A Watering Hole's Ethno-Folk Baroque Haunts - Lake Atitlan, Guatemala
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Stumble It!Lake Atitlan, Guatemala
Atitlan evokes a fluid getaway. In a league with Bali, its tranquil Kathmandu-setting bohemians, hedonists, and premature-retirees die for is surpassed only by Shangri-La. Easygoing, exotic, esoteric, and electric, deservingly, it's the "Little Bali of the West".
Curious about the fascinating folksy imagery concocted by the villages around this Lake, I embarked on a light exploration into its scheme-of-things.
This 52-square mile petri dish, a teeming micro-culture of villages with distinguished dialects, costumes, crafts, market and saint's feast days, is ruled north by Kaqchiqel and south by Tz'utujil Mayas, in a flimsy film of Spanish innuendo.
Water - its accessibility is visibly the formula for a culture's success but here, it's just half the story. The cupped lake resulted from a surging-sinking upheaval, forming a no-fast-way-out drainage system.
Fire - the secret ingredient - fueled the tumultuous first half. 150,000 years ago, this was a boom box of unrelenting geologic fireworks. In the nexus of the Pacific Rim of Fire, today's volcanoes branched-out of a piping system as vent stacks, the lake's rim as the main pipe's top-end.
The fire-and-water tandem sustains the fertile soil and abundant marine produce simultaneously composing a breathtaking interplay of oscillating terrain sandwiched by the diffused blue backdrop sky and foreground pond.
A 4,500-feet cool stress-free weather gets locals' artistic juices going. Dosages of tropical sun's rays invigorate their proclivity for brilliant colors and geometric patterns. Moreover, winds and marine layer spun-out from cotton candy-maker phenomenon created a microclimate, spicing-up mysticism and myth.
Panajachel
Panajachel is the Grand Central for a village-hopping boat trip.
Overwhelmed by heavy concentration of tourists, I can't believe that it's the "ground zero" of Guatemalan tourism, which accounts for the disappearance of backpackers in Guatemala City. Panajachel is Banglampoo/Lane Crawford/Nathan Lane/Shibuya & Wall Street rolled into one catering to the comfort and distraction of tourists. It inspired me to write this poem:
Calle Santander
The lake calls, a lane unfurls. I see...
a Babylon of budget-conscious globe trotters,
a strip mall of hotels great and small,
a food court of cheap good comedors,
a party central of rowdy bars,
a souk of "I ♥ Guatemala" T-shirts,
a flea market of ripped-off Mayan weavings,
a bazaar of touristy baubles and bangles,
a tiangge of handcrafted knick-knacks,
a nerve center of agencia de viajes,
an agora of best-rated casa de cambios,
a beehive of phone and internet booths --- what else,
a Mecca of bike rental shops.
Money talks, my business is welcome here.
At a travel agency, I booked for tomorrow's boat-ride for San Pedro La Laguna, Santiago Atitlan, and San Antonio Palopo.
The Baroque sandstone church is at the north end. Gazing at my first Guatemalan folk-ethnic religious structure, I was deceived by its high interior against its panoramic wide façade.
Its nave is flanked by almost life-size images with narrow sad Caucasian faces executed in local folksy style. A main theme - carved hardwood everywhere trimmings in naïve vegetal patterns and coated dark brown contrasted with the white stucco wall, evoking a harmony in ebony and ivory.
The altar elicits unusual observation. It resembles a royal Thai study-console glittering with mother-of-pearl-like inlay.
San Pedro La Laguna
The boat ride started past nine. No amount of camera tweaking made my photos' quality better if only the all-day long mists would evaporate. From the dock, the lake virtually looks like an endless sea. We approached San Pedro volcano up-close as we set for the first stop to the town of the same name.
San Pedro is a spin-off of Panajachel serving the all-consuming tourism industry. Nested on a Mediterranean setting, it's a tightly packed village with Third World infrastructures. A dozen tourist cops hang out at the dock leisurely eyeballing every arrival.
Its very steep flagstone-streets welcome everyone but handicaps wait for crews to patch up its cracked sections.
Dangling electric cables and clumsily erected timber light poles ganging-up with an anarchy of antennas, satellite disks, and hand painted signs and streamers complete the urban landscape.
Lorries, in lieu of public buses, carry passengers holding-on to run-around armpit bars while standing on flat beds. Still unspoiled and naïve, this town's beggars are nowhere to be seen, unlike in many touristy Mexican towns.
Opened-armed house doors reveal unfinished rooms. Skeletal column-and-beam extensions patiently wait for owners to save-up for next trickle of construction budget.
It's just another topsy-turvy town living in Technicolor vision.
