Guatemala

Up early for Lido breakfast and a 7:00 call for our shore excursion to the Mayan ruins at Iximche. This was a big tour – two full sized busses – and through sheer luck we ended up with Hugo, a fabulous tour guide. His knowledge seemed unlimited and he imparted it in good sized chunks that made sense. And he didn’t make stupid sexist jokes about shopping or wives. Guatemala is full of volcanoes and Puerto Quetzal has quite a few; 2 of the closest ones are classified as active and one of those, Fuego, has been continuously erupting for something like 500 years. Quite often we’d look over and there would be puffs of gray ash coming out of the top, like volcano flatulence. We learned about the history of Guatemala and its exports and all sorts of other stuff; we learned about the Germans who came in 1871 after the liberals took over the country and offered land instead of money to repay debts. We were sitting right behind Hugo (the ‘H’ is silent) so I could ask him all kinds of questions like do the different central American countries have different accents  - yes, and everyone makes fun of how the people from East Guatemala talk.

The drive was long – about 2.5 hours – but it went by very quickly. We drove past coffee plantations and also sugar cane, and saw many roadside fruit stands, both of fresh fruit (cantaloupe and green beans being the primary fruit exports) and canned fruit, mostly peaches and apricots glowing in their glass mason jars. There was livestock everywhere; a horse here, a cow there. They all looked very thin. We drove past an area where Fuego had erupted and caused a mud slide that filled a river and destroyed a housing development. Our destination, Iximche, is at about 7,000 feet above sea level, just outside of the town of Tecpán, which is primarily populated by indigenous (Mayan) people. We had a 3^rd tour employee on the bus whose job it was to get off the bus in Tecpán and help Jose, the driver, navigate through the narrow streets and extraordinarily sharp turns.

The ruins at Iximche are in a large and beautiful park. Because of its altitude it’s much cooler than sea level – I was comfortable in my sweatshirt and lightweight down jacket. The ruins were created when the Spaniards came (by the way, the ‘d’ in Spaniard seems to be silent in central American Spanish – “espaniars”) and burnt them down as part of the conquest. We learned a whole lot of things. One of the things is that the Mayans were thought of as a peaceful people, but in fact they were just as involved in the human trait of conquest as other tribes. He told us about how they used game playing instead of fighting wars, and about the Mayan codices, and about the calendar and the three periods of history and how soldiers got promoted and a whole bunch of other stuff. You have to go to university for two years to get a tour guide degree and it’s clear Hugo was a star pupil.

The ceremonial portion of the ruins is still used by the indigenous people as a sacred site, and we walked over there and watched for a while. Hugo said that many of the people there were asking the gods’ favor for the journey to immigrate illegally to the US. It felt intrusive and weird to be there – and smoky, since fire is a major part of the ritual. Afterwards we talked about it and how odd it felt, and yet we have been in many European churches during services with priests and monks and congregants doing their things and not felt intrusive at all, and so maybe it was the unfamiliarity of the ritual and not the ritual itself? Or that unlike being in a historic cathedral, where there are other reasons to be there, it was pretty clear that we were there just to watch?

There is also a museum there, which we walked through. It had a good diorama of what the area looked like before it was burnt – the Spanish conquistadores kept records, so some of this is archaeologists reconstruction, and some of it is from the records and many displays about daily life. We have enough Spanish to be able to get the gist. Most of the indigenous women still wear traditional outfits in this heavily patriarchal society (and ride sitting sidesaddle on the back of the motorcycles), but the men don’t, because of discrimination. So it was interesting to see the men’s clothing in the museum. They also had a small example of the spheres made from volcanic stone that we saw in Cartagena. Dave thinks that learning to carve them ight be his next hobby.

The Iximche ruins are a big tourist destination, and we were the only tour ship in town, but the parking lot was very crowded. On Sunday afternoon people from Guatemala City go for a drive (in groups, in the case of the motorcycle clubs) out to Iximche, then stop at a restaurant for lunch before driving back home. And people come there from other central American nations as well. It was fun to be in the midst of a large group of what were essentially tourists, but still be in the middle of a foreign culture. The place we stopped for lunch, Pueblo Real, is clearly meant for tourists but again not foreign tourists. It has a central square with souvenirs, pony rides, hiking trails, greenhouses, and even a go-kart track with pedal powered go-karts. There was a waiting line to get in when we left. A drawback to cruising is that you rarely get to be part of the culture, and we enjoyed being part of the Sunday afternoon crowd. The drive home was good for napping, and was memorable for clear skies. The other active volcano was completely visible, no clouds, which was unusual enough for Hugo to have to take a picture with his phone, something I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a tour guide do.

We got back to the ship in time to get cleaned up for our dinner in the Canneletto restaurant, the other specialty restaurant on the ship. You might be wondering why a Dutch ship has an Italian restaurant, and it’s a nod to the ship’s heritage – all HAL ships are built by Fincantieri, an Italian company. So there you go. We sat next to each other so we both had a great view out the windows, and got to see the sun go down and the tropical night fall BOOM, it was light and now it’s dark. The dinner was good, but it wasn’t quite up to the quality of the food on the rest of the ship, which was surprising. The servers seemed a little unsure as well. We know that during the pandemic they had to let the crew go, and it feels a bit like they didn’t quite get the new folks fully trained before having to send them out on the ships. As we were finishing dinner the Chief Engineer in full uniform (and it was a full uniform; he’s one of the broadest men I’ve ever seen) came and sat downat a table across from us with two of the engineering crew, who were Indonesian or Filipino. It looked very much like an incredibly awkward employee of the month dinner that someone in HR thought would be a great idea and that both the manager and employees dreaded equally.

After dinner we were able to go to the Ocean Bar for the band’s first set; it was pretty mellow and mostly full of slower couple dance songs. They did play two faster songs at the end, and there was one other of the ladies’ dance crew there, so we finished out the evening well. Of course I had to yell “Cumbia!” and the band had to laugh and say “…before the Cumbia…”

Afterwards the whole ship was watching the super bowl. Dave bitterly remarked how he hadn’t been able to find the world series games even in the sports bar and here they were showing the super bowl in the big theater. There had been a jewelry cleaning event at one of the shops and I took advantage of the shops being empty to see if they’d be willing to clean some of mine; they were. We watched the end of the game in our stateroom and then I debated about going down for more dancing, but decided on sleep instead.