“Once there was a way to get back homeward…”

Josh is Gone. And so is my wallet.  As well as the top layers of skin from the areas above and below my bathing suit where I forgot to apply sunscreen.

My wallet was stolen on a chicken bus between Chimaltenango and Los Encuentros when Josh and were headed to Lake Atitlan.  So much for having a big strong man with you when you travelled.  I ended up getting swindled by a seemingly well-intentioned 50 year-old lady.  We were pushed off of one bus into the back of another, and purse in my lap, the lady kindly helped me with my backpack by putting it on top of our laps, putting the area between my purse and her knife out of sight.  She slashed the side of my purse, removed that dirty old money bag I´ve been using since IHP and cut off its strap that was undoubtedly tangled in all of the other shit that I carry around in that bag.  Here is a summary of the damage.

Things lost:

1. Passport (including badass kenyan, indian, and tanzanian visas)

2. Debit Card

3. About $80 in Quetzal

4. $100 Gift Card to REI

5. Little pouch containing currency collected from around the world

6. Tiny oragami clam Bart made me with beautiful quote inside

7. Silver owl pendant bought in Mexico

8. Zapatista pin I got with Amit in Mexico City the day were pooping too much to move

9, 600 reciepts I couldn´t throw away because they have sentimental meaning.

10. The Kicker: Necklace my mom gave me before I left for IHP that contained a lock of her hair as well as hair from all three of my siblings.  gahhhhhhh.  i gotta stop now before i remember more stuff

Charges attempted with my debit card within 2 hours of the heist:

1. $700 at ClubCo (Guatemalan CostCo)

2. $300 at some grocery store

3. $100 god knows where

4. $3.27 at Burger King

This lady totally tried to use my debit card at burger king.  I mean honestly she had $80 in cash at her disposal and she HAD to charge that purchase. Anyway…new passport is in the works and Josh gave me enough to tide me over for a while so things should be ok.

Now I´ll do a quick Day by Day:

Day 6: We return to Coban after a nine-hour drive that was supposed to be 5 and Josh and I get into our first of two fights.  This one was about my making political conversations too personal.  The second was about whether or not Qtips are good for your ears and if it is better to pop or not pop blisters.

Day 7: Josh and I travel back to Guatemala City to have lunch with our uncle Rudolfo only to find out that he is a lawyer overseeing the construction of a hydro-electric dam in Guatemala that will receive funding from the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, saying that access to energy is the first step on the road to development and insisting that the only reason they got a negative response from the people of the area was due to their ignorance and lack of education.  How the heck do I end up in these situations?  I love that all my relatives are colonists.  (Mom you should perhaps not forward this to nona or just edit this slice out.)  Next up he is planning to dam the river that runs between Guate and Mexico and he is also working on a project to try and get reparations from Mexico for the thousands of square kilometers that  were given to them as a gift from a Guatemalan president in the 19th century.  Cute.  I bit my tongue, and was very polite and enjoyed all of the expenses meals he bought us.  Hope I made everybody proud.  Then we went antiquing.

Day 8:  Rudolfo took us to breakfast in Antigua.  We then toured this big Dominican church that had been destroyed by the earthquake.  I love the way relics of colonial rule look when they have been crumbled to the ground by mother nature.  Josh had what he affectionately calls mudbutt for the rest of the day.  Little 18-hour inconvenience.  Once we got to the  Frida Kahlo themed Mexican club that night, he had fully recovered and was taking pictures of wild teens.

Day 9:  Swindled on the bus.  We got stuck in Solola with out even a Quetzal to use for the public bathroom.  I spent a couple hours on the phone with Bank of America.  We got to San Marcos La Laguna on the ever so transcendentally beautiful lake Atitlan that night and I saw my friend David again which was AWESOME.  That night we shacked up with a couple homeless Danish chicks.

Day 10: MY DREAMS COME TRUE.  David and I went on a hike (ok maybe i just like hiking) up to this place where you could see the entire lake.  We had to take a ride in the back of a pick up to get to Santa Clara to find a way up the mountain.  While getting out fo the back of the pick up, a lady handed to me her elaborately wrapped, ADORABLE Mayan baby to hold while climbed out.  Finally after all this time I got to hold a precious little indigenous bundle.  It was more beautiful than any lake view could ever be.   She then insisted that David take a photo of her, me, her gorgeous children and her chicken which I was petting.  That night Josh helped drunk lady out of the rain.  My brother can really be a sweetheart sometimes.

(side note: don´t worry be happy is playing from a car nearby…)

Day 11:  We took two boats (on one of which I sung Titanic as loudly and in as high of a key as possible for Josh) and a bus to meet up with Rudolfo to go to his beach house.  We drank beer, sweat a lot, got devoured by mosquitos, and watched my cousins play Risk for hours.  Josh came in last.  6 years of military training by the U.S. Armed Forces not enough to counteract discussion of the rules happening only in Spanish.  Poor guy. 

