Crimson Tundra

Last night I was lucky enough to be adopted by a group of expats who live and work in Antigua. I stumbled upon their trivia night at one of the pubs near my hostel and was immediately invited into the fold. Their stories are fascinating.

There is Alan, who I met first and who was born in Antigua. His mother was here on a missionary trip from England and met his Guatemalen father, who happened to be married to another woman. Three days after he was born, his mother abandoned him and returned to England. He was raised here until he was five, witnessed the murder of his father and was then sent to live with his maternal grandmother in Europe. He started working in bars at 12 and by the age of 18 he had saved up a staggering 35,000 pounds. He used it to buy a motorcycle and bought himself three years on the road, traveling throughout Russia, Greece, Turkey and ending up in Hanoi, Vietnam when he sold the bike and started working on a cruise ship that docked there. Weary of the road, he came back to Antigua six years ago and has remained.

Alan´s girlfriend is young and from Indiana. Kate came here with the Peace Corps three years ago and would have left after her two year commitment had it not been for meeting Alan. They´re a pretty deadly combination at trivia. I didn´t answer a single question correctly…

There is Brendan, who is running trivia night and happens to be from New York. He´s 39 and has been traveling for ten years, supporting himself by writing remotely for English magazines based out of China. He´s obviously brilliant and also a raging drunk, and his stories keep getting more skewed towards booze and sex as the night goes on. Everyone in the room seems to adore him.

Dan lived off the same subway stop I do in Bushwick for ten years and owns and runs Antigua´s only comic book shop. He left Brooklyn a year and a half ago and we toyed with the idea that we may have seen one another at Goodbye Blue Monday, a bar very near my current and his old apartment. It´s probably not true, but it´s a fun idea. His knowledge of comic books is astounding and I´m told that Guatemala is currently experiencing a “Golden Age” of comic book writing – “you know, similar to the one Mexico went through in the 80s…” Right.

Dana (actually a man, not a woman) is from a small country called Malta in the Mediterranean and was sailing from California to Africa when his boat broke down near one of Guatemala´s beaches. He´s in Antigua until he can save enough money to fix his engine and he´s also unsuccessfully been looking for a crew here. He´s almost 40 and left a job as a chemist about a year ago. If I understood correctly, he was working on splitting H2O into hydrogen and oxygen which, if acheived, would solve the world´s energy crisis. Which would, you know, be kind of a big deal. Now he just sails and hopes to die an old man on the water somewhere.

William arrived in the country 12 hours ago from Washington, DC after dramatically dropping out of a PhD program in economics. He would tell you differently, but he has no idea what he´s doing. He bought a one way ticket and is sleeping on Alan and Kate´s couch for the time being. We try unsuccessfully to get the bar owner to hire him.

We stay out until 3am. The bars in Antigua close at midnight, so I´m introduced to an after hours place, the door to which is unmarked and on which you have to knock to get in. The place is packed with people speaking more languages than I can count and I feel grateful to be there and a bit sour towards the idea that I´ll be leaving so soon.

This morning I learned four things. The first is that when standing behind a man who is wacking something with a machete, you should give him a little space. The second is that the word for steep in Spanish is escarpado. The third is that the phrase for ‘fucking steep’ is mierda escarpado. The fourth is that I am not in shape. Miguel is. He’s the guide I’ve hired to take me up the San Pedro Volcano on the other side of the lake and keeping up with him as we ascended the volcanoe’s 3,020 meters was like spending four hours on a treadmill and letting a tiny, enthusiastic Guatemalan man control the speed. I could hear my heart in my ears in a way I haven’t in years and I think I sweated out all the beer from last night in the first thirty minutes.

I haven’t done a ton of climbing but this is undoubtedly the most challenging climb I’ve ever attempted. If Salkantay in Peru had been five days of this, I’m not sure I would have been able to do it.

He picked me up from my hostel at 6am in a tuk tuk, which is basically a motorcycle disguised as a cart, and we took a small canoe across to the base of the volcano. It was lined with some kind of grass to absorb the water that was coming in through its numerous holes.

We began after he hid his ore under some brush and used the machete to fashion a walking stick for me, which I, at first, thought was cute and for show, but I soon learned that nothing on our climb was for show. The walking stick turned out to function as life support, the machete led the way through thick brush that obviously doesn’t see a lot of traffic and every piece of food and water we had on us was consumed. We stopped every forty five minutes or so to share a piece of fruit – he had brought along apples, bananas and the sweetest mango I’ve ever tasted.

