Lake Atitlan Revisited

Still today the ancient lake gives up its secrets…

Photo by Irene De León on Unsplash

It has been a rather plentiful last two days. I’ve met some interesting people here at our Airbnb rental chalet on the shores of Lake Atitlan in Guatemala.

Considered one of the world’s top ten most beautiful and wondrous lakes on the planet. Seems only appropriate, though, to add a few other well deserved descriptive terms.

Besides ‘beautiful’, which the lake absolutely is, it is also dripping in mystery. So, when we speak of Atitlan it would be fair and accurate to say besides the most common: beautiful, we could add mystical, a vortex area, a lake which inspires to this day such amazing reports which truly separate this highland body of water from others.

When I refer to the lake as a ‘vortex’ zone, it’s in a similar nature with which they referred to certain areas in New Mexico as. In a few words: mystical, energy, magical.

Beneath the surface of the lake sits an ancient Maya city. No one, it seems, can adequately give the exact reason this place ended up under water. But one thing is certain: it adds along with a long list of other things to the lingering mystery that provides the place with an energy all its own.

Yesterday along the edge of the lake I met Mateo, the fisherman, and Jose, who comes from the next-door town of San Pablo. San Pablo is the small town which follows San Marcos along the lake’s northern shoreline. After San Pablo comes both San Juan La Laguna and San Pedro La Laguna.

There may very well be one or two more, much smaller towns tucked into the sheer incline around the lakeside. San Pedro and San Juan and San Marcos are known for being the most rambunctious on the lake. These towns cater to the bohemian youth from all over the world. My guess is that the young, back packing visitors here perceive a sense of security.

Some who visit and stay will say there are other deeper things that cast a spell, causing them to stay for extended periods, even years.

Still, stories of assaults and sexual abuse are always evident. The unlucky wandering ‘hippy’, innocently, scantily dressed, suddenly becomes prey to dangerous elements that may either be fellow foreigners or native men from the lake area or even partyers here for the weekend from Guatemala City.

I use the word hippy and bohemians loosely here. Hippies, as far as I understand it no longer exist, but the local folk still refer to the young travelers that come to these shores as ‘los hippies’.

San Marcos, the town next to our Airbnb is known as a hipster town. It could be that the difference is that the town does not raise hell as much as its two neighbor towns.

San Marcos has small shops selling incense, exotic teas, hard to find food items such as genuine, Canadian maple syrup! Spices, locally crafted jewelry sold from small tabletops along the edges of the maze- like walkways throughout the town. They hang art by resident artists for sale from temporary walls, the artistic quality varies. Guatemalans do some of the art which often depicts the lake and the surrounding volcanos, cornfields, forests.

As the years progress, one can actually detect this countryside art improve in its colors, accurate perspective and painterly skill.

Other art is what the foreigners do, and they have sunk roots here for several months to several years. They will stay as long as the money comes in enough to survive.

I saw a sign on the small entry gate to a dwelling in San Marcos offering certification in ayahuasca. I understood that ayahuasca only grows in South America. But who knows? People bring stuff from all over the planet. Of course, ayahuasca, as is weed, or any other entertainment drug, is highly illegal.

Other crudely marked, colorful signs on the outside fences to private homes advertise yoga, vegetarian foods, special diet supplements, Tarot cards, artfully made candles, fortune telling, massage of all kinds, woven textiles not of the native kind, scent therapy. The list goes on and on. Testament to the drive to survive on threadbare finances in this place.

The tradeoff for these dwellers is the incomparable beauty of the lake and shore, its mountains shooting skyward just a hundred meters or less from the water’s edge. The other draw is the social aspect. People live here almost as if it were a commune. They all know one another, will gather frequently to party or to help one another out.

You will hear of some who have escaped the hustle bustle of modern society and profess to cherish or crave the solitude which is available here.

Yesterday my son and his girlfriend bought me some great incense and several boxes of tea from San Marcos, a suitable selection which I look forward to trying!

Across from our rental, looking to the far shore of the lake, towards the south, two volcanoes, Santiago and San Pedro, stand majestically as if sentinels protecting the lake.

Another man my wife and I met on the rentals dock named Jose was almost frantic trying to catch a few tiny fish to take home for him and his wife’s dinner that night. His desperation was clear to me. The sun had just set, and the darkness was rapidly approaching. Crickets increased their high-pitched screeching as though announcing the coming night. Some of the local folks live that close to the line, of either having just enough to eat tonight or not.

Jose told us of a time he and some friends were looking up at the stars while doing some late-night fishing off a lone shore towards the west shoreline. Suddenly what appeared to be UFOs appeared rising out of Volcano Santiago’s pitch-black crater, which has lain dormant for thousands of years. Silently, several craft rose and leveled high over the lake, then suddenly lit up the lake with impossibly powerful lighting!