Day 12:  Lots of discussion about how good meat is.  Great.  We went out to the beach via jetski.  The house is on the Pacific and the waves were so incredibly rough that you could only swim in places where there were barriers built.  Josh still says he got tossed around ¨like a little bitch.¨ The beach is totally composed of black volacanic sands and gorgeous bits of white, orange and pink shells.  If you don´t believe me I´ll prove it to you when I get home, because I will undoubtedly be pulling grains of black sand out of my nose and ears by then.  Still some accumulation in other places I need not mention.  Josh ran the jetski into the dock at the house, and tried to stop it with his foot.  He also dumped us off the jetski while trying to retrieve his flip flop and lost his sunglasses.  I don´t know why I love things powered by petrol so much.

Ahhhk don´t want to write anymore.  We went to Anna´s fantastic ridiculous crazy vacation home built in an intentional community only by intentional I mean intentionally excluding everything and everyone else unless they are servants riding in on motorbikes or owners of every last one of the businesses that I have been told are exploitative.  That said the Guatemalan family are some of the most hospitable   Josh is gone.  I miss him.  I´m in Antigua.  Same internet cafe as always.  I get picked up to go to the midwife, Odelia´s house tomorrow morning.  I have no idea what things will be like for the next three weeks, but I will update when possible. 

Probably gonna turn 22 out there.  Happy Birthday to me.  I´m nervous and excited…mostly hungry. 

Finally a couple weeks where I won´t be meeting the 6 beer a day quota,

Andrea

Day 3: Josh, Alejandro and I hit the road.  He makes us call him Tio (uncle) even though that is not his technical relationship to us, and specializes in delivering killer dead pan insults directed at your most obvious insecurities and maintaining a constant uncertainty even after he cracks a smile as to whether or not he was serious.  He also LOVES Josh.  He constantly calls him “El Capitan” and persistently says “Sorry” to him with eyes sadder than the most distended youngster from Save the Children commercials after each time he shows him something beautiful, or completes an activity with us that was either fun or exciting.  Enough about him.  He took us to los Cuervas de Candelaria, an intricate network of caves spanning the Northern part of guatemala for who knows how many kilometers.  I am definitely getting married there.  I don’t care if half the senior citizens in my life can’t hobble down into the cave entrance.  I will pay for hip replacements for every one of them.  I’ve never seen anything like it.  Carlsbad was cool but these caves had huge “ventanas” or entrances that let the sun in in rather creative ways.  Our guide used a flashlight to show us how the stalactites and what not looked like bears, ducks, dogs, heads of Mayan rulers etc. and then Alejo asked Josh and I to try and find some figures ourselves but the only ones I could find looked obscene so I just stayed quiet. I know nobody wants to listen to me slobber over how beautiful they were so instead I’m going to do so over the new love of my life.  Gaero.  He is the strongest, kindest, most adorable barely pubescent boy in all of Central America.  Background: After the caves we went to a lake called Petexbatun where Alejandro has a little house on the lake surrounded by a jungle that he is preserving.  The lake is completely surrounded by land that has been deforested for cattle grazing so this house was on an island of eco-privelege in the most literal sense of the phrase.  We had to cross the lake on a tiny boat to get to it and that is when we met Gaero.  I would seriously be in love with him if his voice wasn’t still cracking.  He paddled us valiantly out to sea so that we could get the boat deep enough to start the motor.  He tried to teach me to paddle but alas I had already had a couple beers and my balance is notoriously bad to begin with.  That night I cooked for everybody, including Gaero and his grandpa, over a little woodburning stove in a hut with no electricity, and I must say it was awesome.  Que ricos todos dijieron profusely.  Vikki…I made leeks only no cream or butter, and I only knocked like 20% of them out of the pan.  That night I swung in the hammock and wrote a good story about the Keeper by candle light and drifted off to sleep.

Day 4: HOWLER MONKEYS.  If you have never been awoken by these things before it is like straight out of Jurassic Park only with literally no real concern for your life.  But good heavens are they ominous sounding.  I saw them sitting around in the trees, crowing like velociraptors just outside the hut.  We went on a hike that morning.  Hiking: this activity has for whatever reason become the most common activity of my summer (note the reservation in value judgment) along with access to blueberries and maple.  Irony is the best.  The ground was wet from the heavy rains so Gaero machete’d me a stick to walk.  We went to some Mayan caves on Alejandro’s property and guess who found some awesome Mayan pot shards for me and Josh…duh.  His majesty also used his cellphone to show me around these little cubby holes in the cave.  The whole experience was magical.  We left the lake that afternoon to head towards Tikal.  Tikal is the site of the most famous Mayan ruins in Guatemala.  We tried to stay in Francis Ford Coppola’s hotel nearby but it was full so instead we ate Italian food and stayed at a French Hotel.  Colonialism is a bitch.  I got into a delightful conversation about globalization and the origins of Modern Culture with Josh and Alejandro.  Inserted by josh himself: Josh had some interesting views and I appreciated his insight.  End quote.  The conversation lasted longer than Josh’s patience. 

