Blogs from Lago de Atitlán, Western Highlands, Guatemala, Central America Caribbean - page 20

This weekend was a 2 day excursion to Lago de Atitlan (Lake Atitlan), which is about 2 hours from Antigua. about the lake: the massive Los Chocoyos erruption of 85,000 years ago, which blew volcanic ash as far as Florida and Panama, caused a quantity of magma to expel from below the earths crust and the surface terrain to collapse, forming a huge roughly circular hollow that sooned filled with water - the Lago de Atitlan. Smaller volcanoes rose out of the lake´s southern waters thousands of years later and now surround the lake. The dramatic volcano vistas are what make Atitlan what it is today. (The lake is 300m deep, surface area 128 sq km). - compliments of Lonely Planet. We spend 2 days visiting the Lake and some of the surrounding Mayan villages.... read more

The day after visiting Santiago Atitlan I continued my mental rest this time with some physical exercise which required little thought - tackling San Pedro Volcän. At 3020m high this would be probably the highest altitude I have climbed to, although starting at just under 2000m made the task seem a lot easier. A hefty entry fee of Q100 (about US$13, less for locals) was necessary with a rather unusual arrangement of being the same price with or without a guide - this basically being to encourage employment, by subsidising this, to strongly encourage people to take a guide (also for security reasons). However I prefer walking at my own pace, alone so I can take in the surroundings better, discussing things later with others. This bemused the guys in the ticket office and they keep ... read more

I finished my last article a little puzzled about the attitude of many a traveller with some more thought, and help from a book, I have come up with a way to shed a bit of light of this. A few defintions and terms are necessary first. I´m going to borrow the terms from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle maintenance. A simplistic breaking down of human understanding gives two types: Classical and Romantic. Classical being ´primarily one of underlying form´, this basically means seeing things as part of structure where logic rules and things are restricted. And with Romantic being ´primarily in terms of apperance´ which is a little more self-explanatory. Both schools of thought suffer from similar problems and this can be seen when pretentiousness is considered. Classical Pretentiousness to the other school: Here ... read more

Guatemalan history and the recent, lengthy, civil war is in large a story of perscution, racism, injustice and war. Many of it´s fellow Central American countries have suffered from the same fate. Following on from a previous point, this this is the reason why some indigenous people (mostly men) don´t wear the traditional dress, to avoid persecution. It´s typical in Guatemalan society for the men to do the work outside of the home environment and ,as a result, they put themselves in the front line, identifying themselves as supporters of the rebels forces from the civil war (mostly indigenous people though this was a frequent misidentification). My language school owner was one, he sees himself as weak for conforming, compromising with this. Using the same counter argument as used in the Zapatistas stuff, Do you stand ... read more

Admittably I've plopped this in my current location bit although much of this relates to Chiapas, Mexico. A book I'm reading at the moment has captured my political, philosphical and moral imagination and I feel I need to write about it here. The Zaptistatas are named after Emiliana Zapata, a prominient figure in the 1910 revolution in bringing rights to indigenous people after hundreds of years of abuse. This period was many a subject of a Diego Riviera Mural (see Mexico City bit). He suceeded in creating some land reforms, which have since been recinded in order to allow NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) to take place and basically allow rich companies to kick indigenous people off their land (again) and force them in to confirming with the Capatilist system (basically to live in poverty ... read more