Into Guatemala

Goodbye Mexico!

Hello Guatemala!

The photos above are from the Pan-American highway, the road that almost but not quite spans North and South America.  It sounds like a big, easy-to-find road, but so far it hasn’t been marked at all on road signs and is often hard to pick out from the other highways on maps.  It’s also still under construction in some places, and narrows to a one-lane dirt road where you wait for the workers to let traffic pass in your direction.  We were stopped at one yesterday for about ten minutes, and when they finally let us go we made it halfway through when the two pickup trucks in front of us stopped abruptly as a sudden small landslide of rocks and dirt buried the road ahead of them.  The first truck waited for the dust to settle and then climbed right over the pile, but when the second truck tried the same trick it got stuck on the rocks, and a bunch of guys came over to help pull the rubble away, dodging the still-falling rocks as they worked.   We scooted through the newly-cleared path as more ominous trickles of dirt slid down the hillside towards us.

At other times the Pan-American looks like a nice four-lane highway, especially for the first hundred miles in Guatemala.  More often it’s been a two-lane road which passes through numerous towns, many of whose main occupations appear to be speed bump manufacture and shock repair.  Actually, it’s kind of interesting the way towns in Mexico seem to specialize in one particular thing.  There was one intersection where along the roads in all four directions hundreds of vendors waved bags of dried shrimp at the passing cars, a product we haven’t seen for sale before or since.  We passed a town in Southern Mexico where every store advertised mezcal… or rather, we started to pass that town and stopped halfway through.

Those pineapple-looking things are the agave stems, which grow for about eight years before the farmer digs them up and lops off the leaves to make tequila or mezcal. I’m still not sure what the difference between those two is, other than one makes me really friendly and the other makes my mouth turn inside out.

We passed one group of towns where every vendor had piles of strawberries, another several-mile long zone where there were 40 lb bags of carrots for sale for $2.50 every hundred yards, and one memorable town which, judging from the proliferation of signs advertising their services, appeared to get the majority of its revenue from charging passersby to use the bathroom.

The scenery has changed a lot over the 1,500 miles we’ve driven since we left Baja.  After the ferry from La Paz dropped us off in Mazatlan, we’ve driven most of every day until last night, when we descended a steep series of potholes* to Lake Atitlan.  The first few days through Central Mexico we were in fairly arid regions, and we drove for several days past hills covered in organ pipe cacti and blue fields of agave.

*Oh my god.  Not only did this ‘road’ break all of our carefully packaged eggs, it scrambled them into a yellow frothy soup in the bottom of the cooler.

Untitled #2 from the series "Zach with Giant Cactus."

Then we took a short break from driving outside Oaxaca to look at some rocks.

It’s really weird looking at two thousand year old ruins.  I kept trying to imagine what it might have looked like when it was new and covered with etchings and Mayans, but instead I kept pulling up scenes from movies, and despite the best journalistic intentions of Beverly Hills Chihuahua, I think that’s not quite accurate.

Oh!  But guess who does still have a thriving community in the Mayan ruins?

Leafcutter ants!  As penance for getting overexcited about pitcher plants I will suppress the overweening urge to explain in great and exclamation-point-ridden detail exactly why leafcutter ants and their underground gardens are so completely amazing, but I would not blame you at all if you stopped reading right here to Google leafcutter ants.  And then you will know why sometimes their tiny sisters hitch a ride on top of the big ants to keep their heads from falling off.

This ant is clearly at risk of spontaneous decaptiation

On Saturday, we crossed the border.  Several times.  We made it Guatemala and were sent back for Mexican exit stamps, then had to go back further to a bank to get our vehicle deposit returned, and then we ran around in circles for a while looking for a receipt that I actually think I threw out when the Bajaferries ticket lady told me it wasn’t important, then back to the bank to try and pay another 25 bucks to get a new receipt, only to be turned away because the computer system won’t let one person pay twice.  Finally, after we stared at them desperately for another half hour, the guys at the border office stamped the passport and waved us through.  They were really nice; I even asked if I could just give the money to them directly since the bank couldn’t take it and they refused.  We’ve read warnings about cops and officials looking for bribes, but at every federal checkpoint we’ve been through the officers have smiled us on our way and these guys wouldn’t take money when I tried to give it to them.

So we finally made it to Guatemala, and now we’re in the town San Pedro La Laguna on Lake Atitlan, which is very pretty.  See?

The town itself is cool, a mix of indigenous people in brightly colored outfits and students from various countries visiting one of the many language schools in town.  The waterfront area is a little strange.  The level of water in the lake suddenly dropped 6 feet in 1976 when an earthquake opened up a fault below, and the water level has been very slowly climbing back up since then, especially since last year which had more rain than usual.  People keep building houses on the waterfront, and they keep getting swallowed up, which means where you would expect to see a shoreline there is a line of drowned houses and slowly drowning trees, and roads that never actually end but just continue into the encroaching waves.

