Well, I´ve got the next three days planned out: fifteen or so hours of Spanish language class, a textiles tour with Carlos Molina, who runs some kind of Mayan weavers´project in a nearby city; a visit to the San Francisco El Alto market, which is one of the two biggest in Guatemala, and a couple of days staying with a Mayan family in between all that. That should be plenty to keep me busy through Saturday. After that, I think I´ll probably pass up through Todos Santos in the northern highlands, through Coban (which is famous for its coffee), and up to the Belize border. My various leads have mostly petered out, so it´s pretty clear I´m not going to get my conversation with a Mayan weaver–which is a pity, but oh well. Outside of that and Carlos´s textiles tour, there´s really not much else to keep me in Guatemala, and it´s pretty rough traveling, so I think I´m going to cross into Belize and spend a week or two there instead.

Belize doesn´t have a weaving tradition, but they do have fantastic ecotourism, and the biggest barrier reef in the Western Hemisphere, i.e. spectacular diving. It also has a much larger number of English speakers, which should make for easier traveling. I don´t think I´ll lose much by bailing on Guatemala–I´m not going to be able to get out to the Maya (beyond the homestay that is) and I already have a nice collection of Guatemalan textiles, and will get more at Friday´s market. (They´re not especially cheap–between $50 and $75 per handwoven skirt–but considering that each is 8 meters of handwoven cloth, that´s a very good price.)

Tomorrow´s going to be a quiet day; I´m taking the first half of the day to relax, plan my onward journey, and take a look at all these weaving books. After that I´ll be in language school until around 7pm. Thursday, on the other hand, should be a lot more interesting.

I forgot to mention that I´ve been having minor problems with the altitude. Quetzaltenango is at 10,000 feet, and I get altitude sickness starting around 7,000 feet, so I have way less stamina than usual and am crankier, prone to getting out of breath, headaches, etc. It should pass in another day or so (I hope!).

Tien

I got an email from Openwave today asking me to please fill out and send them a bunch of forms ASAP. I said, “Umm, I´m in Guatemala.” If it turns out they need it earlier, I think I´ll express-mail it from Guatemala. THAT would be funny.

LOL

More later,

Tien

The Traveling Tigress is extremely smug this morning, having spent two hours laboriously working through two phrasebooks and my book on Mayan culture (which is, helpfully, written in both English and Spanish and can be used, admittedly with great effort, as a weaving phrasebook) to produce three sentences in Spanish identifying myself as a weaver interested in local textiles and asking for an English-speaking guide who can help. I figure I´ll call this Carlos Molina, and if I´m lucky he´ll speak enough English to answer me. If he doesn´t, I´ll ask the folks at Adrenalina Tours (the expensive travel agency) if they can help translate the conversation for me.

I´m also extremely smug at having successfully ordered breakfast in Spanish this morning, albeit with liberal help from a phrasebook and pointing at things. It appears I won´t starve after all. (Don´t laugh, I was seriously worried.)

I think this trip will actually be good for me…I have a deep distaste for expressing myself in any language except English, and this has handicapped me a lot in my attempts at learning other languages. Having no other option but to speak Spanish will help me get over that, and maybe in other countries it´ll make me more willing to attempt the local language. Besides, after I get over my stark raving terror of looking like a complete idiot (which is ludicrous since you look like a total idiot if you can´t communicate, anyway), I think I´ll be fine with it. I´m rather looking forward to my crash course in Spanish.

So: the Saljaca market.

My guide turned up at 8:30am, as agreed, and we set off for the market by chicken bus. (I have no idea why they´re called chicken buses–unlike Vietnam and Thailand, there don´t appear to be any chickens on the bus. And the drivers are definitely NOT chickens.)

Have you ever wondered what happens to old school buses when they die? Well, wonder no more: they get shipped to Guatemala, repainted in bright colors, and used as chicken buses. Lurching, old, rusty, spouting black smoke into the smoggy air, they nonetheless get around surprisingly well. Our chicken bus came to us courtesy of the Geneva Unified School District, Geneva, Illinois, and rechristened (on the top of the windshield only) “Esperanza”. I´m not sure if “Hope” was a prayer that the bus would keep going, but that would have been entirely appropriate, IMO. We lurched forward, over the worn cobblestone streets, and we were off.

The Saljaca market turned out not to be all that big, maybe 4 or 5 blocks worth of streets crowded with little stalls and people selling out in the open air. The place was paved in textile shops, all with an astonishing display of beautiful huipils (women´s blouses) and cortes (skirts). The first place I went to explained that all the textiles were “factory made”, and I was very disappointed and asked if handmade were available. My guide said no, never. Aargh.

