Rainy Season

It´s really something just how many indigenas live in Guatemala. Mayans are the majority here, and it is something that you really feel. A large percentage of Mayans, especially in the smaller towns and pueblos, along with the bigger highland cities, wear the traditional traje. The suit is really colorful- for the women, it is a skirt woven by hand with bright colors and an embroidered blouse with brilliant colors and funky themes characteristic of each area. The women also wear a scarf folded on their heads, often with dangling tassles. The men, if they aren´t simply wearing jeans, shirt and cowboy hat, wear bright, striped, hand-woven outfits topped off by a hat you might find on a Venician boat guy. Now that we´re out in the mountains, in the highland farming country, I´ve just been blown away by how much ancient, native culture there is, a culture that is a couple thousand years old. Compare that to Native Americans in the States, where you can still find a few pockets of the old cultures, but they are fenced onto a handful of scattered reservations or buried under casinos. It´s really stunning here. The school we´re studying at is surrounded by coffee fincas, with two villages nearby where we go to eat our meals with indigena families. Partly with the help of the school, and mostly by fighting tooth and nail, people have cement block houses with running water (as of 2 weeks ago- big party, with, I would guess, a shitload of water balloons). Some have electricity. The two families I´ve eaten with have dirt floors and cook over firewood. I´ve seen something like this before, in Kenya, but the cool thing here is that we get to know the townspeople a bit. Instead of just getting an eyeful of grubby children rooting around in their trash-filled yards and thinking ¨what a pity,¨ we get to see the other side, the side where the people are working hard with the tools at hand, raising their families, and having fun to boot. I´m also learning a lot: you don´t eat duck eggs, just chicken eggs and ducks; a machete can be used for anything- lawnmower, axe, harvesting tool, musical instrument, razor for shaving, and chew toy for infants; the word for goat is cabro, not cabrón.
We went to the championship game of Xelaju vs. San Marcos, and sat with the Marquense fans even though our hearts were past the row of cops bristling with machine guns and over the barbed-wire fence with the maximally crazed Xela fans, whose team won 4-1. Also, I will never forget my raincoat again, after enduring about 3 hours of downpour with nothing to keep me warm. We couldn´t even work up a sweat by cheering, since the bums were so far out of the game within the first few minutes. But again, it was an experience. Think Boston after the World Series, even in San Marcos where their team lost.
Time to go, peace out until next time.

Our Second Home

We´re back in Xela, and driving in along familiar streets and seeing all kinds of things and even people we recognized, while in Central America, was a heady feeling. Now we´re settled back in to the first hostel we stayed at when we got here, in the exact same garage converted to a room by pinning a comforter over the garage door windows and dragging two beds in. We ate at the great little taco place called Tacos, No Mas that actually does have mas, and now we´re in to the secret, good, fastly-connected internet place that only costs a buck an hour. So, I have the ´gameday´ thing for the second game of the double header on in the background, and it´s not even slowing my roll. I love Xela.
We´ve been attracting single travellers lately (Joost, I was about to take a stab at you then realized that I gave you the blog address so maybe I´ll pull my punches. But I take stabs at everyone, so it would have been nothing personal). Joost, a Dutch fellow diver, came with us all the way from Utila to Antigua Guatemala, with a few days in Copan Ruinas, Honduras. We had a great time with company, and since Joost had been through there, he had some good insights on where to stay and catch buses and stuff. Just didn´t leave a lot of make out time with three of us in one room, combined with his 9pm bedtime (just 15 min. after Mariam´s). Anyway, this time on the ferry back from Utila to La Ceiba, Mariam didn´t throw up on herself or me, or at all actually. Then we saw the amazing ruins of one of the biggest Mayan cities of it´s time (in the 7-8oo´s) at Copan. They just go on and on, with huge trees and forests growing up between, on and over them. I thought I saw a quetzal for a minute, but I didn´t actually know what a quetzal looked like so figured any bird with some green on it and a longer than usual tail might be one, until I saw a picture of one near the entrance to the park and it was nothing like what I saw. Also, the ruins are kind of scattered on these huge lawns that are neatly trimmed, and I just wanted to say something about lawns. For the most part, they are cut here, by hand, with machetes. I thought that stupid push mower that Paula used to make me use to cut her lawn, that had the stupid freewheel on it that, when you pulled the mower backwards, completely stopped the 20 lb. spinning blades which took a lot of energy for 12 year old me to get spinning in the first place. It was a safety thing so the 12 year old boy you hired to mow wouldn´t mangle his feet, but it was a huge pain in the ass. There is no safety mechanism for these guys, swinging their machetes in a perfect arc exactly 4cm above the ground, ending up with a beautifully manicured lawn. I hope that´s not how they cut the grass at Copan Ruinas, because it looks very tiring.
Next we went back to Antigua, which has become our hub for travelling. I had had a horrible hankering for McDonalds, even after we had a long discussion with Joost about its evils, and they caved and came with me. Mariam got a Cajita Feliz, and refused the accompanying Pretty Polly doll (boys get Ninja Turtles, which are hugely popular here but only allowed you if you have a penis). I got a double Big Mac. That scratched my four-patty itch. Then today we chicken bused it to Xela, on the way meeting a guy from Massachusetts, going from Antigua to Xela and then the Escuela de la Montaña (what we´re doing) who also had to get a new passport right before he left because he put his through the laundry. It´s like the land of frigging coincidences here. He proceeded to get pickpocketed and so we´re helping him out with tuition. Ma, you should expect a check in the mail one of these days (I was right on the Generosity chapter in my self-help book when he hit us up for the cash. What did I say about coincidences?).
We´re heading up to the Mountain School for 2 weeks, in Columbo, where it´s a lot quieter and more Mayan. Looking forward to going back to school, to having everything taken care of in terms of eating and sleeping, and in getting steeped in Guatemalan culture. This school is in a former guerrilla hotbed, and is known for being a little revolutionary in flavor, in terms of the afternoon activities they offer and stuff. I´m looking forward to that.

