Wanderlust

(An Internet photo album of photos I took of Nebaj and Chajul is at album.) Nebaj is my most remote destination in Guatemala and the only one where I have never been before. It is the fulcrum of three indígena villages that form the Ixil triangle (the x pronounced like sh), nestled in the Cuchumatanes mountains in the northern part of the Western Highlands, the only part of Guatemala where the language Ixil is spoken. This area suffered unspeakably brutal massacres during the civil war, punishment for being the theater of operations of one of the guerrilla groups; I had planned to visit Nebaj during a trip in the early 90s but read in the newspaper that there was fighting nearby, so quickly changed my plans. In recent years it has undergone many improvements, due in part to the arrival of NGOs, in part to the remesas sent by those who have migrated from here to the US. Thus there is a Spanish school and a company providing trekking guides, the chicken buses have largely been replaced by vans known as microbuses, there are tuk tuks everywhere, and the plaza, now quite pretty, recently underwent a renovation.

Nebaj is especially intense because the traje típico, which virtually all the women in town are wearing, is the prettiest I've ever seen. The ankle-length skirts are burgundy with a vertical design in white, the huipiles are various colors woven in distinctive angular designs that you discover depict birds or horses. Then there is the headpiece, a strip of elaborately woven cloth with pom poms at the end that is somehow wound around the head and the hair. A rebozo, also elaborately woven, is also frequently used.

I arrive Monday at 10 by microbus from Santa Cruz del Quiché, two hours away, the drive one curve after another through breathtaking scenery of one level of mountains giving away in the distance to another, beautiful pine forests, also a fair amount of deforestation, and of course near-vertical corn fields. Shortly after I get to my hotel I call Brian, a contact I have made through the Thorn Tree and for whom I have brought several baseball caps for the children he works with. Brian is a one-man NGO who spends eight or nine months of the year here, working with children and working on a stove project. (Traditionally cooking is done on a fire surrounded by three stones to put the comal and other cooking implements on, which wastes a lot of the heat and fills the room with smoke; the stove, built of concrete, uses half the amount of firewood and funnels the smoke through a chimney.) Brian says he and a Guatemalan woman are about to visit a school in the country nearby, so I express an interest in accompanying them and he offers to pick me up at my hotel.

It turns out that Brian is preparing for a visit the following day of a team from a small American NGO that is building schools in Guatemala (something the Ministry of Education apparently doesn't much do) and which he hopes to persuade to build a school in Nebaj and to use him as their contact person. Therefore we are visiting two schools to prepare them for a visit to show the visitors how needy they are--in fact, they aren't exactly schools, they're single classrooms in log-cabin shacks with tin roofs, dirt floors, and minimal equipment. In each the (male) teacher is teaching four or five grades because there are only a few students in each grade. We also visit a nearby vacant lot that the teachers hope to persuade the mayor to buy for a school to be built on.

We return to Nebaj on the back of a pickup truck, standing and holding on to a scaffolding, and Brian and I continue on to the house of a family (indígena of course) where we are going to have almuerzo, the middle meal here. It turns out that Brian, who lives in a cheap hotel, arranges with families to eat in their home for a minimal payment. This family has electricity, meaning bare light bulbs but no refrigerator, running water in the pila (what we call a lavadero in Mexico except that it has three sinks, one for dishes, one for clothes, the middle one a deposit of water), and a sort of outhouse near the house. There is firewood stacked up and a good supply of chickens in an enclosure. There are dirt floors in the two rooms, a kitchen and a large bedroom (the pila is outside). Brian and I sit down with a small table between us but not facing the table, we are furnished a basin of water to wash our hands and then given bowls containing beans mixed with greens and a small omelet. A high stack of tortillas is put on the table; I ask Brian if we eat with the tortillas, he says that is what the family does but we'll be given spoons. To drink we are given something like orangeade but hot.

As we return to el centro, Brian and I arrange to meet in the plaza at 6:45 to go to another house for cena, which he has arranged by cell phone as we walked to where we had almuerzo; apparently there are a lot of cell phones in Nebaj. In the meantime, I unpack, rest a little, and go to one of the several cybercafés here.

