My friend Carlos, who I usually stay with, had already rented his room to someone else for three weeks in April.  So I had to go looking for a place to stay for the rest of my time here.

Living in underdeveloped countries has its challenges, but it isn’t always choking diesel exhaust, doing without, and dysentery.  Witness my new digs.

I found a very nice private room and bath on the roof top of a house owned by a woman named Hilda.  If ever the need arises, you can find her on AirBnB.  This is right in Antigua, on the south end, so it’s a little more expensive than living in Santa Ana, but not by much.  Here is the front of the house, Number 10, right next to the Urban Dance School.  And below is the street it’s on.

This is the little patio area outside my bedroom door, which you can see on the left side of the photo.  Oh, and did I mention it’s a roof top room?  Below are some  photos showing the view in several directions.

Not bad, huh? 🙂

I don’t see anything in this last group that warrants specific comment.  Like any “somewhat serious” photographer, I take lots of shots, often the same shots, in hopes a getting a few good ones that seem interesting.  Then it’s playtime in editing.

On a completely unrelated topic to Tikal, in the last three or four days there’s been a lot of seismic activity in Guate and around Central America.  Nothing big, like 4 something on the Richter, and nothing of extended duration.  As a strictly amateur geologist, (incredible understatement), 🙂  No wait, would that be an overstatement?  ??  Whatever.  Now I’ve really thrown my thought off.  As an amateur blah, blah, blah, it makes me wonder what, if any, impact that has on the volcano.  If any of this sounds worrisome it’s not.  This is completely normal stuff down here.  So, believe me when I say;

I am well and hope you all are too.  Peace to your day.

I still had a guided tour that I had already paid for but not used.  So after a great breakfast and some reading, oh, and dog soaking, I had the pleasure of entering the park once more with Andres.  This time my touring companions were a father and son from Connecticut, (the son was on spring break from UConn), and two couples from Canada that were traveling together.  Unfortunately for them, they looked like, and dressed like, they didn’t know what they were in for. Twice during the tour they stopped to rest and waited for us to double back for them.  But I digress.

Part of what Andres covered on the tour I had heard but it didn’t matter.  Ultimately we entered an area of the park that I hadn’t yet been in.  The Plaza of the Seven Temples.

Here are a description and a little model of it.  It seems to me that it was a key “neighborhood” of the area and a community gathering spot.

Right near the Seven Temples, but not part of it, is Temple 9.  In the previous post was photo from on top of Temple 9 looking over at Temple 4.  This wasn’t as long a climb as Temple 4, only about 150 steps or so, but steeper.

Here are a few more shots from on top.  Below are two looking straight down the sides.  See the little peeps at the top of the second one?

So we had a little internetus interuptus in Santa Ana.  In hindsight I should have just taken my laptop with me into Antigua, but I kept expecting it to come back “at anytime”.  But we’re back now.

I have a few more photos of Tikal that I haven’t used.  I’ll go through and edit and load those and have them up a little later.

It’s called the Sunrise Tour and it was the reason I rolled out of bed at 3:30 AM for the second morning in a row.  My companions for this walk in the park in the dark were Andres, our Tour Guide, and Surya, a young woman from Vancouver, BC.

My first glimpse of Surya was the previous day as she was piling into the van at the airport that would take us to the Tikal Inn.  She had on a cap from an animal rights organization which on the front declared, Animals are animals, not food.  On the back of the cap was stitched, I don’t eat animals.  We didn’t speak.  She just curled up on one of the seats and went to sleep.  The next time I saw her was when we were waiting in the darkened lobby for our guide to come.  This post isn’t really intended to be about Surya, but the truth is she proved to be an interesting part of this little sojourn.  As we were exchanging chit chat in the lobby she told me she made her living teaching breathing, so there ya go. 🙂  I didn’t ask if there was a University of Breathing in Vancouver.

Andres, our tour guide, was also an interesting character.  He speaks four languages, two of which are Mayan Dialects.  His English was not great, but it was better than my Spanish, and good enough so he could work as a tour guide in the park for people who speak English and Canadian.

