Atitlan at Last
There is something about El Lago de Atitlan. Something mysterious and elemental and profound. A vast lake in the highlands of southwestern Guatemala, large enough that there are ten distinct towns and villages on its shores, it fills an enormous volcanic crater, at it’s deepest over a thousand feet, and is impressively ringed with active and dormant volcanoes and striking hills. I came to Lake Atitlan a few years back, was very taken with its poignant landscape, and knew that I would return.
There are places that you talk up for years, but a second visit can only disappoint, because there is no way the reality can compare to the pedestal you have built on memory and recollection. But Atitlan is not one of those places. You can say: crater lake in the mountains of Guatemala, green volcanoes, cool blue waters, peaceful towns climbing the hillsides; Mayan villagers in rainbow-colored attire, but what do those words, either written or spoken into the air, compare with the feeling of actually being there?
As the birthday of my fortieth year loomed, and I was planning to embark on this trip, I pondered where I might want to spend my birthday. When I considered all the places on the road ahead, as of yet unseen or previously visited, Atitlan was my response. It took me longer to get out of the states than I’d planned, I didn’t cross the border into Mexico until eight days before my birthday and so I didn’t pass through southwest Guatemala until almost a month later. By then I was pressed for time in getting to Antigua for the start of my TEFL course, and I rode right by on a chicken bus some twenty miles away.
So when I was nearing completion of my class, looking for a place to shed the accumulated stresses of a month of intensive study, I decided to backtrack a bit and head north to Lake Atitlan for a few days. Part of it was the appeal of one of my favorite places in the world, but I also had a reason to travel that way. Before I’d even arrived in Antigua, it had become clear that my traveler’s Spanish was limiting my interactions and experiences, that I was no longer content to simply get by, and wanted to better communicate with the people along the way. The city of Xela, a half-day’s journey back towards Mexico, is considered one of the best and cheapest places to study Spanish in Central America, and I had found a quite affordable school there. I was due to start there the week following my TEFL class, which ended on a Tuesday. So inbetween, I would very conveniently stop in for a few days and make my belated appearance at the Lake.
My final class teaching English was on a Monday evening, and the objective was to review everything we’d covered in the four previous classes. I was apprehensive, because this would be the truest reflection of my success as their teacher. At this point, after a holiday weekend, had they actually retained the material I’d taught? What did they know? In consultation with Claudia, I planned a session of Review Jeopardy, in this case the game show minus the double and final jeopardy parts and the whole answering in the form of a question. Came up with five questions in each of five categories, and a game plan of how to carry it out. When the students came in to class, I felt happy to see them again after three days, and also relieved of any lingering stress. I’d already taught them what I could. I knew what I was doing and how to run a class while barely talking, and beyond that the chips would fall where they might.
To my surprise and delight, it appeared that the majority of the class had a decent command of the material. Of course the most advanced students knew all the answers, and were hard-pressed not to blurt them out when it wasn’t their turn. But even the students who struggled the most were coming up with mostly right responses. The game went along smoothly, and the class got super into it, cheering each other on and groaning when the other team got more points. It was really a teacher’s dream, to see fruits from my labors, students engaged and motivated to use and display what they knew (and of course, a demonstration of how powerful games are).
We finished up a close, hard-fought competition, and at the end of class I told them that this was my last day, and tomorrow their regular teacher would be back. There was a fair bit of aww’s, and hearing several of the women saying “Teacher?” melted my heart a little. I thanked them for how much they’d taught me, wished them luck in their English studies, and I was a proud and sentimental teacher.
The next day, the last day of our month-long class, seemed to be mostly playing games, and Claudia and I telling the embarrassing stories we’d saved for last. Everyone was a little sentimental at saying goodbye to our TEFL family. The real work was done. We turned in portfolios of all our completed work, and it was amazing all the hurdles we’d cleared to finish the class. It was almost surreal that I’d done all that: nine page grammar paper, five page professional development paper, five formal teacher observations, eight one-hour lesson plans, three twenty-minute lessons. I felt so much more prepared to teach English (or anything else) than before, and knowing what a challenging task it is to teach people in a language they don’t understand, it baffles me how many people go teach abroad with little or no training.