By the end of the evening I decide that Brian is either a saint or fulfilling a personal need. After our cena, in a house without electricity, just two candles in the kitchen, getting to which has involved walking on several narrow paths, indispensible the flashlight I have brought, the meal the same as almuerzo except we have atole (a hot drink made from wheat) to drink, afterwards Brian rounds up a large number of children because we are going to go to another house and the children are going to sing. Except that some of the children rebel and have to be rounded up again, and somehow this performance gets delayed more than I am comfortable with, while I chat with some of the adults who have been brought to this house (which has electricity) to hear the children. Finally the children are ready to be put through their paces, Brian always singing with them, and it turns out that all but one or two of the songs are in English or in one case Swedish (Brian is Swedish), songs like "Old McDonald Had a Farm" (with the name of the animal in Spanish), "Jingle Bells," and "We Wish You a Merry Christmas." They do a bilingual version of "This Land Is Your Land," for which Brian has done a Spanish translation with appropriate geographical references. The quality of the singing is what you would expect of random kids with no training. Later I ask Brian if the children know the meaning of the non-Spanish words, and he says for the most part no.

During our cena Brian, who talks incessantly, gets very defensive about his upcoming encounter with the head representative of the NGO, whom he wants to choose him as the contact person for the school he wants them to build, but he doesn't feel he should have to prove himself, as if it were a job interview, that's what he came to Guatemala to get away from. Which makes me wonder about his work with kids perhaps providing him with a level of fulfillment that he's been unable to get otherwise.

In any event, on Tuesday Brian is occupied with his visitors, the town of Chajul, another point in the Ixil Triangle, has its market day, so I take a microbus there in the morning. My guidebook says there is a store of a weaving cooperative between the church and the market, which interests me, but it takes asking a huge number of people for directions to find it. In these parts it's safer to ask directions of a man than a woman because the proportion of men who speak Spanish is greater than the proportion of women. In any event, the store is open but deserted and what's in it is in a state of chaos, so I return to the church and the market (the churchyard is above and gives me good views of the market for shooting photos) and am happily taking pictures (of people who I think aren't aware I'm taking their picture--one woman who became aware threw a small potato at me) when I'm approached by a señora who starts talking to me about buying a huipil from her. I have been thinking of buying one of the strips used around the head, so I follow her to her house, which involves walking through a school to get to. She shows me a number of things and I choose a strip that afterwards I wonder if it's used on the hair because it's much wider than most, but in any event it's gorgeous and the colors will go very well on the (turquoise) wall of my bedroom.

I stay in Nebaj through today, Thursday, because Thursday is market day here and my itinerary is based on market days. My last two days are less intense than the first two--I explore the market and the new Mercado de Artesanía, puestos housed in an attractive new building (I buy cloth bookmarks and an elaborately woven strip such as a priest might wear hanging over his neck), wander around shooting photos, and deal with the problem of finding vegetarian restaurant meals (pizza turns out to be my best option).

I should fill in the narrative between Panajachel, where I last reported, and Nebaj. From Pana on Saturday I take a tourist van for an hour to Chichicastenango, spend the night in an overpriced hotel, and go out to explore the tourist market at 7:45 Sunday morning. At 10 I am on a microbus for the half-hour trip to Santa Cruz del Quiché, an indígena town (where the frilly huipiles look like they were made on a sewing machine rather than a backstrap loom) that also has its market on Sunday, spend the night there, and Monday come to Nebaj.

My transition tomorrow to Antigua, my final destination in Guatemala, where I will spend a week, is more complicated than I would like. I take an early microbus to Santa Cruz del Quiché, there get on a chicken bus (recycled US school bus, garishly painted and with a rack on the roof) that's going to Guatemala City, get off 40 minutes before there at the side of the road in Chimaltenango, and catch a passing bus going to Antigua. Ordinarily it's a five-hour trip, but the construction work on the Panamerican Highway will undoubtedly make it longer.

