I took everything down from the walls today in preparation for the packers arriving Thursday. All my pictures and wood masks and posters. I replaced the relatively expensive polished chrome electrical faceplates with cheap white plastic ones that cost just $0.50 a piece. I have even taken down most of the drapes and related hardware. It feels naked. My apartment feels stripped and bare and not like a home.
Friday night, I’ll be back to sleeping on an air mattress in an empty room. Which is how I spent the first weeks in my apartment in September 2004.
A vacation for me, a true vacation, is more than just getting away from work, playing with my camera, and seeing a new part of the world. A true vacation for me is also a vacation from thinking about the Middle East and any other news of the day. It’s rare when I can resist the temptation to pick up a newspaper, and that temptation is so strong that I will often struggle through a newspaper in Spanish or Arabic if I can’t find one in English. But my trip to Guatemala didn’t involve a single newspaper. I think starting in the disconnected jungles of lowland northern Guatemala helped.
When I left on 12 July 2006, I believe that two Israeli soldiers had just been kidnapped by Hezbollah guerrillas in southern Lebanon. When I turned on NPR this morning, I expected to hear Daniel Schorr commenting on Iran’s efforts to evade IAEA inspections on its Bushehr nuclear facility, on sectarian violence in Baghdad, on the further fumblings of the mendacious autocracy of George Bush. I did not expect to hear that for the past 10 days, the Israeli Air Force had been pounding southern Lebanon, that the IDF was calling up reserves and massing on the border for a potential invasion, that over eighty Lebanese civilians, including children, had already been killed.
When Ariel Sharon, the man who masterminded the IDF’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, withdrew the last Israeli forces from Southern Lebanon in May of 2000, there was already hope that Lebanon had put behind four decades of intermittent sectarian violence. Beirut had been rebuilding for a decade, and was beginning to reclaim its title of the Switzerland of the Middle East. Lebanon might even have become a symbol of hope for peaceful, democratic and self-realized sectarian reconciliation in other Arab countries that had only tamped down on simmering tensions with violence and repression. Think Syria and Egypt for "successful" examples of this repression. Think Iraq and Algeria (from a few years back) for examples of what happens when that unfortunate safety valve of repression is suddenly removed.
Is this another full chapter in the Lebanese war? Or just a footnote? Will this rip Lebanon apart again? Could Syria’s minority Alawite government resist the pressure of sectarian violence from both the West and East? Will my friends, the Khalafs, have to flee Beirut again?
All I know is that there are again coffins for children killed in a war I grew up watching on the evening news, in a country whose refugees started me on a path of studying Arabic and the Middle East, in a land that might have proved an example to the entire Middle East.
I took a perfect picture today in the last 30 minutes of my visit to Thursday’s market in Chichicastenango (gallery), the last real 30 minutes of my vacation. It was of a young woman–maybe 15, though she could have been a few years younger and maybe even 10 years older–wearing a huipile of dark, almost iridescent blue. She was one of many women in traditional dress wandering the market with textiles and jewelry for sale.
Most were much older, though, and many had young children–maybe three or four–in tow selling little trinkets for a quetzal or two. Most of the women were also more confident, outgoing, like the ones in Antigua who now know me by name, ask how my day was, and touch my forearm or knee when leaving or after a joke.
No, she was shy, albeit persistent. She wouldn’t interrupt or block your path, but instead would wait quietly until you turned her way. She caught my eye within 30 minutes of our late, 10:30 a.m. arrival (damn micro bus driver said he just needed to go to the bathroom–we found him 30 minutes later eating breakfast). Somehow, though, she was always facing the other way, or my line of sight was blocked by someone taller (didn’t take much to do that). Either that, or she was inches away, trying to get my attention.
When she found me at 2 p.m., she tried to sell me a small bracelet for five quetzales. I countered, five quetzales for a picture. She agreed. The shy almost smile, the tilt of her head, the brilliant colors… well, you can see for yourself. Best picture I’ve taken in years, in my opinion.
No, not incredible: well-nigh infallible. I once spent four hours wandering aimlessly in White Sands National Monument, going a dozen different directions among acres of indistinguishable white sand dunes, and came out just 30 feet from where I went in. Yes, mind you, I thought I was 30 feet above were I went in, when in fact I was 30 feet below and walked 100 yards before I figured it out. But I knew that I was close.
So, I met these two very personable young British women in the taxi to Antigua, and after I helped them get a hotel I suggested we have dinner. I told them I would meet them at their hotel after I checked into mine. I didn’t want them to come to my hotel, because, if they got lost in the dark, they wouldn’t be able to ask for directions–neither spoke a word of Spanish.