Stories like Joses’ are common. Just about every soul one stops to talk with about these strange matters had several stories to tell. Then there are those who say they know nothing of these things.

When telling us about the fish in the lake, Jose referred to a vast body of water pointing south toward the volcanos. He told us he’d heard that in that vast water were fish greater than one might imagine. My wife and I looked at each other through the gathering darkness and realized our new friend was referring to none other than the mighty Pacific, not four hours to the south.

Not very atypical but revealing about how some of the native folks have never gotten too far from their birthplaces, usually the dirt floored thatched roof home of their parents. One day, the house would belong to the growing children.

Jose probably never had cause nor could make the relative straight forward bus trip to the ocean’s shore. As a youth I worked on a huge cattle ranch on the Pacific coast in Guatemala and many of my ranch hand friends would reference to things similar to that of the ocean or something in outer space which oddly defined the limited scope of ground seen by these hard-working people.

This doesn’t minimize in any way their mental reach. In fact, these people who never strayed far from home and work were often easily the wisest I’ve ever met.

As incredible as this and other fascinating stories sounds it still doesn’t minimize the impact it has on the listener. Lake Atitlan is certainly still remote enough so that such fantastic events seem hardly surprising. As improbable as they sound, things happen out here.

We said goodnight to Jose, and I passed him some cash. He could now go to the store in town before they closed to take enough supplies home for a week. The man's face lit up, and I thought he was going to get emotional. I can’t even imagine the relief he must have felt, even if it was only short-lived.

Our house caretaker, Ezequiel, a handsome young man of Maya’s decent, was proud of his heritage and his strong, dark face immediately brought the Mayan ancestry to mind. He and his wife lived on the property and our first afternoon told us about an experience he’d had in 2012. The Mayan calendar had predicted the end of the world for 2012 October, Ezequiel said. Turns out to everyone’s great relief that happily someone had misinterpreted the ancient calendar, otherwise astounding in its stellar accuracy.

But it doesn’t mean that on that special date that nothing was going to happen.

Ezequiel, along with another young friend, were invited by a group of much older Sacerdotes or Shaman priests to join them up the solid rock mountain overlooking the lake, just up the climb from our rental. Turns out Ezequiel’s father was a practitioner of the mystical arts and was given the approval to have his son join them that night.

Late after midnight, the shamans sat in a circle amongst the high boulders, shawls wrapped around them against the sharp cold. No fires were permitted so as not to attract any unwanted attention from unknown entities. Part of their quest that night was to see if the fated Mayan date would cause a major cataclysm.

Among the group was another shaman who came from the Chichicastenango area, who spoke a dialect unknown to the others. His specialty was to detect sounds not typical of Mother Nature. Perhaps a whistle hidden in the air, or a certain clucking. He could identify beings who might be drawn by this unusual shaman gathering; some harmless, others malevolent.

They sought signs.

As they sat under the brilliant star filled sky, they chanted and prayed, lit up pine incense and set out in certain order small powerful figurines made of black clay. They gently tapped homemade drums and smoked strong homemade cigars. Around the circle, they had arranged branches of wild plants that had elements to ward off unwelcome apparitions.

Ezequiel told us that one elder preferred to stuff his stubby cigar into a rustic, clay pipe, which provoked some mirthful ribbing and friendly mimicking. One asked the pipe smoking man if he was smoking a finger belonging to a being that several had seen walking the trails in the area the previous week.

Suddenly the sky grew light, by UFOs. Some similarity to Jose’s’ story of UFOs, but different.

The term they used for UFOs is OVNIS. Suddenly, fifty or more of these flying things flew into the space over the lake. Ezequiel explained OVNIS was a word we would understand that the Mayan name was impossible to pronounce. They had the distinct sense the OVNIS seemed to draw something from the depths of the thousand-foot-deep lake. More an intuited sense.

The hovering crafts lit up the area impossibly, as though the lights of a stadium. The flying entities flew in from all the compass points to converge over the lake. After reaching a central point in one vast display of light, no sounds to be heard, silent as can be, they formed one enormous ball of light.

Airplanes don’t do that…

No sooner had they met that they immediately dispersed, flying off at impossible speed and angles towards space. The old shamans, or: ‘los sacerdotes’ seemed unsurprised by the amazing display.

As it turned dark and Ezequiel's’ telling of that strange night came to its end, far across the lake from the party town of San Pedro, a deep drumbeat started. Our friend just said: ‘fiesta’, or party. The beat would go for much of the night.

A crashing in the small plot of corn captured our hosts’ full, though momentary, attention. It was completely dark. Johanna asked him what that was, and he quickly said it was nothing.

