It's 9 pm and the creatures are out and about at the one and only bar in Jaibalito -- a tiny village on the shores of Lake Atitlán, Guatemala, home to about 150 inhabitants. A list of what Jaibalito has: two steep streets covered in an inch-thick layer of dogshit, two fried chicken vendors (Guatemala has the best fried chicken), loads of stray dogs with mange who run around eating used diapers, a handful of miscreant youth causing general mayhem, a few tiendas selling mostly chips and bananas, and one rickety wooden dock marking the only connection to the other lakeside towns. It's a tiny, off-the-beaten-path village nestled into the cliffs along the water, looking out across the blue expanse at the two volcanos looming in the background.
Quite the scene.
Jaibalito also has some of the strangest expats in the world, and I'm stuck in a one-way conversation with one of them -- Mark, a 67-year-old piss-drunk Irishman with a wicked accent, seven total teeth, and a history of incarceration spanning three continents.
"I tell ya yet about the time I woke up in a ditch by the soccer field over there, with a bleedin' tampon stuck in me head?" he yells at me.
"No, Mark," I say, "you haven't told me about the time you woke up in a ditch with a bleeding tampon stuck in your head."
The "bar" we're at is really just another chip-and-banana tienda, but it's got a fridge stocked with beer and the locals swarm it every night. There's a little cement patio out front with three plastic stools and one plastic table, and every evening at around 7 the townsfolk gather under the weak blue and red string light to drink 10,000 beers, only getting up to pee on the floor in the corner or buy loose cigarettes. It rocks.
"There I am," Mark goes, standing on the lit patio in the dark night like a stage figure in a spotlight, "and I figure I really got ta prove meself to the locals in this little town, ya know? I'd done just moved in back two years ago, and the fellas want ta know if they can fuck with ya, and so I go walkin' up the street there and there's one of 'em waitin' for me with a machete. He starts yellin', callin' me 'gringo.'"
He has a huge grin on and his very blue eyes are wet and beaming, the Irish bard lost in the story, drunk in his reverie.
"I say, 'oi, piss off, I ain't no gringo! I'm Irish!" He's full of pride and beats his chest. It sounds like "Oim Oirish!""And I can see this bastard wants to chop me, so I load one up and BAM right there in the teeth like, and then we're rollin' on the ground, and then I'm on top of him with me hand back about ta give the final blow, and someone comes behind me and pulls me off."
"Oh," I say.
"So what do I do, I come back here and have another beer don't I, and then I wait a little and then get ready to get back to me place. But then Maria here tells me --" he calls to Maria, the woman working at the tienda, "Maria, remember when they was all waitin' for me up the road?" and Maria shrugs -- "Maria says, 'Mark, there's a whole lot of 'em waitin' up the road for ya.' And I go out there and there's twelve of these bastards all with machetes. And I think, well, nothin' to it, rock and roll."
He grins. "And I charge right into 'em, I does."
Mark takes a slug of his beer. I look at Maria and she shrugs again.
He continues. "I took a good number of 'em down with me, ya know. Just throwin' haymakers, left and right. But one of 'em gets me with the machete right here --" he points to his temple -- "and I go down, I hit the ground. And at some point, I guess somebody saw me bleedin' head and plugged it up with a Maxi Pad, just stuck right in there, wham, and then they drug me over to the ditch by the field so I could sleep right, and I woke up there the next mornin' thinkin', Jee-sus. I rubbed me head and came back and got a beer from Maria, I did, and then went home.
"And I tell ya what. Since then, the local fellas have done left me alone. I didn't take 'em all down, but they know not ta fuck with me."
"Nice," I say.
And that's the story of how Mark from Ireland woke up in a ditch with a tampon stuck in his head.
View of Jaibalito's dock, View of one Jaibalito street (taken from Google)
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Okay, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, Hey scuzzo, you missed a week of the blog and you're just gonna plow ahead writing about dog crap and machetes without saying anything? Don't you think we deserve better than that?