So off we went in the dark.  Full disclosure, both Andres and Surya had small flashlights, so we weren’t walking along in complete darkness.  Even so, when you’re in the dark, senses are on full alert.  Andres continually scanned the jungle with his flashlight looking for eyes.  I walked along in silence listening to Surya query Andres about the history of UFOs at Tikal and what the Mayans believed about astrology.  Told ya.  Even in the dark I could tell Andres didn’t quite know what to make of young Surya.

We made our way straight to the Grand Plaza where there were a few other small groups of people that were there for the same reason as us.  Andres had a laser pointer which was cool ’cause he was able to point at the exact things he was telling us about.  He was truly a wealth of information about the temples, the acropolis structures, Mayan history, tombs, human sacrifice, masks, mass grave discoveries, wild life, you name it.  I was really impressed with Andres.  Surya wanted to know why he raised chickens just to eat them.  I don’t mean to sound as critical as I know I do, because Surya really was a very likable young woman.  While we were learning all about Tikal I was completely entertained by her presence.

Ultimately our goal was to make it to, and up on to, Temple 4 to watch the sunrise.  As it turned out we didn’t get to see a peeking sun sunrise because it was cloudy and foggy.  But it didn’t matter.  It was well worth the trip anyway.  This seems like a good place to insert a note about access.  The physical access that the public has to the ruins is surprising to me.  But great from purely a selfish standpoint.  But human nature being what it is, it’s also concerning.  By comparison, over at Tuluum in the Yucatan, people are confined strictly to walking paths with no actual touch access to the ruins.  That said, at Tikal, you can’t just climb up on the temples.  The temples where access is granted to upper levels is accomplished by staircase.  Temple 4, our perch for the sunrise, has a staircase  of I’d say a couple of hundred steps, that meanders back and forth up the side.  Eventually you can walk out onto the front of the temple.  To your left, steps rising toward the top of the temple.  To your right, a serious fall that would give you the honor of bouncing down the side of a temple.

There were twenty or so other people, spread out on different steps, barely visible in the dark.  It was about thirty minutes to sunrise.  To my great delight it was completely silent save for the sounds of nature.  I didn’t hear so much as a whisper the entire time we were up there.  Here is my first camera shot as the light gradually came up.

The closest temple in all of these shots is Temple 3.  Going back and to the left are Temples 1 and 2.  They face each other on the Grand Plaza, Temple 1 otherwise known as the Temple of the Grand Jaguar.

Here are two more shots that are zoomed and, as you can see, gradually getting lighter.  Even without the sun it was a spectacular experience.  

This photo I took later on in the day, from up on Temple 9, to show you where I was in the morning.  It is zoomed all the way ’cause I was hoping you could see the little tiny people up there.  They are just above where the color of the temple transitions from light to darker.  In reality this temple is more than a half a mile away from where I’m standing.

Later, when we came down, Andres took us around the front of the temple to an area that was closed off.  This is still well above the actual base of the temple and shows some restoration and preservation work.  In the previous photo you can just see that little spec of tarp in the lower right.  Below is the “entrance” to a tunnel that is being excavated.  It goes in and then up into the temple.  About sixty meters have been excavated so far.

As we were walking back to the hotel, right near the checkpoint, I managed to catch this little guy scurrying around.  This is a Coatimundis, (co tees, for short), a member of the raccoon family.  They are fast, very shy, and don’t seem to be near as ill tempered as the raccoons we know.

Okay, below I’ve inserted the links to four videos.  I have no idea if any of you will be able to view them.  I took them with my iPhone and can view them on my Mac seamlessly.  I’m almost positive that won’t be universally true.  I sent one of the videos to my kids using Message.  Three of them have iPhones and could view it easily.  My son-in-law Adam, who normally is a pretty smart guy, has an Android phone.  An Android phone.  He told me he could hear the audio but not view the video, so I don’t know.  An Android phone.  I kid of course.  I have a great son-in-law but, ……………., an Android phone. 🙂  I can tell you if it helps that the files are .mov and in mp4 format.  If you point at the link and an extended link pops out, click on that.  If it opens to a video screen but there’s just a tiny image in the center, click on that.  Good luck to us all.

I’m obviously a complete newbie in using the video capabilities of my phone.  I panned the same area four different times just trying to learn about the light and the effects of zooming on the results.  To me the best thing about them is they give the sense of how peaceful it was.  By the way, I could hear a howler way off in the distance but it didn’t pick up on the audio.

