Lanquin, Guatemala

The anonymity I enjoyed in San Ignacio and El Remate is gone. Again, we turistas have targets on us. The shuttle hasn’t even stopped and there are hands coming in every window holding adverts for the hostels and hotels in the area. So intent are they on putting their paper in your hands that we can’t even get out of the shuttle because they are crowding at the door. Angry, I begin yelling at them to move so we may disembark, and finally they cooperate.

I had decided to look into a place called Rabin Itzam. It isn’t more than 50 feet away so I stop to chat with one of the guys from the shuttle about his plans. He is heading to Las Marias, which is quite a popular place about 1 kilometer from the 8^th wonder of the world that we are all here to see. While we are chatting, a man walks up to me and asks in English as clear as you might hear anywhere in California, “Do you know where you are staying?”

‘I had planned to go to Rabin Itzam.’

He says,”there is another place up there that costs the same and is a little different. Check it out if you like.” And with that he hands me a slip of paper and walks off.

Rabin Itzam is nice looking. The building is truly neat looking inside, but so are many of the buildings here. The beds are clean and hard as a rock. And with that deal breaker, I am out and on my way to the place on the paper in my pocket.

Once you actually enter Lanquin, if you take the first road on the right and walk about 30 meters, you will encounter on your right hand side a gate that is always open. There is a small courtyard and several doors bearing names of notable cities in Guatemala. Tikal. Antigua. Etc. Take the stairs down and you will find more doors, a couple hammocks, a clothesline, a kitchen, and a refrigerator. None of this is too out of the ordinary except that it is all available for use by the people who stay here.

Jimmy is the hotel owner, and his is not Guatemalan, but hails from Nicaragua. His English is so good because he used to live in the East bay not far from where I was born. We spend a few minutes laughing about our friends up in California and the quirks of Guatemala while I look at the beds. They are the most comfortable bed I have found since leaving the USA. I’m sold.

Every room is lockable from the inside or out. The shower is spacious and single temperature, and he seems to know the best way to go about everything. Jimmy’s wife, Francis, is solid gold. She knows that I am barely serviceable at speaking Spanish, but she never slows down or caters to my gringo-ness. She just keeps on talking to me full speed until I get my act together. It is some of the most consistent and honest Spanish practice I have received since I got here. She never loses patience when I can’t understand, she simply keeps finding new ways to say it until I get it. It is priceless and worth far more than the 35Q a night for the room. She is continuously striking up conversations about everything.

Addison is a likeable, if a little talkative, aspiring archeologist from Pennsylvania that I was speaking with on the ride to Lanquin. Walking around the streets, I take a detour on my way to the post office to go back to the main street and tell him about the place I found. He takes off to check it out and I go in search of the post office. What follows is a classic example of Latin American values.

I’m looking for the post office. Lanquin is composed of about ten streets, each of them roughly one or two city blocks in length. Perhaps it’s my fault for not remembering the word for post office or mail, but I am hoping that by waving postcards at someone and making up the words I can get pointed in the right direction. Not so much. The first person I ask tells me that it is back on the main street. I’m almost positive that isn’t true because Jimmy gave me the directions earlier in a very vague sense. Still I run down there to check. The building I was told had the mail houses simply an old woman who informs me that there is NO post office in the whole town. I know this isn’t true. Heading back up into the town, I stop to ask a couple people on the street on how to get there. They direct me to my hotel. Finally one of them comes up with the word “correo” which I am assuming means mail. Victory. Almost. He then informs me that it is 5 minutes after 5, not 5 minutes before 5 as I had though, and that the post office is surely closed. For those who care “la oficia postale”, post office in Italian, does NOT mean anything in Spanish.

I want to upload some pictures to the site, so head back over to where I was told the internet was available. The internet is available, surprisingly enough, dozens of miles from anything, in the middle of the jungle, some enterprising youth has rented a storage shed or oversized closet underneath one of the hotels, paid the deposit for a satellite link, and has a few broken down computers hooked up to it to surf the web. The latency is incredible (awful) and I’m losing packets everywhere, but I am connected. After a few minutes I manage to get connected and with some difficulty get the pictures uploaded. As such, you can go back to some of the older entries in this travelogue and take a look at some of the wackiness I was describing. Addison is here now and is arguing with the kid as to wether he should be charged for a half hour or less, since Addison has only been in attendance for about 20 minutes. I’ve been here for about 45 minutes. The kid charges Addison for a full hour, and charges me for an hour and a half. As I said, the kid is enterprising.

Wandering down the street discussing our recent robbery, Addison and I meet a lovely women from Great Britain and invite her to come have dinner with us. We are all chatting amiably in the restaurant, being congenially ignored by the serving staff for a while, when I finally get one of the women to come and take our orders. We’ve been here for about 30 minutes now, so we’re right on schedule. A camioneta rolls up outside and unloads about a dozen local men. It is dark outside, so I am assuming they are all coming back from working in the fields surrounding the town. Within about 30 seconds, there is hot tortilla on everyone of their tables.  Within about 5 minutes, they all have a hot plate of food accompanying it and coca cola in front of them.

A thin, somewhat unwashed looking white youth walks in the door and starts to take a seat at the table behind Addison. We three beckon him to sit at our table and chat with us a bit. He does so hesitantly and introduces himself as Connor. This is where things get awesome. Connor is an anthropology student who recently graduated in the States and came south with no itinerary. He’s been around for several months and is widely accepted as one of the locals. Except for when he sits at a table with a bunch of turistas. For now he is being ignored just as soundly as we are. This works out well for us, as Connor has the most interesting conversations topics I have heard in years. We are talking about the land owners of the pyramids, the local ddrug dealers, muggings, etc until the heavyweight comes on. He spent some time hanging around with an Incan priest in Mexico long enough to figure out why they were so into studying the heavens. They believed that we are currently orbiting the 5^th sun to give life. Knowing that the sun would eventually die, they were searching the heavens for the 6^th sun that would give life. Talk about forward thinking.

We spend hours discussing ancient civilizations and comparing their stories and technologies to our “advanced” civilization. Like how the Egyptians had the steam engine, and acid batteries. The Babylonians had stories of a city that was completely destroyed and all the inhabitants who survived died within weeks. We talk about Nietzsche and his demonic question. Imagine that you are at the end of your life and a Demon appears to you. The Demon tells you that you will be sent back through time and you will relive every second of your life all over again. The question being, will this be a great reward or a great misery? We talk of Buddhism and the karma and dharma. Reincarnation and pre-existence to this planet. Why did you choose to come into the world with these particular parents? What do you need to learn from them? What mission do you have to fulfill?

At the end of all this, I look at Connor and ask, “Connor, how did you get here?”

He looks at me, smiles and says, “I don’t know. I really don’t know anything.”

At the end of a night like this, a little quiet time goes a long way, so I excuse myself from the table to go and ponder my dharma. Connor writes down his email and we part ways. I’ll save you the weight of the rest of my thoughts that night.