to the mission for meals and someone will show us around and explain what goes on. On Tuesday, Ana is going to show us around San Lucas.

I am tired, I have written too much, and it is time for me to sleep.

Goodnight!.

We’re on our way to Mpls to catch our plane in the middle of the night and begin our trip around the world. The past week has been strange: we’re both unemployed and homeless and we’ve been driving around the state, visiting with grandparents and family for the last time for six months.

It’s like we’ve been leaving all week–everywhere we go, we visit and eat big meals, then we say goodbye, we’ll see you in 6 months, and then ramble on to the next stop.

The best trips start in the middle of the night. Kari has agreed to give us a ride to the airport at 3 am and our plane leaves at 5:30. We’re flying to Atlanta and then to Guatemala City, where someone from the mission in San Lucas will meet us with a van and give us a ride to the town we’ll be staying in and the family we’ll be staying with.
I think it’ll be interesting. I worked on a landscaping crew with a bunch of guys from Mexico while I was in school and they taught me all the swear words, but other than that, I don’t speak any spanish. When I do try to speak spanish, my Minnesota accent is so bad that I feel like I’m offering people a hotdish everytime I try to say anything. Anna will be a little better off; she took Spanish in high school and spent some time in Mexico. I think she’ll pick things up pretty quickly and I’m sure I’ll even start to recognize words. When I was working with that landscaping crew, I could understand what they were talking about, I just couldn’t contribute to the conversation. Which is fine with me.
Yeah. So. World tour ’07, about to be under way. I can’t wait. I’m gonna try, but I doubt I’ll be doing much sleeping tonight. So it goes. I will sleep all the more soundly tomorrow night in Guatemala.
Keep us posted on the goings on here in Minnesota. We want to visit the rest of the world, but Minnesota will always be our home. Help keep things here familiar for us.

see you in 6 months!!

Aaron and Anna

So.

I should probably make my standard first post blog confession, that being this: I am a person whose interest frequently wanders and I am a person of little patience for tedious activities. As such, I have a tendency to abandon any and all blogging effors that I start once my attention lapses. I have done this before and I will eventually do the same with this blog. I am hoping that being on the road will give me something to write about and hence maintain my interest while we are traveling, but being on the road will also make updating more difficult. I will do my best. I can do no more.

We are still in the planning stages, but weeks are starting to slip away from us with frightening rapidity. We are flying to Guatemala on February 4, 2007 whether we are ready or not. Between now and then, we have to move out of our house, store our possessions somewhere, purchase more plane tickets, acquire certain difficult visas and on and on. We’re keeping plans to a minimum to allow ourselves maximum flexibility, but we’ve still got to make a fair number of decisions beforehand.

Here’s the plan so far: we will begin in Guatemala, staying in San Lucas with the family of a friend of ours. They’ve graciously agreed to host us gringos and help us avoid being robbed or taken advantage of in a country that can be difficult for first time travelers such as ourselves. We’ll stay with them for 10 days before flying to LA for a few days, and then on to Fiji, as long as they aren’t having any more military coups.

We’re spending a week in Fiji and then continuing to New Zealand. This is one of the main places we want to go. We’re going to spend almost a full month there, trekking around both islands and trying to avoid the forces of the dark lord Sauron.

After that, we’ll spend a week in Sydney, AUS, before meeting Paul and Patty (Anna’s Godparents and teachers at an International School in Kuala Lumpur, Mayalsia) and Anna’s mom in Bali. We’re spending another week there, and then going to India.

Ah, India. This is another place we’re really looking forward to, along with Nepal. We want to hike around in the Himalayas for a while, and see some ancient ruins and all that stuff. Things start to get pretty vague and this point, though, because we don’t know where the best places to go are. There’s only so much information you can get from a guidebook and besides, we want to see the amazing things that are swarmed with tourists and hucksters.

So yeah. That’s the plan. I’ll do my best to keep things updated here, with occasional posts before we leave and more frequent after we’re on the road. I’ve got a nifty little gadget that will store my text and spit it into a computer when I get to one, so I will likely write every day, but only post once a week. I’ll backdate entries so they are accurate as to the date I wrote them, not the date I posted them.

Thank you everyone who has or will help us prepare for this trip and who will help us get settled in in Mpls/St. Paul when we come back. We both feel lucky and special to be able to go on such a wonderful adventure and are keenly aware that none of this would be possible without the encouragement and support of our friends and family. It sounds cheesy, but you really are the best. Thanks!!