IMG_1172

IMG_1173

IMG_1176

IMG_1178

Oh, and BTW 2, I am well and hope you all are too.  Thanks for being out there.

This strikes me as sort of an odd “where to begin”, but so be it.  Almost immediately upon coming into this area I began to have memories of Viet Nam walking around in my head.  I want to be quick to add, (so my sister doesn’t freak out), it wasn’t a bad thing. 🙂  There were no horrific flash backs, just lots of old visuals of muckin’ about in the bush.  In the end, it was another comforting reminder that I am able to walk right up to that line without being pushed over it.  It’s always been fascinating to me how distant it seems, but at times, so very near.  Did I just write something that’s understandable?  I’m not sure.  But I thought it would be an interesting thing to share.  The mountains of northern Guatemala are just like the central highlands of Viet Nam.  A blending of vegetation that’s a mixture of forest and jungle.  Beautiful and intimidating at the same time.  Oh, and did I mention hot and humid?  ‘Nuff about that.

Let’s restart with the Howler Monkeys shall we?  These guys are an interesting lot.  And I’m starting with them because I know I’ll refer to them again.

There are signs around the park reminding visitors that they like to try to defecate on people.  The benign version is, they are just showing their presence, but I like to think there’s a little distain in there for us humans.  A reminder they can have the upper hand so to speak at times.  Glancing around on the ground is evidence that you don’t want to be caught under their ploppage.  They’re called Howler Monkeys because they howl and growl.  Think of the nature things about the big African cats you’ve seen on TV.  The sound they make when they roar and grunt.  It’s like that, only from a smaller body and chest cavity, so it’s not as deep and guttural.  But still oddly similar.  I can tell you this; they can, and do, make a racket. And of course there’s the poop.  There are also Spider Monkeys in the park, but when I tried to shoot pictures of them, you couldn’t even tell what it was.  They’re small, stay high in the canopy, and never seem to stop moving.

I was supposed to go on a tour with a guide on the first morning.  But something happened and the guide couldn’t make it.  I was told I could do it in the afternoon, or tomorrow morning, so I went wanderin’ off to the checkpoint and into the park on my own.  See what I did there?

In what serves as a small market and visitor center is this scale model map of the area.  The ruins are quite spread out, and and some still very encroached by jungle.  The area of the ruins, which was this Mayan population center, is a little over six square miles and contains about 3000 different structures.  The greater Tikal National Park and Preserve is about 220 square miles.  Most of the walking is up or down.  Some of the main trails are very “finished”, but many that branch off to smaller ruin sites are narrow and rugged.  That little red temple model, in almost the exact center of this photo, is Temple 4.  I’ll be getting back to that one in another post.

This inviting little guy was in the very first ruin group I hiked to.  Close inspection revealed there were footprints going in, but none coming out.  Hmmm.  C’mon, I’m messing with ya.  Once I got into the dark, the tunnel turned about forty five degrees to the right and there literally was a light at the end of the tunnel. 🙂  The tunnel was about 25 meters long and came out the back of the structure.

Most of the larger structures in the park are either temples or what they call acropolis areas.  These would be residential areas where, for lack of a better term, the movers and shakers lived.  Political leaders, people of wealth, family members of the chiefs, etc.  The normal people living throughout the area lived in wood structures with thatched roofs.  At it’s height, it’s estimated that about ninety to one hundred thousand people lived here from 800 BC to about 900 AD.

I made my way to what is essentially the jewel of Tikal, The Grand Plaza.  From the park entrance it’s a twenty five minute hike, all uphill.  The Plaza, undoubtedly the center of this Mayan population group, has temples on each end with acropolis areas on both of the other sides.  This is the temple of the Grand Jaguar.  Jaguars were revered by the Mayans.  Did I mention there are jaguars in the park?  If you ask almost any local they’ll tell you they have seen them, even in the daytime.  I had no such luck.  Below are two photos of the more prominent of the two acropolis sides on the Grand Plaza.