His pace as we ascended was unforgiving and for some completely irrational reason I felt like asking him to slow down would disappoint him in some way so I stared at my feet and kept up. The reality of the hike demanded too much from my body for me to make conversation as we went, but we talked every time we stopped for rest. His English isn’t terrible and my Spanish is sort of passable, so I was able to find out that he has a 13 year old son who will most likely also become a guide when he’s older and finished with his schooling. School in Santiago is expensive and Miguel can only pay for about five years of it for his son. He can do that or become a teacher of some kind. Those are apparently his only two real options. I also found out that Miguel speaks the native Mayan language of this region more fluently than Spanish. His parents, who are in their 70s don’t speak any Spanish at all and his son will speak Spanish and English more fluently than the Mayan dialect. I find this disheartening and also very, very odd. The Mayan heritage surrounding the lake has withstood generations and I have an example in front of me of a major piece of that culture – its language – vanishing from a single family in just three generations. Before I could concentrate on this too much, however, my reprieve was over and we began climbing again.

A word about the difference between hiking and climbing…I keep saying climbing because I believe somewhat strongly that when your hands are on the ground in front of you and you aren’t bent over and your movement would be better characterized as crawling than walking, then you’re climbing, not hiking. It was steep and it wasn’t steep in parts – it was steep the entire way to the top. We did finally get there and he shared with me sandwiches that his wife had made. They were made from eggs and what seemed like refried black beans between tortillas. They weren’t hot but I was dizzy from exhaustion and thought they were life saving and delicious. The view was mostly obstructed by clouds – because we were above them – but every once in a while they would clear and you could see the entirety of the villages that surround the lake. Miguel tells me the hike sometimes takes 5 or 6 hours and we’ve done it in three.

We don’t stay long at the top and descend rapidly, him setting the pace in front and I feeling like I’m 12 trying to keep up with my Dad, whose legs are longer than mine. Except Miguel’s definitely aren’t, he’s just fast. I am more sliding than anything and fall more than once, hard on my ass because of loose gravel and leaves and Miguel laughs at me.

I’m back in my hostel now and my thighs and calves are shaking. Hot tub…

Guatemala might smell better than any place I´ve ever been. I´m on a ¨shuttle¨ride (read: really old van) going from Antiqua to Panajachel and the windows are down and the air has that clean post-rain smell, combined with some sort of flower, pine and grass. It´s an incredible freshness that´s really in contrast to the poverty we´re passing on either side of the van.

I got to Antiqua by taxi with a French girl I met at the airport. We chatted intensely the entire hour long ride from Guatemala City and discovered we´re the same age and appear to have the same deamons gnawing at us. I guess this means either nobody is special or everyone is, depending on how you look at it.

She´s one of those people whose mouths seem to be set in a permanent and subtle grin and she´s incredibly bubbly – a trait I sometimes question, but is so obviously genuine in her that it´s immediately disarming and we talk like old friends. We part ways in Antigua – she confidently in the direction of her hostel, me clumsily looking for any bus that might take me to Pana. We don´t exchange last names or contact information and that´s okay.

There are tiger puppies (whatever you call a baby tiger) caged and for sale along the side of the road on the way to Pana. I see at least three of them. There are also five people in the van. A spanish girl taking up the entire back seat and sleeping, the driver, myself and two women who are also from New York but were born in Argentina and Ecuador. It turns out all three of us are trying to get to Santiago, which is a small town on the other side of Lake Atitlan from Pana. It takes about four hours – two longer than we were told – because of a landslide on the only road that goes to Pana. They haven´t closed it, but have simply blocked that piece of the road and when we pass, the earth is still falling. It´s falling so harshly that at first I think it´s water.

We get by without incident and arrive in Pana near the docks in the dark to learn that the boats don´t run past dusk. It turns out, though, not surprisingly that you can bribe a captain to take you out. We confer quickly and decide we´re definitely doing it – I had been traveling for sixteen hours at that point and really wanted to arrive. They felt the same.

We end up flying across the lake, which is enormous, in a tiny motor boat. We look out into an absolutely pitch black night, but we happen to be crossing during a lightning storm that lights up the sky purple behind the volcanoes that flank the lake. So as you feel like you´re flying into nothing, every few minutes you get the sillouettes of the mountains. They get closer and closer, and we´re going so fast that it seems like at the next strike of lightning we might find ourselves about to crash into them. We appear to be the only boat on what is the largest lake in Central America.

Upon arriving we have to scale a fence to get to the road that will take us to our hostel – a fairly good sign that we may have been lost – but we make it and decide to have dinner together. After nearly 20 hours on the road, the negro modelo I´m served is entirely delicious.

I’m on a plane on my way to Peru and am purposely making sure my handwriting as I write this is poor so that others on the crowded plane can’t read what I’m writing. And I’m also reading Jonothan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals and he’s talking about shame and it calls to mind two ideas: the first that I can’t seem to understand is if shame is cultural or not. Can I more easily experience shame in front of an American? And the second idea being that it’s a little absurd to be writing anything because it pales in the shadow of his brilliance. But I’m a person too so I’ll write and endure the shame of the words through the comfort of that fact that almost everyone around me can only speak or read Portuguese. Which is, by the way, a beautiful language.

