Xela, Antigua and Chichi
Thursday, 27th November 2003
I can’t stop pooing
Hello from the pleasant and loathsome tourist city of Antigua. I’ve been
feeling pretty rough for the last few days. Ate something in
Chichicastenango or Panajachel that really didn’t agree with me, and
late yesterday evening my digestive system seemed to switch
to “liquify and reject”. After several trips to the very pleasant
Rainbow Cafe’s toilet, I headed back to my hotel and proceeded to
spend a while leaning over the toiletbowl making some extraordinary
yacking sounds, but produced very little. This morning nothing had
changed on the digestive front, and as the prospect of hanging
around Antigua much longer was really not very appealing (see
below), I went to see a doctor. I’ve met lots of travellers
unhappily waiting for weeks for their stomach bug to clear up
naturally, and so had resolved when something similar happened to
me, I would head quickly to a hospital for a cure. Thirty minutes
and 100 quetzales (c. £7) later, I was told I have a stomach
infection, one that wouldn’t have cleared up by itself, have been
proscribed a six day course of pills and should be fine soon.
However, some preliminary good health news is that repeated spraying
of bug spray seems (hopefully) to have finished off the fleas/bed
bugs that have been making me itch badly for quite a while now.
The first time I stayed in Antigua was just before I headed to
Todosantos, and am now visiting the city again, trying to recuperate
a little before heading off to Coban and the by all accounts
beautiful village of Lanquin. After leaving Todosantos, I went to
Xela for a few days, then to Chichi for the weekend, then on to
Antigua. So please forgive the somewhat confusing chronology of this
article, but feel it sort of makes sense to describe Xela then
Antigua then Chichi.
PS: Have finally scanned in various photos, which have now been added
to past journal articles (Guanajuato, Mexico City and Oaxaca). If
you’d like a full scale version of any of the photos, email me and
I’d be happy to email you back them.
PPS: Aware that in this article, I’m kind of rude about the students
studying Spanish in Antigua and also make note of the physical and
possible mental problems of a Guatemalan woman. Apologies if either
of these are upsetting to anybody.
Xela (full name Quetzaltenango)
I spent my first night in Guatemala in Xela and didn’t really like
it. After three weeks in Todosantos, I went with my friends Fred and
Isabel back to the city because the Matrix was being shown there. We
all shared a room in the hostel Casa Argentina and had a fantastic
few days. Isabel is an 18 year old from New Hampshire, and was
traveling in Guatemala during a gap year before University. She was
a lot more of an interesting and mature person than many of the
twenty-something travellers I’ve been meeting � well, aside from
tendencies to throw pillows at my head when I was trying to sleep,
or a tendency to hang on to my backpack when she was tired of
walking and wanted to be dragged along. Fred was a cool older guy,
originally from Florida. Fred was a very impressive person for me �
very calm and open, unashamed of himself in a way few people seem
able to be. He worked six months each year in a very enlightened
sounding summer camp in the US, then spent the next six somewhere
else � lately he had kept returning to Todosantos. He spent his time
in the Chuchumantan mountains “living” � walking, talking to
friends, running art or sport activities for local children.
In Fred’s words, “we had a blast”. We seemed to be telling jokes and
laughing almost all the time, talked about some deep stuff, and
shared a high regard for Todosantos, a disappointment with the
Matrix 3 (don’t get me started on this one), and a love of donuts.
The Mennonite-run bakery in Zone 3 of Xela is well, just…. A man
could eat himself to serious illness there, among cakes, yoghurts,
breads and lots of donuts. I would tell you how the couple that ran
it had come to Guatemala, or how they were able to make such great
food, but the whole time I was in the shop I had my face stuffed
with donut and my clothes covered in icing sugar. I ate four donuts
on the spot (blueberry, lemon, cinnamon, apple) and bought a bag of
small donut balls covered in sugar for our trip to the cinema. This,
I am extremely proud to recount, was enough to pull a
bemused, “Aren’t you full yet?” from the austere shop manager.