finally

Jake has had the blog market cornered for awhile now. we had the half way point of our trip a couple of days ago so i figured it's time. i finished the scuba course and am officially addicted, just like the crazy manic island man who taught me how to do it said i would. i was scared to take the class at first, talked to zanna, brielle and angela about it and they agreed that it was crazy, who would want to do that? it's like torture they said. i remembered the time when jake made me go diving in Fiji about 3 times as deep as i would be able to go after i took the beginner's course and i had to agree with them. but i'm trying a new thing in my life where i don't want to be afraid anymore. so i spent some time thinking about it, separating out the fear from the rest and decided that seeing a whole other part of the world that you can't otherwise see couldn't be bad. and the second me was right, it is thrilling, even without the nitrogen narcosis. just the coral alone blows your mind. my favorite thing is how all of the rules are different under water, all the things you thought were constants are no longer. like..people breathing under water, first of all. Rule number 1> fish don't fly> then there are the flying fish that don't just jump out of the water they are like birds that soar forever above the water. fish that fly. rule number 2> you are whatever sex you are born as. not true anymore. parrot fish are all born female and then the biggest one becomes a male and fiercely protects it's position so that other females don't become males. rule number 3> girls have the babies. while male seahorses are the ones who carry the babies, and everytime they give birth the female goes and impregnates them again. i love it cause it just goes to show that there are no set rules, everything is a variable that evolution can play with. turns the world upside down.
i don't think that the scuba place was ready for me, i think that they are used to hippie travellers who go out drinking all night before class and don't understand anything. i threw my long neglected swarthmore self into the course, it was my life at stake after all, and memorized every detail of the book. the instructor promises everyone that if they score a perfect score on the final exam he will by them ice cream. so i got to eat carrot cake and flaming ice cream while everyone cheered at the bar the night after the exam. the guy also misheard me and thought that i said i was going to medical school, so he would ask me all the time about the physiology of diving and stuff and after he had told everyone else that i was a doctor i couldn't reveal that i was just a silly youth worker with no job, so i had to pretend like i knew what apnia was and stuff. stressful.

my instructor, the pirate, invited jake and i over for dinner the last night on the island and in his craziness really made me think about some things. first of all he had fascinated me from when i first met him, he's like an island version of my brother Noah. he has way too much energy, can't sit still, and can sell anything to anyone. he has so much respect for things that make money, and you can tell he's so proud of himself when he can get someone to do something. he is also a self7proclaimed pirate which means that he drinks too much and smokes too much weed and can't be tamed despite the constant labors of his wife? girlfriend?. so, it always amazes me to see how different personalities manifest in different situations, if Alfred were born into my family i think he would be making tons of money banking in new york, but as an islander he's a pirate. it follows that he has a heavy dose of respect for the US of A. and we had a long drunken, on his part, conversation about the US and about how Americans feel about their country. He was very upset because he felt like Americans had the liberty to criticize our government, which he envies and thinks we should definitely keep doing, but that now that's all we do. "I have never met people who think so poorly of their country as Americans do" He said about 50 times. He definitely meets a certain type of American, but I still think he's right. and it made me think of MLK, of course, and how, despite everything that he was fighting against, never lost faith in America. He recognized the potential and had a vision for what it could be. Alfred made me realize that I don't have a vision anymore for what America could be, so of course all I do is criticize, and it's directionless because i don't even have something that I'm pushing towards really. So, that's what i'm going to be thinking about for a little while.