I arrive in Lima at 1am having very little idea where I am going and hoping some kind taxi driver will recognize the name of the hostel I thought I was meant to be headed for. I found one. He knew the name. He drove me and played Shaggy the whole way with the windows rolled down, singing along with the sounds but not knowing the actual English words he was imitating. It was cold. I got to the hostel. It was now creeping toward 2am. I hadn’t slept in 30 hours. My friend was nowhere to be seen and the place looked locked up, closed and condemned. After being left on the street with my giant pack and several pounds on the ancient door later, a sleepy Peruvian man answered. Panic subsided temporarily. There was no trace of my friend in his logbook, my phone didn’t work in Peru and I felt a little stranded. I was then led through a pitch black corridor to a single desktop where a computer circa 1988 lived and where a young Peruvian boy who was rocking out to American Youtube videos that were taking 20 years to buffer was asked to relinquish his chair so that I could try to make some sense of my situation. Gmail opened. Yes, I’m at the right hostel. No, my friend hasn’t checked in. Yes, the hostel is full and I can’t stay there. No, there’s not another one nearby. Yes, the walk at 2am for an American girl alone is dangerous. All this transmitted through my broken Spanish and his non-existent English and a lot of gesturing. A lot of gesturing. I should have been a mime. At some point during my late night game of charades my friend responds to the email I sent upon sitting down. No body, just a subject line, “Where are you.” No question mark because I can’t find it on the Spanish keyboard. Anyway. He got the point. He came and collected me and took me to the hostel he was sent to upon learning the one we had booked was full. I was asleep in five minutes. I was awake in five hours. Cold shower (I am told Peruvians don’t “believe in” hot showers). Back to the airport. I’d spent 16 hours in the Sao Paulo airport the day before while reading Foer’s account of caged farm animals in America. This didn’t help my anxiety during my tenure there. Probably also didn’t help anyone paying attention to the security camera who was attempting to give me the benefit of the doubt and not deem me a paranoid schizophrenic as I paced and inspected the same three restaurant menus for hours. I ate seven granola bars. Anyway. The airport is not my favorite place.

Cusco comes soon enough. It’s all worth it. It’s breathtaking and as I write this I am being served coca leaf tea and am looking out over the town’s main square. I am watching children play a game of ball I’ve never heard of. A woman is doing laundry. The smell of burning is strong and comforting like fall and campfires. I can’t tell what’s being burned. But I can feel a shared sense of humanity. And it’s precious.

I woke up on the second day of our stay in Cusco after 10 hours of coma like sleep. I did the math last night and realized I’d slept about seven hours out of the last 60. I feel more human. It’s a gorgeous day here. As I write this I’m on the terrace having breakfast and am told it’s always a beautiful day here. My traveling companion has been in deep conversation with a 50 year old American man and I discover upon entering the terrace that at age 45 he gave up his home refurnishing business in Boston to travel and write. I salivate. I want that life, I think. I wonder if it would make me happy or if just the idea of it makes me happy. But today it doesn’t matter. The traveler has told us about two ruins within walking distance of the city and a market where we can have the best Peruvian lunch in Cusco. The bees are relentless as I sip coffee and wait for Michael to shower so we can set out. I’m told in Spanish that they’re friendly. Okay. Yesterday was spent wandering the city. At one point, we were consumed with following a little boy who was walking the streets alone with a box on his head and laughing and unabashedly bumping into strangers without apology. We followed him blindly through the city until a Peruvian woman very unexpectedly grabbed my arm and told me in Spanish that we should turn around. We’re in a bad neighborhood, I’m told. I lose sight of the boy and am free to take in our surroundings a bit more. Michael doesn’t understand what she’s said, but I do. And I realize she may have a point. We turn around and continue exploring. We find a church and a secret (to us anyway) passageway up to the bell tower. I talk about litigation in America and how we would never be able to do this there (we could have easily fallen to our deaths). We sit in the bell tower and have a perfect view of the sun setting over the Andes. Later in the evening we meet our guide for the trek, which will start, we’re told, at 4:30am the day after tomorrow. It will be my birthday that morning. I’ll be 28 and I decide it will be a good opportunity for reflection. Still so young but not that young. As I recently told a friend, if you can’t do some decent self-reflection in near solitude in the Andes on your way to another world on your birthday, you’re fucked.

This morning I was standing at the foot of a melting glacier called Salkantay Mountain. I stood there at 5am with my new family looking at what we’re told is called by the locals the Savage Beast. It’s never been climbed. We watch and hear avalanches on its surface. We’re told we’re gong to spend the next six hours climbing past it. We begin. On a trek that has so far been quite chatty, this climb is silent. You can hear only breathing, the wind and an occasional avalanche in the background. Among the languages previously spoken, prior to our being silenced by the Beast, are Hebrew, French, Spanish, English, Portuguese and Dutch. There are fifteen of us. And though we’ve only spent the last 36 hours together, we’ve become intimate. We wake together, we brush our teeth together side by side in the grass, we pass flasks of whiskey, we struggle together and sleep together. It almost seems absurd that I ever lived without these people.

So I’m blogging now. Lucky you.