The thatched covering to the far right of the first photo is over this mask that was discovered underneath the acropolis and excavated.  The round stones in the photos are the alters where blood sacrifices were done.  They were, and can be found, all around Tikal.  Some are original excavated altars and some are replicas.  I spent a lot of time researching the history of human sacrifice practiced by the Mayans.  In the end, I’ve chosen not to write about it.  It’s a macabre rabbit hole you can do on your own if you want.  Both written and archeological records suggest that at some point the Mayans stopped sacrificing humans and switched to animal sacrifice.  The reasons for this are only a matter of speculation.  Here are some other photos from around the Grand Plaza.

In this first one I’m standing at the base of the Temple of the Grand Jaguar looking straight up the steps.

It was early afternoon and I was hungry and feeling the effects of the heat and humidity, as well as getting up at 3:30 in the morning.  So I made my way back down to the Tikal Inn for some lunch, some dog soaking, and a nap.  Tomorrow was going to be another 3:30 wake up.  That little story will be next.

It would prove to be a long couple of days but very worth it.  Two days that started at 3:30 AM.  The first to get to the airport for a morning flight to Flores, the closest airport to Tikal.  It’s a pretty expensive little ride for only thirty five minutes, but the alternative is a six hour bus ride.  I’m curious enough to maybe try the bus ride on a future trip.  I see myself going back to Tikal.

I have tons of pictures and it’s going to take me awhile to sort through and edit them.  I think I’ll pick out some that I will accompany with some writing, and put up a bunch more for you to just look at without lots, in any, comment.  But first, where I stayed.

The Tikal Inn is billed as an “ecology resort”.  That’s code for the electricity is only on in the rooms from six to nine thirty in the evening.  I know that probably sounds awful to a lot of people but it really isn’t all that bad.  The power is always on in the lodge but I had no need for it.  I have a portable charger that Adam loaned to me for this trip and The Holy Land trip.  It’s proven to be worth it’s weight in gold.  I think a lot of Americans have a unique set of expectations about what good accommodations are.  The only other guests were a couple of young families traveling together that I think were German, and three blonds from Latvia who seemed put out when I asked them if they were Norwegian.  Didn’t matter, they mostly ignored everyone.

The pool was actually the nicest part of the grounds.  Although I want to be sure to add that there were four young guys doing all of the food and serving, and those guys could cook.  The food was all native and outstanding.  I didn’t really use the pool, but took several opportunities to sit and read and “soak my dogs”.  That made my feet very happy.   Above is the heart of the water system and below is a very impressive tree.  You can’t really tell from the picture, but at it’s thickest point, it was about five to six feet in diameter.

I’m always a little fascinated by ideas that for whatever reason never came to fruition.  This “idea” was on the grounds right adjacent to the lodge.  I can only imagine what it was going to be and why it only made it part of the way there.

Can’t wait to show you the good part of the trip.                                           Peace to you all.

“Now why don’t he write?”

Once again quoting my favorite line from Dances with Wolves.  And if you don’t remember it, it was spoken to a wolf.

The title of this post is meant to be indicative of, …. what?  My state of mind?  Nah.  It’s more like an expression of complete relaxation.  I have slowed to the pace of, the pace of, me in Guatemala.  Daily walkabouts, going to mass in churches that were around when the Conquistadors either went home or became part of the landscape.  Catching up on Netflix.  Now that’s interesting to me.  It’s something that I don’t quite seem to get to at home.  Reading.  I make time for that, always.  When I’m at home and in conversations about how I spend my retirement time, one of the things I always seem to say is, I’m as busy as I want to be.  Down here, I’m as not busy as I want to be.  It’s nice, and I appreciate it, and this is probably really boring.  Maybe that’s why the title is appropriate.  Crickets, I hear crickets.

So, I just wanted to share a few photos, and write a little something ’cause it seemed overdue.

As I move through my world down here, the contrasts really seem to register with my eyes in a way that isn’t the same anywhere else.  There’s the tiny house in Santa Inez where my Guatemalan daughter Lourdes grew up.  Santa Inez is a poor little spot along the road between Guatemala City and Antigua.  To a coffee shop that is as modern and nicely appointed as any anywhere.

There’s beautiful foliage growing out of the tops of walls, and goats grazing by the side of the road in spot I walk past all the time.  The old churches are all a story unto themselves, and the restorative and preservation work is ongoing.  Thankfully.