Grandpas proudly stroll in their embroidered capris on bare dusty leathery feet. Women in their equally colorful traditional market day dress balance heavy head paraphernalia and cargo. A number of evangelical houses intensely compete with each other for garishness in contrast to the immaculate white colonial Catholic church.
Pocketed by a very small plaza, the church makes a simple dainty statement but leaves a question of why it has an open grand stairway to the sky?
Santiago Atitlan
After an hour of aimless sightseeing, I hopped aboard for Santiago, leaving San Pedro volcano while greeting Toliman and Atitlan, all within spitting distances of the village. Tourists are pestered by touting, a business monopolized by mothers and teenaged-girls desperate to cut a deal using hard-sell unshakeable tactics. Tourist money parts right here, settled prices are less than half-off to those in Panajachel, identical item and condition.
Santiago's uphill church is through a lane flanked by souvenir stalls at the dock end transitioning to a rowdy market at the top end selling things that are more mundane. One's attention is drawn to noisy women selling live chickens and exotic farm produce. Here, any Mayan inhibitions are shed off. The lingua franca is Tz'utujil Mayan.
Screened-off from market chaos by a walled plaza, the church is a perfect Hollywood set for a forsaken town overrun by bandits and longing for a rescue hero. I can almost hear the sound effects of peeling bells, horses' hooves stumps, and ricocheting gunshots.
An ornament-free gable wall, a tropical green balcony supported by Tuscan columns up a set of semicircular entry stairs, and a bulky bell tower with spalling stucco make a rustic façade.
A line-up of wizard-like idols on the walls' ledge flanks a spooky pew-less nave. In oversized dress shirts, gaudy multi-scarves, some capped with Jamaican berets, they're distinct as Russian icons. To Western eyes, they project sorcery, occult, and voodoo mysticism - a spine-tingling blend of Catholicism and Mayan worship.
The apse's Baroque altars or retablos finished in tropical golden brown, shelter native costumed idols evoking Indian, Tibetan, or Balinese divinities.
In one candlelit chamber, mothers sat on the floor as if on a picnic, chatting in whisper mode while desperate ones supplicate Japanese style facing an image.
Melodramatically involved as a notorious refuge for left-wingers during the military-dictatorship era, this town witnessed the assassination of its American parish priest whose heart lies in repose in a sanctuary while his body is interred in Oklahoma. A military massacre of civilians ignited in 1990. The locals were undaunted; having lived in the shadows of three volcanoes is a feat by itself.
Hooked-up to bargain hunting on the way down, I missed my boat. My itinerary thrown in disarray, I jumped to the next dispatching boat even if it's bound for Panajachel and not my intended San Antonio destination. I can't wait longer for the shy sun is ominously fading away fast.
Challenging as the Amazing Race, this leg got me back to Panajachel. I zoomed off the nearest bike rental shop, grabbed a bike, and pedal pushed coasting for the villages of Santa Catarina and San Antonio, for 9 kilometres. It's a breezy physically extraneous, quads-busting ride on the edge of the lake, full of steep rises, plunges, and hairpin turns exacerbated by my bike's gear malfunction.
Safety was my non-concern. Occasionally, three Mayan garment peddlers, three lone bikers, a skateboarder, a lady jogger, a honeymooning tourist-couple, and a dozen vehicles breezed by. Isolated and sparse, this road is patrolled by a tourist cop duo, admonishing my presence, a rare interruption from their leisurely chat while on a boring duty.
Cyclopean and rubble fences, Aegean pot-topped posts, artsy twiggy railings, and bougainvillea cascaded property walls protect millionaire homes and classy resorts.
San Antonio Palopo
While Santa Catarina's chapel-like church cowers like a chicken inside a nest, San Antonio's church perches like a mighty eagle on the edge overlooking the Lake. Its haughty posture is hardly approachable by such a steep and narrow alley from the town's doorstep.
The church is typically rural Baroque. Heavy fortifications shore-up the façade's base corners. A gazebo sheltering a bell sits along the north side.
Its altar is a scaled-down version of Santiago's. Naive images on simple pedestals flank the nave.
Men down below worked the fields in traditional brown Guatemalan kilts, just one of the cultural dress-code diversifications spawned by this lake.
The view of the lake from the forecourt-promontory of the church is a dramatic snapshot opportunity. On the side against the cross-marked parapet at the edge of the lake are three Mayan girls wearing intense indigo attire and headpiece, in pensive mood repose. Although just taken from my less professional tourist camera, this snapshot is a perfect composition for a Romanticist scene just yearning to be recreated on the canvas.
Because of time constraint, I missed the town of San Lucas Toliman, which has a colonial church. I left my passport at the bike rental shop and I have to return back before it closes.
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