Fred and Isabel left to return to Todosantos, a sad moment. I was
more than happy to leave Xela once again, and so went on to the town
of Solola for its Friday market.
Antigua
So, here’s what I think about Antigua. I had heard so many opinions
about Antigua before I visited it: lovely buildings, chock-full of
tourists and language students, lots of western comforts, expensive,
not really Guatemalan in character. I decided I wanted to see the
city, so resolved mentally that I would arrive and be an unashamed
tourist: I would wallow in consumerism, eat Thai food, watch movies,
buy things, speak only English.
And I did. I ate in Thai, Italian and Chinese restaurants, watched
Buena Vista Social Club (great), and Hulk (good, but could someone
explain the ending to me?). I drank coffee in cafes and thought up
cunning opening lines to start conversations with strangers.
Was my experiment a success? Not really. Two days in to both my
trips to Antigua, I was gagging to leave. It is a nice place, but
you have to pay a lot for your often mediocre Thai peanut curry. I
couldn’t escape the feeling of vacuousness � what was I doing
spending my money here – I could do all this back in London…
Antigua is indeed a pretty place of cobbled streets and earthquake
ruined colonial treasures. But there are a truckload of tourists and
well-off Guatemalans on holiday here, which does sap something. I
found that just after dawn, and also during a furious thunderstorm
one night, when the city was silent outdoors, I started to find
Antigua beautiful. I got up each morning before seven, and with the
other visitors mostly still in bed, I had the pretty city for myself.
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Volcano de Agua |
The most incredible sight for me in Antigua is the nearby Volcano de Agua. It rises immense and alone above the city � it seemed so
incongruous to looking both at cobbled streets and at this towering
thing. And because the volcano has fields and villages nestling on
it, it looked to me as if the curvature of the world had been
reversed and the world was curling upward into the distant sky.
Three days ago, however, me and some friends took bikes and cycled
up to the highest village on the volcano, then navigated narrow and
nasty trails back down. This was a pretty exhausting and difficult
experience for me, confirming my suspicion that volcanoes are to be
looked at, not climbed. A far more enjoyable and amazing experience
was sitting on the roof of the trendy Antigua bar “Sky Cafe” later
that night and seeing a distant volcano have one of its periodic
eruptions of smoke and lava.
Why I don’t like Antigua
I find an Antigua, and to a lesser extent a Xela, just odd places to
want to hang out in for a while, at least as part of a long travel.
These places seem just to make me depressed and frustrated after
only a few days, in retrospect quite similar to how I was feeling
during my two weeks in Guanajuato. I’ve been in Antigua for four
days now, and I feel like all I am doing here is feeding my body
pleasantness � I seem to be feeding my mind not at all. And wasn’t
feeding the mind kind of the point of setting off on this trip: new
experiences, new outlooks, fresh challenges? A warm hotel room,
lounge cinemas, ten varieties of bagels and house parties are cool
as a break from the exploration, but are hopefully not the raison-
d’etre of the exploration. Antigua is quite a hard city to get to
know people. The locals have little interest in me because there are
so many other people like me visiting, and as there are so many
tourists the tourists don’t seem to want to meet new people � they
seem to have selected groups of friends from their language schools
or from people they arrived with. I find myself walking or reading
in a bar among small groups of other twenty something foreigners,
and I am completely alone until I run into someone I’ve met before
in another place.
Occasionally I resolve to ignore these feelings of being separate
from all these stylishly dressed, slim American and northern European
language students, and join a conversation � two Dutch girls and an
American guy sitting directly in front of me in Sky Cafe one
afternoon were talking about Livingston. This is somewhere I am
planning to go, I smile, what was it like? Oh, different to the rest
of Guatemala, very Afro-Caribbean, she says. I wait expectantly for
some information not on the first page of a guidebook, but no, this
is all she can think of to tell me. She had mentioned that the Rio
Dulce and the Lake Izabal leading to Livingston were wonderful and
beautiful � I try again: any parts you can recommend to visit? Oh,
all of it, really, she smiles, seeming a little confused at the
question. During our short dialogue the American guy hasn’t turned
to look at me at all � after the ensuing pause he says something to
one of the girls, clearly not including me as a recipient. I retreat
back into my very enjoyable Poppy Z. Brite novel about vampires.
