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Published: March 24th 2008
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Finca Tatin
One nice place to chill out Its a bit of a cliche to harp on about the diversities of a country, but over the last couple of weeks I´ve been steadily amazed at just how many differences Guatemala packs in to one little country- I´ve been in some pretty diverse places, where the language, culture, nature and vibe of one place sometimes having almost nothing in common with the last place I was at.
My first stop since my last blog was at
Finca Tatin . Pretty much in the middle of nowhere up a river from the Caribbean coastal town of Livingston, in the heart of Guatemalan jungle country, Finca Tatin is a damn cool spot to chill out in. Apart from the place itself, there´s nothing else around apart from a few isolated Guatemalan river villages where dugout canoe and paddle power is the most common form of commuting, principally as there are no roads. Finca Tatin is built into the jungle, and to get to my cabana was a few minutes walk through a narrow path in the jungle from the big common area, which was right near the river with lots of comfy sofas and hammocks strung about for chilling out in. They also
rented Kayaks, and me and the english couple I went there with rented some for a few hours and went and explored a nearby area designated as a bio-reserve which was uber-pretty. Everyone staying at Finca Tatin eats dinner together at 7pm as well, which is a nice touch too, and the owners put quite a lot of effort into making nice vegetarian food which is a bit of a rarity in Central America. Curiously enough, the area shot to international notireity just a couple of days after I left, as the Guatemalan police arrested a Mayan (ie. Indigenous) rights activist in the area, so the locals responded by
kidnapping some tourists on the same river I´d been on just a few days earlier! They were demanding the release of their activist.
Although Finca Tatin was very cool, it is something that exists pretty much just for us travellers (there were no Guatemalans staying there, even half the people that worked there were non-Guatemalan) so when I left I decided it was time to go properly off the beaten track for a while in search of Guatemalan small town life where I wouldn´t see any other gringos for a while.
Middle of Nowhere
One of the many middle of nowhere villages I passed through in my search for quiet Guatemalan countryside life After a boat ride to the nearest town, I then proceeded to spend the next 5 hours on 3 different micro-buses (read: vans) to arrive truly in the middle-of-nowhere, at the small town of Fray Bartoleme de las Casas. There was absolutely nothing for me to do there as such, so I just sifted around the dirt/gravel streets for an afternoon, an evening and a morning watching small town Guatemalan life without any gringos to see. The Lonely Planet only listed one hotel and I was the only non-Guatemalan staying there, but I did get to use my spanish by chatting to the old owner, his daughter and her son for a while trying to explain to them what New Zealand was like - they seemed quite interested, and even fielded some oddball questions at me, like do we eat peanuts in New Zealand, etc.
The next morning I went on the craziest bus ride of my life - the roads were so bad (think one-lane poorly-maintained gravel trails through jungle-clad highlands), and 4 hours later we had travelled the 70km I needed (yes I did type that right - we had to stop for a flat tire, a
Small Village Life
This is prob my personal fave of the photos I´ve taken over the last couple of weeks landslip, and of course when we ran into any traffic coming the other way there was a bit of to-ing and fro-ing as to who would reverse until there was an appropriate place to pull over for one vehicle to let the other pass) before it was time for me to get off at an equally nowhere village called El Pajal - where I tranferred to the back of a flat-deck truck with my bags, and a dozen or so Guatemalans transporting large bags of vegetables, a couple of long rolls of corrugated iron, and some piece of machinery that I wasn´t quite able to identify, before it took us another 45 minutes on scarcely better roads to drive the 15km to Lanquin, where I was returned to the beer-swilling international backpacker community.
The village of Lanquin is most famous for being near the pools of
Semuc Champey , which are without doubt the most beautiful thing I´ve seen over the last two months. Semuc Champey is a geological freak - its a series of cascading limestone pools with crystal clear, turquoise water set amongst tropical jungle. I spent the better part of a whole day up there just chilling out
with my Ipod, my book and a few folk from the nearby funky budget accom, called El Retiro. El Retiro was a pretty sweet place, with lots of cabanas built down by a river that you could go tubing in, really good food (ie. a change from the Guatemala staples of tortillas, eggs and beans) in its restaurant and a couple of pretty sweet happy hours from 5pm till 6pm, and 8pm till 9pm every night.
After 3 fun nights at El Retiro, I decided it was once again time to head off the beaten track a little, and headed for the small mounatin village of
Nebaj which is cool for trekking, and also to spend a week at the
Nebaj Language School doing their full programme of 20 hours spanish, a couple of treks and even one Maya cooking lesson! It was a good week and the teacher I had at the school was really good, and I was billeted with a family which was interesting experience too. The Ixil people are really quite short compared with the likes of me (and I not so tall either), my spanish teacher looked fairly typical of people in the area at 4
Ex-Guerilla Guide
Nicolas used to hide out in the mountains and attack government soldiers, now he just guides people like me around the same mountains and half feet tall and wearing a cowboy hat. The whole area of Nebaj was hit hard during the 30 year
Guatemalan civil war (approx mid 1960s to mid 1990s), and a lot of the local people were involved in armed resistance to the US-backed Guatemalan goverment during that time. One of my trekking guides was a guerilla in the mountains in his younger days, and my spanish teacher had helped organise resistance in the towns.
Just as I was about to finish the course and was pondering exactly what I would do next, my mate Jessi showed up almost out of nowhere (for careful readers of my blog, you will remember Jessi from a couple of months ago when I went and chilled out on a beach in Mexico), so having only done smaller one-day treks up to that point, we went and found a guide from a local trekking organisation and the 3 of us plotted out a route that would take us 3 days and 2 nights to complete. The first day was pretty hard work as we climbed from 1900m above sea level to 3300 metres, but our guide was nice and let us take frequent rests!
Chuatuj
Strange landscapes on our 3-day, 2 night trek through the Guatemalan highlands He was a pretty cool guide, both his parents died when he was young as a result of poverty and war in the area. He was full of interesting stories about the war and about Maya traditions as well. Both of our nights were spent in a couple of small Maya villages, eating with local families and doing what we could to learn a few words of the Ixil dialect of the Maya language, which is mainly what people speak in that area of the mountains. One of the villages had no electricity at all, so at night we sat inside having dinner with only the fire in the woodstove in the middle of the lounge floor to give light to the room, and the movement of the flames flickered orange and shadow over the walls and the faces of the family we were eating with, which was kinda cool.
Anyhoo, thats about all for now. I´ve just been in Antigua for Semana Santa (or Holy week, or Easter as we call it) which was very cool, and am now at the San Pedro in Lago De Atitlan but will write more about them another time. Hope all is
El Retiro
A couple of Irish lads chilling on the deck of a Cabana at El Retiro well with all of you, and send me some new soon!
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