(An Internet album of photos I took of Panajachel and Sololá is at album.) The transition by van from San Cristóbal across the border to Lake Atitlán in Guatemala on Monday, April 14 is something of an ordeal, 12 hours instead of the advertised eight. Partly the problem is delays due to construction on the Panamerican Highway, but mostly it is lack of communication between the tour agency that sold me the ticket and the outfit that actually did the transportation, plus logistical mess-ups of the latter--the sort of occasion that makes you want to just forget about it and move on.

Panajachel, where I have been several times, I have always had mixed feelings about, more positive in my old age than earlier. It is located on the north shore of Lake Atitlán, which Aldous Huxley famously called the most beautiful lake in the world, the beauty coming not just from a large body of water 5,000 feet above sea level but from the three stunning volcanoes that loom above it (although depending on where you are, they may appear to be only two), with mountains going off to the side. The effect is to suck you in and lift you up--awesome in the original sense of the word.

Panajachel is something else, something rather bizarre. A mile or so from the lake it is an indígena village, with plaza, church, town hall, and market. In between that village and the lakeshore is 100 percent tourism--puesto after puesto selling artesanía, shops with the higher-end stuff, restaurants, hotels, and transportation services. Since my last visit there are tuks-tuks puttering down Calle Santander, the center of the action--like cocotaxis in Havana but with a full canvas cover and painted red. (If that descrition isn't helpful, they are three-wheeled vehicles that can take two passengers.) This seems to be a very low low season, and the atmosphere is quite relaxed (and the weather marvelously warm).

There is an increasingly tourist infrastructure in some of the other villages around the lake (one of them has long been noted as a hippie and druggie hangout), and now there are boutique hotels with their own landing docks isolated from everything else.

Pana is one of the three best places to shop in Guatemala (the others are Chichicastenango and Antigua), and since I have a camera crisis and the day after my arrival can't take pictures, I pay my respects to the lake and shop. (Apparently I messed up my snazzy new camera trying to insert a new memory card the wrong way, and after visiting two photo shops it appears that a friend of a muchacho in the second one can repair it for an exhorbitant amount, hopefully by late the following day.) Aside from the mangos and avocados I buy in the market and the loaf of banana bread in a bakery called Pana Pan, in short order on the artesanía strip I buy two runners from the same woman, made in Santa Catarina Palopó, one of the dozen or so indígena villages on the lake, and a medium-sized cloth shoulder bag made here.

The night of my arrival I experience an earthquake, lying in bed not to sleep but collapsed from exhaustion, wondering about that sudden vibration, like one of those lounge chairs that gives a massage. Since nothing is jumping off the table, I decide I don't have to do anything. The next day I read in the paper about the 40-second, 5.8-degree earthquake, centered on the Pacific coast but felt in the entire country, without any injuries or damages.

The camera crisis deepens--I entrust my camera to a muchacho in QuickPhoto on Tuesday morning, he says his friend can fix it for Thursday, I plead as earnestly as I can to get it on Wednesday, he leads me to believe that there was a possibility for Wednesday afternoon, I should come by at 4, at which time I'm told to come by at 6, at which time I'm told to wait ten minutes (I go out for ice cream), at which time I'm told it will be Thursday afternoon. So I have no choice but to take the boat ride to Santiago Atitlán Thursday morning without a camera, since Friday, my last day here, is market day in Sololá and I must go there.

Santiago Atitlán is across the lake from Panajachel, and the boat ride normally takes an hour. But this time they're using a much smaller boat than the ones I've been on in the past, one that will hold maybe 20 people, with a roof but otherwise totally open, with an outboard motor. We're much closer to the water and our speed is much greater, so we arrive in 20 minutes. Santiago is the largest of the indígena villages around the lake, really too large to be called a village. The huipiles of the women there are traditionally white with widely spaced lavender stripes and embroidery of birds at the top in between the stripes. The men wear pants the length of pedal pushers, traditionally white with widely spaced purple stripes and embroidery across the bottom, covering both stripes and background. Now one sees many variations on the traditional style, and some clothes that, while still traje típico, don't look anything like it.