To which I reply, no. I was busy. Boy stuff. Don't ask.
I will at least answer one question. What was I doing in Jaibalito?
I had spent a week in that quirky little town, volunteering at a school (good person). Jaibalito sits on Lake Atitlán, a big old lake formed in the caldera of an ancient megavolcano that erupted in ancient times. The evolutionary history is this: the megavolcano spewed, then three other volcanos formed around the rim of the crater, then the caldera filled up with water and fish and snails and such, then little Mayan towns popped up, then boats evolved from the muck to transport people from town to town, then the boats grew wheels via natural selection and turned into tuk tuks to shuttle people by land, and then tourists came. And that's it. Overall, Lake Atitlán is maybe the most beautiful place ever -- big expanses of blue water surrounded by dramatic cliffsides, little towns set in amongst the hills, the peaks of volcanos fixed blue within the clouds in the distance.
I'd found this school on Workaway, which is a website for volunteers to connect with people who need help with stuff. To get there I had to walk to the end of one of Jaibalito's two roads and then follow a narrow path winding uphill between the banana trees. I found the place in the middle of the woods, tucked way back, two buildings made of cement and bamboo looking like a grounded treehouse. It was dead quiet. It felt like I was stepping into a Guatemalan Grimm's Fairytales.
Suffice to say, the week at Jaibalito started weird and only got weirder.
I spent that first day on a recruiting mission trying to get the local street kids to join the school. I followed the one teacher as he played the ukelele and we walked down the two streets, singing a song to the tune of "Mary Had A Little Lamb" in Spanish that went, "Follow us for English class (English class, English class)."
The miscreant street youth stopped what they were doing. They looked at us with a look. The look said, Who made people out of yogurt? and What is this kumbaya crap?
They were a ragtag bunch. There was maybe ten of them that ran wild along the streets of Jaibalito, playing a game that involved flying through the air and kicking each other. They shouted out in Kaqchikel -- a Mayan language. I don't speak Kaqchikel, but it didn't sound like complements. Somehow, though, we got a group of them to follow the sound of the music, and we routed them up the hill and corrralled them like little hurricanes onto a circle of stools in the schoolroom.
The teacher had set up a microphone and a speaker, and his plan was to teach the kids English words by having them repeat them into the mic and listening to their own voices. He asked them to say a word in Kaqchikel in the mic before he repeated it in English. We started, for some reason, with "watermelon," and one kid would get up and say something in Kaqchikel in the mic which would send all the others into a fit of hysteria, and that made me think that they weren't saying "watermelon" in Kaqchikel at all but something much more humorous, like "butthole" or "peeny." I laughed, too. Comedy transcends language.
The funny thing is, it actually worked for a little bit. The kids learned a couple of English words, sitting in the circle and practicing saying them, but eventually the levee holding the tides of kids needing to kick shit broke, one of them got up and shouted "Pee pee!" and ran out the door, and the other nine got up and shouted "Pee pee!" and ran out the door after him.
That left me, Will (the other volunteer), the teacher, and Lupe and Fiona: Lupe is the nine-year-old daughter of the school's owners, Fiona her also-nine-year-old friend, and the two of them the school's only consistent students. We sat amongst the overturned stools and rubble like the grounds crew the morning after a Black Sabbath concert.
"Alright," the teacher said after a pause. "Do you girls want to sing a song?"
"Yeah!" they shouted.
He started strumming some chords, and the girls started to sing. No joke, it was "Country Roads," and they knew every word. I don't know what I expected from day one at the school, but it sure wasn't getting called "milk-ass" in Kaqchikel and singing John Denver in the middle of the woods. I sang along, feeling like I was in an episode of the Twilight Zone.
Strange place.
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I won't recount everything about Jaibalito. Instead, I'll detail some of the characters, the wonderful and wacky cast and crew, a series of Still-Life-With-Clowns, if you will, which I think paints a fair picture of the town and its events.