Xela is certainly a world away from Antigua, no question, it is an
actually Guatamalan feeling city. But after two days, that same
feeling of “what am I doing here?” kicked in… I don’t know, well
aware I haven’t stayed in the city long enough to say much about the
place. I just find a real gulf between myself and the travellers that
seem to have come to a Mexico or a Guatemala because they wanted a
great place to party and to an extent continue what they were doing
in their old life in a different setting for a few months. I realise
how little I know about what is happening back in London as I listen
to girls in Xela internet cafes regale friends in exact detail what
someone’s boyfriend back in somewhere USA has been doing with someone
else.
Well aware I am no Indiana Jones here, and understand completely the
urge to take culture shock easy, but do notice a distinct difference
in personalities between the travellers that were really happy in a
place like Todosantos, who seemed to be more motivated in actually
exploring Guatemala and its people, and the people who say how much
they adore being in Antigua.
I mean, I do understand the urge to come to a place like Antigua,
and why the people who are studying Spanish like it here. It is
great to be away from home but have almost all the comforts of home.
I kind of wish in hindsight that I had gone somewhere pleasant like
a Guanajuato or an Antigua and learnt Spanish during one of the
summer holidays when I was in University. I would have had a party,
taken classes, become friends with some of the stylishly dressed,
slim Americans and Northern Europeans � and been happy just to be in
an exotic country. It would have been an amazing time, and probably
more what I needed back then than some of the trips I actually did
(e.g. go to work in a small American town’s wax museum). I don’t
know, I guess all I’m saying is that right now I’m after something a
bit different on this trip.
One place I do like in Antigua though, is the Rainbow Cafe and
Bookshop. I’ve come here three evenings now, and each time have got
into an interesting conversation with a person at a nearby table. I
also had there probably the only genuine rush of emotion I’ve
experienced in Antigua. There is a blond woman who sits in the
central square, dressed like an indigenous Guatemalan � I guess I’d
always just made the assumption that she had an albino-type
condition, as she sits with other Guatemalan women selling stuff to
tourists, but had never really looked at her. She was walking around
the cafe last night with a basket, and we looked each other straight
in the face for the first time. Her face was deeply, unhealthily
mottled, looking diseased or badly damaged from the sun, lips
cracked, her few long yellow teeth jutting at odd angles. This
wouldn’t have been much to report in itself except for a very sad
story, but she then started to produce apples from her basket. “They
are sweet, they are sweet, I am selling them,” she said over and over
again. The red and green apples were deeply, disgustingly rotten,
black spots covered them. At least one ex-green apple had a putrid
chasm carved into it from decay. She stood over me closely, our
heads at eye level as I was sitting down, with me muttering, really
quite disturbed, “No thank you, no thank you,” and her repeatedly
whispering, holding the apples out to my face, “They are sweeeeet,
they are sweeeeet.” This went on for a while, then she turned away
from me and walked out of the cafe without speaking to any of the
other tourists.
Chichicastenango
Chichicastenango is the site of the most famous market in Guatemala,
recommended as unmissable by all guidebooks. I would really advise
missing it.
There seem to be two Chichis. I arrived on a Friday afternoon, fresh
from the fabulous non-tourist focused Friday morning market of
Solola (by Lake Atitlan). Solola is a quiet town that explodes each
Friday � fabrics, chickens, foods, all kinds of other practical
stuff in stalls covering the town center. Walking is a crawl,
Guatemalans pushing as hard as they can in the crush (and they are
strong people), town inhabitants with deformed or missing limbs
sitting by the side asking for money. I wandered around all morning,
then as the market was winding down headed an hour north to the more
famous Chichi.