PICTURES! (I hope)

Try this link to my Picasa web album:
http://picasaweb.google.com/jake.kissel/WatermelonTravelsII
I'll put captions and a few more pics up next time I have 2643 minutes to spare.

From the Bottle

That's the coolest thing about being in any country besides the US- coke and everything comes in glass bottles. Even beer, and all those amazing Fanta flavors that they had in Kenya, like passion-fruit and mango. They don't have all the amazing Fanta flavors here, although they have fruits enough to inspire good ones. I wish I could remember the names of all the funky fruits they have here: there is this bite-sized fruit that you eat with salt, tastes sour and sweet, and then salty, and it's green and then more red when riper. I like that one. I hate papaya. At first I was trying to eat it, but now I've just given completely up, and ask specially that it not be served to me because I'll barf if I even smell it now. There were these weird fruits that we kept seeing in the markets and trees in Rio Dulce, that looked like a big, wooden pear. I think the lady said they were called zapotes, which also happens to mean "shoe." She said they were so good, that I had to try one, that they tasted like papayas except much stronger. Shoe, indeed. I didn't try one. Anyway, all the soda and beer comes in those awesome glass bottles here, with the little worn rim where the bottles knock and rub each other when packed together in pallets during their long, long lifespans. Seems very environmentally friendly, to reuse bottles like that. But it would never fly in the US. People would get freaked out that the bottles are obviously used, even though they are certainly cleaned and sterilized, and plus, what would we throw out after we were done? We can hardly consume a product unless we get to peel the plastic off the box, open the box to find the bag inside, then eat the ounce of whatever inside, open the plastic wrapped free toy/piece of garbage inside that bag, and then throw the whole mess away to let someone else deal with it. It is refreshing to be refreshed while avoiding that whole cycle (although the little industry that has people dumping drinks into plastic bags with straws, so that they can collect the deposit for the reusable glass bottle, sidesteps every benefit and adds its own trash problem to the equation), but now I find myself drinking 4 or 5 carbonated beverages a day, where before I drank 0.
I'm at the second internet cafe of the day, after spending over an hour at the first place downloading all my pictures to the desktop only to find it was impossible to install the software to upload them to this blog or anywhere, as well as to burn them to cd. Now I'm at the next place, where I made sure I could download the software first, only to find after the hour of downloading the pics again that uploading 425 pics in 'largest' format was going to take aproximately 2643 minutes. Then the computer crashed, so I started over again, this time using the smallest format for only a few pictures, which started out taking 15 minutes, but the counter kept going up, until it hit 150 minutes. So I'm just doing a few, and it's taking forever, so I figured I'd write a little while I wait, which is probably slowing it down but what the hell. See how hard life on a tropical island can be?
Tonight, after Mariam finishes her first few dives to practice all the technical skills, we're going to get sushi and play poker at the bar. I dove on a huge Halliburton wreck today, and did a big, long drift dive. Last night we did a night dive, where I saw a moray, an octopus, and a bunch of sleeping fish. Fish sleep resting on the coral, not moving even when you shine a light right on them. Plus there were these little nematodes and bitsy fishes that were attracted to the light beam, and they would swarm so thick it was uncomfortable at times. They'd fill your ears and ping off your mask and face and get stuck between your fingers. But if you shined the light on the coral, little polyps would shoot out, grab the worms, and suck out their insides right while you were watching. It was a great dive.
I really wish the pictures were easier to post, because they tell an amazing story without me gumming it up with too many words. I might try putting them on a disk and sending them to the States with someone whose going that way, to mail to my house when they hit US soil, and then have my dad post them.