#1: Will. Other volunteer at the school. Twenty years old, Australian, in his last week of a
round-the-world solo hitchhiking trip, from southeast Asia, through Europe, flight to Canada, then to Guatemala via hitched boats and cars. He's been Couchsurfing along the way and had three dollars left to his name for his last week, and when I found him in the volunteer room he was reheating a pot of beans that he'd been surviving off of. So I bought us food, and together we helped teach at the school in the afternoons (mostly Lupe and Fiona), and we did a tiling project on the kitchen counter in the dorm during the mornings, which entailed taking boats to the main town to get supplies and lugging all the tiles and cement and grout and crap back up the hill. It came out looking great, even though we didn't really know what we were doing with half the crap, and overall Will is a pretty cool, adventurous fella.
_
#2: Luz. Fifty-two-year-old Californian expat who runs the school with his wife, Hannah. Luz has lived in Jaibalito for the last seventeen years. The two of them built their house up in the woods above the town and built the volunteer space and classroom right next to it. They make their money by offering classes in Chinese healing and they're supposed massage
experts.
On Saturday I spent the morning helping unload goats from the dock and bringing them up to the property -- a task made challenging by an angry male goat with big old horns who looked like his favorite food was whiteboy pie, and who the sellers had tied to the boat for transport by all four limbs like some kind of maximum security prisoner. After we loaded the goats in the pen (the angry male trying unsuccessfully to lodge a horn in my butt as I turned to latch the gate), Luz said he needed a body for his massage class, so I volunteered. Two younger hippie types were his students, and Will asked if he could join in, and (as instructed) I got babyback naked under a thin little sheet while the four of them prodded my "meridians" for two hours. And they weren't too careful with the sheet.
I knew I was in for a strange one when one student told Luz she had a question right at the start. "How do you go about including genital massage?" she asked.
I shifted, my bare cheeks barely covered by the transluscent sheet.
"Just ask the client," Luz said.
At the behest of my lawyer, I have redacted my answer.
At another point, Luz (who really is a great masseuse) had his thumb about an ass-hair's width away from my b-hole.
"One time," he said, I think to his students, still on the topic of genital massage, "I gave a client a massage that ended in a thirty minute orgasm."
Gulp.
_
#3: Hans. Hans is a crazy old Dutchman who lives in Jaibalito and runs a little hostel. We went to buy PVC pipe from him to fix the kitchen sink, since selling PVC is one of his many hobbies, which also include: being perpetually drunk, raising a turkey, feeding stray dogs, running a hostel, roasting coffee, and brewing beer (which tasted like beer made by a crazy old perpetually drunk Dutchman). Hans is about 6-foot-5, all stooped over, and to my knowledge, has never showered. He looks like Dubmledore after a monthlong bender. Cheap PVC, though, and he showed us his turkey.
_
#4: Mark. Aforementioned Irishman. Prison time in England, Morroco, and Guatemala. From his stories, his interests seem to be fighting and fornicating. Among Mark's sage advice for us:
-"Rock and roll"
-"Make as many babies for as you can"
-"Never let anybody fuck with you"
-"Know your family history" (this one felt strangely poignant?)
_
#5-6: Lupe and Fiona: Lupe and Fiona are the two nine-year-old students. They were weird, but in the most wonderful way. From the minute I got there, they were open and friendly and climbed all over Will and me. We spent afternoons up in the classroom singing, dancing, drawing, and learning math. They're wildly smart and musical kids, each of them speaking three languages and playing three instruments. They started by calling me "Pumpkin" and then switched to giving me my new least favorite nickname ("Whipped Cream," because they said I looked like whipped cream, which I had to pretend didn't hurt), and they spoke in their own invented dialect together, a mix of Kaqchikel and English and Spanish, and they were a delight to hang with.