Just to be safe, I took my Rough Guide to Guatemala with map of Antigua just in case (inset right–click to enlarge). But it was easy. My hotel, Posada La Merced, was in the south-southwestern corner of the city at the "Y", and they were in the northwest corner of the city near the "C." The city was laid out in a grid, in the streets were all numbered like in Manhattan (Avenidas were N/S, Calles E/W, and instead of Fifth Ave. splitting the city into East and West, Parque Central split it in all four directions). The avenues even numbered in the same directions: Avenues went lower in number the farther east one went. Streets were different–the highest were the furthest south.
Anyway, all I needed to do was walk from West 8th Street and 5th Avenue South to West 1st Street and 7th Avenue North… Simple, right? Not quite. Read on…
I was out on the nature path by 7:15 a.m. this morning. I was actually weirded out: this was a very different jungle, and it was obvious no one had been on the path in days, if not longer. I was utterly alone. Within five minutes, I heard a huge amount of noise in the underbrush to my right. It took a moment for me to remember I didn’t have to worry about the packs of man-eating hogs from Corcovado, Costa Rica (seriously, the guides tell you that if you encounter wild hogs in Corcovado, you need to get up in the trees immediately or you are pig feed). It was probably just a tapir, but I couldn’t see more than a few feet into the underbrush. In fact, I didn’t see anything at all on this site. I heard lots: monkeys, birds, small critters just a few feet from the trail…
Then it suddenly started raining buckets. I had my poncho, but the added heat was unbearable. I turned around maybe 1 km into the 5 km hike, and far from the Mirador overlooking the entire Tikal area.
After breakfast, I decided to check out the pottery and engravings museum. Much to my surprise, there was not a prohibition on flash photography like you will find in most Western museums, so I began shooting. But everything was over exposed, just like some of my shots of monkeys. With the monkeys, I didn’t think much about it: a flash is not designed to work with a zoom lens, let alone the Better Beamer flash extender, so you’re going to get some overexposed and underexposed shots. But this was different: it was within the working range of the flash. I knew it had to be the light meter, but everything seemed to be set properly. After fumbling around with the camera for a few minutes, I noticed that on this one odd, hard-to-reach screen the meter was set to take pictures 1.5 stops overexposed. The screen had the little lightning bolt symbol that represents a flash. I had no idea one could even have a separate meter setting for a flash. Makes sense, but… shouldn’t it just adjust the regular meter setting? You know, load it as a new default, and then let you adjust the regular setting? It took me a few more minutes to figure out how to set it back to normal. Bloody aggravating, but it takes time to learn a new camera.
When I got out of the museum, the damn weather was perfect. Blue sky with maybe 50% cloud cover, all puffy white cotton balls and broken into picturesque clumps. Plus, the weather was dry and cool–well, dry and cool relative to prior days, and even to an hour ago. I thought about staying one more day to retake some of my shots of Tikal with that gorgeous sky. But I only thought about it for about 10 minutes. I’m dying for more moderate weather in the highlands, and I’m sure that it will start raining as soon as I go back into Tikal.
More importantly, I need the rest. My knees and legs are still sore from yesterday. I guess if I can’t make today’s flight, then this will almost be a wasted day. Well, not entirely. I shared some of my best monkey pics with a few different groups of tourists (I love showing off, and with digital, I can do it right away) and passed on my advice about finding monkeys: don’t look for them, listen for them. And in exchange, one pair of young Russian women pointed out some huge caterpillars nearly four-inches long nursing in huge clumps on a tree near Comedor Tikal.
Well, I’m fed and packed. I’ll head to the airport in Flores, see if anyone is at the TikalJets office so I can check-in and drop off my pack. Maybe I’ll get an hour or two in Flores before the flight leaves. And maybe I’ll get a full 24 hours in Flores instead. Well, I need a change. If I can’t get a change in locale and weather, I’ll settle for a change in locale.
After being on my feet for six hours this morning, my knees were killing me, and I was just generally exhausted. But with hours to kill and a strong desire not to pay another 50 quetzales for a morning hike tomorrow, I went back in (I had noticed one nature trail outside the ticket-check area that I can take tomorrow morning). Instead of heading into the main area of the park, though, I took what looked to be a remote route to isolated Templo VI.
For the first 15 minutes, all I saw were mosquitoes and tiny tree toads. I picked up one of the tree toads: it was cool.