At night we had a celebratory pizza party, and that afternoon Angie, Monica, and I, with Emily’s boyfriend Luis as translator, went to the crafts market to get a present for Claudia. Our goal was to find a painting in the Atitlan style of brightly-colored, almost surreal and simplistic depictions of Guatemalan landscapes. But with an elephant (Claudia’s favorite animal). We visited every stand selling paintings, and it was hilarious to see the reactions as we declared that we wanted a painting with an elephant and a volcano. As you might imagine, as elephants are not native to those parts, we were unsuccessful, though several people did say that they could paint one for us by the next week, of course for the right price. As we walked away, there was much head-shaking and eye-rolling of the “crazy gringos” variety. We settled on an elephant backpack, which Claudia seemed delighted by.
Over a fine spread of halfway decent pizza, beers, sodas, and cookies, we did a round of tributes/thank yous/roasts and talked about the class and what everyone would do as we went our separate ways. Emily would stay there in Antigua and teach at Maximo Nivel. Angie was returning to Iowa, hoping to come back to Guatemala in spring on a mission trip, and maybe find work and stick around. Tayannah was going to teach for a few weeks at Maximo and then head to Lake Atitlan for a month-long yoga course. Monica was going to volunteer at a hostel on Lake Atitlan, then fly to Chile to trek in Patagonia, and had a teaching job lined up in Colombia. Grant, well, he hadn’t finished the course. He had gotten very sick before Practical Teaching Week and probably needed two more weeks to finish, but we all suspected that he simply hadn’t been ready to teach an hour-long class. He’d probably just keep doing what he’d done beforehand. For Claudia, our teacher, this was her last TEFL training course, which seemed strange to me given how good she is at it, and how much joy she seems to take from being in the classroom. She’d work on designing an online program for TEFL training.
Afterwards Claudia and Monica and I went out for a nightcap at a little cantina and it seemed like the trappings of teacher/student had fallen away and we were just three friends out for a beer. Monica and I were heading for a second nightcap at a salsa club, but there was a fifty year old Lebanese-Guatemalan guy there who had recently professed his love for her, didn’t seem to take kindly to my presence, and I decided that this wasn’t the movie I wanted to be in and bid my friend goodnight and goodbye.
After all that, it was time to take my leave of Antigua. I felt a little sentimental attachment to the town, but moreso ready for new, grittier places. Guatemala had slightly different plans, though, and there was an announced national strike the next day in protest of the administration of President Jimmy Morales. An outsider, in fact a TV star and comedian, he had been elected the year before out of general disgust at mainstream politicians. Now he was facing multiple accusations of his own corruption, money-laundering involving his son, and election irregularities. Sound familiar?
Apparently everything was going to be closed the following day, including buses and highways, so I put off my travels to wait and see. I was skeptical: if a general strike was called in the US, how many businesses would close? The solidarity of Guatemalans was impressive. About half the stores in Antigua were shut down, a striking display for a fairly conservative and business-oriented town, and indeed the buses were not running. I went down to the square in the afternoon to see the march, and found a modest river of people with signs and flags, chanting and singing. It would seem that civic activism is strong in Guatemala.
And so it was the following day that I came to Lake Atitlan at last. I packed up all my baggage for the first time in a month, said my goodbyes at Casa Matilda, and a shuttle van picked me up on the street at 8:30 in the morning. We rattled around Antigua’s cobblestone streets collecting various backpackers from their hostels, and then we were out on the road, up through Jocotenango and the other hillside villages on the way to Chimal. A surprisingly good quality of conversations were to be had on that shuttle- far beyond the typical “how long are you in Guatemala for? Where have you been?” The Canadian philosophy student and the Israeli engineer sitting in front of me, the Irish expat English teacher and his Chilean wife, the Israeli filmmaker, and the record store owner and her bike mechanic husband from Georgia behind me combined for a solid chorus of opinions and stories.