"Bye, Whipped Cream," they told me the night before I left Jaibalito. "Thank you for being our teacher."
"Bye, Monster 1 and Monster 2," I said, because those were their nicknames.
Pretty neat.
And those are the characters of Jaibalito.
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Okay, so I know there's a good bit to catch up on. It's been a month since I last wrote, and this is the first I'm writing of Guatemala. Jaibalito was only my last week, and I suppose I should give the full picture.
So from here there are two narrative options: one, like that movie Memento about the guy who looks at his tattoos to remember everything that happened, would be to work chronologically backwards. Option Two is to do a Tarantino, do the ending then the beginning then the middle. Since I don't have any new tattoos to reference (even though Will offered to stick-and-poke me), it's gonna be #2. Ficción de la Pulpa. And as Pumpkin in Pulp Fiction says, "The days of me forgetting are over, and the days of me remembering have just begun."
So let's begin back at the beginning.
Whole lotta crisis coming
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ACT I: Arrival, Antiguan Shenanigans
Arrival
The shuttle from the Guatemala City airport to Antigua had just one passenger, and that was this lucky little clam (me). So I got to chat to the driver, Eric, the whole way, and he gave me the best primer to Guatemala I could ask for. Among the information he shared:
-The Border: The Guatemala/Belize border is still under dispute (which is why it's a dotted line if you look on the map). Guatemala claims that at least parts of Belize blong to it, and now, the dispute has escalated to the International Court of Justice (which is also processing my old roommate Frank's war crimes). The Court is set to release a decision next year, which could reshape the map of Central America.
-The Danger: Eric said Guatemala City was dangerous, but Antigua and the lake were totally safe. He said one of the most common ways people got robbed in the city was by motorcycles pulling up to your car or van and pointing a gun at you, so he was always on the look for motorcycles that looked dangerous. I asked what he did if he saw one, and he swirved the wheel out into the next lane and laughed maniacally.
-The Politics: Before I got to Guatemala I knew there were protests blocking a lot of the roads because the current government refused to certify the results of the recent election, in which an anti-corruption candidate received the most votes. "Here's what politics is like here," Eric told me, and he told me this story:
There's this one mayor from a rural community who got popular by being a sort of outlaw cowboy figure and broadcasting on Facebook Live. His most popular videos were of him explaining to the camera, "This is how you shit if you're a cowboy," and then dropping his pants and doing the dirty right there in the woods. And then he ran for mayor, and then he won.
There was another mayor from a bigger city, and he and the cowboy mayor didn't really get along. At one point, the cowboy mayor made a derrogatory comment about the city mayor's sexuality, and they traded public verbal blows which eventually escalated to them deciding there was only one way to settle it: a boxing match.
And so, in a packed stadium transmitted to the nation on public television, two government officials squared up. Unfortunately the fight only lasted 90 seconds, because the cowboy mayor knocked the other mayor out in three hits, for which he earned the nickname "three hits." So the bad guy won, but then did the vaguely decent thing and donated all the prize money to the city mayor's city, with the request that it be used for public works.
"That's Guatemalan politics," Eric said.
-Mayan Communities: Eric told me that one of the cool things about Guatemala was how in-tact and visible the Mayan communities are. He said I would see people all over dressed in traditional clothing, speaking local dialects, living in a way similar to how they did before the Spanish. He was right. Especially around Lake Atitlán, the Mayan presence is one of the most interesting things about Guatemala. A vast majority of the women wear the handwoven clothing, which is colorful and intricate. Most people use Kaqchikel, and Spanish is a second language. And little things -- people carrying baskets on their heads, babies wrapped in colorful textiles, the farming and local produce -- it all adds up to paint a picture of another world. Guatemala, to me, has felt truly unique.
