#20: El Retiro and the Day of the Devil – Guatemala – A Year and a …

By: Daniel Wallace

El Retiro and the Day of the Devil
Friday, 12th December 2003

After a couple of days in Coban, on Sunday I travelled to the backpacker
hostel El Retiro, three hours away in the village of Lanquin. I simply
planned to hang around and relax there until my friend Gari arrived (he
had just flown into Mexico City and was taking buses to meet me).

I quite disliked El Retiro at first. A lovely place, full of hammocks,
swings for bar stools, great vegetarian meals, run by an Englishman – a
flawless home away from home for travellers. Unsure how long I could
endure this, I came across a really brilliant novel in their library
(Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood) and settled down to relax. As the
shock of all this gringo trail-ness wore off, I came to really enjoy my
time at this happy, calming place. I read my book, played chess,
befriended some very fun people and generally lowered my stress setting
(already quite low) another few notches.

El Retiro is set by a relentlessly flowing river, and we hired inflated
tubes in the shape of an O and would float down, propelled by the
current. “Inner tubing” was a mixture of idle sailing and furious
avoidance of low hanging tree branches. One time I found myself helping
two Israelis who had fallen out of their tubes (tubing can get kind of
scary when you realise there is no way to swim upstream against the
current). With the girls trying to climb back in, I somehow ended up
clinging on to a taut, thin tree branch to hold us all steady, while
holding on to one of their tubes with my other hand. I felt my strength
failing as the water tore past us – “Umm, I’m not going to be able to
hold on to this tree much more.” The response, “A little more time
please,” came back, in the same tone as though I was a tetchy husband on a
shopping trip. I gritted my teeth and held until everyone was ready to
float on, the tree branch giving me a parting gift of a whipping red
scratch across my arm as I let it flick out. Later I had an even more exciting
encounter, being swept under and through a tree fallen across the river,
immediately losing my tube and tumbling between thick raking branches,
but as my mum is reading this I’ll leave off any further details.

Semuc Champey

This is the great natural wonder of the Lanquin area. A ferocious white
water river ricochets along this valley’s floor, and is swallowed whole
into a 60m long limestone cave, before escaping out the other end to
continue its journey. The natural bridge formed by the roof of the cave
contains clear pools for swimming, and there is a steep hike/climb to a
lookout point above the valley. The view from the top was lovely,
hopefully my camera will be able to convey how beautiful it all looked,
but the climb up was somewhat terrifying. I found myself repeatedly
grasping rocks or roots and hauling myself up over deeply slippery mud to
the next level-ish part of the “trail”, pausing frequently to reflect on
what a stupid thing this was to do alone. But I reasoned another tourist
would be along soon if I got into trouble, and quickly became more scared
of trying to descend this nightmare than continuing upwards.

Despite not strong climbing skills and a not mild fear of heights, I reached the top and sat for a while admiring the view and wondering why I
hadn’t brought any lunch. There turned out to be an easier route down,
only it petered out halfway, so I spent a little while tramping randomly
through the woods before finding the bottom. I went for a lazy swim in
the pools, after I had begged an apple off one of the van drivers that
took tourists to Semuc. These young guys’ life was to drive their pickup
trucks back and forth, lounge around all day in the valley until the
return trip and crudely perve at the female tourists in bikinis – they
thought the world of themselves.

Gari arrives

Gari’s long series of bus journeys from Mexico City ended on Thursday,
rousing me from my late morning doze, shouting “Dan? Dan?” by my
dormitory’s window. It was great to see him again and we immediately set
about resuming conversations old and new. Gari has been my friend for
over three years now, we’d met in a train station when both travelling in
Italy, and he was one of the people that had been encouraging me to do
this trip from the start. Being a writer himself, he had also given me a
lot of advice on the writing of this travel diary. He is 39, originally
from the north east of England, works in London but like me has a massive
dislike for the city.

One of the things he brought was a copy of The Sun newspaper. This was a
pretty complete cure for homesickness: leafing through The Sun’s fury at
the unimportant, its unthinking diatribes thinly disguised as news, the
confused love triangles of Dear Deidre’s page, all the reasons for
leaving England returned to punch me in the stomach. By this point it was
late, and the hostel’s security guard, Mario, came by. The Sun was
immensely popular with him, especially the bare breasted lovely on page
three (she was explaining her views on tagging asylum seekers). He laid
the paper on the ground and slowly turned each page, all incomprehensible
as he didn’t speak a word of English, pausing only at one photo – he
pointed: “Bush!”

About 11pm, Gari went for a rest (he had taken a 5am bus to get to me)
and I went down to the El Retiro bar, to say a long and drunken farewell
to the friends I had made.

Burn the Devil

Gari shared my liking for Coban and we stayed there another few days,
partly to give him a deserved rest from bus journeys and partly because
there was a fiesta coming up, The Day of the Devil. We were colossally
ignorant about what the fiesta involved, and sat in the town square a
little bemused, until around 8pm a huge wooden float of the Virgin
Mary proceeded past us, carried by about twelve Cobaners and surrounded
by slowly walking locals. A man holding long rocket fireworks was
lighting them in his hand and letting them fly, sparks shooting in all
directions. This perhaps seemed a little dangerous, but was merely a
taster of the madness that was to come. As the Virgin crawled through the
streets, a man holding a wooden/papier-mache goatlike float-thing above
his head leapt into view. The Devil’s float, despite being unquestionably
flammable, was porcupined with fireworks, which he proceeded to launch
off in all directions as the procession continued. More than several whooshed close by members of the crowd, to my and Gari’s horror and to everyone else’s immense amusement. The Guatemalan nonchalant
cheerfulness in the face of problems or danger now seeming disturbing
rather than comforting – as my eardrums began to ache from the ever
unpredictable explosions, I started to feel as though I was surrounded by
the laughter of the insane.

The procession came to its destination, a small church, and things got
crazier. The Devil slung off his spent artillery piece, and was strapped
into a huge wooden set of bat wings (or maybe a spider’s web). This was,
perhaps now unsurprisingly, arrayed with more fireworks, and he began to
dance with another devil figure as more fireworks lit one after another.
With my arms clapped over my ears and more than a little petrified, I
watched the finale of the night, as the pyramid at the top of the wooden
frame turned into a fiery spinning catherine wheel.

As the crowd dispersed, we returned to the town centre, and drank strong
Cuba Libres to calm our nerves. Those of a nervous disposition may wish
to avoid Guatemala on December seventh.

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Questions?
If you want more information about this area you can email the author or check out our Central America Insiders page.