We stopped for gas after about an hour, and somehow diesel got put into the van rather than gas, or the other way around, the van no longer worked, and we waited there for an hour while they siphoned it out and made a big mess of fuel on the pavement. Ah, Central America. You should always assume an extra hour or two of travel time. I spent the time talking to the Irish/Chilean couple- they live in the mountains above Santiago, Chile, and the bike mechanic from Georgia. We talked about the south, about white supremacists, Charlottesville, the state of things back in the US. He said things seemed different now. People seem angrier, and quicker to anger, he said.
Then eventually they’d gotten it worked out somehow, and we were back on the road, mostly the Pan-American highway, until we got close to the lake and we drove through half an hour of little farms with cornfields and then it was up and over the high mountains that surround it. Horrible road, with hairpin turns washed out by the rainy season, the occasional paved sections cratered and crumbling over into precipices, and every so often a glimpse of an impossibly blue expanse, a smattering of little houses climbing above.
The shuttle dropped me off above the village of San Pablo, while everyone else was carrying on for San Pedro, with a tuk-tuk driver ready to take me over to San Marcos for an additional ten quetzales. I complained to the shuttle driver that I’d already bought a ticket to San Marcos, but he said they don’t go there, and said I’d walk, but he insisted for my seguridad that I take the ride. So I grudgingly did, and we bumped our way up and down the dirt roads with deep ponds around the lake.
This time at the lake I’d chosen to stay in San Marcos, considered the new age, healing, hippie town, as opposed to San Pedro, the backpacker party town. I wasn’t really interested in doing yoga or reiki healing; I’d heard that SM was quiet, and the best village for swimming, and my time in Antigua had taught me that I didn’t really enjoy the backpacker party scene. The tuk-tuk dropped me off at the Centro, where I found a towering Ceiba tree, a few tiendas all selling the same things, a woman selling fried chicken and potatoes, a basketball court, and a church. It was pretty much all Mayan people there, women in traditional handmade dresses in brilliant colors, men in western clothing. I was immediately reminded that the people are some of the friendliest in the world. Walking the paths and streets there is a constant refrain of Buenas and Holas.
In the towns around the lake, there are generally two sections: in the proper towns, almost always set some distance above the waters and their shifting shorelines, it is all indigenous Mayans. Then several of the towns have a lower portion, which are a combination of gringo establishments and the Guatemalans who cater to gringos.
I immediately walked right out of town, without meaning to, up and then down a steep hill that was no fun to walk back up in the sun with my bags. My second time through the village I discovered the paths that led down to the lake, where most of the hostels and restaurants are situated, and after much wandering up and down, settled on the Hostel San Marcos, the cheapest bed in town,and right up from the dock. In the back there was a dorm room set up on tall pilings above a lovely little garden, reached by a ladder, all windows and wood, and it appeared I was the only resident. In fact the only other residents of the whole place were two volunteers, Alan, a friendly, well-spoken Irishman, writer and former teacher, now on a multi-year travel program with his Catalan wife Mara.
Their version of traveling was to find a place they liked, volunteer there for half a year, then move on to the next place. Slow travel. They had been in San Marcos a couple months already, and had made friends with what seemed like the whole town. Alan was working the front desk when I arrived, and we launched right into a good talk about travel philosophies and mid-life: he was to turn forty in a few months, and his vision was to spend his birthday sleeping in a teepee on the side of a mountain above the lake.
I walked down to the town dock for a swim, the water brisk and the views striking. Sitting on the dock, admiring the town of San Pedro directly across cascading down the slopes of its namesake volcano, and various other settlements I couldn’t identify in their lakeside valleys, I realized that Lake Atitlan was actually just as- if not more- beautiful than I remembered. Immersing myself again in those cool waters, with infinite swaths of green and blue in every direction, was one of those moments when I knew exactly why I was traveling. A little Guatemalan boy was fishing from the dock while his dog kept him company. The world made sense from here.