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Antiguan Shenanigans
After Eric dropped me off I spent two weeks in the beautiful colonial city of Antigua. Looming high above the cobblestone streets and colorful buildings of Antigua is Volcán De Agua, a dormant 14,000-footer. One of the first days I ran up to a lookout to get a view of the city, the colorful streets running in sraight lines to the massive volcano dominating in the distance, and I thought, neat-o. And it stayed neat-o.
Antigua looks like this
I stayed at a great little hostel run by an American couple who also sold psychedelic mushrooms behind the desk, and for Thanksgiving they made a big feast and I bought a bunch of beer for everyone ("It's a Thanksgiving tradition to be drunk," I explained. "How else can you spend that long with family?") In the box of beers was a free T-shirt, which is now my new favorite run shirt. After the feast we went to an American-themed trivia hosted by the hostel owner, and I got all the questions right about American Football and MMA and Bruce Springsteen (I didn't know the answers to the science or global affairs sections, but I got the important ones).
Towards the end of my time in Antigua, my friend from high school, L, who I had last seen in Oaxaca, and her friend, M, arrived there as well. M is also from Vermont but had been living in New York the past few years, and she was visiting L on a break from work. We met up for drinks a couple of nights and then decided, ya know what, maybe we should do this Antigua Bar Crawl thing that was advertised everywhere.
As soon as we walked into the hostel that was the first stop of the bar crawl, we knew it was going to get out of hand. The evidence: The Wheel.
For those who are decent members of society and have never encountered a hostel wheel, the idea is simple. At many grimy party hostels, there's a wheel on the wall. At some point, someone eggs someone else to spin it. Along the wheel are listed lots of sanitary and normative things, like "Swap underwear with someone." "Make out with a stranger." "Get spanked by the bartender." And, if the hostel has a pool, invariably, one option is "Get naked in the pool."
M and L and I watched as person after person spun the wheel. Without fail, they all landed on naked pool. We watched as cretin after cretin dropped down to their derma and dove in. It must have been rigged. L and M and I, respectable young adults, did not spin the wheel (I kinda wanted to, though). When we were moving to the next spot, after everyone had cleared out, I hung back a beat. When it was truly empty, I made my move. One quick spin. "Naked in pool." I knew it!
Anyway, it was a great night with karaoke and strangers and lots of tequila shots, and it ended with me waking up at 3 in the morning on the hostel couch in nothing but my underwear, the cleaning lady poking me with a broomstick, saying "Ay, Dios," and shielding her eyes.
The next day I figured I should avoid the cleaning lady, so I headed down to the coast for the weekend. I stayed in the little black-sand surf town of El Paredón. The hostel was right on the water and had this system where they charged you at checkout for whatever you consumed. I did an eleven-mile run to a little village where I got candy as run fuel, and when I came back to the hostel the pool party was in full swing. It was a blast, with highlights of someone riding a bicycle into the pool, sunset beach volleyball, an American guy the next day telling me he was having heart arrythmia from mixing too much cocaine and Viagra.
"Huh," I said.
I checked out and couldn't believe the amount on my tab. I asked for an itemized list, and it read like one of those infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters situations, except if the only button on the typewriters was "cerveza."
"Yeah, guess that's right," I said to the lady.
And so, having arrived and enjoyed and unable to afford any more shenanigans, we close the first act.
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ACT II: Outdoor Adventure
At this point, I was ready for some good old outside time. I headed back to Antigua to do one of Guatemala's most popular activities: hiking to the active Volcán De Fuego (Fire Volcano).
They tour group picked us up early and shuttled us out to the base of the mountain, where we ate breakfast and drank coffee and grabbed cold weather gear and looked at the map. The first leg was roughly five miles and 3,000 feet up another volcano -- Acatenango, this one dormant -- to the basecamp at 11,000 feet of altitude. From basecamp we faced directly to Volcan Del Fuego, the active one, and we could hear the rumble of eruptions and watch plumes of smoke coming from across the distance.