Santiago's history is very much entwined with the bloody history of Guatemala's civil war. An American priest who had ministered in Santiago for many years was killed by the army in the early 80s, and his heart is buried in the church, where a chapel is dedicated to him. A historic victory for indígena rights took place in 1990, when the army post in Santiago was forced to leave as a result of an international uproar over the army shooting at a crowd of demonstrators who were protesting the actions of a couple of drunken soldiers trying to kidnap someone, killing 19.

I resist the approaches of two guides but find myself agreeing to go with a third, who has a credential around his neck, agreeing to pay 70 quetzales (down from the original price of 100) for him to take me to see Maximón and to the Catholic church. Maximón, also known as San Simón, is a saint not in the Catholic pantheon but much venerated here and among indígenas in other parts of Guatemala. He is kept in a person's home, changing from home to home every November 1. He has a room all to himself, with fruits, herbs, and papel picado hanging from the ceiling. His head is carved out of wood, and it's impossible to see what his body is made out of. He is wearing a black hat, has a cigar in his mouth, sports a tie around his neck and is so festooned with scarves draped over his shoulders that it's impossible to see his jacket. His pants are vividly embroidered. There's a plate in front of him where one can leave a donation. I ask my guide on the way about my impression that many people here are Evangelical Christians, and he tells me that the majority are, and while seeing Maximón he tells me that both Catholics and Evangelicals come here to pray to him in times of sickness or other hardship.

From there we go to the Catholic church, where a service in which those in attendance are all women is taking place, led by a laywoman. The imagenes lined up by the side walls are all dressed in cloth robes, those on the left being identical and those on the right identical to each other but differerent from those on the left; the clothes are made by different societies, my guide tells me. After paying my guide he agrees to take me to the market for no additional charge; I remember when years ago it consisted of people laying out their goods on the ground in front of the city hall, but now it's a substantial three-level building. Finally, we walk down toward the lake--the walk from the lake to the center of town is lined with puestos selling artesanía--to where there is a small but very well-laid-out museum of the weavings of Santiago, created, it turns out, by an American woman who has lived there 30 years. On the way we pass an Evangelical church, a three-story structure that looks like a hotel or an office building.

Thursday afternoon at 5 I am finally reunited with my camera, and of course I rush down to the lakeside to take pixtures--and of course the day is so cloudy that the volcanos, although visible, look like ghosts. So I take some ghostly pictures and resolve to go out before breakfast on Friday. But at 6 a.m. the volcanos aren't really any more distinct (of course the day after my arrival they were strikingly distinct), so I take more ghostly photos. Later on, after breakfast and shower, I hire a tuk tuk to take me to Sololá for the market instead of taking the bus because there's a mirador on the way where I ask him to stop. Well, I will try again tomorrow morning, but I fear my best photos of the lake are going to be film pictures from one of my previous trips.

In any event, Sololá is an indígena town, state capitol in fact, located on a cliff above Panajachel, about 20 minutes away. Both sexes were a traje típico of many colors on a dark blue or black background; the men wear a short wrap-around skirt of brown and white wool over their pants. I've bought some of my favorite weavings there, in a building at the Friday market, most of which is out of doors, but I've also been robbed twice there over the years, so I take precautions--my wallet stays home, money for the bus goes in a little zipper case, money for the tuk tuk goes in the secret pocket of my travel pants, and money for a weaving or two goes in my waist pouch.

The tuk tuk leaves me on the edge of the market, where there isn't a total crush, a good place to get started taking pictures, which is always a challenge in a situation where people are constantly moving and in close proximity. I slowly move through the market in the direction of the parque central, as the main plaza in a Guatemalan city is always called, and as I am happily shooting away there a señora approaches me with an assortment of weavings over her arm. One of them I am tempted to consider--I want to replace a huipil on the wall of my livingroom that I no longer like--although I had wanted to check out what was in the building, so I am in a state of doubt as a second woman appears with an absolutely knock-your-socks-off weaving in just the color I want (burnt orange) over her arm (a huipil in which the center hole has been filled in with cloth and embroidery and long tassels have been added at the corners). This is so gorgeous that it is absolutely impossible to resist, so we get down to the business of bargaining; I manage to get her down from 500 quetzales to 410 (US$55, $4 more than I have ever paid before), think afterwards that I could probably have gotten her down further if I had started to walk away, but that I wasn't capable of doing.

