Cursed in the Highlands

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After a hasty escape from the cold, but very admirable streets of San Cristobal, we found ourselves in Quetzaltenango, the second biggest city in Guatemala (only 200,000...Guatemala City has 3 million!) We got off the bus, only to be sheparded into a hotel by the two 60-year-old Slovenians that rode in with us. We spent the first day in Chichicastenango (Guatemala loves their 'castenangos') which is one of the world's most famous markets. For some reason we decided to go at 5:30am, hey why not have another ridiculously early morning. It was really an experience.

Chichi was a labyrinth of stalls, with bright handwoven Mayan tapestries walling you in on either side. At some points there were walls and walls of wooden masks, others there were stalls selling completely random appliance parts and childrens clothes. In the middle, there's a huge church where the steps are adorned with flowers and burning incense, an offering to the Mayan gods. After five hours there, we were exhausted and headed back to hotel, only to encounter the saleswomen Slovenian ladies, which sold us yet again on a volcano climb the following day.

Again, up in the middle of the night, we took a great two hour climb up a volcano to a crater lake guided by a Mayan shaman. On the way, we met a Mayan priest who spoke no Spanish, only Mayan Quiche, but was perhaps the happiest man I've ever seen, in a constant smile, and somehow managing to communicate with us despite the obvious language barrier. At the lake, the Shaman blessed us by putting his hands in the lake then palming the top of our heads. He told us a great Mayan legend of the lake that involved a young girl going in and discovering a city underneath (or at least according to Calum's translations, I clearly had no clue what was going on.) On the way back up, the Shaman, once again putting his oversized machetee to work, cut down some branches, and performed a Mayan blessing with them. 'Blessing' I use as a generous term, it was really him whacking us all over for a minute or two. We joked on the way down that he was probably working over some naive Gringos, and would soon produce a sacred pot which he would explain that in order for us to be granted eternal happiness, we would have to drop our wallets inside.

We returned to the hotel to have a few beer with the old Slovenians, and headed off to the restaurant. Calum was really messed up there, and quickly left. On my way back I found the remnants of Calum's illness, and proceeded to find him tossing and turning in his bed (even paler than his usual Scottish self!) I headed off to the internet, came back for a nap, and that's where things began going downhill for me as well. For the next solid 24 hours, I was mostly in the bathroom, and spent the remaining time feverishly ill, staring at the ceiling in bed. We were constantly visited by the Slovenians who came in producing various pills and concoctions to make us better, it was kinda nice having two moms next door for a while.

It took us a full day to recover, then we took off to Guatemala City, where Calum headed back to Costa Rica, and I began my trek upto Belize in dire need of a hammock and a few coco loco (a full cocunut with rum.)

As for the illness, we narrowed it down to two things. A) it was the beer, the only substance that Calum and I had that the Slovenians didn't. But since we refused to believe that beer could ever bring any harm to us (it was basically against Calum's Scottish heritage), we knew it could only be option b.

b) the Shaman cursed us with the water and the branches, knowing that we were cheap backpackers, and clearly weren't going to tip.

We got cursed by a Mayan shaman in the highlands of Guatemala.

Ian

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