But then the owner said come back, I´ll show you my factory (he owns a factory? in the back of his shop??). I was expecting to see an old automated commercial loom, but what did I see but a four-harness, two-treadle loom?? I was astonished. He sat down at it and demoed weaving, showed us his ikat-dyed warp, his warping reel, and so on–all of which were perfectly recognizable to me.

Eventually I worked out that “factory”, in Guatemala, refers to anything made on a treadle loom (which was introduced by the Spaniards circa 1500), as opposed to something woven on a backstrap loom. I wound up buying several cortes (skirts) and one huipil, and my guide was very good about identifying where each came from. (Every Mayan village has its own distinctive style–this is a throwback to the days when the Spaniards kept the Mayans as peons/slaves and insisted that all the Maya in a given estate should have a distinctivey style of dress, so their owner could be identified at a glance.)

I am amused, by the way. A pickpocket got my watch while I was wandering through the market. I´m impressed–these people *are* damn good, if they managed to take the watch right off my wrist without my noticing. I salute their professional competence, and wish them the best with my battered old Timex with a scratched crystal and the plastic housing partially torn off. I´m also highly entertained by the fact that they managed to take the watch right off my wrist, yet missed the $300 digital camera in the pocket right below. Admittedly, I had very sensibly put it into a zippered-shut pocket and secured it there with a safety pin and carabiner, so it would have been considerably harder to make off with. (All my pants have zippered pockets–it won´t stop a pickpocket, especially one who´s expecting a zipper, but it will at least slow them down.) Nonetheless, I´m glad they took off with the watch and not with anything else. I bought a new digital watch in the market for 120 quetzales (about $15), and that settled it. Hey, I got a new watch out of the deal. A quality one, too, a genuine Casio. 🙂

Anyway, I now have a big pile of textiles, which will have to be mailed home at the earliest opportunity, a guide who speaks at least a little English, and LUXURY!!! a hotel room with hot water that actually gets HOT!!, towel service (unheard of!), and even little soaps in the rooms! If I´m not careful, I´m going to start thinking I´m back home. 🙂

Tien

I wound up taking a first-class bus to Quetzaltenango, a very nice Pullman bus with air conditioning, music, and even an in-flight movie. I´m not sure what the movie was, but it was highly amusing. It mostly involved two guys running around the jungle, getting caught in all sorts of outlandish traps, fighting some rather outlandish-looking Maya-like natives armed with torches, whips, some weird sort of jungle karate, and, um, stuff. Oh, and howler monkeys, who would invariably show up and harass the guys as soon as they wound up in the latest trap (dangling head down from a snare, etc.). It was very amusing, probably even funnier without the dialogue.

I am intrigued by the music they play on first-class buses here. It is almost exactly the same as what gets played on buses in Thailand and Vietnam. There´s a couple of local ballads mixed with eight or nine American pop songs that seem to be universal. There´s “I Want it That Way”, some over-mixed piece from Cher, La Bamba, and this dance remix that goes “Be my lover, won´t you be my lover?” over and over. I´m wondering if there isn´t some CD out there titled “Top Travel Hits of the Third World” or something. About the only thing that´s missing is Gloria Gaynor´s “I Will Survive”, which gets played about every twenty minutes in Thailand. (I´m sorry that one didn´t make the cut, because it´s my favorite of the numbers on offer.)

I´m also happy to say that bus drivers here are much safer than they are in India, which is to say that if your bus driver happens to be passing an 18-wheeler around a blind curve in the fog, he will at least slow down and honk his horn a bit. (I didn´t waste too much of my time on it; after my experience in India, I find it´s much healthier just to accept that you´re going to die in a fiery crash, and not concern yourself about it further.)

I had phoned up a travel agency in advance, by the simple advent of calling the phone number in the guidebook, discovering that the number was wrong/outdated, then looking them up on the Internet and calling the number posted there. Of course, as soon as I got in touch with them I discovered that they were no longer a travel agency but a language school. (Hey, these things happen.)

But the guy who answered the phone spoke fluent English, and said the magic words: come on down and we´ll see what we can do to help, so I got their name and address and hopped on a bus to Quetzaltenango.

After the bus arrived, I got off and was immediately accosted by a couple of taxi drivers. I handed the slip of paper with their name and address on it to the taxi driver, who had no idea where they were and drove around the city for awhile trying to figure out where they were (I´m not sure he could read the address, actually, even though I wrote it down in Spanish). Eventually we got there, he spouted something incomprehensible in Spanish at me, and eventually we worked out that he wanted to charge me 75 quetzales ($11) for the trip, which is complete highway robbery. However, I didn´t argue–it wasn´t going to do any good (I couldn´t speak enough Spanish to argue with him!) and it wasn´t a huge amount of money on the grand scale. It´s good to have a sense of perspective on these things, otherwise you´ll just be miserable when traveling.