I know I promised not to repeat a lot of Procession stuff, but I took this photo because it also showed something else.  It’s been really hot and windy down here and fires are burning in the hills and up on the mountainsides all around Antigua, and probably other areas of Guatemala.  I remember similar fire scenes all around Lake Atitlan last year when I was up there.  Guatemala is in the last couple of months of the dry season and there’s plenty of fuel.

Last year I wrote a little about, and photographed, one of my favorite quiet spots to read and write.  It’s a cultural and training center in Antigua that has quiet courtyards, a nice little cafe, good wifi, and shady spots to sit.  The Central Park is a beautiful spot, but it’s also an endless stream of people trying to sell you stuff.

This year, on my first stop at the cultural center, I came upon this little scene, and it sparked a memory of a lesson learned long ago.  For reasons I don’t know, a tree had been removed and these two gents were pounding the stump into submission with axes.  As you can see from the size of the stump, no small task.  Now some of you might be looking at this and thinking, why wouldn’t they?……., or, how come they don’t?…….., what, use machines?  Logical.  Maybe.

To the lesson learned part.  When I first started coming down here I spent almost all of my time, with my friend Greg, doing manual labor in a mountain project site called Nueva Esperanza.  At it’s height, the Guatemalan construction crew was about forty five guys.  We built retaining walls, built forms and poured concrete, dug trenches and laid PVC, you get the picture.  Stay with me now, ’cause it’s the trenches.  We had a backhoe.  But we dug most of the trenches with picks and shovels.  One day, I asked my friend Jeff Barnes who was the construction foreman, in what could only be described as gringo logic meets cultural naivety, why we didn’t use the backhoe much.  His answer was probably my first lesson in how narrow our perspective and priorities can be as “outsiders”.

In the early days of New Hope, (Nueva Esperanza), the biggest impact this undertaking had on the surrounding communities was the employment of these forty five men.  Backhoes, while more efficient, resulted in less man hours to complete a task.  In America, we value that efficiency.  In Guatemala, the ripple effect into the local economy of the man hours of work provided to these men, (sorry, there were no women hours going on then), was the priority.  Less backhoe equals more pay to the construction crew.  The donations to the organization bought that backhoe.  But more importantly, those donations fueled a different kind of priority.  Payroll.

Now do I know that that’s what’s going on with our two stump pounders, I don’t.  But watching them took me back to a time, and a new kind of thinking, that I thought was worth sharing.

On Tuesday I’m going up to Tikal, an important historical Mayan site.  I won’t be bringing my laptop on this run through the jungle, but look for posts toward the end of the week about my time there.  Before the end of the month I’m also going to have an opportunity to go up to New Hope for the first time in about ten years.  I’ve seen pictures, but being there again, I can only imagine at this point what memories and deja vu will spring from that.

I see that Minnesota is heading for the 50s at the end of the week.  I’m still not coming back until the end of April. 🙂

With apologies to a previous post in which I promised to try to write about and photograph interesting things, it’s a rhetorical question laced with a little self indulgent mirth.  It makes me feel a little pretentious, but that’s my own silly stuff.  Speaking of which, this is, I think, my third ever selfie.  It’s an epidemic. 🙂

Last Friday part of my “family” in Guatemala picked me up at the airport.  Sami, my youngest Guatemalan grand daughter, was along ’cause she had a doc appointment.  As we were chatting away and catching up, I turned to Sami, who at the tender age of ten has a serious case of bilingual, and asked her if there was a Spanish phrase for Holy Land.  She told me she didn’t know and wasn’t familiar with the words Holy Land.  I turned to Lourdes, whose English is like my Spanish and said, Viajo a la tierra de Jesucristo.  For you Spanish speakers, correctly it would be viajé, with the little accent sign over the e, indicating past tense, traveled to the land of Jesus Christ.  Renato then chimed in with, Israel, pronouncing it correctly, Is-ry-el, not the way we Americans say it, Is-real.  Then he introduced me to a new phrase, La Tierra Prometida, The Promised Land.  With Spanish and English bouncing around in the car, I told them about my trip.