Happy Birthday

Happy birthday to my sister, who is now 25. Just when you're about to catch up to me, I get another year older too. Guess I'll always be 3 years older. Happy surgery to my dad. Sounds like everything went as good as it could have. And they'll have that catheter out in no time. Happy Mother's Day to my mom, and happy anniversary to my parents, too. Write me if I missed you. Happy Beckett going for 7/0 (there's no dash key on this keyboard/ that's gonna cramp my style).
Chilling out on this island, Utila. You can see the mountains of Honduras' mainland from here, and great stars and sunrises/sets. Actually, I know the sunrises well, because my watch somehow got set back to Boston time, so I've been up for them, and pissed, too, because everyone else in my class keeps coming 2 hours late to everything. Really, I figured it out after the first time it happened, but not before I woke my sorry ass up at 4.30am and stood on the dock for two hours in a tizzy while I got the holy hell bit out of me by the dawn mosquito bumrush. Then everyone came and we went on the mother of all dives. I haven't been diving since Victor and I went for lobsters this past fall, and before that not since Fiji in 2003, and so for my first dive, we had a nice easy little jaunt to 40m (that's 130ft, the absolute deepest you're ever allowed to go without, well, without imploding). With a swimthrough, which means a frigging cave, at the bottom. It was absolutely fantastic, but I was a bit freaked out on the boat beforehand. We started down, and down, and down some more, and all I could concentrate on was following the instructor and clearing my ears. I didn't see anything. Then I was the second one into the cave, behind the instructor, which was filled with these little balls of schooling minnows, which you just had to swim right through, and reaching coral arms and colors and who knows whatall nasties in the nooks and crannies. I just followed the fins in front of me and tried to look unappetizing, and then, after a left turn, there was the light at the end of the tunnel. Closer and closer until wheeee, out into the dim light of the wicked deep. I could tell I was starting to get 'narcked' a bit (nitrogen narcosis, a diver's high that comes from having nitrogen forced into solution in your blood and brain, and that makes you feel loopy and, well, really good). My bubbles, because of the pressure or the narcosis, sounded like breaking glass, but pleasant. Actually, they sounded like icicles breaking off and then sliding away down a river of ice, tinkling along above me, defying gravity. Diamonds, maybe, in the sky, with Lucy. Okay, so I was definitely stoned on nitrogen. Then we cruised along, and looked at all the ridiculously brilliant fishes and corals and sponges and crawling unidentified things, and I got comfortable and actually started to notice things. Diving is funny, because you see all these incredible, mind blowing things, at an overwhelming pace, and you just want to grab everyone and show them and they want to do the same thing. But you all have big ol' regulators jammed in your mouth, and masks over your eyes and nose, so everyone has the exact same expression. It's kind of a serious expression, kind of stern, because the muscles are tensed holding the mouthpiece in. So you see some florescent technicolored oompa loompa coral crab, and you're so excited you can't believe it, and you turn to your buddy with wide eyes and point, and he just stares back, a stern expression on his face. Maybe you get a little nod. And what he has seen was you, pointing, and looking very stern and kind of angry, scaring him and the oompa loompa coral crab. And you go along like this for, like, an hour, trying to remember everything so that you can gibber about it back on the surface, and then you get back up, and everyone takes off their masks and you can see their faces again and everyone says "How was it?" and everyone just answers "Oh, it was great." And that's pretty much it, and all the specifics are forgotten or not talked about, and just kind of remain part of the allure and mistique of the deep, waiting until next time.
Mariam is doing the open water course, and I'm doing the advanced course, and hopefully she'll like it and we'll do a few dives together at the end. She's got a great instructor and it's a great outfit, so it should be fun. And the island is cute, our bedroom is more sauna than bedroom, but the food is good and the locals speak spanish and that funky english of the islands, and there are great views and cays and blue waters all around.