After another talk with Alan, I walked up to the Moonfish Cafe for a vegetarian dinner, a falafel burrito, exactly the kind of fare you might expect to find in a hippie village, and lingered there reading as the evening rains came down furious. When it finally let up I wandered through the village again, until I saw the sign for Hostal del Lago, where I’d heard there were various nighttime activities. Walked down a long steep path to the foot of the lake, and was greeted in a sort of pirate-treehouse restaurant by the owner, Brian, a hippie burnout from Colorado about my age, sitting with a few friends. He said “you must be here for the poker game” and I said yes, I guess I am. Starts in half an hour, he said. 70 Quetzal ($10)buy-in. Seemed bizarre that this is where I’d find myself a poker game, amidst the yoga and cacao ceremonies and healing centers, but there I was. Got a beer and said hello to a few people hanging around. When I said I’d just arrived at the lake, a guy said “welcome home” in a way that made me feel a little suspicious.
What a thing I got myself into. Roughly five hours of card-playing and betting and talking and arguing in escalating degrees, as the various players continued to imbibe beers and rum and smoke spliffs and the night grew long and dark. It was mostly slightly tweaked expats, Americans and a couple Brits and a German guy named Pieter, with a smattering of travelers mixed in. It seemed like a regular game, with usual players and built-up resentments and rivalries. Brian the owner was adamant about the rules about re-buys and on what schedule the blinds (antes) increased, and about us not making too much noise, especially as he began to slip into drunkenness and got loud himself. Several times he threatened in raised voice to end the game if we wouldn’t be quieter, and in the end he violated his own rules and bought in two times.
It was a strange and aggressive game, a lot of smack-talk and old rivalries, and the travelers were walking on eggshells a bit to avoid the crossfire. I had an early big win on pocket Aces when another Ace came down on the turn. Pieter tried to intimidate me into folding out, and I acted like I wasn’t confident and seriously considering it, but called him each time and took a pile. Kept playing not-so-great hands because I had the biggest stack and could afford to, and I have this idea about being sociable in poker which isn’t necessarily strategic. My chip holdings dwindled down until I was the small stack and there was just three of us left: Scott from LA, about sixty, film producer, retired to the lake, who seemed out of it, and Luke, the hippie pot-smoking yoga teacher with long blonde hair, and me. Brian and the rest of the table had left in drunken stumblings, and the game had become much more mellow.
Scott went out on a misguided all-in that I stayed out of, and after Luke and I took turns taking hands for half an hour, it was about one in the morning. Luke offered me an 80–20 split of the pot, and I said “let’s play a few more hands” and all the hands he actually played I won, and I declined offers of 70–30 and 60–40. Fine, he said, 50–50, and I agreed, a fantastic offer as our holdings were probably 65–35 in his favor. Went home with Q700 in my pocket, which paid for the whole three days I spent in San Marcos. Felt like I’d pulled some kind of a magic trick, showing up for an unexpected poker game, and walking away with half of the pot off a bunch of salty old would-be sharks.
I’d stayed up until almost two, smoked most of a pack of Pall Malls, and drank an armful of beers meanwhile, so the next morning I woke up feeling fairly rough. But I had no responsibilities, so I took the opportunity to just stay in bed and read my novel for awhile, and then went over at a leisurely hour to Restaurant Fe, where I was entitled to a free breakfast included in my hostel stay. Turned out Mara, Alan’s partner, was my waitress, and I had a fine meal of huevos revueltos with tomatoes and onions and fresh-baked bread. She was sweet but with a sense of fierceness under her gentle manner, and we talked about their travels and the unrest taking place in Catalonia. They’d spent six months working on a farm in the mountains of Chiapas, and would eventually wanted to make it to Chile, though it might take years to get there. And she predicted that her homeland wouldn’t become independent. “Madrid will never let us go. Never.” Feeling better, I came back to my tree-house dorm room and took a lovely three hour nap.