Like probably most of my fellow pilgrims, thoughts since coming back have been filled with visual recollections, conversations, and memories of the Spiritual, the historical, and the archeological.  A trip to the Holy Land is blessedly long in it’s linger.  I keep replaying in my head the things I’ve told people about my trip since returning.  The last one before coming down to Guate was with my kids, over dinner, the night before I left, ….. again.

In all of that, one word keeps percolating to the surface of my thoughts and recollections; privilege.

It’s a privilege to be able to travel anywhere because it takes two things many people do not have; the health and physical capability to do it, and resources.  But I have slowly come to a realization that resides in both my head and my heart, that the privilege to walk in La Tierra de Jesucristo, the land where Jesus “lived, and moved, and had his being”, is a privilege with it’s own bar.  And it will tone every conversation I have about being there.

Meanwhile, here in Guatemala, I have been enjoying being motionless for the first time in awhile.  While I’m down here I walk almost everywhere, with the occasional “chicken bus” ride.  Chicken bus is by no means derogatory, but intended to be descriptive in a way people seem to understand.  In truth, I love riding on these rolling containers of chaos.  But my preferred method is always walking.  Back to being relatively motionless.  My brief time at home was filled with errands, responsibilities at the hospital, a fund raiser, chauffeuring my Spiritual Director who has Parkinson’s, of course laundry and repacking, coffee with friends, kissing the kids, anyway, it was anything but motionless and relaxing.

Now slowly, methodically, jet lag is leaving me, sleep is returning, breathing is becoming relaxed and even, and my love for, and the pace of Guatemala, is soaking it’s way back into my whole being.  Which brings me to a familiar spot.

I am well, (understatement), and hope you all are too.  Now, aren’t you glad I didn’t mention the weather in any of that? 🙂

Yesterday, on my first morning back, jet lagged but happy, I went to have my usual Saturday morning breakfast with one of my Cursillo groups.  One of my groupies asked, what was the most memorable part?  I knew he was asking about a place, but a place was not my answer.  Without hesitation I said, the community piece.

I had never traveled in a group before on an organized tour.  And being a solitary wanderer in all of my trips since starting this blog site, I would be living the polar opposite of that.  I can honestly say I spent a lot of time trying to mentally prepare myself to accept whatever pace was given, knowing when to remind myself that it’s not about me, and embracing the idiosyncratic notions that all groups probably have.

I mentioned in early posts that there were five couples in this group that were close friends to me, and to each other.  That was about twenty five percent of the group.  In addition, most of the group was from the same parish community because their Pastor, Fr. Tom Krenik, was the “leader” of the pilgrimage.  That’s him pictured celebrating Mass in my previous post.  I put “leader” in quotation marks because, in my view, to his great credit, he traveled with us like a friend and fellow pilgrim, and not like a tour leader.  In all of that there was certainly the potential for cliquey behavior, but there was none that I felt or witnessed.  I can say sincerely that there wasn’t a single thing about this experience that fell short of my hopes.  The group seemed to move together smoothly, with people helping others when it was needed.  And most made a concerted effort to engage the people in the group that they did not know ahead of time.  It was not simply a positive experience.  It was pure blessing.  I was proud to be part of the way this group became community.  It’s what happens when nice people do stuff together. 🙂

So that’s it.  That closes this chapter.  In a matter of days I will be heading to Guatemala for a couple of months.  I will be writing again fairly soon.  For my regulars, I promise that I won’t regale you with all the same stuff I wrote about last winter while in Guate.  I’m going to be selective.  For any new readers, (I know there are some out there), if you want to get some of the flavor of Semana Santa, and see the spectacle of the processions, scroll back through the pages on my site until you get into the stuff from Guatemala last year.  The beginning will be posts dated toward the end of January 2018, and they will lead up to the Easter Season.  And if you’re a real gluten for punishment, you can go all the way back to the beginning and read about my camping adventures through the first two years of my retirement.  I’ve been thinking about doing that myself someday.

Lastly, as always, I so appreciate you being out there and sharing this with me.  What started out to be a simple way for my kids to follow my traveling adventures and see all my pictures, morphed into something I never expected.  The satisfaction I get from trying to write stuff I think will be interesting to people, and trying to take photos that will also be interesting to folks, has been an unanticipated blessing.  And the affirmation I get from you is beyond priceless to me.  Thank you.