Forgotten unforgettables

In a really nice internet cafe, with a/c and ergonomic stuff. Actually, maybe ergonomic for a Honduran, so I´m kinda contorted using it, but like I said, a/c. So I´m happy. Plus, I´m completely healthy now, except for maybe a few malarial protozoans spreading through my blood. Mars and I never bothered to take the profilaxis (I just did spellcheck to see if profilaxis was spelled right (figure I better look like I know how to spell the medical terms...) and every single word was highlighted, except for ´I´, because, I think, it´s a Honduran spellcheck. Go google) so we´re just trying not to get bit, which hasn´t worked out perfectly. I guess we´ll start taking the pills today, but they say to start 1-2 weeks ahead of time, and we´re not even going to be here for that long, I don´t think. Although we´re considering a trip into the Moskitia, although Andrew and Anne have already done it, like everything we want to do, although Mars says that´s fine, Jake, what are you so worked up about? Ít´s not like you´d be the first person ever in there, anyway. True. Anyway, if we do that, we definitely need the malaria pills.
I forgot to mention how Brielle and Mars and I rented motorcycles in Antigua. It was awesome. We took them through those crazy cobblestone streets, dodging horses and deranged cabbies and stopping constantly for speed bumps, which are everywhere, because they are absolutely the only traffic regulator that centroamericanos respect. There are no traffic cops, stop lights and signs are at best noticed, if not totally ignored, and living creatures, from dogs to children, might as well be invisible. But speedbumps, man, earn a screaching halt and then a comically slow advancing of each set of tires over it. So that´s funny. Another funny thing is how the showers give exactly the opposite temperature from what you want. When you want a hot shower, there are these giant showerheads with dubious electrical wiring twisting all around them, that are meant to heat the water just before it comes out of impossibly small holes. I´m surprised we´ve survived this long. Brielle managed to get ours to spark and start a small electrical fire at a hotel in Antigua, without herself being electrocuted, after which, thankfully, it stopped working completely. Now here in Tela, where the air temp is over 100º and the ocean is in the high 80´s, the coldest water you can get from the shower is a lukewarm blast that would have been welcomed in Xela or anywhere else but here.
Anyway, we took the motos to a beautiful little coffee finca nearby, where we sat and had some great coffee, and then we went back. It scratched an itch.
Heard from UMass that I´m on the waitlist, and from Albany that I got in there (even though I had sent an email telling them that their interviewers are jerks and I would never go there just a week or so before. Maybe I should try that with UMass...?). Still waiting on UC Davis, although I don´t think we´d go there over Kentucky. It was nice to here something from UMass that wasn´t ´no´ but still a little hard. I guess it makes checking email that much more exciting. And c´mon, could there be a better place to wait it out? I mean, we´re going scuba diving on a tropical island for the next week, and then maybe, if we feel like it, taking a boat trip or a rafting trip into the jungle.
Yesterday we went to the old United Fruit Company experimental reserve, where they tested out all the different fruits they could grow here and honed their wage slavery skills and exploitation methods. Now it´s a park maintained by the Honduran gov´t, very pretty. We wandered and swam and tasted weird fruits against the advice of the signage. We even followed Royal deep into the jungle in search of some monkeys that we had heard from the dirt road, after which he thanked us for trusting him. Damn, we did until you said that, dude.
Gotta get a move on if we´re going to catch the the 4:30pm ferry to Utilan from La Ceiba. We haven´t woken up before dawn for, like, two days now, so we´re getting reaccustomed to the late start.