Ezequiel told my wife and me other stories that night. After a while, still awestruck by the OVNIS account, I asked about the fishing at the lake. He gave us a full rundown of the varieties of fish species and how they caught them, each species requiring its own way of catching them. Often, they were speared but at night. Other fish were best caught using hand tossed nets.

Some fish were caught using a hand line with worms. Depending on the fish, one went after worms that grew in the earth, like earth worms or ‘gallina ciegas’, translation: blind chickens which were a white, stubby morsel the fish couldn’t resist. Other worms were cultivated by crushing an orange or mango and letting it sit out for several days, which was soon covered by worms the eggs flies laid.

Some fish reach fifty or more pounds, some from the deepest depths are never caught, but will be seen breaching the surface from time to time. The fifty pounders can only be caught spearfishing or with ‘arpon’ which is the word for harpoon.

He said that if there was a full moon and unclouded, they wouldn’t catch anything. Far below the surface, the fish could see you in the moon glow!

In Guatemala, it’s commonly known in the countryside that one will not hunt any rabbits when the moon’s out as they will see you and hide.

He told us about the huge water snakes which he’d taken part in catching. These were gigantic snakes, three inches in girth and fifteen feet long! He assured us there were much larger ones, but they were too smart to get caught. He told us that these snakes never attacked humans, as they only ate fish. The snakes could only be caught at night. The reward was they could be cut into filets and pan-fried.

Finally, he told us more about the great shamans; that they were still very much in existence. Contrary to popular lore, these high spiritual beings live amongst the normal folks, farm their small impossibly steep and rocky hillside plots looking down at the massive lake’s expanse.

The three men with which we spoke during our short two-day stay confirmed that ‘ghosts’ are seen frequently about the nighttime hills and narrow trails. They described them in similar fashion: as being egg-shaped, phosphorescent in white brightness. Seemingly not bothering anyone. People have cultivated stories of humans and farm animals being devoured by these lights.

The egg-shaped orb I witnessed in the countryside as a young teenager on the Guatemalan Pacific coast region just stood eight feet from where I awoke with a start. It was as if it was watching me. Nearly seven feet tall, it hovered above the clay floor, then slowly drifted through the screen window and was gone. There were no electric lights as the power plant on the cattle ranch was shut off by nine every night…

As if in warning, Ezequiel said that the aging man dressed in full native regalia, lacking teeth but eyes with a twinkle and as sharp and piercing as knives, could be a powerful shaman standing shoulder to shoulder with you in the marketplace.

There are too many stories Ezequiel shared with us that evening to relate them all here. There is one more though worth telling.

He explained to us that the town San Marcos was formed from people fleeing from a nearby town of San Pablo on the lake’s edge, which is where Ezequiel is from. Today, upon entering San Marcos, one is met with an entrance arch built over the blacktop arriving at the town. At the top of the arch is a statue of a full maned lion, painted dull gold, and standing watch. Ezequiel told us that countless years ago his native town, San Pablo, had been set upon by a large, man-eating pride of lions! The lions attacked by night, entering the town’s few roadways and pouncing and dragging away unlucky victims.

No one knew where the lions came from. Some local wise ones insisted they were a shamanistic curse. The local Spanish priest had condemned a suspected shaman and was executed near the town’s gathering place.

Soon, many of the village people gathered en masse in the town center and moved eastward along the shoreline, away from the marauding lions. They soon stopped at a green, hilly area and built the town now known as San Marcos. Today, that lion statue stands as a warning to visitors and a show of defiance to ward off spells.

Atitlan has twelve towns that dot the shores around the huge lake. Some say there are over twelve. Strangely, they are named after Christ’s apostles. After the Spaniards crushed the native people, they renamed most towns in Spanish, erasing the original Mayan names. But as Ezequiel explained to my wife and me, these towns predate the Spanish conquest!

He explained this to us to help us understand how these legendary stories of fantastic things that happened around the lake happened long before the Spaniards, with their crushing pestilence and religious oppression, ever showed face here. Suddenly, the things he told us about seemed to gain in veracity once we understood that some of these stories may have originated even a thousand years before the conquering Spaniards.

A strange aside to the lion story is that today the vegetable production in San Pablo far out produces that of San Marcos. Ezequiel explained that was why the vegetables in San Marcos were more expensive than those in San Pablo.

Even though the distance between the two towns is just an hour-long walk apart, San Marco finds the need to import vegetables from San Pablo, which drives up the prices.

Something about the rich volcanic ash soil in San Pablo versus the steep and rock studded cultivation ground in San Marcos.