We start school tomorrow, or rather today since I won’t be able to post this tonight.  How’s that for a confusing penultimate sentence?

In Which Melissa and Zach almost get concussed by mobula rays

I have changed my preferred mode of expiration from chocolate overdose to a flying ray to the head.

They jump!  Holy wow!  Huge flocks of them!  We took a snorkel trip in Cabo Pulmo on the recommendation of German, our awesome host in La Paz.  The guide took us straight out into the Sea of Cortez, and as the shore shrank behind us little jumping black dots appeared on the horizon.  As we got closer, they started erupting out of the water all around the boat.  They were mobula rays, not the huge 25 foot mantas they resemble but a smaller related type that the guide called ‘jumping rays’, and there were hundreds of them.  Maybe thousands.  Oh my gosh.  When dolphins jump, they come shooting out of the water in a graceful arc and slip back into the water like the streamlined athletes that they are.  When mobulas jump, they come out still flapping away madly, continue flapping all the way up like they’re trying to keep going through this oddly thin new water, and crash back down haphazardly, usually with a huge bellyflop but sometimes upside down or on their heads.  We tumbled off the boat and swam towards the oncoming rays, and they started splashing down all around us.  One of them came so close he almost hit me on the way down.  Above water, all you could hear was “FlapflapflapflapSMACK!”  Under water, you could still hear the rays learning over and over that they can’t fly, but it was harder to pay attention to those guys because ten feet below your mask (which keeps leaking because it’s hard to keep a good seal when you’re grinning like an idiot) were more rays than I knew the world contained.  They swim in schools so large there’s no visible end to them, and when they’re underwater they swim at a much more dignified pace so you can keep up with them and see nothing but rays below you and to all sides.

We also got to swim with a huge school of jacks, and saw puffer fish and parrot fish and swam with sea lions who pretty much ignored us except for one who dove right underneath us and let out a burst of bubbles right in my face.  It was a good day.

We left Baja last Sunday, after spending one more day in La Paz, which is an aptly named town far enough south to be fantastically warm but far enough north to escape the influence of Cabo San Lucas.  It’s really lovely, and I think my favorite city in Mexico so far.  The overnight ferry ride to the mainland took sixteen hours, and although we had cushy seats that let you lean back far enough to look up the nose of the passenger behind you, the passenger cabin was loudly playing American movies dubbed over in Spanish, so we rolled out our sleeping pads on the deck and slept outside.

I had a master plan to write on the road, and then post when we had internet, but this has been soundly thwarted by Mexico.  Partially because it’s more fun to stare out the window than at the computer, but more so because we have three maps that all disagree vehemently with each other, and driving has become a team effort in an attempt to figure out where the heck we’re going.  And to avoid the cows, and the chickens, and the dogs and the blankety-blank topes.  Tope, we had already been warned, translates to speed bump, which means anything from a line of gravel or a rope across the road to a concrete hump so big you have all four tires on it at once.  And they’re everywhere.  Perhaps because they seem to be more effective than actual traffic lights at making people stop.   (To be fair, it’s not always the drivers’ fault for ignoring the traffic signals.  A lot of them seem to be broken, including several today that had working lights but broken covers, so all you could see was a white light bulb.  White, apparently, also means go.)

When dogs aren't busy playing chicken with your car, they like to hang out on the roofs.

Speaking of dogs… They’re everywhere.  Mostly, of course, on roofs or roads, but all over the streets in every town we’ve come through.  There are also chickens and cows and horses and donkeys, but we realized today that we have not seen a single cat in the two weeks we’ve been here.  Possibly because there are lots of dogs and cats are delicious.  (To dogs.  Probably.  This is pure conjecture and not the voice of experience.) (Previous parenthetical expression brought to you by the fear of pissing off all the cherished cat lovers in my life.)

These are the fattest horses we saw in all of Baja.

The roads in Baja were mostly two lanes or gravel, which was fine because there’s pretty much nobody in southern Baja but retired Americans and Canadians who’ve already parked their RVs on a beach for the winter.  However, the roads in Mexico are also just two lanes with no shoulder, and much better traveled.  On the third day of driving, we were watching yet another impatient truck driver pass a vehicle while approaching a blind turn, and remarked with amazement that although people here do insanely risky things in order to get past someone, we hadn’t seen a single accident.  By the end of the day, we’d been stopped three times behind multi-car collisions that took up the entire roadway and were attended by several ambulances.

Despite topes and crazy drivers, we’ve made it almost all the way to Guatemala, and the plan is to cross the boarder tomorrow morning.  The drive has been exciting and scenic and fun and whatnot, but I’m going to bed now so I’ll just leave you with that illuminating list of adjectives to describe our last four days.  We’ll be at language school in Guatemala for three weeks, so theoretically there will be lots of time for bloggy goodness!