Day 5: We went to Tikal today.  Giant city of temples and ruins and jungle and more monkeys.  Ok enough history.  Josh had…the worst…swampass/junglebutt ever recorded.  We are talking overt peed in pants kind of wet.  Annotated by Josh: “I felt like I just got out of the pool, and I was the only white guy around. The humidity was worse than Dallas and I honestly know what it feels like to be the fat guy in the crowd that everybody makes fun of, however I am just sweaty. This is me for real: Does it look like I pissed my pants?!?!?! Walk in front of me cuz I dont want you staring at my pee pants.  At least I was hydrated. And only one arm is sunburned.”  Josh thought the best way to beat the heat was to go commando since he was out of clothes.  He went through three pairs of boxers (undies) on account of the humidity.  We climbed three huge pyramids and took some stereotypical pictures and stuff, all of which had to be taken from the side because he didn’t want anyone to see the crotch and ass puddles.  Tikal is one of those places where if you haven’t gone, everyone will tell you always that you HAVE to go, which I didn’t really understand until we were on top of one of the tombs and it started to downpour.  We continued walking around Tikal in the deluge.  Suddenly the swampass didn’t matter anymore and Josh was at ease.  Despite a later comment that religion is screwing up everything geopolitically, Josh still described this afternoon as a spiritual experience.  Alejandro decided to stay by the pool for the day.  Now we are playing checkers and drinking away what I discovered was Josh’s second to last army paycheck.  God Bless America.  That is a good note to end on I’d say.

Happy Father’s Day Daddy!

Andrea

That is the headline of my summer.  Yes I know I usually go with a pertinent song lyric or a quote from my travels but this trip has just taken on too distinct of a theme.  I spent the whole year trying discard luxury and unmerited good fortune but ´between graduation and today, the world has been intent on turning me into a princess.  I ám in Flores, Guatemala right now.  My brother and my cousin Alejandro are having a beer in a bougie tourist cafe a few meters from here.  I have been itching to write this blog for a while.  Given how much has happened in the past 4 days, I am going to defy convention, i.e. the usual stream of conciousness and go day by day for organizational purposes.  Enjoy.

Day 1 - We arrive in Guatemala City after a 4 and a half hour flight from Los Angeles.  I was kindof freaked out before hand because I had some how managed to forget that I was leaving for the ENTIRE summer yet again, only this time no Amit or Meg or IHPers, just me and my big backpack, big brother, and bad spanish.  So to the tune of Stevie Wonder´s version of ¨´We Can Work it Out (Best cover of all time)´ even though I was being told to put my electronic devices again, we descended into Guatemala over god knows how many volcanoes (one active and smoking) and the greenest, most beautiful place you´d ever seen.  Ok NOW I remember why I am doing this.  Jesus it´s beautiful.  Our cousin Leonor got us at the airport and we went to our other cousin Ana´s house.  We almost immediately dove into bed because Josh and I both were sandwhiched between snorers on the flight.  Wes Anderson himself couldn´t have written the scene better himself.  I am already roused by the thunder, and suddenly my twin bed is shaking.  ¨Josh.  This is an earthquake.  ´Really?´ ¨Yes¨. And that was it.  It was I think about a minute long.  A 6.8 earthquake came from a few miles off the coast and was pretty mild in guate city, despite CNN´s reports that everyone in Guatemala is being evacuated.  I hate CNN.  We had lunch with the family, and by family I mean about 30 people, mostly children, that showed up.  Here we go with the servants and the bells and the small portions again. Welcome to the house of Alejandro and Ana Botran.  DIY Stricly Prohibited. We spent the afternoon looking a pictures of cousin Gabby´s wedding.  We sleep next door a room the size of my mom´s apartment completely full of nothing but her SOON TO BE RETURNED BECAUSE THEY ARE ALL DUPLICATES OF THE ONE SHE ALREADY HAS wedding gifts.  My cousin Juan Pablo (dream boat) and his wife Ushie (dream boat) took us out that night to his boutique hotel and Sushie restaurant, the Otelito, for dinner.   A trip to Guatemala to me doesn´t usually imply appletinis and imported cheeses but that is what we got.  Everyone in my family is EXTREMELY attractive.  I fit right in. =)

Day 2 - Rafael, the son of Alejandro picks us up at 5am from Ana´s house to take us to Coban, a town to the north of the country.  I tried desperately to converse with him and translate for my brother armed with nothing but my 5am spanish, but I think we were all just too tired and too floored by the jungle-encrusted mountains all around us.  Josh finally saw what I have been blabbing about all this time.  In Coban we spent the night in Alejandro and Leslie´s beautiful hand-built casita on their property.  Alejandro is big in the exporting potentially invasive species to the United States to make a quick buck market and has been trying like hell to get my brother to transport these large ferns called Ponytails back to the U.S. This guy is seriously nuts.

Ahh ok my brother is getting impatient and Alejandro is trying to smoke in the internet cafe so I should Jet.  Day 3 is a good one so I´ll hit that up when I get to a computer again. 

Mosquito bites beggining to outnumber the freckles,

Andrea