The beautiful Airbnb property we rented reaches water’s edge. Fences defining the property on either side reach the shoreline. But on both sides, the fences have permanent openings that the indigenous folk, tourists, etc., can walk across without obstacle along the lake’s shore. Ezequiel explained that this was a law that originated after the civil war ended in the early nineties, which took almost two hundred thousand lives.

His words: ’the people have the right to walk along the shores. They go to town along these open routes. So, then they can cross a homeowner’s property. Thing is, though the walker can walk through the property, they just can’t stay.’

About ten years ago, my wife Johanna and I were sitting on the shoreline roof top porch of a local, thatched roof eatery in the main Atitlan town called Panajachel. Late afternoon we waited in the day’s end, growing chill to catch the sunset. People will travel from all over the world to see the Lake Atitlan sunset. The combination of high western shoreline hills, the clashing of Pacific winds from the south and wind from the north right over the lake will almost daily produce sky lighting rarely found elsewhere.

Looking westward at the incredible sunset and the sun’s glare reflecting off the wind stirred choppy surface, we waited. The sun began its final descent just before reaching the ridgeline and plunging down behind and throwing skyward, bright shafts of orange, blue and gold, a light show not soon forgotten.

Then there they were!

Suddenly mist vortexes as if steam whirl winds or miniature tornados rose from the lake’s surface. Dust devil like apparitions rose and fell, some simply vanished, vaporized. At least one of the spinning towers rose to the height of a solid rock lakeside bluff. Later I could confirm the bluff’s elevation reached almost a thousand feet.

We gazed out in disbelief towards the west half of the lake to follow the sunset. It added to the utter amazement that the mist like swirls rose from the surface of the entire lake! These weren’t isolated things. They carpeted the lake.

Our jaws dropped open.

I’ve witnessed this phenomenon twice. As if to confirm beyond a doubt so that later on, much later, I would never doubt what I’d seen.

I’ve spoken to perhaps two others who confirmed having seen the same show. What has to be a natural phenomenon. Wondrous and magical like, but probably something a weather expert could explain. These spinning towers give added credence to the local tales of mystical happenings. That they must have a natural explanation shouldn’t lessen the magical impact.

That night on the dock at our rental just the day before yesterday, the fisherman we’d met assured me that what we’d seen was a ‘señal’, a sign. A sign of exactly what he left up to us.

This morning, as the sun had just barely defined the two volcanos across the lake, I took my coffee mug to the beach and built my ritual fire. There is truly a mystical energy to this highland lake; no doubt the spirits abound here.

From the Maya city buried under the lake’s depths, from impossibly ancient times to today’s still functioning shamans communing with the OFOs, is it any wonder at all this place is special? A place that demands and deserves a certain reverence.

As the years pass, Lake Atitlan is slowly succumbing to unbridled pollution and contamination. The once crystal-clear water I beheld as a boy sixty years ago where I could easily see sixty feet down to cascading boulders now completely invisible. Now opaque, the bottom dotted with many colorful plastics, which will surely outlast us all.

I recall as a youth the large group of Atitlan grebes out on the water. A diminutive duck declared extinct by 1990. Hard to grasp that this beautiful waterfowl has vanished from the planet.

A combination of disregard for nature and the financial incapacity to correct the ongoing damage. Those in power cannot solve a dying lake’s dilemma. Oh, certainly the lake attempts to auto heal itself and, amazingly, almost makes some headway. But a lake such as this one can and will tolerate only so much punishment.

The beauty and wonder of this place are still undeniable. Try to imagine a thick jungle abundance growing around the lake full of many forms of wildlife just fifty years ago. Still, visitors to the lake today who don’t have those memories are still awestruck by this special, mystical body of water in the Guatemalan highlands.

Saturday night, I had a cup of tea and walked down towards the dock. The water’s edge was hidden in the darkness, though I could hear as the late-night waves slapped gently onto the gravelly shore. The wind had long since died down. I thought a walk down to the dock would be fun for my last night there.

As I started down the sixty-yard stretch on the grassy incline from the house, dogs barked not far away. Maybe a drunk finding his way home. Maybe something else. The crickets suddenly stopped their loud opera of screeching. Normally I thought crickets will go still like that when one walks nearby.

I took a few more steps, then suddenly sensed something else. An intelligence. It was watching me from somewhere. In an instant, I felt that if I continued down towards the darkened water’s edge; I was going to come face to face with the light. Similar to the floating orb I’d seen so many years ago near a swamp at a ranch house near the Pacific coast.

I froze. There was a presence that I felt. I chose to slowly back away, work my way back up to the house.

Back in the well-lit house surrounded by contemporary modern stuff, questions struck me again. Lake Atitlan gives up its secrets carefully. How much longer will the greatest mysteries still linger in and around that amazing body of water?