Trusting strangers - a detour to Chisec

The first friendly people we met at Los Amigos hostel in Flores happened to be on our bus to Lanquin (where we were planning to visit as a jumping off point for Semuc Champey, where we´ve heard there are beautiful limestone pools for exploring). I believe Balen mentioned them earlier - Zak and Frankie, from Sarasota. Apparently the bus was going to leave Flores without us and they insisted that we were waiting at our hostel down the road. Thank goodness. The bus was a cultural experience in itself. In the backseat were 2 hippie kids from Los Amigos, the female version singing Beatles classics for most of the trip, most notably ¨Hey Jude,¨ and saying things like, ¨Oh, you took a tour at Tikal? I never take tours. I´m more of a feelings and energy person than an information person. I just like to go and feel the energy and meditate.¨ We also took a scary though exhillerating floating dock-barge-like thing across a river, and there were many Oregon Trail references about fording the river from our seat and from new amigos Frankie and Zak.

As it turned out, our new friends were not headed to Lanquin, but to a very small K´echi Mayan village called Chisec. They had, as highschoolers, fundraised for a local NGO here (coordinated through a Peace Corps volunteer from their hometown) and they had been there a couple times on school exchanges and in their own travels. Hearing things like ¨local NGO, off the beaten path, undiscovered,¨etc. Balen and I were curious. And, as these guys seemed both normal and nice, we figured this leap of faith couldn´t end too terribly (and it wouldn´t be the worst thing in the world to miss out on more Beatles classics from the backseat). So Chisec it would be - we hopped off the bus after only about 3 hours and checked into a crazy big yellow hotel, complete with water slides like a theme park in the back (which we sadly didn´t get photos of). The highlights, in somewhat haphazard order:

We were delighted to find upon arrival that Zak and Frankie both spoke excellent spanish,  much better than ours; however, it became quickly apparent that their spanish was probably as good or better than everyone else in town. Chisec is a town of campesinos, indigenous K´echi Mayans who speak K´echi rather than Spanish (I am unsure of spelling, apologies if this is wrong. It is phonetic, at least). This made for interesting experiences with ordering food in restaurants and communication in general. I also quickly noticed that women here wore long skirts and the probable reason why I seemed to be getting stares from locals was both because of my accent, appearance, etc. and the fact that I was wearing shorts. Oops. I quickly changed into my longer skirt and the concerned and-or disapproving looks from old ladies lessened considerably.

While in Chisec we got to spend time with Ernesto, Frankie and Zak´s friend who works for the local NGO, SANK. He was kind and patient with our Spanish and very open about discussing Chisec and his work. He set us up for a tour of Bombil Pek which less than 1,500 people per year visit, compared to 5,000 per day in Tikal during the high season. Bombil Pek was exhilarating. We spent hours climbing slippery rocks to make it into and around the caves, and the ancient Mayan paintings were breathtaking (we had to crawl through 2 tiny holes in the cave walls to get to the cave paintings, see pictures below). Our tour guides, Guillermo and Hugo (the latter claimed to be 15, he looked more like 11) were very nice, knowledgeable, and patient with our language skills. We were disgustingly dirty and very tired at the end of the day, but it was so worth it. I personally was very proud when Frankie commented that his sister ¨would have given up a long time ago¨ with the climbing and squishing one´s body through little holes along the way. Take that, machismo!

There were many noticeable similarities between Chisec and the Marshall Islands and I would guess many rural places worldwide. Some observations:

• a new relationship with the internet and globalization, and growing numbers of international and national visitors - 7 years ago there was 1 internet cafe, now they are everywhere.
  
• NGOs trying to preserve the local culture and improve the community - we spent time with Ernesto, who works for SANC, a local NGO that Zak and Frankie fundraised for in high school. He was a very impressive guy who gave us a complete history lesson on the indigenous K´echi Mayas from the beginning to present.
• very conservative women and a culture of machismo
• strong family ties
• inadequate education, both for preserving cultural principles and in general
  
• environmental degradation (here, largely deforestation caused by a change from farming to cattle ranching, Ernesto says it´s much cooler to be a rancher than a campesino)

Our last night in town, we got to play basketball with some of the local kids, which was so fun and, of course, reminded me of most of my Friday nights in the Marshall Islands :) very wholesome. Sweaty and tired, we said goodbye to our tourguides and new friends, planning to leave the following morning for Antigua, by way of Coban (a long trip).

We also had some interesting experiences with food in restaurants in Chisec, because most adults there don´t speak very good Spanish. The combination of poor Spanish skills on both sides made ordering a bit difficult. Unfortunately, Balen became quite ill on our last night in town, probably from the fried chicken (which everyone agreed was very tasty). He was a trooper and by the afternoon felt ok enough to get on a microbus for the short ride to Coban. Little did we know that our bus driver would be racing the bus in front of us - I spent the hour with my head ducked, praying for my life and gripping the seat in front of me. I tried to gauge the safeness of this seemingly very unsafe situation by the other passengers, all of whom seemed very unfussed. The man in front of us was sleeping, so I thought against my intuition that we would be ok. Balen later had an ¨unfortunate incident¨ out the back window of the bus and I thought it served the bus driver right. After we passed the microbus ahead of us, he slowed down noticeably, and I could breathe again.

We were very happy to arrive in Coban, Guatemala before dusk and found a nice place to stay, at Hotel Central.

* We´ve been delayed with photos and will try to get more up, sorry, sorry!
** I apologize for terrible use of accents - I have not figured out Central American keyboards yet, please forgive me.