We had the option to hike across to Volcan Del Fuego and get a close-up, hoping for lava flow at night. It was another 3 miles, 2,500 feet, and we arrived right around sunset to the exposed ledge facing Fuego. It was surreal -- the trail all black volcanic rock, wind blowing like crazy on the exposed ledge, 360 views of the valley all the way to the lights of the capital in the distance. Clouds rolled in as we arrived and the temperature dropped to just about zero, and we sheltered on the side of the ledge, waiting, hoping the clouds would clear. As the sun went down totally and we lost all the light, finally the sky parted. And then, as we sat there shivering, the big zit popped, sending bright red lava up into the air glowing against the dark night sky. It was totally nuts, and when nobody could feel their toes anymore we switched on the headlamps and hiked back to base, turning at every rumble to watch the volcano spew like an overstuffed four-year-old after too much birthday cake. Wicked.
Back at base we had a little food and then I tucked in, since the summit group left at 4 the next morning. Earlier than bright and early, the guide was tapping on the little lean-to, and I crawled out of the sleeping bag still in all my clothes and winter jacket and hat, and strapped on the headlamp, and we went up another 1,500 feet of the volcano we were on -- Acatenango -- to watch the sunrise.
The summit was, again, about as cold as a stainless steel toilet in a snow cave. But up at the top we were greeted by a crazy view of the sunken crater, again all black rock, Fuego off in the distance, and the sun slowly turning the sky shades of orange and blue. We watched as Fuego popped off again, sending plumes of grey ash billowing, and when the sun was finally up, we sprinted back down the volcano to base, trying to warm up the bits and bobs that had frozen to the icicle, so to speak. We hoofed it back down quick, grabbed all our gear from base, and took the long way down the mountain. For the last half mile the guide said we could sprint down and not wait for the group, and so I got to hoot and holler behind him, bombing down the mountain, calling out to the him, "I'm gonna getcha, ya little stink bug!" I didn't quite catch him (that little stink bug), but I came close, and we piled laughing into the van to head back, wrapping up the adventure of Act II.
Photos from Hike
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ACT III: Into The Wild
(Act III, where it has to get *dramatic*!)
Having thoroughly enjoyed my time doing cool stuff, my next stop was to head to Lake
Atitlán to keep ramping up the outdoor adventure. I met a buddy on the hike, Julian, who was going to the lake, too, so we went together. We got a bus to Panajachel, the biggest city on the lake, and then took a boat over to San Juan, and right off the dock we were greeted by the most colorful, funky street running straight up into the mountain behind. Local shops lined the main avenue, the cobblestone painted in bright colors, umbrellas hanging over everything. It felt like a fairytale, like nowhere I'd ever been. And one of the best things about San Juan, we discovered, was how relatively unbothered it was. The majority of the people there were locals, wearing their colorful woven clothes, carrying textiles and baskets of fruit.
Julian and I were staying at places one block away from each other, and every day for a
week we'd meet right on the corner and plan something to do. We kicked it into high gear for the outdoor activities. We boated to other towns to explore, we hiked to the viewpoint to look out over the lake and the big volcanos framing it. We ziplined out over the water, rootin' and tootin' and trying not to drop our phones. (Wowwee, how crazy would that be, losing your phone in Guatemala!) One day we kayaked out to a spot where you can jump from the cliff 30 feet up into the lake and spent the day plunging. The kayak rental guy asked if we wanted life jackets and we said not really. He said "Experts?" and we said yes, which was a lie. Like most lies, it felt like there would be no consequences. And like most of the times I've thought there would be no consequences, I was being a jackass.
A note on Julian: He's a great guy. First I liked him because we had similar interests -- doing stuff outside. He's from Germany, pretty mellow, and is generally up for anything, which fit the lakeside vibe. Little did I know I'd like him even more after he saved my life. Kinda. (foreshadow!)
