We spent the night in a field and it was hot and sticky so we ran our air conditioning off the batteries which was enough to keep us feeling dry if not cold. Our design works!
A young Mayan girl walked up just before the appointed hour of ten o’clock and said she was Lisa and our guide. She is 14 and has completed free schooling and is working in her family business.
She lives with her grandmother and two aunts as her parents have remarried and didn’t want her around. She doesn’t see her father any more. I hear this shit and have no idea how to handle it. Her future? You’re looking at it and she’s a bright spark. She speaks Quechua and Spanish and she is a great guide, patient and careful. She can pull her bootstraps as hard as any cliche you like but here she is, for life.
The walk was about half a mile and the tubing lasted about an hour. The water was occasionally shallow as we are at the end of the dry season but it was a magical experience.
We saw a few bats and lots of stalactites. Photographing them was tricky as we were lying in an inner tube armed with the flashlight they provided staring at the ceiling sliding by. It felt like flying.
We twirled merrily around each in our own inner tube.
It was lovely and cool and our underwater camera (Panasonic TS7) did fine when I got the chance.
Don’t judge the quality of the cave by the pictures. It was spectacular, a cathedral underground. The blackout section creeped me out but our young guide paddled us through. She was exceptional herding us gently.
It was a privilege being alone on the trip. Weekends are packed we’re told.
We paid 60 Quetzals each and gave her a 50Q tip. It’s 7.5 Quetzals to the dollar. The Quetzal is the national bird of Guatemala, a brightly plumed rarely seen bird. Lisa saw one once when she was eight.
This is the shrimp flower naked because…it looks like one!
A cacao pod. We saw other plants but -ahem-the battery died. She showed us a monkey ladder, quetzal tails which are actually ferns and a stringy green thing they call Mayan spaghetti which they cook apparently. Lisa wasn’t too enthusiastic about that dish.
This was where we put in:
Back at GANNET2 I woke Rusty up and even though he was fine parked in the shade I always worry just a little about him. Silly me.
Young Bryan gave me a lesson in Quechua which I practiced on passing women. “How’re you doing?” I tried to say brightly. They just giggled. “Dang-Grang-Chuck?” Tee hee was all I got back. It’s a horrible language. The word dog was unpronounceable. It sounds like tsee with a spitting action with your lower lip. I kid you not. No wonder they don’t write it down. Back on the road we went, dodging giant potholes.
You just dive in and hope for the best…
Lunch was a peculiar cut of pork with rice beans hot sauce and piles of thick soft hot corn tortillas. $3:50 a plate. We chatted with our neighbors who told of their working the power lines, maintaining them in the mountains and getting yelled at by landowners for tromping on their land. “They want reliable electricity but they don’t want to help us” he shrugged. Lovely to be retired!
Layne found a nature park for the night for $27. We’re an hour north of Cuban with a swimming pool, a river, showers and trash cans and we are by ourselves.
The weekend approaches and this place will be a circus. We’ll be gone by the time you read this.
Up next: a tour of a coffee plantation. Can you stand the anticipation?
Some random roadside shots. Not all great photography obviously but this is what you see if you drive through Guatemala. Hope they illustrate the actual drive for you.