In the afternoon I walked over to the nature reserve at the edge of town, Cerro Tzankujil. I hiked up the steep hill on shady jungle paths whose foliage would part now and again to reveal sweeping panoramas of the lake, and I found several Mayan altars with painted stones set in clearings. Sat up at the top a long time and I knew I’d have to come back and make some kind of offering- a little time at Lake Atitlan and you may find your nascent spirituality bubbling up to the surface. I also knew that despite the fact I was leaving shortly, I would be back to this place again and again.
Climbed back down the mountain to find a whole stretch of rocks along the shore to sit on and jump off, and the waters were healing and clean. I met some German girls who had kayaked across the lake from San Pedro carrying beers. They offered me one and though it was lukewarm from the sun, it hit the spot as I sat with my legs in deep turquoise, looking out at Mayan fisherman plying the waters from wooden canoes. One of them was wearing a “The City” Warriors T-shirt with #30 on the back.
That night Alan and I were the only people in the lounge area of the hostal, both writing, and we talked some more. He is a little bit younger than me, but has a daughter who is about to go to university, and because of that felt free to quit his teaching job and set out for some years of a walkabout. Several times he hinted at some kind of ominous and untreatable health condition, and I got the sense that he was doing this because he felt like his days were numbered, though he seemed to be peaceful about it. His passion is writing short stories, and despite the fact that he doesn’t care much for travel writing, I told him about this blog.
He spoke thoughtfully, and I couldn’t help thinking that the way he was traveling was much better than mine. Staying a long time in one place, getting to know the people there, seemed so much more beneficial than rushing through from place to place, two or three nights a pop. And besides, since their housing was covered, and he got his meals at the restaurant, he wasn’t really spending any money. It was counter-intuitive, that moving faster isn’t necessarily cheaper. I said to myself that when I got to South America, which seemed to be worlds away, I would try to emulate their example.
The following night I spent an hour looking for a mysterious Japanese restaurant, which it turned out could only be accessed from the town soccer field and a narrow, unlighted dirt alley. Some ways up this, a door with no sign was open to some kind of a Japanese hippie dream. They served me tempura lake fish with sushi rice and vegetables in a curry sauce, with a real matcha green tea. Feeling sated and sleepy, I walked back over to the Hostal Del Lago for the next poker game. My heart wasn’t really in it, but the other players had implored me to come, presumably to win some of their money back.
It was a weird vibe right away. There were a couple new travelers at the table who thought themselves good poker players, and the expat regulars determined to disprove them of this notion. It was less friendly and quieter than the last game, more serious and edgy, and I could sense a building confrontation between Pieter and a young white South African backpacker who clearly didn’t like each other. Decided I didn’t really care to spend hours to see how it all played out, and played any half-decent hand I was dealt. This is not the way to play poker, but it is a great way to leave early. Within an hour I went all-in on pocket 8’s and predictably lost, said goodbye and wished them all luck, over strong encouragements to buy back in, and walked back through the sleeping village to my bed.
Turned out my instincts had been dead-on. The next morning, waiting at the dock for the boat that would take me to Panajachel, the biggest town on the lake where I’d catch a bus to Xela, I saw Scott the ex-film producer’s daughter. She asked me if I was okay, and I said, sure, why? She told me that late the night before Pieter and the Afrikaner had gotten in a fight, Pieter had broken a bottle and gone after him, and the young guy had pulled a knife. It had ended up with Pieter being held over a high sea wall with a knife to his throat, when people were able to break it up. I sure was glad I’d left early. So absurd that not only would I find a poker game in this new age village, but that it would turn out to be so violent.
But these strange tidings couldn’t sour my mood. Getting on my boat I felt refreshed and reinvigorated, ready for the next chapter. Ready to go back to school, this time to study not my native tongue but the language I needed on my journey. As we clipped across the lake in the morning sun, past steep and rocky shorelines, stopping in at villages to pick up local folk and travelers, I knew that I would come back to these waters again and again.