By that point, too, the old pals L and M had made it to the lake, and we reunited for a big night out on the town. We spent the night at a place called Sublime, which is one of the cooler bars I've been to. The street level is the bar and dance floor, and below that, on the lakeside, is a level with a firepit and seating, and below that was a dock where you could sit out and stargaze. It was one of M's last nights, and she headed home early because she thought she had a fever which she thought might be dengue (it wasn't, I think. I dunno.). We all drank a bunch, we sat by the fire, watched the stars over the lake from the dock, other stuff happened, it was great. Surreal.
Assorted images of lake stuff
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Okay, here it is! This is the climax, and good stories always just tell you when the climax is coming. Right now!
The next day, M having gone back to her home of New York, L and Julian and I decided to spend a day kayaking a short distance to a little beach and hanging out there. We got the kayaks, same as the other day, and then we started paddling.
And then. All of a sudden. Windy. The lake, once a placid and gentle creature, turned about as angry as a goat being pulled off a boat by a lanky white stringbean. Bucking, tossing. The sky clouded over, lightning flashed and thunder boomed. The water turned choppy, flinging the kayak like a turd fleck in a bathtub. The waves were cresting higher and higher, peaking at like 30 feet. It was a storm of Biblical proportions. I paddled and paddled as best as I could. But I couldn't do it.
In reality, it was a little windy and choppy (no storm). The only truth of the story is that I'm just not good at kayaking. Out in the lake, a good distance from shore, I tipped it. I was there floating in the waves, thinking, well. Julian and L paddled over, and I tossed all my stuff into their kayaks, and Julian stabilized mine while I clambered back in like a cat pawing it's way out of the tub.
"Wow, that was crazy," I said. And then I tipped it again.
Whoopsie!
This time, I was a little more spooked. The waves had picked up and I was bobbing like a tiny little apple in a big apple-bobbing bucket. The wind was blowing out into the middle of the lake, so it felt like I was getting pulled out and away. I don't like being pulled out and away. Even swimming to shore would have been a tough ordeal.
Thankfully, Julian and L are competent adults with the coordination to manage basic water toys, and they helped drag me back into the thing again. After that, we decided to just paddle to the nearest earth. Eventually we hit sweet land, and I think everyone was a little shaken up by the idea of what would have happened if we couldn't have stablized the kayak enough for me to crawl back in (twice, ha). We figured our best bet was probably not to kayak back to the launch point (seeing as how the waves kept growing and I had the skillset of an earthworm), and so I went back to the road and got a little tuk tuk to take me back to the rental guy, and I told him what happened.
"Oh," he said.
And then he said, "No problema." He gunned up a boat, and we motored over to the little stretch of beach we had moored at, and we loaded all three kayaks onto the boat and boated back to the launch.
"Sorry," I said to the kayak guy when we got back.
"We should have told you not to go," he said. "It's choppy and last week someone drowned right over there."
"Oh?" I said.
"But you said you guys were experts."
I rubbed the back of my neck. "Huh," I said. "Yeah. Did say that."
And that was that.
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Resolution
There are resolutions where we make promises to ourselves, like I won't pretend to be good at stuff I'm not good at anymore. And there are resolutions where stories resolve, like the following:
So far on this trip, in the three months, I've lost a decent amount of crap. I lost my favorite shorts and my favorite run shirt when I left them at the Couchsurfing place in Mérida. I lost my good microfiber travel towel at a hostel. I left one of my two sweatshirts at a restaurant. I lost one Darn Tough sock, which effectively means I lost two Darn Tough socks, somewhere in Oaxaca. Then my belt at the school. I was light on clothes when I started. I'm down to the old inside-out method at this point.
Add to the list, two casualties from the kayaking calamity:
1) A good amount of dignity
2) My iPhone (gasp!)
Yurp, at some point in my second little swim, my iPhone took a tumble to the bottom of Atitlán, where it still, to my knowledge, resides. Thankfully, all my photos had backed up to my computer, and I have insurance on my phone so I'll get a new one when I go back to the US. Funny to have phone insurance and no health insurance. But, hey, I float. I got a Guatemalan potatophone in the meantime.