I noticed after while that the mosquitoes wouldn’t bother me if I kept moving, even at a slow, Joe-in-his-his-last-six-months-pace stroll. They just couldn’t keep up, and would hover in a cloud behind me. But stop for 30 seconds, and they were all over me.
Actually, the walk was pretty boring. A few times, I heard the snapping of branches and some small items falling to the jungle floor, but after the pounding rain, a lot of twigs and nuts were loose, and I couldn’t spot any monkeys.
That is, until I was about 30 minutes in. Then, I spotted a pair of good 150 yards from me–too far for my zoom lens, but I was so bored, I hung out watching just in case they got close to the trail. I’m glad I did, because five minutes later, that pair was joined, first by five or six more spider monkeys, and then by another dozen. It must have been at least 20 individuals in total, and they just kept jumping back and forth between two sets of trees on either side of the past.
I even found a little past into the jungle that went right under one of the trees they were feeding it. After 15 minutes, my neck was near numb with pain from looking up into the canopy with a six-pound camera rested on top of my face. But the opportunity was incredible. There was always at least one spider monkey a mere seven or eight feet above me and not blocked by intervening foliage.
[click any picture to enlarge]
I left eventually, but I didn’t give in to the pain in my neck. I gave in to my flash, the batteries specifically. After I don’t know how long, the flash began to take a minute to recharge. I had three fresh batteries in my pack, so I opened up my flash to replace three of the four. They were actually hot to the touch. Not warm. Literally hot. Just a hair below too-hot-to-handle.
So, I didn’t talk about my new flash when I bought my new camera. Well, my old flash wasn’t compatible with the 1d Mark II N, so I bought the top-of-the-line Canon flash. But I didn’t read the manual or experiment with it before arriving in Guatemala. I just took the old batteries from my flash and put them in the new one. To be honest, I was a little disappointed with the new flash the first couple days. It wasn’t any different from the old, from what I could tell. Basically, I paid $500 for compatibility. Damn Canon and their proprietary systems.
But with three fresh batteries… oh man, I could snap off three shots in succession without waiting for recharge. Incredible! I can only imagine what it will be like with four fresh batteries. Why does this matter? Well, in this case, the monkeys are distracted by the flash, and look right at you after you nail them with the strobe. I’d seen this before in Costa Rica, but by the time my old flash recharged, the monkey was looking away again. Now, I shoot one to get the monkey’s attention, and once more for the real picture.
Of course, I had to rotate the four drained batteries every few minutes, since the flash would start taking minutes to recharge again, but hey! Anyway, when the four drained batteries couldn’t help the other three charge the flash anymore, I was done.
After that, I took the long way home. I was utterly exhausted, but there was one more set of ruins close by. Might as well check ’em out. On the way, this European couple showed me this ridiculous, furry white caterpillar.
By the time I got home at 7pm, my knees were in agony, my back on strike, my neck in open revolt, and my stomach growling more loudly than a howler monkey. I don’t know, maybe I won’t have the energy to take that morning hike after all.
Still, a good walk for shooting. The pictures of the spider monkeys were fantastic.
Ten minutes ago, I began to hear rumbles of thunder. The weather has been so constant since arriving–suny with some clouds, hot, humid–I forgot it was the rainy season. Now, there is a torrential downpour. It’s simply incredible. From nothing, to a massive storm in minutes. My bungalow has a little porch, and I’ve camped out in a chair to experience the sound.
I brought out my camera, somewhat curious if the weather seals would work. I couldn’t bring myself to try, though. I have a pic, but accidentally took it in RAW format. Can’t convert until I get home.
And like that, it was all but gone. Just fifteen minutes of a cooling downpour, then the humidity came back down like a blanket, and the mosquitoes regrouped and began to feed again.
For the past week, my stomach has been bothering me more and more. Every meal has been a chore, no matter how hungry I am, and each meal has been harder to eat than the last.
I think I know why, now. I was worried it was just the malarial meds that I’ve been on since last Wednesday. But last night was the first since then that I haven’t had a drink, and my stomach feels gloriously normal today.
I’m not looking forward to four more weeks as a near-teetotaller, but I’m glad I’m back to normal and on the meds. I’ve been at Campamento El Sombrero for all of ten minutes, and I already have a mosquito bite. I’m sure there will be more.
I have arrived. My first solo adventure in three years, since 2003.
When our flight was descending this evening, I saw flashes of what I thought was lightning in the clouds. But the lightning only appeared in two places. I can only assume they were volcanos erupting. Just as I was considering pulling out my camera, the plane banked around to land.