Having made the purchase, my problem becomes that two or three women insist on following me and plying me with their weavings, refusing to believe my insistence that I'm not going to buy any more. Eventually they give up and leave, I push my way into the building because a friend has asked me to buy a weaving for her new apartment (she covets the huipil over the sideboard in my diningroom, but no way am I going to part with that), and after walking past the meat, always difficult for me, I find the section with the weavings, but nothing my friend would like for her wall. At this point I am beat from all the intensity, leave the building by a different exit, find myself at the edge of the market, see an ice cream place, and treat myself to a vasito de chocochip to give myself energy to stay a little longer, before climbing onto a chicken bus (so-called for their occasional feathery passengers) to go back to Pana.

Tomorrow I move on to Chichicastenango, site of a famous tourist market on Sunday that many years ago I stopped going to because the tourist presence was too overwhelming. This time I'm going because it's on the way to Nebaj, about which more when I get there. I will minimize the problem by arriving Saturday afternoon; I can watch the preparations, which is fun to do, and then arrive at and leave the market before the tourist vans arrive.

(An Internet album of photos I took of San Cristóbal is at album.) Here I am in Chiapas for the first time in eight years, on my way to Guatemala, having flown on April 7 from Mexico City to Tuxtla Gutiérrez and shared a taxi the rest of the way. Like Guanajuato, San Cristóbal is a tourism-oriented colonial city, but it has a totally different feel. On the one hand, it's larger (population about 250,000, as opposed to 150,000) and brisker (everyone seems to be in a rush), built on a grid with traffic lights (which are unheard of in Guanajuato, where the streets wind and rarely intersect). On the other hand, there's a marked indígena presence, with the various groups from the surrounding villages (speaking various languages other than Spanish) coming to town to sell their artesanía to the tourists, in the churchyard of the Iglesia Santo Domingo and in the zócalo, and selling to and buying from each other in the large, busy market.

San Cristóbal is centered on a square, well-landscaped plaza with a Victorian-looking kiosk in the center, well populated with muchachos selling newspapers and shining shoes. On the north side is the Cathedral, painted mustard color with red borders and white flowers, facing to the west a large open space punctuated by a large cross. The first street to the west has for several blocks been made into a pedestrian corridor since my last visit, tourist-oriented restaurants and shops alternating with everyday stores. Several blocks to the north, the Iglesia Santo Domingo is a major presence with its spacious churchyard thickly populated with indígenas selling artesanía, the municipal market a little further north and east.

Santo Domingo Church deserves its own paragraph, looming above a steep stairway with its superbaroque facade, inside the walls of both sides of the center nave and the chapel to the right one baroque gold altarpiece after another without interruption. The main altar, in austere neoclassical style, looks oddly out of place. There is an enormous space around Santo Domingo and between it and the smaller Church of La Caridad further south, where indígenas have sold artesanía as long as I've traveled here but whose density has now reached saturation. The ex-convent attached to Santo Domingo is the site of Sna Jolobil, a weavers' cooperative founded by an American anthropologist who wanted to encourage native weavers to revive their traditional patterns and dyes, where the weavings are breathtakingly exquisite and the prices are breathtakingly high.

I divide my time between museums, buying provisions (I eat two meals a day in my room, buy fruit at the market and fabulous cinnamon buns and empanadas of curried veggies at a gringo-oriented bakery), looking at artesanía, and wandering around taking (over 200) pictures, with occasional stops for a lemonade or hot chocolate. I do two day trips to indígena villages.

Chiapas being one of those places where amber is found, I go to the Amber Museum and marvel at the delicate sculptures carved out of (not large) chunks of amber--people and animals, even a marimba. (At the church to which the museum is attached, in a former convent, by a side altar with an enormous quantity of artificial flowers there is a large bowl of water on a stand, and a number of indígenas who were kneeling on the floor in front of the altar rub the water on all exposed parts of their bodies and their children's bodies.) The private Museum of Regional Dress Sergio Castro, which requires an appointment, is a good orientation to the variations (for everyday, for fiestas, for weddings) of traje típico of the various indígena groups throughout the state. More along those lines is the Museum of Popular Cultures.