Julian left a few days later, and I thanked him, half-joking, for saving my life. He laughed it off. "It's been a wild ride," he said, which was true. A great, adventurous, wet week at the lake.
From there, I had three days until I was expected at the school, and I spent them with L at a hostel on the water called Free Cerveza, where, at like 5 pm, they ring a bell and yell "Free Cerveza" and you can get, you know, free cerveza. It was a great spot to hang by (not on, never again on) the water and dry out, and they had a running trail next to the town. Supposedly there was a guy up the trail with a machete robbing people, but I went for it anyway. As I rounded a corner there he was, a short Guatemalan guy in a mask holding a big machete, and I said, "Can I get by ya, here?" and he said "Go for it, amigo." I don't think he wanted the potatophone. The hostel also had a big dock and a beautiful view of the volcano right across the lake, and at night you could see the stars come out around the volcano and in the morning you could watch the sunrise slowly turn the sky orange over everything, and it was all around a lovely time with a lovely person.
And then I went to the school in Jaibalito for a week, and then I waited for a shuttle to take me to the airport, where a plane will take me to Boston, where a car will take me to Vermont and all the best things: home cooked food and a clean bathroom and my brand spankin' new iPhone. And family, and whatever. And that is the end of the falling action and the conclusion of the third and final act.
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Brain Stew
Yeeoo, we did it! Started at the end and then looped back to the beginning! The Tarantino Circle! And now, of course, I'm supposed to say nice, redeeming things that make me seem less like an earthworm confusing spilled beer for a rain puddle and more like an intelligent, upright humanoid who will return to productive society at some point.
So, what can I say, here on the precipice of the return to the real world? Hmmm...
Firstly, I'm my own biggest danger. I was warned of a lot of insane, almost laughable things when I said I was going to Central America. Being kidnapped for ransom was a big one. People hacking off your arm from the window of a taxi to get your watch. But no one warns you about your own general stupidity. From the three months, from countless people's stories of how they got unlucky, got robbed, lost things, the most common cause, by far, isn't people willing to chop you to bits for your jewelry. It's just being dumb and being proud. So I'm trying to do less of that.
But there's a whole lot out there. It's a great big world and a relatively short life and it's meant to be an adventure. Adventure is different for everyone, but if you only do things you're good at, you'll never do much at all. And sometimes you have to risk it for the proverbial biscuit. The fun zone, the adventure zone, is just past the edge of what you're comfortable with, and if that means every now and again you flip a kayak and lose your phone, or have to skirt around the machete man on the single track trail, so be it. It's a contact sport. Maybe be a little more honest about your skill level with various activities. But at the end of the day... "Rock and roll," as Mark the seven-toothed Irishman would say.
The world is a great big mix of crazy things, volcanos and crater lakes and black sand beaches and spiders on the toilet paper roll and fruits you've never seen before and all that. And I think sometimes about my old life in Boston, of seeing the same thing every day for three years and having a few hours of free time to cram all my crap into -- and to be fair, that was an adventure in it's own way, and they were three good years. But I'm three months in, two countries down, and it just feels like there's so much cool stuff if you're willing to go for it. There's a world of excitement and nature and wonderful people to meet and connect and reconnect with, and twenty seven ain't but a blip, a drop. So I'd like to keep it going for a while, because, honestly, I'm having a hell of a time.
Feliz Navidad
Sincerely,
-Naked and afraid
Another fire post, write a book please
My comments:
1 - Julian is attractive. Maybe invite him to join us in Honduras?
2 - you dumped yourself... TWICE!?
3 - "a turd fleck in a bathtub"... have you experienced this? Is it a phrase I am not familiar with? Either way, gross imagery. I dislike.
Can't wait to be a part of this story soon! <3