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?