[I had to wait for morning and go looking for a bettersignal before I coud get this up.]
Today was a long day on the bus. Wake up call came at 5:30. We had to have our luggage outside the door by 6 AM. Caravan Tours is very efficient. The bellboys picked up our luggage, and Guillerme, our guide, marked it with our room numbers for each of hotels. All we had to do when we arrived this evening was to pick up our key and wait in the room for the luggage to be delivered.
The drive out of Guatemala City took us through a less prestigious part of town than yesterday’s tour. Guillermo explained that by a law passed to help the nation recover after the 1976 earthquake, no taxes are charged on unfinished houses. Therefore people leave the cement block unplastered and steel reinforcement rods sticking out so they don’t have to pay taxes. It looked a lot like Brazil. The small towns we passed through also looked like Brazil.
The green rolling hills we came through made us think of Minas Gerais.
One of the things I enjoyed was “living fences.” It looks like the fence posts planted every few inches have taken root and branched out. They bear pink flowers if allowed to grow that much. Therre were much better views than this, some obviously cut back year after year so they were topped sith mossy knobs, but the bus doesn't make photo stops, especially not to take pictures of a fence. The rest of my shots were pretty blurred.
Potty stop was a local resort with coffee, lots of flowers and this wildlife.
The highlight of the day was the stop at Quirigua Archaeological Park
Before we arrived we watched a video in the bus called “Cracking the Maya Code” about how they figured out how to read the texts carved on steles like this one that tells their creation story. It was a painstaking task to even determine whether the alphabet was phonetic, syllabic or representing whole words like Chinese. The art of reading had been lost after the civilization collapsed a thousand years ago and almost all books were destroyed by conquistadores who wanted to convert the Maya to Catholicism. Now their myths and folk tales can be read from the three surviving codices and the many, many carvings.
I think this is a palace rather than the ball court where the losers lost their heads—literally—although the steps are the height of bleacher seats.
It was really cool to scramble around over the ancient buildings and imagine discovering them covered with jungle a thousand years after they had been abandoned. (Remember that 200-year drought I mentioned yesterday?) Colors are blurred by the fine rain that was falling most of the time--enough to make the steps slippery and call for caution, but not enough to get wet. It just added tot he middle-of-the-rain-forest atmospher. The weather is very muggy and this is January! I don’t think I would want to be doing too much scrambling in July.
Besides the carved stele, there were other carvings. I think this was supposed to be a jaguar, but I can’t see it myself.
A late lunch was in a cabana on the Rio Doce, 16 km upstream from the Caribbean Sea. Guillermo took our orders ahead of time on the bus because they needed to know how many fish to catch and cook for us. It was sunfish that melted in my mouth. Some Americans were hesitant to eat fish that had the head and tail because they had problems with their food looking at them, but I don’t think anyone was disappointed.
Tonight we are in the lovely Villa Maya in a cabin similar to this one seen from our balcony.
We arrived just at sun down. I’ll have to do some more exploring tomorrow. I was hesitant to walk along the lake in the dark since Guillermo had warned us of crocodiles and jaguars. He assured us jaguars are not aggressive, but all the same, I think I’ll wait for daylight.
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