Thursday being market day in Tenejapa, 30 kilometers away, I want to go there, and the morning after my arrival I inquire of the guide rounding up tourists by the Cathedral to go to Chamula if he'll be going to Tenejapa on Thursday. As usual, it depends on a few other people being interested, which as it happens on Thursday, there aren't, besides which, when I learn that the tour would cost 220 pesos (my transportation cost 40) my interest declines, so I set off to find the colectivo that goes to Tenejapa. (A colectivo is simply a taxi that fills up with passengers.) Tenejapa's plaza is crowded with people, and as I wander around I start to see here and there men who must be members of the cofradía, wearing their traje of red-and-white hand-woven wool shorts under a black wool tunic, with an ordinary long-sleeved shirt. Some have long necklaces with what look like large coins but are really religious medals. So I scurry around chasing them, taking a lot of pictures from the back, noticing on the way that most of the women have forsaken their gorgeous red-and-white huipil, woven on the backstrap loom, and are wearing turtlenecks instead, which is logical in that they would be both cheaper and warmer in the chill of the highlands. From the plaza after a while I walk down to the market, simply a long street lined with improvised puestos, and try shooting pictures in a confined space with people constantly moving. After an hour or so, having checked out the church, I take a colectivo back to San Cristóbal.

The following day I go to Na Bolom, a more-or-less obligatory stop for visitors to San Cristóbal, though I must confess that my interest in the inhabitants of the Lacandon Jungle is minimal, I guess because their traje típico is so austere. Na Bolom was the name given to their huge house in a former seminary by the late Frans Blom, an archeologist, and Trudy, his photographer wife. For some reason the lacandones became their special interest and special project, so the museum--where I arrived for a tour, but since I was the only person interested, the tour wasn't--is replete with photos and artifacts of the lacandones, of whom Sergio Castro of the private museum has told me there are only 200 left, with a major problem of inbreeding.

I am here until Monday the 14th, really a day longer than I need, because my itinerary is based on market days, and Sunday is market day in San Juan Chamula, an indígena village only 10 kilometers away--and the source of large numbers of indígenas living in shantytowns around San Cristóbal who have been expelled from Chamula for converting to protestantism. I take a tour that goes to Chamula and the nearby village of Zinacantán. In Chamula the main attraction is the church, in which a syncretic version of Catholicism is practiced and the only sacrament a priest is permitted to perform is baptism, which happens once a month. The church has no pews, there are pine needles on the floor and groups of people placing candles of different sizes and colors on the floor, with chickens, eggs, and soda bottles in evidence, all used for healing purposes. Glass cases with figures of saints line the walls. The market area is to one side of the large central plaza, and on another side are cement benches where the mayordomos are in evidence, with their black wool tunics over white pants and shirt, hats with multicolored ribbons cascading from the center of the top. Picture-taking is strictly prohibited of these officials and of anything inside the church. The normal traje for Chamula is blue blouses and black wool skirts for the women, white or black wool tunics over Western clothes for the men. (Our guide's take on the question of the expulsion of Protestants is that it is the fault of the Morman and Jehovah's Witness missionaries who are intruding on the native culture.)

Chamula is an agricultural village; Zinacantán, where we go next, produces flowers for export and is more prosperous. The curious thing about its traje típico is that when I was here eight years ago it was bright pink, but it has undergone a transformation and is now blue and purple, the women wearing a long skirt and triangular poncho and the men wearing a similar poncho. Here the church has the usual pews and the usual service. Here we are permitted to visit a family, the hope being that we will buy some of the weavings they have produced, for which purpose we are allowed to take pictures of a young woman weaving. Personally, I prefer Guatemalan weaving, so I put off my purchases for later in my trip.

Tommorrow morning I get on a tour agency's van and cross the border to Guatemala, getting off in Panajachel on Lake Atitlán. I have five destinations in Guatemala, with stays ranging from a day to a week, then spend four nights in Mexico City.