Anyway, I went into Inepas, where the guy I´d talked to (the native English speaker) wasn´t in, but someone else helpfully explained that they weren´t a travel agency. Eventually, after some further discussion, they referred me to a guide who ran a tour agency a couple doors down. I talked to the guy, who turned out to have only a little English and very little understanding of textiles (I had to take out one of my textile books and point at the photo to explain that I was interested in weaving), but he offered to do a half-day guide around a local market for 100 quetzales (about $15), which I thought about and finally signed up for. It wasn´t so much that I desperately wanted him as a tour guide, but I needed someone–anyone–who could get me to a hotel and take me around a bit, and this guy at least spoke minimal English, and was friendly, so what the hell. So I´m going off at 8:30am tomorrow.

He took me to a good hotel and negotiated a much better rate for me (this is one of the reasons you want to hire a local guide), I checked in, and went looking around the block or so where my hotel was.

After a bit of exploration, it seems pretty clear that there is only one outfit in town that offers guides who speak English, and they do it as part of a package tour that includes a private car and runs $100/day (!). Unfortunately for me, they do a fixed-price package, so if I were going with three other people, it would be a reasonable $25/day; but I{m not.

I´m highly concerned about the complete lack of English-speaking guides (even with pidgin English). I had been expecting more English speakers, and it´s going to be hard going without any Spanish. So I spent half an hour in a language school talking to the class coordinator (who is a native English speaker), and it looks like I´ll be doing a crash course in survival Spanish over the next few days. They do five hours of teaching in the morning followed by cultural activities, so it might not be a bad way to see something of the local area, either.

Oh, and they offer homestays with Mayan families, which I think I definitely want to do. The catch here is that the Mayan families generally don´t even speak Spanish (Mam is the local Mayan dialect), so there´s really not much possible in the way of cultural interaction. Still, it would be really interesting to stay there and see what it´s like.

So tomorrow, I´m going to the market with this guy (I´m not even sure what city it´s in–every city has its weekly market, and I couldn´t make out the name of the city) and then after that I´ll be going to the language school, trying to call up this guy named Carlos Molina who runs some kind of Mayan textile conservation group and might possibly speak English, and going back to the expensive tour agency to chaffer over what kind of tour they can give me. I{m seriously tempted to ask for both Lucas, who speaks both Spanish and Mam and knows a LOT about the local villages, and Henry, who speaks both English and Spanish, for a day in the Mayan villages. Yeah, it´ll be expensive, but it seems about the only way to have a meaningful cultural conversation with a Mayan weaver–and it won´t be the first time I´ve had to use two translators to talk to someone. Unfortunately, if you want to get really off the beaten track, you usually wind up paying. But I´ll look around town tomorrow–it´s nearly dark now, and Guatemala is NOT the kind of place where you wander around unescorted after dark, especially if you´re a clueless tourist still hazy from four hours on a bus.

Tien

I´m stringing the next few episodes in chronological order, as if I´d written them at the time, rather than all at once. I´ll try to get the dates right.

So: Monday, April 25.

Got up this morning and went down to the Ixchel Museum, which is renowned for its textile displays, in hopes that they could find me a textiles expert to act as guide. Didn´t work; they didn´t have anyone who did this normally and weren´t willing to ask random university students, etc. whether they´d be interested. The textile displays were nice, including a very nice set of models of backstrap looms being woven, and sections on the significance of various symbols, but on the whole the samples weren´t as good as they were at the Archaelogy and Ethnobotanical Museum. I did, however, buy just about all their books on weaving and textiles, which include detailed explanations of how they weave and a couple of cultural studies on particular towns. I don´t have time to read them now, but they´ll be cool to have back home.

I am pleased to say that the travelingtigress has collected herself back out of culture-shock “aack!! I need someone to hold my hand the entire time I´m here” and is starting to show some traces of independence. I think I´ll be looking for local guides rather than taking along the same person the entire way. Locals are also likely to know more about the area.

So, I´ve decided to leave for Quetzaltenango, which is the second-biggest city in Guatemala. There I´ll see if I can find a local English-speaking textile-expert guide, and if that doesn´t work, I´ll do a crash course in Spanish and see what I can manage. One thing is obvious to me: the majority of people here don´t speak English, so it´s going to be more of a challenge than I thought. (In Southeast Asia everyone who has anything to do with tourism speaks English.)