Chichi has two weekly markets, on Thursdays and Sundays, so Friday
afternoon was tranquil with almost no other tourists. I sat with
locals drinking banana drinks and ate boiled chicken. I woke up
Saturday morning and walked out of town to a mask maker’s house (I
had been asked by a friend to buy some woodwork art for her). I
talked with the family, watched the old man carve for a while, drank
coffee with them, then bought a few masks. I asked for directions to
the Mayan idol that my guidebook said was in the nearby woods � two
of the daughters walked me up the hill and at the top we came to the
shrine of Pascual Abaj. He is a curved black stone about the height
of cricket stumps, with a face visible at the top, surrounded by
black stone crosses. A Mayan man was performing a ceremony to the
idol as we arrived, burning delicious incense and chanting softly.
He and another Guatemalan (who was wearing jeans and a t-shirt with
The Rock’s face on the back) in turn knelt in front of the idol and
prayed. One can pray for a partner or protection from robbery �
tourists can apparently pay to be allowed to do this. I considered
requesting protection during my travels as the men finished their
ritual and waved us a smiling goodbye (the daughters and I were the
only people on the hill at this point), but it felt like extremely
dubious spiritual hypocrisy, so I just stood in the path of the
remainder of the windblown smoking incense and breathed in deeply.
I walked back into Chichi around lunchtime and the town was
transformed. Stalls had been erected, tourists were walking around,
heckles from vendors of “Hey Amigo! Speak English or Espanol?”
followed me everywhere. The Sunday market was to me incredibly
ghastly. Amazing in its scale, true, but everything you could buy
was repeated three stalls down. And nowhere was the amazing men’s
clothing of Guatemala � I asked someone who was hassling me for
business, ok, where can I buy that jacket the man over there is
wearing? She replied, oh, that’s from Solola (an hour away by bus),
we don’t have that here. Instead there were endless awful black
waistcoats decorated with lurid pink roses � I won’t go on. This
just seems one of the odd things about Guatemala. A country with
such evidently amazing artistic and creative ability � yet every
cornershop (tienda), local restaurant (comedor) and market stall
stocks exactly the same thing. I remember in Todosantos and San
Pedro that feeling of mild panic when the thing I wanted (e.g. a
pack of Kleenex) wasn’t in the first shop I came to � knowing
instantly no one in town would have it. I wondered who Chichi was
for and how it had evolved � did the tourists actually start
demanding this pap, or did the Guatemalans in the surrounding area
decide this was what we wanted, or are supplies of products just
very limited, so all the vendors have to sell identical stuff?
After a few hours I was utterly sick of the market and decided to go
on a day trip to Panajachel.
Three hours in Panajachel
Panajachel is known as Gringo-tenango, because it is the place of
tourists – I wanted to go just to see what it was like. It was OK to
walk around for a few hours, but I’d really recommend staying
somewhere else on Lake Atitlan. It seemed to have removed the sunny
Guatemalan cheeriness that everywhere else in the country I’d been
to possessed. Many of the tourists had that vaguely perturbed
expression I’ve seen in a lot of resort type places, “we’ve paid our
money, why aren’t we happier?”
I had a nice afternoon meal though, right above the shores of the
lake in a posh restaurant. Surrounded by what I figured were all
well-off Ladino Guatemalans, facing “the most beautiful lake in the
world”, I ate a very nice two course meal for about three pounds in
total.
I was planning to head straight to Coban and then Lanquin, but the
next day in Chichi didn’t finish getting my parcel sent to New York
until midday, and so decided to get a little bit of the way and
return to Antigua for a day or two (then got ill and so am
recovering). Hopefully will be a bit better tomorrow, so plan to
head off.
Trying to decide whether I should try and go for Sam’s job in the
Todosantos school in February. Does seem very appealing, but will
mean tearing up my travel plans (and probably also my visa to work
in Australia, which expires in May 04) if I decide to do it. Hmmm.