Salama Safari

Life on the road is much more fast paced than Xela- every day new adventures. After climbing Pacaya, we took off for Lago Atitlan a day early. Had a great ride through the country, down through a huge ravine filled with a Colorado type landscape. A few hours later we were in Panajachel, the gateway to the lake. Most of the twelve little pueblos, named for the 12 apostles, are accessible only by boat. Mariam haggled for all she was worth to get the shoeless, starving teen to drop the price of the boat by $.46, and off we went, to Jaibalito and our beautiful hotel. Casa del Mundo is pasted on to the side of a steep mountain, brimming with flowers and stone terraces and patios. And stairs. We definately burned more calories than we ate, even though the chef served these amazing, family style dinners that we ate the hell out of. From the patios, or the wood-heated hot tub that we reserved one night (and had to share for a while with a bunch of bitter Peace Corp vollies who left a bit of their funk in the water and atmosphere), you could look out over maybe the most gorgeous lake in the world. Supposedly Antoine St. Exupery wrote Le Petit Prince while staying here. Remember how the little Prince lived on a planet with three volcanos? Me neither, but I said yes when asked, and Lago Atitlan has 3 volcanos towering above it, giving it these wicked steep sides perfect for jumping off and putting posh hotels on (and Charlie Sheen´s vacation house, of which we had many theories). Also, remember that part when the little prince asks everyone what that funny shape is, and all the old people with no imagination say ´a hat´and really it´s a snake that swallowed an elephant? Me too. Well, there is this big formation/mountain that looks exactly like the picture in the book. The landscape is this mixture of tropical flowers and verdure with little farms and towns and a bit of drier vegetation, with the biggest, bluest lake smack in the middle. We had a great couple of days mellowing out at Casa del Mundo, jumping off balconies into the lake, lounging in hammocks, taking some sun, and developing bulging quads on the stairs. Next we went to another little luxury hotel in the half hippie enclave of San Marcos. More eating and swimming and chilling and running away from these horrid black scorpions that seemed to have their kingdom in Susannah and Angela´s patio. We also found some really high rocks to jump off, and some really deep water to drop Brielle´s goggles in and test Jake´s diving abilities in. Then back again to Antigua, where we attempted to have a nice dinner but were thwarted when I fell for the trick where the guy runs you down in the street and tells you how good his food is. That dinner may have single-handedly undone what 5 days of powerful antibiotics had done for my bowels. Not to ruin my streak for the night, I also found us a classy hotel for the evening, using the same technique of following randos into whatever building, just because they are yelling at me. This place cost about a buck apiece, and it was worth it. We got a discount, because, as Mariam and Brielle found in the morning when they were waiting in the lobby/garage as men walked in and out and were checked off on the dry erase board, it usually goes for a buck an hour. Susannah and Angela got on a shuttle for the airport while I pooed in a baby food jar. Two hours later, I had the report back from the lab that I have no parasites. The only other part of the report that I could understand was the color part, ´cafe,´ but already, knowing I didn´t have any wormies in me, I felt better. I did fart out my mouth all morning on the ride to Rio Dulce (Mars and Brielle still don´t believe those smells didn´t come from farther south, but why would I lie about this?), but that´s a little later story. After trying to find a bus to Rio Dulce that day, we finally realized the futility and got a (different) hotel, smoked some Cuban cigars, and managed to find an amazing restaurant to splurge at for Brielle´s and my birthday. We ate our weights in meat, drank wine, had chocolate cake for dessert. Awesome. Then, pleasantly full, we wandered over to the central park, where the Guatemalan Symphony Orchestra was playing a free concert. We hit it just right, as my father-in-law would probably appreciate (hi Uncle Beaver), just at the loud part. We sat down, and after about a minute of the soft, boring stuff, the cymbols guys started in and everyone started wailing away at whatever they had in their hands and it got real loud and fun. And then with a little flourish, it was over, and they thanked us for coming and we got to go home and sleep so we could get up at 3:30am for the Rio Dulce bus. Then the part where I fart our my mouth and no one believes me, but at least I don´t have parasites so I feel real good, and we arrive at the edge of the biggest lake in Guat, Lago Izabal. Rio Dulce is a funky, colorful little fishing town, also full of yachties on their way around the world. Very tropical and muggy and slow, and we stayed at an appropriate hostel between the jungle and the river. Actually, in a little hut on stilts right in the water. Ate a ferocious shrimp stew before it ate me (these shrimps had claws). In the morning Brielle and I kayaked over at 5am (pre dawn awakenings are now the norm) to see, and hear, the howler monkeys. Who knew? Hiked all over the jungle later, and saw creatures and plants I still can´t believe. Brielle heard about Susannah and Angela´s misadventures at the airport, so we decided to put her on the 3am bus so she´d have plenty of time at the airport. Checked and double checked to make sure that the kid with the boat would be there at 2:45am to take us across, and were assured. Then, at 2:50am, he still wasn´t there (notch another pre-dawn wake up), so we did what any sensible person would do. We stole a double kayak. Luckily the dude with the shotgun didn´t see us or didn´t care enough to kill us as we slipped across the harbor under the moon. On the other side, we had to try a couple different landing spots before we found one with a low enough fence to climb over. This time, the guy with the shotgun did see us, but held his fire. Brielle made the bus, and I paddled home. Even managed to get the 40Q back that we had prepaid for the boat trip (even though kayaks rent for 100Q/hr! ha!) later in the day, and I don´t even think the kid lost his job. We packed up at a reasonable hour and took a boat down the river to Livingston, where we are now. Livingston is an amazing little Garifuna community, reachable only by boat, of black Guatemalans decended from escaped slaves, shipwrecked sailors and Carib indians, with their own language and culture. Lots of African ties. Great seafood, too. I ate another vicious stew, this one with coconut milk, plaintains, a whole fish and lots of creatures with claws. Getting hungry again, too. It´s hot as all get out here. Tomorrow we´re heading to Tela, Honduras, for a few beach days while we celebrate my birthday, then hopefully on to the Bay Islands, where I might be able to talk Mariam into taking the world´s cheapest scuba diving course (now why would she even hesitate?) for a week or so.
Ain´t life grand?